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I recently watched some traditional cable and was shocked by the number of crypto ads bombarding viewers. I have to imagine that this market was goosed up by r

by lumost 4y ago

I recently watched some traditional cable and was shocked by the number of crypto ads bombarding viewers. I have to imagine that this market was goosed up by retail investors trading on coinbase and binance just as the e-betting market was. The only difference between crypto and e-betting is that everyone got to be a winner on the crypto markets for a while. As users lose out, and exchanges stop ad campaigns - how long will that last? Crypto needed a tangible market/reason d'etre to be valuable. This required lower transaction fees, cheap audits, and a reasonable degree of price stability. We haven't seen any of that materialize except for cheap auditing. Cheap auditing isn't much use if there isn't anything of interest to audit. I'd doubt BTC will go to zero, but I wouldn't be surprised if the entire covid rally gets wiped out and we see BTC 6k again.

mmastrac 4y ago
I recall walking through an airport this year and seeing Crypto ads everywhere. That was my shoeshine boy moment (1) (1) https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-spot-stock-market-bubbles-2017-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-spot-stock-market-bub...
- piva00 4y ago
  I visited Brazil recently (3-4 months ago), I got into cryptocurrency-talk or some shitcoin peddled by cashiers, Uber drivers, waiters in some restaurants, acquaintances that aren't tech-savvy at all, etc. That's when it downed on me how big this whole thing got outside of internet chatter, it downed how many vulnerable people are exposed to the fallout of a crypto implosion.
  - DonHopkins 4y ago
    It's so ironic how all those libertarian crypto-bros think they've got the inside track and they're so much smarter than everyone else, when actually they're just as gullible and common and deluded as random cashiers, Uber drivers, waiters, bartenders, used car salesmen, chiropractors, cosmeticians, shoeshine boys, and ordinary hoi polloi on the street, all being influenced by the exact same mass market ads and hype all over the world.
    - melenaboija 4y ago
      Yup, and seems to be getting worse: “Families in despair over IM Academy: ‘The crypto-sect has kidnapped our children’”[1] https://english.elpais.com/international/2022-04-18/families-in-despair-over-im-academy-the-crypto-sect-has-kidnapped-our-children.html https://english.elpais.com/international/2022-04-18/families...
    - FabHK 4y ago
      Well, people that got in early and got out about 6m ago (or now, still) might have made good money. Attributing it to a deep understanding of the technology is almost certainly wrong; attributing it to a certain street-smart understanding of bubbles, marketing, and hype might be correct. Though I'm inclined to just call it luck.
    - twirlock 4y ago
  - blep_ 4y ago
    ("dawned") ... but yeah. It's depressing. Countries with already bad economic conditions (like "we literally don't have functioning currency" level, not the things US residents complain about) seem particularly susceptible to it.
    - piva00 4y ago
      I really thought I had written "dawned"... I think it's the same issue I have when writing "ratio", I always end up writing "ration". Thanks for the correction.
      - bcrl 4y ago
        The older I get, the more errors my typing contains versus the mental stream of consciousness I intended to type.
      - dizhn 4y ago
        The way I type compute always involves deleting the r at the end. :)
    - yellowapple 4y ago
      Because they're actually using it as a currency. Consequently, they probably won't feel as much of the pain speculators are feeling right now / will continue to feel; as long as the amount of $FOO earned from a day's work pays for the day's expenses, they have little reason not to continue adopting and using $FOO (for whatever value of $FOO we're using). Put differently: when the options are "failed local currency" v. "hard to obtain foreign currency" v. "easy to obtain electronic currency", you and I would probably be inclined to use the third option.
- nicbou 4y ago
  I had a few different moments, since I was always very skeptical of crypto. However being pitched crypto by an old bartender in Stuttgart was probably the most obvious one. Generally, crypto was not promoted to me by people who would understand either computer science or economics.
  - boc 4y ago
    Not to be flippant, but nobody who I've heard promote crypto has any real, deep training in economics. Computer science yes, totally, but not econ. There are obvious problems with the entire concept of decentralized money if you've studied economic/financial history. We already experienced it back in the 19th Century and it's following pretty much the same pattern. Wildcat banks, frontrunning, wash trading, bank runs, and much more. Some brilliant computer scientists created crypto and Dunning-Kruger'ed themselves into thinking that they were also experts in finance.
- username_my1 4y ago
