11 ms·

The crypto crisis has created an advertising vacuum

82 points by ilamont 4y ago

hourago 4y ago
Will the meme economy destabilise the economy? Millions speculating on all types of shares and exotic investments. As discussed in another post, news move faster than ever. Would not you like to be the next early investor in a successful trend. You don't need to care of "the thing" has value or not, you just need to sell the hot potato before it burns you. One possible learning use the cryptocurrencies were a bad investment and a cost to the planet. Another one is that unregulated markets are good for early investors. Don't let stop you that probably when you hear about it it's already too late. I do not know if the "real economy" will be same to handle this big bags of money that go as fast as they came. (Ads, GPUs, energy, ...)
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
"And nothing of value was lost." This was one of the top voted posts in the Austin subreddit recently: https://old.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/vmtmul/finally_some_good_news/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/vmtmul/finally_some... Seriously, during other crashes, I remember thinking of the real negative externalities that happened during the crash, e.g. many economists have drawn lines to the current housing supply crunch due to underinvestment after the Great Recession. I don't feel any of that now. I primarily feel that a bunch of grifter scams are finally getting washed away, and then what you're left with are products that are searching for use cases where they aren't worse in every way than currently available products.
- silasdavis 4y ago
  That's good then. Good to not be causing a housing crunch.
- abirch 4y ago
  OMG nothing of value was lost. Now I can even invite my crypto nephew to Thanksgiving this year.
- Retric 4y ago
  What’s interesting about this crash is prices are still so high. Bitcoin is close to 20,000$ right now. So there are still huge paper losses, but I doubt that many bought in at just 20+k. It’s odd to look prices dropping to 1/3 and think thing things could get a lot worse or it could turn into just another blip on a larger upwards trajectory.
  - Victerius 4y ago
    One bitcoin could be worth $20 or $200 000 in one year. Which is just one of the reasons why it's a bad store of value or medium of exchange.
    - jquery 4y ago
      To be fair, that property made it great for people selling get-rich-quick scams and the people falling for them. A few people did get rich, pay no attention to the vast majority who lost money.
  - pavlov 4y ago
    A ton of people bought Bitcoin at >$20k. It reached that milestone even before Elon Musk started promoting it about 18 months ago, and that's when the hype really started. I suspect that most retail Bitcoin holders bought it last year and are down 30-70%. The people who post on HN are very much outliers, having known about Bitcoin for a decade. The real retail volume in 2021 came from relatively uninformed people buying their first crypto. Also, there are the publicly listed corporate whales. Tesla has 42,000 Bitcoins bought at an average price of $31,620. MicroStrategy has over 130,000 Bitcoins bought at an average price around $30k as well. Public company accounting standards require these companies to mark down their crypto holdings regularly, so it seems that Tesla will be booking a roughly $420M loss for the past quarter, and MSTR has lost a whopping $1.3 billion. (I'm sure Musk appreciates that the loss is close to 420 though, even if Tesla shareholders don't.)
    - mdm12 4y ago
      Apparently, the average investor's position for BTC in Coinbase is around 21k, per some Mizuho survey: https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/survey-showed-average-bitcoin-buy-price-is-21k--mizuho-432SI-2828082 https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/survey-show.... So, many folks are underwater on their so-called 'investment'.
- jjfoooo4 4y ago
  It’s a demonstration of the societal value of bad businesses going under. There are certain ideas that people just cannot be swayed against by evidence, especially if they have skin in the game. The real destructiveness of crypto is the other ideas that have been starved for oxygen during this bubble. I am glad it looks like we are beginning to move on.
  - cortesoft 4y ago
    > It’s a demonstration of the societal value of bad businesses going under. I always think about this when I see people rail against short sellers, as if the whole idea of betting against a company is morally wrong. Short sellers are one of the only checks against overly inflated equity prices. If the only people allowed to participate in a market are the believers, you are going to get a very distorted view of the actual value of assets. For the market to do its thing, you need failure.
  - jrkrk8jdjf 4y ago
    Now consider all the ideas starved for attention coddling old wealth, salary feudalism, military industrial complex, and consumption of resources ostensibly to send future humans who don’t exist yet into space, at the expense of people living now. Basically anyone who comes along is joining an in progress game of Monopoly. The real destructiveness of business as usual. “When a man’s salary…” is how the saying starts.
- huijzer 4y ago
  > Seriously, during other crashes, I remember thinking of the real negative externalities that happened during the crash, e.g. many economists have drawn lines to the current housing supply crunch due to underinvestment after the Great Recession. Don’t underestimate what can come still. Based on the high price to equity ratios in the stock market, it is likely that the "correction" will correct more. This is also in line with the recent rounds of layoffs. Crypto going down first makes sense due to the amount of speculation. I‘m really curious whether we‘ll get a Lehman Brothers moment in 2022.
