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I would feel bad for people who lost money in crypto if every time I tried to warn them during the bubble they wouldn't have said 'have fun staying poor' and ca

I would feel bad for people who lost money in crypto if every time I tried to warn them during the bubble they wouldn't have said 'have fun staying poor' and called me ignorant. It is tough to remain motivated to try and convince people that they are making bad decision when they actively berate you. It feels like telling someone about to jump into the shallow end of a swimming pool from a balcony that they are going to really hurt themselves and that the 2 feet of shallow water is not deep enough to buffer the fall, and them telling me I just don't understand and they use a new measuring system and the pool depth is in feet which is a made up measurement too so their measurement is just as valid and they can make it any depth they want to because they believe it and everyone else around does too. Then they jump feet first and break their legs. A friend behind them says it is their own fault for going in feet first and dives head first and breaks his neck. Another friend says 'bad luck, but you know how many people break their neck walking to swimming pools measured in feet?' and jumps sideways and breaks his collarbone. At that point 'welp, I tried'.

_8j50 4y ago
You can say the same about options traders who got wiped during the tech stock decimation last year or plain old gamblers. Ultimately they are making a prediction and many have gotten rich over crypto but just like stocks you buy in a downturn like now not when it is all hyped up. Even a dollar would have lost use ~20% loss over the past few years just sitting in a bank. The best place to store wealth is in assets not currency. People who stored their wealth in crypto are as silly as people who put savings in a bank except with more volatility like this. Crypto isn't a fad that has gone away, there is still demand for it except now all the exchange crashes will introduce regulation that will make it a safer bet than before. Trial by fire and all I guess. You shouldn't bet or risk money either in stocks or crypto that you aren't prepared to lose. That's like the first-ish rule of investment isn't it?
- Eisenstein 4y ago
  And retail traders should not trade options. It is a terribly stupid thing to do and is almost guaranteed to lose them money. If a sophisticated financial actor wants to trade in options or crypto, then I don't think it is terribly productive but that is their business. There are also people who fly airplanes and cliff dive, but if my acquaintance Joe the whitecollar sales associate who lives two houses down from me starts telling me he is going to go solo flying or cliff diving for the first time with no experience, I will warn him off it in no uncertain terms. As well, if he is talking about how much he is making on the side doing options trading, do you think I wouldn't tell him that it is a bad idea and he is going to end up most likely losing a great deal of money? People who make these comparisons like you have are acting as if crypto is being marketed to wall street and not people like Joe.
  - _8j50 4y ago
    It all depends on how much they are spending. If joe has $1k disposable income he can play the lottery,crypto,options whatever. I personally only ever bought a few hundred dollars at a time only to sell at 5-10% profit. Even right now you can make a few bucks on the normal turbulence. You seem to have overlooked my statement about rule #1 it has to be money you can afford to lose and of course people will tell you the risk is tol high, you have to learn the hard way if you think you know better.
    - Eisenstein 4y ago
      You seem to overlook the fact that you are comparing sophisticated financial instruments to 'investments' marketed at moms & pops sometimes as de facto bank accounts with FDIC markings on the marketing materials. Did I know people who made out well playing the crypto market? One. Did I tell him to not do it? Nope, because he knows what he is doing. The flipside of this is the 5 or so people in my direct personal sphere and hundreds if not thousands (if you count the lurkers who followed conversations I was having with individuals) online who have advocated for or expressed direct involvement or interesting in playing in crypto markets that I have advised against doing so, with a rare few heeding my warning but the overwhelming majority using circular logic, fallacies, personal attacks, and 'not-even-wrong' economic theories to justify putting a large portion of their income (sometimes even taking out loans) on it. Please understand that the perspective I am trying to show the readers of my comments is my own.