  This article is off by 3.5 years and I bet that most FAANG stocks are still above their values when it was published. Tech “growth” companies has been overpriced but it made kind of sense as long as interest rates were negative and their revenue was growing… people believed in positive returns because they assumed the only way is up. Truth is … in any healthy public market no company has any business being at a higher than 20 p/e ratio. Unless maybe for a transitioning period of time (market making)
  - namaria 4y ago
    Boom and bust seem to be the prevailing pattern for the development of complex systems. Happens in ecosystems, and in economies. I don't even think it's detrimental... That was how we get a lot of otherwise unthinkable infrastructure development. The dotcom bubble left a lot of very cheap fiber connections that fueled later internet adoption, for example.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  I saw the Crypto.com Arena as a Pets.com Superbowl moment.
- ProjectArcturis 4y ago
  I had a similar moment at the peak in 2017 when my non-financial friends asked me if I owned Bitcoin.
- illwrks 4y ago
  I love that phrase, 'shoeshine boy moment'. I've stayed away from crypto, but my shoeshine boy moment was when we went on a road trip around Wales last summer. We happened to wander into a small shop in a small harbour town in Wales, literally about 4-6 streets in total. The guy behind the counter had some 'pay with crypto' machine and was singing the praises of crypto to all of the old ladies, moms and dads that were ahead of us in the queue...
  - smaddox 4y ago
    To be fair, he was likely being paid to sing those praises.
    - kylebenzle 4y ago
- namaria 4y ago
  About a year ago I was chilling in my bedroom and overheard some crypto-bro shilling just outside my window. That clinched my conviction that it was just a matter of time for it all to collapse.
- kayxspre 4y ago
  I often see the ads in advertising billboard. I usually go to a public park every other day, and the road will pass through a major intersection with large billboard. At one point, a billboard of cryptocurrency broker appeared every time I passed through that intersection. The particular broker also advertises into a convenience store (7-11), so I will be pretty much guarantee to see its ads every day. Another broker dared to register the domain name "Join the Crypto Revolution" to promote its scheme. I wish we could have an enforceable rules on prohibition to market cryptocurrency to general public like Singapore did (see [1]). We did open for comments regarding this, but it has not been set in stone as cryptocurrency broker tried to game the rules. [1] https://www.zdnet.com/finance/banking/singapore-cautions-against-marketing-of-cryptocurrency-services-to-public/ https://www.zdnet.com/finance/banking/singapore-cautions-aga...
golergka 4y ago
> Crypto needed a tangible market/reason d'etre to be valuable. I have recently paid $40 for a $240 SWIFT transaction that I made on behalf of my father, as his bank (with most Russian banks) have been cut of from the world's financial system. Crypto is fulfilling a real need felt by many people all around the globe; it's just most of those people don't live in first world nations.
- scoopertrooper 4y ago
  I think most people would prefer for the sanctions on Russia to be more rigorously enforced
  - golergka 4y ago
    I would prefer if Europe actually put in place oil/gas embargo and stop giving Putin's regime billions of dollars to wage war instead of blocking the people who have spent years protesting and are now trying to flee the totalitarian regime, but here we are.
- mmastrac 4y ago
  I'd be careful about admitting to evading financial sanctions in public, myself.
  - jhugo 4y ago
    What makes you think their father is a sanctioned person? It's not very likely, given the number of sanctioned persons vs. the number of Russians.
  - renonce 4y ago
    What is your nation? How the law is enforced varies greatly from country to country so it depends a lot.
- t_mann 4y ago
  Even those users still need price stability in order for your use case to work. And fiat on/off-ramps (as which Binance functioned for many).
fartcannon 4y ago
Bitcoins reason d'etre is to permit an exchange of value without involving the banks/classic financial infrastructure. It could go down to fractions of a penny and still be able to do that.
- danuker 4y ago
  I use it as an alternative store of value. That has gone badly for me in the past month. But its supply economics make me still want it.
- planb 4y ago
  No, because energy is not free.
  - DebtDeflation 4y ago
    Energy expended to mine BTC in the past is a sunk cost and so is irrelevant to the discussion. In the future, if the price of energy required to mine a BTC is below the value of the BTC there will be an incentive to mine BTC. There is no equivalent incentive in the opposite direction. You can convert energy to BTC, you can't convert BTC to energy.
    - namaria 4y ago
      What happens if the value collapses bellow the point where it's profitable to mine it then? Wouldn't this only reinforce the collapse as miners flee the system? Then once it goes below a threshold where it would be trivial to attack it and take it over it's a free for all for the remaining market value and that would be the coup de grace...
      - vineyardmike 4y ago