- ddjsn111 4y ago
  If you do not recognise that there is value in decentralised, self-sovereign, permissionless, censorship resistant, anonymous, Internet native money then you are retarded.
  - dang 4y ago
    We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. You can't do that on HN, regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- ditonal 4y ago
  Hacker News has gotten overwhelmingly anti-crypto to an extent it’s as bad an echo chamber as many pro-crypto echo chambers. People have such a hatred for crypto they are overjoyed to celebrate a crypto crash. They were annoyed people they disliked were getting rich and now feel “vindicated” the bubble is popping. But…have people actually looked around? Airbnb stock is down 80% in the last 6 months. Netflix, Twilio, DoorDash, and many many other companies have taken a similar beating. Bitcoin has actually done much better then most of the tech stocks, especially if you look at a 2 year chart. Amazing to see all this gravedancing when the crypto crash isn’t a crypto crash at all but a speculative asset crash and most of our jobs fall into that category. Another funny dynamic is many pro-crypto subreddits hate NFTs but similarly we’re seeing gravedancing over monkey JPEGs even though the bored apes have held up better then many “serious” crypto projects. My point is that people want confirmation bias for their narrative. And they are overjoyed to celebrate crypto crashing to extent it confirms their narrative it’s a big Ponzi scam that was due for a crash. But they seem less eager to be intellectually honest and work in the rest of what’s going on into that narrative. If bitcoin falling 60% proves it was a scam what does Airbnb falling 80% say about Airbnb. And I know your answer will be they have a business model with cash flow. But these are all “a priori” assumptions. The crash is viewed in a different lens based not on evidence but on what we believe to be true beforehand. Tech bros celebrating the death of crypto bros are knee deep in the icey waters of the Titanic sinking celebrating the guy whose shoulder deep as they both continue to sink, but due to preconceived notions refuse to realize they’re all about to drown from the same iceberg crash.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    The difference, as always, is leverage. I don’t think there is as much leverage built on top of Airbnb stock as there is on Bitcoin. Airbnb crashing 80% didn’t take any funds out of business.
  - Deletionk 4y ago
    It's different and connected: Different because shares still give you a part of a real business and equal because it showed that money was too cheap. I'm not anti crypto just because, I have plenty of good reasons. And no real cryptobro was able to convince me with good argument s otherwise. Of course the share prices General looked weird that's why I didn't invest last time I wanted to.
soco 4y ago
xwdv 4y ago
Bitcoin has been dropping about 10k per month the last few months. The next big 10k drop should come around the middle of July, and in August I predict the price will be in the low thousands.
- cehrlich 4y ago
  I'm also bearish on crypto, but by that logic it will be at -10k three months from now.
  - postalrat 4y ago
    Maybe after 10k it just halves every month.
    - bogota 4y ago
      Maybe it does maybe it doesn’t. All of this discussion is founded in great TA and economics…
  - paulpauper 4y ago
    right now the decline still seems to be at a constant rate
    - bee_rider 4y ago
      Sigmoids look pretty linear at some points, right?
    - mlyle 4y ago
      Yes, but extrapolating current behavior to the future is risky, especially when just extended a bit further the result is obviously ridiculous-- like a large negative price.
    - bogota 4y ago
      Yea but not a constant percentage. A 50% in a month drop is much different than 10% drop of a much higher prices asset. Anyway i would bet 2 bitcoin that it will not be down another ten thousand in a month. However im not aware of any escrow that would hold btc for one party and usd for the other as im sure you don’t want to bet in btc if you think that asset is dropping. Not without using some derivatives on eth that I don’t trust anyway.
chrismckleroy 4y ago
Curious how long the crypto.com arena will stay with that name, one year into the naming rights lease…
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Usually it sticks until someone pays to rename it. WaMu Theater in Seattle is still called that even though WaMu went under during the financial crisis. (Though now it stands for Washington Music.)
- yardie 4y ago
  The arenas were smart and got their money up front, in dollars. If crypto.com goes under the naming rights becomes collateral and can be auctioned off. And it’s in LA no shortage of buyers willing to take over that name.
- pg_bot 4y ago
  Terra/Luna made a 40 million dollar deal (cash up front) for 5 years of advertising with the Washington Nationals this February. The Nationals played 23 home games before they imploded.
paulpauper 4y ago
>from $3 trillion to roughly $900 billion, and analysts predict the meltdown will continue. It's even worse than that. The $900 billion is about 20% stable coins.
- cynusx 4y ago
  Of which one stablecoin that everybody knows is very unreliable is still alive and well. That's very likely to collapse too soon imo.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    Rumors are swirling about USDC via Silvergate bank as well, which would be tragic and take down DAI too