Lendal 4y ago
I think we need to look at this from the perspective of a society and ask ourselves what else we could have done. Obviously there are a whole lot of people in society completely lacking in common sense and critical thinking skills, while at the same time mass rudeness seems normalized too. Is this a failure of education, or parenting? Or has it always been this way, and the only difference is the way we communicate with each other now naturally results in mass failures of common sense? It's a complex topic, but these rude people are also victims so we need to analyze it and at least learn something from it.
- ethanbond 4y ago
  Well, let's also not ignore the immense greed involved and its power to overcome run-of-the-mill common sense. Doesn't take much to spot the bullshit in: "Risk-free 7% APY in a time when every single noteworthy financial institution is offering less than 0.5%!"
  - duskwuff 4y ago
    Only 7%? At the height of the bubble, there were a number of major crypto schemes offering interest rates of 20% or more. Sometimes even much more; some of the shadier "investments" offered >100% APY. Unsurprisingly, most of those schemes have since collapsed.
    - eddsh1994 4y ago
      It’s easy to give 100% APR in a token you’ve created, it’s very hard to keep the market value increasing at a similar rate to offset coin price dropping. Initial hype will support you for a few months but it’s all tears in the end :) I’m still sort of sad the focus hasn’t been on decent remittance systems, the true useful tool of crypto IMO.
      - duskwuff 4y ago
        Or even simpler: if you put barriers in the way of users cashing out their "earnings", you can keep a naked pyramid scheme running for quite a while. Some schemes have done this by making it difficult for users to cash out their earnings, e.g. by enforcing a lockup period, or requiring users to sell their tokens to another new investor, or even by simply declaring that withdrawals are a feature "under development". One notable example of such a scheme was OneCoin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneCoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneCoin), which wasn't even based on a blockchain.
badrequest 4y ago
My feelings exactly. I knew NFTs were doomed to not live up to their hype on the quality of my interactions with NFT enthusiasts alone. Huge pivots to needless hostility during what is ostensibly a sales pitch.
SinParadise 4y ago
I'd ask them "you rich yet" at this point.
- thehappypm 4y ago
  “Have fun becoming poor!”
- xattt 4y ago
  That doesn’t help the needless hostility.
  - SinParadise 4y ago
    Hostility is the point.
    - Kaedon 4y ago
      I don't know that I'd want to spend the energy to engage in this kind of behavior.
RetpolineDrama 4y ago
>I would feel bad for people who lost money in crypto if every time I tried to warn them during the bubble they wouldn't have said 'have fun staying poor' Not everyone that lost money did this to you though, seems unfair to judge most people who are just trying to get by because of a few assholes on the internet
- thehappypm 4y ago
  I have been told “have fun staying poor” on HN.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- BonitaPersona 4y ago
  This is the most important point in my humble opinion: we keep confounding the most extreme and vocal and annoying minority for the moderate whole. It keeps happening and happening. Together with the corolary of confounding twitter and "The Internet" with real life.
oytis 4y ago
There was a drop indeed, but the price for both Bitcoin and Ethereum is still pretty high. And these are not the only things that dropped this year, you could tell the same to people investing in stocks. I must say though that I don't and didn't own any crypto assets, and am not really well-versed in the web3.0 world, which might be why I am confused by your comment.
- SQueeeeeL 4y ago