        Real question, has anyone actually developed an attack that could be executed? I know “what it would look like” is easy to explain, but is there any implementation? I’m not sure we’re super susceptible to an attack. Assuming you could spot an attack on the network post-hoc (anyone can read the blockchain), if an attack occurred it would destroy the value of bitcoin. This would probably destroy the value of the attackers coins and the attackers mining rigs… which seems like a net loss.
ericmay 4y ago
> I'd doubt BTC will go to zero, but I wouldn't be surprised if the entire covid rally gets wiped out and we see BTC 6k again. I agree. We invest a small amount of money into $BTC and I feel pretty neutral on the topic and my comments come from an intention of neutral observation. I think $BTC is in a bad spot that's about to get worse in the short-term. It's getting hit from both ends: expensive energy, and high interest rates. Many believe it's supposed to be a hedge, and I think it still is, but it's not a hedge against a high interest rate environment in which the dollar and fiat currency (primary reserve currencies: USD, EUR, YEN, GPB, etc.) are still normalized and valued. It's more of a hedge against low interest rates and the central banks printing money in that environment IMO. Long-term I'm bullish because it's a deflationary asset. Eventually we'll get to the point where, similar to maybe Japan or South Korea a pack of gum costs 1000 units of fiat, which will necessitate $BTC being "worth" hundreds of thousands of dollars (or it's worthless, I don't think there is a middle ground here). Unless something crazy happens, deflationary environments in fiat currency will always be avoided, and if you target 2% inflation every year it's all but guaranteed that $BTC will simply be "worth" a lot of dollars (or $0). So I wouldn't be surprised to see $BTC hit $6,000 or even less. I would be surprised if within, say, 15 years it's worth that amount and not $0 or $1,000,000 (or something).
- mumblemumble 4y ago
  Long term I'm bearish because it's a deflationary asset. Deflationary value stores have a tendency to cause all sorts of social ills by encouraging hoarding. There's a reasonable line of thought that observes that it's no coincidence that the end of the age of European colonialism coincided with the demise of the gold standard. More concretely: if crypto is deflationary, then its value works similarly to how an Amway or Herbalife membership's value does. You get rich by getting in first and then convincing others to join after you.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    More importantly it's only "bitcoin" because it's the first; even if everything crypto takes off the world could collectively decide to use something else (Etherium being an obvious choice, but there could be others).
time_to_smile 4y ago
> I'd doubt BTC will go to zero I think there's some serious liquidity issues coming up ahead. You need a buyer at the other end to sell, and I think there's an unknown point where there are effectively no buyers. Right now there are still plenty of crypto-bugs out there that will provide some liquidity because they think things will eventually turn around, but even these people only have so much cash. There's a moment where all of these unsophisticated investors (people that bought crypto based on the ads you're describing) will panic and want to cash out (or need to for personal financial reasons). We may already be seeing the crypto equivalent of a bank run. So much of crypto's "value" is based on the assumption of the future success. A big enough of a collapse in the belief in this future and it will be "trading" back at the levels when BTC was just a hobby project for techies (because that's what it will become again).
- spookthesunset 4y ago
  The problem is, when does bitcoin actually crash? I agree it is a scam and should crash in a sane rational world. But I’ve heard these exact arguments like 5 years ago. It’s the scam that just keeps going! Eventually it has to end, right? What is the thing that makes it end? Or will it just fizzle out with no real implosion? Maybe after 10 years to most people it would be just a distant memory?
  - time_to_smile 4y ago
    > What is the thing that makes it end? This is much easier to answer, at least in general, than many of the other "bubble" questions out there. The growth simply requires a larger and larger pool of new investors. It first started with tech enthusiasts who were really interested in the principles of cryptocurrency and people who also knew how they worked. The was a time when everyone in crypto had read the original Bitcoin whitepaper. Then it spreads to less savvy technical investors, people working at tech companies but not really able to understand it. This was the first bubble a few years back. The crypto boom could have ended here, relatively harmlessly. But then a ton of money started flowing into the market and into individuals pockets as well. Suddenly the pool of potential "investors" opened up and crypto also appeared to be much more liquid than before with the rapid rise of crypto exchanges. This is when you start seeing TV ads for crypto and hear of people on reddit, with no technical knowledge or skills, pouring all their surplus income into crypto. It ends when there aren't enough new "investors" to keep the illusion up, and it crashes as people start to need to liquidate that investment. During the artificial pandemic boom there was money flowing everywhere, people could throw tons of money into crypto and still eat and pay their mortgage. Very soon people are going to need to get that money out, or desperately want to, and then liquidity will be a problem because there aren't any people left to feed into the scheme. The faster the price drops coupled with people needing that money, the more likely a panic is to happen which will cause a sudden crash.