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      The way DAI has been explained to me, this is not likely to happen unless USDC transactions are frozen entirely. Otherwise there's just going to be a flood of USDC collateral liquidations from DAI.
      - yieldcrv 4y ago
        Yes that’s true, DAI should be able to handle mass liquidations very well. MIM has, and is similar technology If USDC exchange rate fell due to crisis of confidence, liquidations will occur fine.
pclmulqdq 4y ago
Could this be the link that ties the shitcoins to the main economy? Advertising? That would be very ironic, given that a lot of tech today is based on ads. It is especially ironic that it appears that FB and GOOG (and so many other free apps) may have been quietly propped up by crypto money.
- altdataseller 4y ago
  The % of all ads devoted to crypto surely must be a trivial %
throw0101a 4y ago
† "Crypto" as in "cryptocurrency" and not "cryptography". (Some of us have more interest in one than the other.)
Animats 4y ago
But the guy who wrote the article is sure ad spend on crypto is coming back. Maybe not. Most of crypto works like a Ponzi scheme. Gains to early investors come from later investors. Eventually, you run out of suckers. We're there. Last 24 hours: - Someone pulled another $160 million out of USDT. Look at their market cap graph for the last 3 months. Every few days, somebody pulls out another $100 million+ amount. Pretty soon you're talking about real money.[1] - Vauld went bust.[2] - The Celsius collapse is affecting Aave and MakerDAO.[3] All those "staking" schemes are based entirely on a "line goes up" assumption. All they are doing is feeding funds into some speculation. [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31974146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31974146 [3] https://cointelegraph.com/news/maker-cuts-off-aave-s-dai-supply-as-fallout-from-celsius-continues https://cointelegraph.com/news/maker-cuts-off-aave-s-dai-sup...
- jquery 4y ago
  I wonder what the remaining USDT holders are waiting for? Is it just the market isn't liquid enough to pull out more than $100M/day?
  - overtonwhy 4y ago
    Tether is not regulated or licensed by any body AFAIK so they aren’t required to process payment requests with any sort or timeliness. lul Same with the unlicensed and unregulated exchanges that they do business with. You want out? Take a number and get in line.
    - jquery 4y ago
      So basically tether is just hoping by dragging their feet that btc will recover in price and their embezzlement won’t be exposed? If I had a large amount of USDT I would get out right now and wait for things to settle down. There’s no upside, it’s all downside right now.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Watching the USDT market cap is like watching a bomb counting down but now knowing where "0" is.
alkonaut 4y ago
When I first saw things like “crypto.com” on a big football team’s jersey, a stadium name or in F1, I knew it was only a matter of time until it all came crashing down. I can’t believe I’m longing back to the days when it was gambling and petroligarchs instead.
- AceJohnny2 4y ago
  Reminds me of a classic story about uber-banker JP Morgan getting stock questions from his shoe-shine boy, and so deciding to sell all stock sensing a crash was coming. His reasoning was that if even the shoe-shine boy was buying stock, the market was saturated and had no-where to go but down. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5273325-j-p-morgan-tells-the-story-of-how-he-would https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5273325-j-p-morgan-tells-th...
autophagian 4y ago
Patiently waiting for the Superbowl Ad where a monkey rides a horse through a wasteland of abandoned company offices with "-inance" and "crypto-" names. (https://youtu.be/ONZFkqzuMjI https://youtu.be/ONZFkqzuMjI)
labrador 4y ago
> Don’t expect to see many crypto ads for a minute "I haven't seen him for a minute" "I haven't been home for a minute" If you're wondering like me why everyone started saying "for a minute" and where it came from, I recently watched The Wire and that's the earliest use I know about. When I was growing up in America, people said they "had to stand in line" but now they say "had to stand on line" I believe "stand on" instead of "stand in" comes from Britain
- hprotagonist 4y ago
  “on” is a new yorker thing. Did you move to the northeast? https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/is-it-on-line-or-in-line https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/is-it-on-line-...
  - labrador 4y ago
    No, I've lived in California my whole life. I figured "on" came from the East, but I've only heard it British shows. I've also picked up a term I really like from the Brits (I think it's them): "get things sorted", "get it sorted"
    - hprotagonist 4y ago
      perhaps some of ours came west :)
      - labrador 4y ago
        We don't have as many East Coasters as Los Angeles, but yes that's true.
- brendoelfrendo 4y ago
  > When I was growing up in America, people said they "had to stand in line" but now they say "had to stand on line" Is this a generational/regional thing? I'm an East Coast millennial and I never hear people say "stand on line." The "in a minute" example I believe comes from AAVE, if it was present in The Wire it was probably common in the Baltimore lexicon long before that show hit HBO.
Synaesthesia 4y ago
Crypto in theory shouldn't require any advertising.
- cowtools 4y ago
  I mean, who benefits from advertising in crypto? The developers, owners, early investors and inside traders. Is it ironic that the most advertised cryptocurrencies are usually the least equitable?
- tirpen 4y ago
  Agreed. Pyramid schemes usually do quite well enough by just relying on word of mouth.