  Bro, you literally just did the pool thing the comment above was talking about
helf 4y ago
Same. I’m one of those lucky few who had futzed with BTC in 2011 when it was almost brand new and then forgot about it till 2019 when it started spiking. I spent two weeks digging through boxes and imaging hard drives before miraculously finding my wallet.dat from 2011 that I luckily hadn’t encrypted or even passworded lol. Had 3.25btc in it (I remembered the .25. The extra 3 were a shock.). I ended up paying for my home down payment with it. You shoulda seen my broker’s face when I showed up with almost entirely crypto to fund the mortgage. It took them several weeks to find a company who would be OK with crypto being fronted. I ended up having to come up with a way to prove it was mine which was fun. Had to back track through the blockchain tracking the history of the transactions, wallet address creation. Show I had the private keys etc. they finally accepted it as after a month of back and forth. Then I didn’t cash out entirely when it spiked to $60k and now I am regretting that lol.
- tantalor 4y ago
  > shoulda seen my broker’s face... That rigamarole could have been easily avoid by converting the crypto to cash, which is trivial to prove is yours. Did they end up accepting the crypto directly, or as cash? Edit: thanks for the clarification, I didn't realize the issue wasn't with possession so much as provenance.
  - dharmab 4y ago
    > That rigamarole could have been easily avoid by converting the crypto to cash, which is trivial to prove is yours. In US law this is a taxable event.
    - astrange 4y ago
      Paying for something with crypto is the same taxable event as converting it to cash. You can’t get out of that.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
wonderwonder 4y ago
I think you likely encounter the rude people on twitter hiding behind anon. accounts. My step dad lost ~30k in what he thought was a relatively safe investment (earning APY). I did tell him to be very careful as most of crypto to the uninitiated is a scam. He ended up being able to put Ethereum in but not able to take it out. Obviously if the returns appear to good to be true they probably are but this is an older guy with limited financial experience and virtually no technical knowledge. These people sit there on the sidelines approaching a tough retirement watching people get rich or "earning" 15% APR and start to panic that they are missing a once in a life time opportunity and jump in. Its sad.
- specialist 4y ago
  What concerns me about these scams is the ever increasing velocity. Old timey gambling required cash or collateral. So there was a physical limitation. Day trading and crypto and freemium games fleece people digitally. It's all ephemeral. What holds people back? It pains me to buy a lottery ticket, so I've never been tempted by these scams. But I imagine having everything online hacks player's inhibitors. eg I've read rants about how Robinhood and the like weaponize "dark patterns" to loot their players.
- PaulBGD_ 4y ago
  Just a heads up, if he's staking the Ethereum directly then the money is still safe. The Ethereum team hasn't implemented staking withdraws yet, which should happen this year: https://ethereum.org/en/staking/ https://ethereum.org/en/staking/
- ska 4y ago
  > pproaching a tough retirement watching people get rich or "earning" 15% APR and start to panic that they are missing a once in a life time opportunity and jump in. Its sad. New clothes on an age old story.
HN_is_for_gemes 4y ago
[flagged]
- remram 4y ago
  Not GP, but are we supposed to feel good for you? You're holding what those people lost. Some people got lucky, some people stole, a lot of people lost big time.
  - ElectricalUnion 4y ago
    > You're holding what those people lost. Not really, a bunch of "lost" crypto money isn't even "stolen"/"transfered" in the traditional sense, it's just lost as in "vanishes from the world because someone did a operational mistake" gone.
    - remram 4y ago
      I'm not claiming GP is holding all that was ever lost, that is a bit much.
- chasebank 4y ago
  I too made a bunch of money on BTC but in the end, it was just gambling. Got lucky, nothing more, nothing less. I did not know anything, the future just landed on what I thought would happen. Survivorship bias at it's finest.