twawaaay 4y ago
> The only difference between crypto and e-betting is that everyone got to be a winner on the crypto markets for a while. Is also description of a bubble or a pyramid.
1270018080 4y ago
As long as people want to buy illegal things online, I don't think bitcoin will go to zero. That has, and always will be, it's only rational use case.
- can16358p 4y ago
  Wow. I just learned that all the toyally legit things I've done with Bitcoin are all illegal.
  - 1270018080 4y ago
    By rational, I mean the only time it is better than other methods. Buying legal things with bitcoin is slower, more expensive, dramatically more environmentally harmful, and dangerous to the consumer (no regulation). Truly no upside in real life applications unless you're trying to do illegal things.
    - can16358p 4y ago
      You must be living in a perfect society with zero government/political corruption. Good for you.
      - yunohn 4y ago
        What “totally legit” things have you been doing with crypto? Curious to know more.
        can16358p 4y ago
        Donations? Purchasing stuff? (And before you ask, NO, there were no other possible ways for me to do those donations to people in war or purchase those stuff where crypto and PayPal were the only way to pay and PayPal is blocked in my corrupted country)
        RobotsDownUnder 4y ago
paganel 4y ago
It was the same thing for football (or soccer, as you call it in the US) over here in Europe, at some time late last year I started to notice that a lot of European clubs were advertising for this crypto thing, much of it related to Binance. It so happens that most of the tokens “released” by those clubs (yes, they also did that) are 90% or more bellow their peak value, there were a few threads about it on /r/soccer recently.
vkou 4y ago
> Crypto needed a tangible market/reason d'etre to be valuable. The reason, as we have been reminded so many times, is that it's an inflation-resistant store of value. Pay no attention to BTC tanking right after actual inflation started. It's weird how, as an inflation-resistant store of value, it only seems to work when we have asset-inflation, but stops working when we have main-street-grocery-prices-inflation. Perhaps it's some web 3.0 financial wizardry that I'm just not smart enough to understand, but it seems to me that the only reason it was going up in price was because printed money (USD or USDT) was chasing yield.
- achenet 4y ago
  no, it's to buy drugs on the internet.
  - Consultant32452 4y ago
    Both are very important functions for a currency or store of value.
winternett 4y ago
I was bored and had $100 lying around when BTC was at ~$39k so I dropped it in the machine and have watched the investment go all the way up to $150... Checking my investment today, it's around $50... It's not that bad for risking tiny amounts of money if you're into losing cash. If you're into losing vast amounts of money, I highly recommend dumping your life savings into BTC. So many large companies have their hands in creating the BTC/Crypto cookie jar that it's guaranteed to fail, it's promoted in every setting because it is their drinking money generator. The factor (they didn't account for) that added a ton of volatility was that independent (whale) investors like Elon would jump in and screw up the entire works with tweets and strategic buying and dumps... Meanwhile, it's all the small people who saw the commercials and though it was legit that totally got hosed. It's literally the rich and corporations robbing the poor, and on top of that in one of the most dire economic points in time ever... It's the pits of humanity I tell you.
throw8383833jj 4y ago
Crypto is having it's DOT COM moment right now. A lot of companies with not much value crashed and never recovered. After the dot.com bust, the internet didn't go away, it only grew and grew. And, I don't have to tell you what happened to amazon, if you had invested during the dot.com bust.
kingTug 4y ago
I predict Matt Damon's career will suffer greatly in the next couple years. Being the face of that crypto.com ad that played 5(?) times during the super bowl and regularly thereafter in prime time slots. I think many Baby Boomers invested last winter based on these ads and will forever associate Matt Damon with a scam that cost them dearly.
kylebenzle 4y ago
Bitcoin Core (and most of the rest) have been digital ponzi scheme since around 2017 when Blockstream and other corporate interests successfully temporarily hijacked control of the "BTC" GitHub repo and inject the malicious code know as RBF. This attack effectivly killed the number one and tititular usecase of Bitcoin, Peer-to-Peer Digital Cash. 99% of the industry is a fraud propt up by Blockstream's parent company Bitfinx and Tether. Only a few actual real projects (out of thousands of frauds) remain, namly XMR, BCH and maybe a few others. If you are "investing" in any other cryptocurrency or NTF you are participating in a convoluted ponzi scheme.