mjburgess 4y ago
A friendly reminder that crypto is negative-sum. If everyone who has taken money out returns it to everyone who has put money in, then there's a net loss. Why? Because money was taken out to pay the electric companies for mining, to the tune of 10-20Bn so far. Has that money generated real returns anywhere? Nope. Nothing was manufactured, created, or improved. The sum is negative. All past and present holders of crypto, on net, are down 20bn -- and havent yet realised it.
- nwah1 4y ago
  Not to mention all the wasted efforts from all laborers and services employed by all of the companies chasing unproductive financial returns in this space.
- divs1210 4y ago
  > Has that money generated real returns anywhere? Snowden and Navalny were funded via BTC.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    Feels like organized crime organizations could smuggle money to VIPs we want to fund for less than $20bn.
  - dehrmann 4y ago
    Are they both in a Russian prison?
- brianobush 4y ago
  Security has a price. As a side, the alt-coins that are purely proof of stake use little energy vs Bitcoin.
- cowtools 4y ago
  I think there is some net utility cryptocurrency provides as a means of payment, but the cryptocurrency "community" has largely veered away from that narrative since bitcoin and others have butted heads with their transaction volume issues.
jmyeet 4y ago
My sincere hope is that this signals the death of crypto in popular culture. I'm sure it'll always have a niche but up until now and for the foreseeable future there aren't any actual useful mass use cases for crypto. The drop in crypto ad spend is an interesting (and meaningful) indicator of market sentiment. I'm thinking we won't be seeing 2023 Superbowl crypto.com ads. I could be wrong. There's what? 20,000 coins? Most of them will die in the short term if they haven't already. So I don't know if Bitcoin will continue crashing or stabilize. No one does. If they did they'd make a ton of money. In the very least I'd bet the bear market will continue for awhile but at some point Bitcoin or some successor will roar back to life.
- marcosdumay 4y ago
  If anything, the crypto craziness ensured that most governments create some secure non-discriminating money transfer system. I just hope more people getting scammed isn't necessary for those systems to get integrated internationally.
walrus01 4y ago
Alexa, search for how to buy a really tiny violin with cryptocurrency.
Gurgler 4y ago
>“Crypto advertisers were quick to reign in ad spending... I've been seeing this misspelling a lot lately. It's "rein in," as in causing a horse to slow down by pulling back on the reins.
superkuh 4y ago
I'm confused. What were the non-cryptocurrency "crypto" "companies" advertising anyway? This hardly applies to actual cryptocurrency which has never needed or had a use for advertising. No one advertises for the dollar or euro for obvious reasons. It seems to only apply to the finance-origin scams that rebranded themselves with the word "crypto" as camouflage for scamming the ignorant. And since the fiat valuation of actual cryptocurrencies is driven by the ignorant the relative value went down there too. But the fundementals, the operation of say, bitcoin, hasn't been effected at all. This is all off-chain BS.
Animats 4y ago
There's something interesting about to happen. On July 6th, Otherside, the Bored Ape Yacht Club's metaverse, will have a load test. Everybody who bought NFTs for land in their metaverse gets to try to log in. The whole system is supposed to go live in mid-July. Yuga Labs outsourced their metaverse to Animoca Brands and Improbable. Improbable has been working on scaling technology for very large multiplayer games for years. There have been working games (Worlds Adrift, Scavengers) using their technology. It does seem to work, although game devs say it's a pain to use. But it's very expensive to run, because it requires a lot of servers and large amounts of communication between them to coordinate a big world with tens of thousands of players in one space. Originally it had to be run on Google's "cloud", and the game operator paid for every event that went to the servers. Three indy free to play games, and one rather nice-looking world (Nostos) from China, went live, got users, and went broke. Lesson: free to play not compatible with the server cost of this approach. Otherside/BAYC is all people with lots of spending money. They all paid at least US$3000 to get in. Some paid much more. None of that "inclusive" stuff. So they've paid for the operating cost. It's extroverted people; BAYC runs raves for them. It's people into FOMO. That's a very attractive customer pool to advertisers.
tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago
The article is quite repetitive so I may have missed it, but does it explain the impact on advertising as a whole? Advertising for crypto surely has taken a hit, but has this "created an advertising vacuum" or removed a very small percentage over overall ad spend, in a category that many publishers didn't want to touch anyways?
rsynnott 4y ago
I mean, good. In Dublin, for a few weeks, seemingly half the buses had ads for something called Floki Coin, which was, and I can't believe I'm typing this, named after Elon Musk's dog. Everyone, _everyone_, who saw those ads and bought in would have lost money. Lost everything, if they'd stayed in. (Ultimately, a complaint against the ads was upheld, but by then it was far too late: https://www.businesspost.ie/news/asai-upholds-complaints-against-dublin-bus-meme-coin-crypto-ad/ https://www.businesspost.ie/news/asai-upholds-complaints-aga...) The world would be a better place with no cryptocurrency ads.

82 points by ilamont 4y ago

Will the meme economy destabilise the economy? Millions speculating on all types of shares and exotic investments. As discussed in another post, news move faster than ever. Would not you like to be the next early investor in a successful trend. You don't need to care of "the thing" has value or not, you just need to sell the hot potato before it burns you. One possible learning use the cryptocurrencies were a bad investment and a cost to the planet. Another one is that unregulated markets are good for early investors. Don't let stop you that probably when you hear about it it's already too late. I do not know if the "real economy" will be same to handle this big bags of money that go as fast as they came. (Ads, GPUs, energy, ...)

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

"And nothing of value was lost." This was one of the top voted posts in the Austin subreddit recently: https://old.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/vmtmul/finally_some_good_news/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Austin/comments/vmtmul/finally_some... Seriously, during other crashes, I remember thinking of the real negative externalities that happened during the crash, e.g. many economists have drawn lines to the current housing supply crunch due to underinvestment after the Great Recession. I don't feel any of that now. I primarily feel that a bunch of grifter scams are finally getting washed away, and then what you're left with are products that are searching for use cases where they aren't worse in every way than currently available products.

silasdavis 4y ago
That's good then. Good to not be causing a housing crunch.
abirch 4y ago
OMG nothing of value was lost. Now I can even invite my crypto nephew to Thanksgiving this year.
Retric 4y ago
What’s interesting about this crash is prices are still so high. Bitcoin is close to 20,000$ right now. So there are still huge paper losses, but I doubt that many bought in at just 20+k. It’s odd to look prices dropping to 1/3 and think thing things could get a lot worse or it could turn into just another blip on a larger upwards trajectory.
- Victerius 4y ago
  One bitcoin could be worth $20 or $200 000 in one year. Which is just one of the reasons why it's a bad store of value or medium of exchange.
  - jquery 4y ago
    To be fair, that property made it great for people selling get-rich-quick scams and the people falling for them. A few people did get rich, pay no attention to the vast majority who lost money.
- pavlov 4y ago
  A ton of people bought Bitcoin at >$20k. It reached that milestone even before Elon Musk started promoting it about 18 months ago, and that's when the hype really started. I suspect that most retail Bitcoin holders bought it last year and are down 30-70%. The people who post on HN are very much outliers, having known about Bitcoin for a decade. The real retail volume in 2021 came from relatively uninformed people buying their first crypto. Also, there are the publicly listed corporate whales. Tesla has 42,000 Bitcoins bought at an average price of $31,620. MicroStrategy has over 130,000 Bitcoins bought at an average price around $30k as well. Public company accounting standards require these companies to mark down their crypto holdings regularly, so it seems that Tesla will be booking a roughly $420M loss for the past quarter, and MSTR has lost a whopping $1.3 billion. (I'm sure Musk appreciates that the loss is close to 420 though, even if Tesla shareholders don't.)
  - mdm12 4y ago
    Apparently, the average investor's position for BTC in Coinbase is around 21k, per some Mizuho survey: https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/survey-showed-average-bitcoin-buy-price-is-21k--mizuho-432SI-2828082 https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/survey-show.... So, many folks are underwater on their so-called 'investment'.
jjfoooo4 4y ago
It’s a demonstration of the societal value of bad businesses going under. There are certain ideas that people just cannot be swayed against by evidence, especially if they have skin in the game. The real destructiveness of crypto is the other ideas that have been starved for oxygen during this bubble. I am glad it looks like we are beginning to move on.
- cortesoft 4y ago
  > It’s a demonstration of the societal value of bad businesses going under. I always think about this when I see people rail against short sellers, as if the whole idea of betting against a company is morally wrong. Short sellers are one of the only checks against overly inflated equity prices. If the only people allowed to participate in a market are the believers, you are going to get a very distorted view of the actual value of assets. For the market to do its thing, you need failure.
- jrkrk8jdjf 4y ago
  Now consider all the ideas starved for attention coddling old wealth, salary feudalism, military industrial complex, and consumption of resources ostensibly to send future humans who don’t exist yet into space, at the expense of people living now. Basically anyone who comes along is joining an in progress game of Monopoly. The real destructiveness of business as usual. “When a man’s salary…” is how the saying starts.
huijzer 4y ago
> Seriously, during other crashes, I remember thinking of the real negative externalities that happened during the crash, e.g. many economists have drawn lines to the current housing supply crunch due to underinvestment after the Great Recession. Don’t underestimate what can come still. Based on the high price to equity ratios in the stock market, it is likely that the "correction" will correct more. This is also in line with the recent rounds of layoffs. Crypto going down first makes sense due to the amount of speculation. I‘m really curious whether we‘ll get a Lehman Brothers moment in 2022.
ddjsn111 4y ago
If you do not recognise that there is value in decentralised, self-sovereign, permissionless, censorship resistant, anonymous, Internet native money then you are retarded.
- dang 4y ago
  We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. You can't do that on HN, regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
ditonal 4y ago
Hacker News has gotten overwhelmingly anti-crypto to an extent it’s as bad an echo chamber as many pro-crypto echo chambers. People have such a hatred for crypto they are overjoyed to celebrate a crypto crash. They were annoyed people they disliked were getting rich and now feel “vindicated” the bubble is popping. But…have people actually looked around? Airbnb stock is down 80% in the last 6 months. Netflix, Twilio, DoorDash, and many many other companies have taken a similar beating. Bitcoin has actually done much better then most of the tech stocks, especially if you look at a 2 year chart. Amazing to see all this gravedancing when the crypto crash isn’t a crypto crash at all but a speculative asset crash and most of our jobs fall into that category. Another funny dynamic is many pro-crypto subreddits hate NFTs but similarly we’re seeing gravedancing over monkey JPEGs even though the bored apes have held up better then many “serious” crypto projects. My point is that people want confirmation bias for their narrative. And they are overjoyed to celebrate crypto crashing to extent it confirms their narrative it’s a big Ponzi scam that was due for a crash. But they seem less eager to be intellectually honest and work in the rest of what’s going on into that narrative. If bitcoin falling 60% proves it was a scam what does Airbnb falling 80% say about Airbnb. And I know your answer will be they have a business model with cash flow. But these are all “a priori” assumptions. The crash is viewed in a different lens based not on evidence but on what we believe to be true beforehand. Tech bros celebrating the death of crypto bros are knee deep in the icey waters of the Titanic sinking celebrating the guy whose shoulder deep as they both continue to sink, but due to preconceived notions refuse to realize they’re all about to drown from the same iceberg crash.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  The difference, as always, is leverage. I don’t think there is as much leverage built on top of Airbnb stock as there is on Bitcoin. Airbnb crashing 80% didn’t take any funds out of business.
- Deletionk 4y ago
  It's different and connected: Different because shares still give you a part of a real business and equal because it showed that money was too cheap. I'm not anti crypto just because, I have plenty of good reasons. And no real cryptobro was able to convince me with good argument s otherwise. Of course the share prices General looked weird that's why I didn't invest last time I wanted to.