by lumost 4y ago

mmastrac 4y ago

I recall walking through an airport this year and seeing Crypto ads everywhere. That was my shoeshine boy moment (1) (1) https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-spot-stock-market-bubbles-2017-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-spot-stock-market-bub...

piva00 4y ago
I visited Brazil recently (3-4 months ago), I got into cryptocurrency-talk or some shitcoin peddled by cashiers, Uber drivers, waiters in some restaurants, acquaintances that aren't tech-savvy at all, etc. That's when it downed on me how big this whole thing got outside of internet chatter, it downed how many vulnerable people are exposed to the fallout of a crypto implosion.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  It's so ironic how all those libertarian crypto-bros think they've got the inside track and they're so much smarter than everyone else, when actually they're just as gullible and common and deluded as random cashiers, Uber drivers, waiters, bartenders, used car salesmen, chiropractors, cosmeticians, shoeshine boys, and ordinary hoi polloi on the street, all being influenced by the exact same mass market ads and hype all over the world.
  - melenaboija 4y ago
    Yup, and seems to be getting worse: “Families in despair over IM Academy: ‘The crypto-sect has kidnapped our children’”[1] https://english.elpais.com/international/2022-04-18/families-in-despair-over-im-academy-the-crypto-sect-has-kidnapped-our-children.html https://english.elpais.com/international/2022-04-18/families...
  - FabHK 4y ago
    Well, people that got in early and got out about 6m ago (or now, still) might have made good money. Attributing it to a deep understanding of the technology is almost certainly wrong; attributing it to a certain street-smart understanding of bubbles, marketing, and hype might be correct. Though I'm inclined to just call it luck.
  - twirlock 4y ago
- blep_ 4y ago
  ("dawned") ... but yeah. It's depressing. Countries with already bad economic conditions (like "we literally don't have functioning currency" level, not the things US residents complain about) seem particularly susceptible to it.
  - piva00 4y ago
    I really thought I had written "dawned"... I think it's the same issue I have when writing "ratio", I always end up writing "ration". Thanks for the correction.
    - bcrl 4y ago
      The older I get, the more errors my typing contains versus the mental stream of consciousness I intended to type.
    - dizhn 4y ago
      The way I type compute always involves deleting the r at the end. :)
  - yellowapple 4y ago
    Because they're actually using it as a currency. Consequently, they probably won't feel as much of the pain speculators are feeling right now / will continue to feel; as long as the amount of $FOO earned from a day's work pays for the day's expenses, they have little reason not to continue adopting and using $FOO (for whatever value of $FOO we're using). Put differently: when the options are "failed local currency" v. "hard to obtain foreign currency" v. "easy to obtain electronic currency", you and I would probably be inclined to use the third option.
nicbou 4y ago
I had a few different moments, since I was always very skeptical of crypto. However being pitched crypto by an old bartender in Stuttgart was probably the most obvious one. Generally, crypto was not promoted to me by people who would understand either computer science or economics.
- boc 4y ago
  Not to be flippant, but nobody who I've heard promote crypto has any real, deep training in economics. Computer science yes, totally, but not econ. There are obvious problems with the entire concept of decentralized money if you've studied economic/financial history. We already experienced it back in the 19th Century and it's following pretty much the same pattern. Wildcat banks, frontrunning, wash trading, bank runs, and much more. Some brilliant computer scientists created crypto and Dunning-Kruger'ed themselves into thinking that they were also experts in finance.
username_my1 4y ago
This article is off by 3.5 years and I bet that most FAANG stocks are still above their values when it was published. Tech “growth” companies has been overpriced but it made kind of sense as long as interest rates were negative and their revenue was growing… people believed in positive returns because they assumed the only way is up. Truth is … in any healthy public market no company has any business being at a higher than 20 p/e ratio. Unless maybe for a transitioning period of time (market making)
- namaria 4y ago
  Boom and bust seem to be the prevailing pattern for the development of complex systems. Happens in ecosystems, and in economies. I don't even think it's detrimental... That was how we get a lot of otherwise unthinkable infrastructure development. The dotcom bubble left a lot of very cheap fiber connections that fueled later internet adoption, for example.
dehrmann 4y ago
I saw the Crypto.com Arena as a Pets.com Superbowl moment.
ProjectArcturis 4y ago
I had a similar moment at the peak in 2017 when my non-financial friends asked me if I owned Bitcoin.
illwrks 4y ago
I love that phrase, 'shoeshine boy moment'. I've stayed away from crypto, but my shoeshine boy moment was when we went on a road trip around Wales last summer. We happened to wander into a small shop in a small harbour town in Wales, literally about 4-6 streets in total. The guy behind the counter had some 'pay with crypto' machine and was singing the praises of crypto to all of the old ladies, moms and dads that were ahead of us in the queue...
- smaddox 4y ago
  To be fair, he was likely being paid to sing those praises.
  - kylebenzle 4y ago
namaria 4y ago
About a year ago I was chilling in my bedroom and overheard some crypto-bro shilling just outside my window. That clinched my conviction that it was just a matter of time for it all to collapse.
kayxspre 4y ago
I often see the ads in advertising billboard. I usually go to a public park every other day, and the road will pass through a major intersection with large billboard. At one point, a billboard of cryptocurrency broker appeared every time I passed through that intersection. The particular broker also advertises into a convenience store (7-11), so I will be pretty much guarantee to see its ads every day. Another broker dared to register the domain name "Join the Crypto Revolution" to promote its scheme. I wish we could have an enforceable rules on prohibition to market cryptocurrency to general public like Singapore did (see [1]). We did open for comments regarding this, but it has not been set in stone as cryptocurrency broker tried to game the rules. [1] https://www.zdnet.com/finance/banking/singapore-cautions-against-marketing-of-cryptocurrency-services-to-public/ https://www.zdnet.com/finance/banking/singapore-cautions-aga...