soco 4y ago

xwdv 4y ago

Bitcoin has been dropping about 10k per month the last few months. The next big 10k drop should come around the middle of July, and in August I predict the price will be in the low thousands.

cehrlich 4y ago
I'm also bearish on crypto, but by that logic it will be at -10k three months from now.
- postalrat 4y ago
  Maybe after 10k it just halves every month.
  - bogota 4y ago
    Maybe it does maybe it doesn’t. All of this discussion is founded in great TA and economics…
- paulpauper 4y ago
  right now the decline still seems to be at a constant rate
  - bee_rider 4y ago
    Sigmoids look pretty linear at some points, right?
  - mlyle 4y ago
    Yes, but extrapolating current behavior to the future is risky, especially when just extended a bit further the result is obviously ridiculous-- like a large negative price.
  - bogota 4y ago
    Yea but not a constant percentage. A 50% in a month drop is much different than 10% drop of a much higher prices asset. Anyway i would bet 2 bitcoin that it will not be down another ten thousand in a month. However im not aware of any escrow that would hold btc for one party and usd for the other as im sure you don’t want to bet in btc if you think that asset is dropping. Not without using some derivatives on eth that I don’t trust anyway.

chrismckleroy 4y ago

Curious how long the crypto.com arena will stay with that name, one year into the naming rights lease…

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
bobthepanda 4y ago
Usually it sticks until someone pays to rename it. WaMu Theater in Seattle is still called that even though WaMu went under during the financial crisis. (Though now it stands for Washington Music.)
yardie 4y ago
The arenas were smart and got their money up front, in dollars. If crypto.com goes under the naming rights becomes collateral and can be auctioned off. And it’s in LA no shortage of buyers willing to take over that name.
pg_bot 4y ago
Terra/Luna made a 40 million dollar deal (cash up front) for 5 years of advertising with the Washington Nationals this February. The Nationals played 23 home games before they imploded.

paulpauper 4y ago

>from $3 trillion to roughly $900 billion, and analysts predict the meltdown will continue. It's even worse than that. The $900 billion is about 20% stable coins.

cynusx 4y ago
Of which one stablecoin that everybody knows is very unreliable is still alive and well. That's very likely to collapse too soon imo.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  Rumors are swirling about USDC via Silvergate bank as well, which would be tragic and take down DAI too
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    The way DAI has been explained to me, this is not likely to happen unless USDC transactions are frozen entirely. Otherwise there's just going to be a flood of USDC collateral liquidations from DAI.
    - yieldcrv 4y ago
      Yes that’s true, DAI should be able to handle mass liquidations very well. MIM has, and is similar technology If USDC exchange rate fell due to crisis of confidence, liquidations will occur fine.

pclmulqdq 4y ago

Could this be the link that ties the shitcoins to the main economy? Advertising? That would be very ironic, given that a lot of tech today is based on ads. It is especially ironic that it appears that FB and GOOG (and so many other free apps) may have been quietly propped up by crypto money.

altdataseller 4y ago
The % of all ads devoted to crypto surely must be a trivial %

throw0101a 4y ago

† "Crypto" as in "cryptocurrency" and not "cryptography". (Some of us have more interest in one than the other.)

Animats 4y ago

But the guy who wrote the article is sure ad spend on crypto is coming back. Maybe not. Most of crypto works like a Ponzi scheme. Gains to early investors come from later investors. Eventually, you run out of suckers. We're there. Last 24 hours: - Someone pulled another $160 million out of USDT. Look at their market cap graph for the last 3 months. Every few days, somebody pulls out another $100 million+ amount. Pretty soon you're talking about real money.[1] - Vauld went bust.[2] - The Celsius collapse is affecting Aave and MakerDAO.[3] All those "staking" schemes are based entirely on a "line goes up" assumption. All they are doing is feeding funds into some speculation. [1] https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/ https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31974146 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31974146 [3] https://cointelegraph.com/news/maker-cuts-off-aave-s-dai-supply-as-fallout-from-celsius-continues https://cointelegraph.com/news/maker-cuts-off-aave-s-dai-sup...

jquery 4y ago
I wonder what the remaining USDT holders are waiting for? Is it just the market isn't liquid enough to pull out more than $100M/day?
- overtonwhy 4y ago
  Tether is not regulated or licensed by any body AFAIK so they aren’t required to process payment requests with any sort or timeliness. lul Same with the unlicensed and unregulated exchanges that they do business with. You want out? Take a number and get in line.
  - jquery 4y ago
    So basically tether is just hoping by dragging their feet that btc will recover in price and their embezzlement won’t be exposed? If I had a large amount of USDT I would get out right now and wait for things to settle down. There’s no upside, it’s all downside right now.
AlexandrB 4y ago
Watching the USDT market cap is like watching a bomb counting down but now knowing where "0" is.

alkonaut 4y ago

When I first saw things like “crypto.com” on a big football team’s jersey, a stadium name or in F1, I knew it was only a matter of time until it all came crashing down. I can’t believe I’m longing back to the days when it was gambling and petroligarchs instead.

AceJohnny2 4y ago
Reminds me of a classic story about uber-banker JP Morgan getting stock questions from his shoe-shine boy, and so deciding to sell all stock sensing a crash was coming. His reasoning was that if even the shoe-shine boy was buying stock, the market was saturated and had no-where to go but down. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5273325-j-p-morgan-tells-the-story-of-how-he-would https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/5273325-j-p-morgan-tells-th...

autophagian 4y ago

Patiently waiting for the Superbowl Ad where a monkey rides a horse through a wasteland of abandoned company offices with "-inance" and "crypto-" names. (https://youtu.be/ONZFkqzuMjI https://youtu.be/ONZFkqzuMjI)

labrador 4y ago

> Don’t expect to see many crypto ads for a minute "I haven't seen him for a minute" "I haven't been home for a minute" If you're wondering like me why everyone started saying "for a minute" and where it came from, I recently watched The Wire and that's the earliest use I know about. When I was growing up in America, people said they "had to stand in line" but now they say "had to stand on line" I believe "stand on" instead of "stand in" comes from Britain

hprotagonist 4y ago
“on” is a new yorker thing. Did you move to the northeast? https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/is-it-on-line-or-in-line https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/is-it-on-line-...
- labrador 4y ago
  No, I've lived in California my whole life. I figured "on" came from the East, but I've only heard it British shows. I've also picked up a term I really like from the Brits (I think it's them): "get things sorted", "get it sorted"
  - hprotagonist 4y ago
    perhaps some of ours came west :)
    - labrador 4y ago
      We don't have as many East Coasters as Los Angeles, but yes that's true.
brendoelfrendo 4y ago
> When I was growing up in America, people said they "had to stand in line" but now they say "had to stand on line" Is this a generational/regional thing? I'm an East Coast millennial and I never hear people say "stand on line." The "in a minute" example I believe comes from AAVE, if it was present in The Wire it was probably common in the Baltimore lexicon long before that show hit HBO.