golergka 4y ago

> Crypto needed a tangible market/reason d'etre to be valuable. I have recently paid $40 for a $240 SWIFT transaction that I made on behalf of my father, as his bank (with most Russian banks) have been cut of from the world's financial system. Crypto is fulfilling a real need felt by many people all around the globe; it's just most of those people don't live in first world nations.

scoopertrooper 4y ago
I think most people would prefer for the sanctions on Russia to be more rigorously enforced
- golergka 4y ago
  I would prefer if Europe actually put in place oil/gas embargo and stop giving Putin's regime billions of dollars to wage war instead of blocking the people who have spent years protesting and are now trying to flee the totalitarian regime, but here we are.
mmastrac 4y ago
I'd be careful about admitting to evading financial sanctions in public, myself.
- jhugo 4y ago
  What makes you think their father is a sanctioned person? It's not very likely, given the number of sanctioned persons vs. the number of Russians.
- renonce 4y ago
  What is your nation? How the law is enforced varies greatly from country to country so it depends a lot.
t_mann 4y ago
Even those users still need price stability in order for your use case to work. And fiat on/off-ramps (as which Binance functioned for many).

fartcannon 4y ago

Bitcoins reason d'etre is to permit an exchange of value without involving the banks/classic financial infrastructure. It could go down to fractions of a penny and still be able to do that.

danuker 4y ago
I use it as an alternative store of value. That has gone badly for me in the past month. But its supply economics make me still want it.
planb 4y ago
No, because energy is not free.
- DebtDeflation 4y ago
  Energy expended to mine BTC in the past is a sunk cost and so is irrelevant to the discussion. In the future, if the price of energy required to mine a BTC is below the value of the BTC there will be an incentive to mine BTC. There is no equivalent incentive in the opposite direction. You can convert energy to BTC, you can't convert BTC to energy.
  - namaria 4y ago
    What happens if the value collapses bellow the point where it's profitable to mine it then? Wouldn't this only reinforce the collapse as miners flee the system? Then once it goes below a threshold where it would be trivial to attack it and take it over it's a free for all for the remaining market value and that would be the coup de grace...
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      Real question, has anyone actually developed an attack that could be executed? I know “what it would look like” is easy to explain, but is there any implementation? I’m not sure we’re super susceptible to an attack. Assuming you could spot an attack on the network post-hoc (anyone can read the blockchain), if an attack occurred it would destroy the value of bitcoin. This would probably destroy the value of the attackers coins and the attackers mining rigs… which seems like a net loss.