Synaesthesia 4y ago

Crypto in theory shouldn't require any advertising.

cowtools 4y ago
I mean, who benefits from advertising in crypto? The developers, owners, early investors and inside traders. Is it ironic that the most advertised cryptocurrencies are usually the least equitable?
tirpen 4y ago
Agreed. Pyramid schemes usually do quite well enough by just relying on word of mouth.

mjburgess 4y ago

A friendly reminder that crypto is negative-sum. If everyone who has taken money out returns it to everyone who has put money in, then there's a net loss. Why? Because money was taken out to pay the electric companies for mining, to the tune of 10-20Bn so far. Has that money generated real returns anywhere? Nope. Nothing was manufactured, created, or improved. The sum is negative. All past and present holders of crypto, on net, are down 20bn -- and havent yet realised it.

nwah1 4y ago
Not to mention all the wasted efforts from all laborers and services employed by all of the companies chasing unproductive financial returns in this space.
divs1210 4y ago
> Has that money generated real returns anywhere? Snowden and Navalny were funded via BTC.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Feels like organized crime organizations could smuggle money to VIPs we want to fund for less than $20bn.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  Are they both in a Russian prison?
brianobush 4y ago
Security has a price. As a side, the alt-coins that are purely proof of stake use little energy vs Bitcoin.
cowtools 4y ago
I think there is some net utility cryptocurrency provides as a means of payment, but the cryptocurrency "community" has largely veered away from that narrative since bitcoin and others have butted heads with their transaction volume issues.

jmyeet 4y ago

My sincere hope is that this signals the death of crypto in popular culture. I'm sure it'll always have a niche but up until now and for the foreseeable future there aren't any actual useful mass use cases for crypto. The drop in crypto ad spend is an interesting (and meaningful) indicator of market sentiment. I'm thinking we won't be seeing 2023 Superbowl crypto.com ads. I could be wrong. There's what? 20,000 coins? Most of them will die in the short term if they haven't already. So I don't know if Bitcoin will continue crashing or stabilize. No one does. If they did they'd make a ton of money. In the very least I'd bet the bear market will continue for awhile but at some point Bitcoin or some successor will roar back to life.

marcosdumay 4y ago
If anything, the crypto craziness ensured that most governments create some secure non-discriminating money transfer system. I just hope more people getting scammed isn't necessary for those systems to get integrated internationally.

walrus01 4y ago

Alexa, search for how to buy a really tiny violin with cryptocurrency.

Gurgler 4y ago

>“Crypto advertisers were quick to reign in ad spending... I've been seeing this misspelling a lot lately. It's "rein in," as in causing a horse to slow down by pulling back on the reins.

superkuh 4y ago

I'm confused. What were the non-cryptocurrency "crypto" "companies" advertising anyway? This hardly applies to actual cryptocurrency which has never needed or had a use for advertising. No one advertises for the dollar or euro for obvious reasons. It seems to only apply to the finance-origin scams that rebranded themselves with the word "crypto" as camouflage for scamming the ignorant. And since the fiat valuation of actual cryptocurrencies is driven by the ignorant the relative value went down there too. But the fundementals, the operation of say, bitcoin, hasn't been effected at all. This is all off-chain BS.

Animats 4y ago

There's something interesting about to happen. On July 6th, Otherside, the Bored Ape Yacht Club's metaverse, will have a load test. Everybody who bought NFTs for land in their metaverse gets to try to log in. The whole system is supposed to go live in mid-July. Yuga Labs outsourced their metaverse to Animoca Brands and Improbable. Improbable has been working on scaling technology for very large multiplayer games for years. There have been working games (Worlds Adrift, Scavengers) using their technology. It does seem to work, although game devs say it's a pain to use. But it's very expensive to run, because it requires a lot of servers and large amounts of communication between them to coordinate a big world with tens of thousands of players in one space. Originally it had to be run on Google's "cloud", and the game operator paid for every event that went to the servers. Three indy free to play games, and one rather nice-looking world (Nostos) from China, went live, got users, and went broke. Lesson: free to play not compatible with the server cost of this approach. Otherside/BAYC is all people with lots of spending money. They all paid at least US$3000 to get in. Some paid much more. None of that "inclusive" stuff. So they've paid for the operating cost. It's extroverted people; BAYC runs raves for them. It's people into FOMO. That's a very attractive customer pool to advertisers.

tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago

The article is quite repetitive so I may have missed it, but does it explain the impact on advertising as a whole? Advertising for crypto surely has taken a hit, but has this "created an advertising vacuum" or removed a very small percentage over overall ad spend, in a category that many publishers didn't want to touch anyways?

rsynnott 4y ago

I mean, good. In Dublin, for a few weeks, seemingly half the buses had ads for something called Floki Coin, which was, and I can't believe I'm typing this, named after Elon Musk's dog. Everyone, _everyone_, who saw those ads and bought in would have lost money. Lost everything, if they'd stayed in. (Ultimately, a complaint against the ads was upheld, but by then it was far too late: https://www.businesspost.ie/news/asai-upholds-complaints-against-dublin-bus-meme-coin-crypto-ad/ https://www.businesspost.ie/news/asai-upholds-complaints-aga...) The world would be a better place with no cryptocurrency ads.