ericmay 4y ago

> I'd doubt BTC will go to zero, but I wouldn't be surprised if the entire covid rally gets wiped out and we see BTC 6k again. I agree. We invest a small amount of money into $BTC and I feel pretty neutral on the topic and my comments come from an intention of neutral observation. I think $BTC is in a bad spot that's about to get worse in the short-term. It's getting hit from both ends: expensive energy, and high interest rates. Many believe it's supposed to be a hedge, and I think it still is, but it's not a hedge against a high interest rate environment in which the dollar and fiat currency (primary reserve currencies: USD, EUR, YEN, GPB, etc.) are still normalized and valued. It's more of a hedge against low interest rates and the central banks printing money in that environment IMO. Long-term I'm bullish because it's a deflationary asset. Eventually we'll get to the point where, similar to maybe Japan or South Korea a pack of gum costs 1000 units of fiat, which will necessitate $BTC being "worth" hundreds of thousands of dollars (or it's worthless, I don't think there is a middle ground here). Unless something crazy happens, deflationary environments in fiat currency will always be avoided, and if you target 2% inflation every year it's all but guaranteed that $BTC will simply be "worth" a lot of dollars (or $0). So I wouldn't be surprised to see $BTC hit $6,000 or even less. I would be surprised if within, say, 15 years it's worth that amount and not $0 or $1,000,000 (or something).

mumblemumble 4y ago
Long term I'm bearish because it's a deflationary asset. Deflationary value stores have a tendency to cause all sorts of social ills by encouraging hoarding. There's a reasonable line of thought that observes that it's no coincidence that the end of the age of European colonialism coincided with the demise of the gold standard. More concretely: if crypto is deflationary, then its value works similarly to how an Amway or Herbalife membership's value does. You get rich by getting in first and then convincing others to join after you.
- bombcar 4y ago
  More importantly it's only "bitcoin" because it's the first; even if everything crypto takes off the world could collectively decide to use something else (Etherium being an obvious choice, but there could be others).

time_to_smile 4y ago

> I'd doubt BTC will go to zero I think there's some serious liquidity issues coming up ahead. You need a buyer at the other end to sell, and I think there's an unknown point where there are effectively no buyers. Right now there are still plenty of crypto-bugs out there that will provide some liquidity because they think things will eventually turn around, but even these people only have so much cash. There's a moment where all of these unsophisticated investors (people that bought crypto based on the ads you're describing) will panic and want to cash out (or need to for personal financial reasons). We may already be seeing the crypto equivalent of a bank run. So much of crypto's "value" is based on the assumption of the future success. A big enough of a collapse in the belief in this future and it will be "trading" back at the levels when BTC was just a hobby project for techies (because that's what it will become again).

spookthesunset 4y ago
The problem is, when does bitcoin actually crash? I agree it is a scam and should crash in a sane rational world. But I’ve heard these exact arguments like 5 years ago. It’s the scam that just keeps going! Eventually it has to end, right? What is the thing that makes it end? Or will it just fizzle out with no real implosion? Maybe after 10 years to most people it would be just a distant memory?
- time_to_smile 4y ago
  > What is the thing that makes it end? This is much easier to answer, at least in general, than many of the other "bubble" questions out there. The growth simply requires a larger and larger pool of new investors. It first started with tech enthusiasts who were really interested in the principles of cryptocurrency and people who also knew how they worked. The was a time when everyone in crypto had read the original Bitcoin whitepaper. Then it spreads to less savvy technical investors, people working at tech companies but not really able to understand it. This was the first bubble a few years back. The crypto boom could have ended here, relatively harmlessly. But then a ton of money started flowing into the market and into individuals pockets as well. Suddenly the pool of potential "investors" opened up and crypto also appeared to be much more liquid than before with the rapid rise of crypto exchanges. This is when you start seeing TV ads for crypto and hear of people on reddit, with no technical knowledge or skills, pouring all their surplus income into crypto. It ends when there aren't enough new "investors" to keep the illusion up, and it crashes as people start to need to liquidate that investment. During the artificial pandemic boom there was money flowing everywhere, people could throw tons of money into crypto and still eat and pay their mortgage. Very soon people are going to need to get that money out, or desperately want to, and then liquidity will be a problem because there aren't any people left to feed into the scheme. The faster the price drops coupled with people needing that money, the more likely a panic is to happen which will cause a sudden crash.

twawaaay 4y ago

> The only difference between crypto and e-betting is that everyone got to be a winner on the crypto markets for a while. Is also description of a bubble or a pyramid.

1270018080 4y ago

As long as people want to buy illegal things online, I don't think bitcoin will go to zero. That has, and always will be, it's only rational use case.

can16358p 4y ago
Wow. I just learned that all the toyally legit things I've done with Bitcoin are all illegal.
- 1270018080 4y ago
  By rational, I mean the only time it is better than other methods. Buying legal things with bitcoin is slower, more expensive, dramatically more environmentally harmful, and dangerous to the consumer (no regulation). Truly no upside in real life applications unless you're trying to do illegal things.
  - can16358p 4y ago
    You must be living in a perfect society with zero government/political corruption. Good for you.
    - yunohn 4y ago
      What “totally legit” things have you been doing with crypto? Curious to know more.
      - can16358p 4y ago
        Donations? Purchasing stuff? (And before you ask, NO, there were no other possible ways for me to do those donations to people in war or purchase those stuff where crypto and PayPal were the only way to pay and PayPal is blocked in my corrupted country)
        RobotsDownUnder 4y ago

paganel 4y ago

It was the same thing for football (or soccer, as you call it in the US) over here in Europe, at some time late last year I started to notice that a lot of European clubs were advertising for this crypto thing, much of it related to Binance. It so happens that most of the tokens “released” by those clubs (yes, they also did that) are 90% or more bellow their peak value, there were a few threads about it on /r/soccer recently.

vkou 4y ago

> Crypto needed a tangible market/reason d'etre to be valuable. The reason, as we have been reminded so many times, is that it's an inflation-resistant store of value. Pay no attention to BTC tanking right after actual inflation started. It's weird how, as an inflation-resistant store of value, it only seems to work when we have asset-inflation, but stops working when we have main-street-grocery-prices-inflation. Perhaps it's some web 3.0 financial wizardry that I'm just not smart enough to understand, but it seems to me that the only reason it was going up in price was because printed money (USD or USDT) was chasing yield.

achenet 4y ago
no, it's to buy drugs on the internet.
- Consultant32452 4y ago
  Both are very important functions for a currency or store of value.

winternett 4y ago

I was bored and had $100 lying around when BTC was at ~$39k so I dropped it in the machine and have watched the investment go all the way up to $150... Checking my investment today, it's around $50... It's not that bad for risking tiny amounts of money if you're into losing cash. If you're into losing vast amounts of money, I highly recommend dumping your life savings into BTC. So many large companies have their hands in creating the BTC/Crypto cookie jar that it's guaranteed to fail, it's promoted in every setting because it is their drinking money generator. The factor (they didn't account for) that added a ton of volatility was that independent (whale) investors like Elon would jump in and screw up the entire works with tweets and strategic buying and dumps... Meanwhile, it's all the small people who saw the commercials and though it was legit that totally got hosed. It's literally the rich and corporations robbing the poor, and on top of that in one of the most dire economic points in time ever... It's the pits of humanity I tell you.

throw8383833jj 4y ago

Crypto is having it's DOT COM moment right now. A lot of companies with not much value crashed and never recovered. After the dot.com bust, the internet didn't go away, it only grew and grew. And, I don't have to tell you what happened to amazon, if you had invested during the dot.com bust.

kingTug 4y ago

I predict Matt Damon's career will suffer greatly in the next couple years. Being the face of that crypto.com ad that played 5(?) times during the super bowl and regularly thereafter in prime time slots. I think many Baby Boomers invested last winter based on these ads and will forever associate Matt Damon with a scam that cost them dearly.

kylebenzle 4y ago

Bitcoin Core (and most of the rest) have been digital ponzi scheme since around 2017 when Blockstream and other corporate interests successfully temporarily hijacked control of the "BTC" GitHub repo and inject the malicious code know as RBF. This attack effectivly killed the number one and tititular usecase of Bitcoin, Peer-to-Peer Digital Cash. 99% of the industry is a fraud propt up by Blockstream's parent company Bitfinx and Tether. Only a few actual real projects (out of thousands of frauds) remain, namly XMR, BCH and maybe a few others. If you are "investing" in any other cryptocurrency or NTF you are participating in a convoluted ponzi scheme.