_8j50 4y ago

You can say the same about options traders who got wiped during the tech stock decimation last year or plain old gamblers. Ultimately they are making a prediction and many have gotten rich over crypto but just like stocks you buy in a downturn like now not when it is all hyped up. Even a dollar would have lost use ~20% loss over the past few years just sitting in a bank. The best place to store wealth is in assets not currency. People who stored their wealth in crypto are as silly as people who put savings in a bank except with more volatility like this. Crypto isn't a fad that has gone away, there is still demand for it except now all the exchange crashes will introduce regulation that will make it a safer bet than before. Trial by fire and all I guess. You shouldn't bet or risk money either in stocks or crypto that you aren't prepared to lose. That's like the first-ish rule of investment isn't it?

Eisenstein 4y ago
And retail traders should not trade options. It is a terribly stupid thing to do and is almost guaranteed to lose them money. If a sophisticated financial actor wants to trade in options or crypto, then I don't think it is terribly productive but that is their business. There are also people who fly airplanes and cliff dive, but if my acquaintance Joe the whitecollar sales associate who lives two houses down from me starts telling me he is going to go solo flying or cliff diving for the first time with no experience, I will warn him off it in no uncertain terms. As well, if he is talking about how much he is making on the side doing options trading, do you think I wouldn't tell him that it is a bad idea and he is going to end up most likely losing a great deal of money? People who make these comparisons like you have are acting as if crypto is being marketed to wall street and not people like Joe.
- _8j50 4y ago
  It all depends on how much they are spending. If joe has $1k disposable income he can play the lottery,crypto,options whatever. I personally only ever bought a few hundred dollars at a time only to sell at 5-10% profit. Even right now you can make a few bucks on the normal turbulence. You seem to have overlooked my statement about rule #1 it has to be money you can afford to lose and of course people will tell you the risk is tol high, you have to learn the hard way if you think you know better.
  - Eisenstein 4y ago
    You seem to overlook the fact that you are comparing sophisticated financial instruments to 'investments' marketed at moms & pops sometimes as de facto bank accounts with FDIC markings on the marketing materials. Did I know people who made out well playing the crypto market? One. Did I tell him to not do it? Nope, because he knows what he is doing. The flipside of this is the 5 or so people in my direct personal sphere and hundreds if not thousands (if you count the lurkers who followed conversations I was having with individuals) online who have advocated for or expressed direct involvement or interesting in playing in crypto markets that I have advised against doing so, with a rare few heeding my warning but the overwhelming majority using circular logic, fallacies, personal attacks, and 'not-even-wrong' economic theories to justify putting a large portion of their income (sometimes even taking out loans) on it. Please understand that the perspective I am trying to show the readers of my comments is my own.

Lendal 4y ago

I think we need to look at this from the perspective of a society and ask ourselves what else we could have done. Obviously there are a whole lot of people in society completely lacking in common sense and critical thinking skills, while at the same time mass rudeness seems normalized too. Is this a failure of education, or parenting? Or has it always been this way, and the only difference is the way we communicate with each other now naturally results in mass failures of common sense? It's a complex topic, but these rude people are also victims so we need to analyze it and at least learn something from it.

ethanbond 4y ago
Well, let's also not ignore the immense greed involved and its power to overcome run-of-the-mill common sense. Doesn't take much to spot the bullshit in: "Risk-free 7% APY in a time when every single noteworthy financial institution is offering less than 0.5%!"
- duskwuff 4y ago
  Only 7%? At the height of the bubble, there were a number of major crypto schemes offering interest rates of 20% or more. Sometimes even much more; some of the shadier "investments" offered >100% APY. Unsurprisingly, most of those schemes have since collapsed.
  - eddsh1994 4y ago
    It’s easy to give 100% APR in a token you’ve created, it’s very hard to keep the market value increasing at a similar rate to offset coin price dropping. Initial hype will support you for a few months but it’s all tears in the end :) I’m still sort of sad the focus hasn’t been on decent remittance systems, the true useful tool of crypto IMO.
    - duskwuff 4y ago
      Or even simpler: if you put barriers in the way of users cashing out their "earnings", you can keep a naked pyramid scheme running for quite a while. Some schemes have done this by making it difficult for users to cash out their earnings, e.g. by enforcing a lockup period, or requiring users to sell their tokens to another new investor, or even by simply declaring that withdrawals are a feature "under development". One notable example of such a scheme was OneCoin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneCoin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OneCoin), which wasn't even based on a blockchain.

badrequest 4y ago

My feelings exactly. I knew NFTs were doomed to not live up to their hype on the quality of my interactions with NFT enthusiasts alone. Huge pivots to needless hostility during what is ostensibly a sales pitch.

SinParadise 4y ago

I'd ask them "you rich yet" at this point.

thehappypm 4y ago
“Have fun becoming poor!”
xattt 4y ago
That doesn’t help the needless hostility.
- SinParadise 4y ago
  Hostility is the point.
  - Kaedon 4y ago
    I don't know that I'd want to spend the energy to engage in this kind of behavior.

RetpolineDrama 4y ago

>I would feel bad for people who lost money in crypto if every time I tried to warn them during the bubble they wouldn't have said 'have fun staying poor' Not everyone that lost money did this to you though, seems unfair to judge most people who are just trying to get by because of a few assholes on the internet

thehappypm 4y ago
I have been told “have fun staying poor” on HN.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BonitaPersona 4y ago
This is the most important point in my humble opinion: we keep confounding the most extreme and vocal and annoying minority for the moderate whole. It keeps happening and happening. Together with the corolary of confounding twitter and "The Internet" with real life.

oytis 4y ago

There was a drop indeed, but the price for both Bitcoin and Ethereum is still pretty high. And these are not the only things that dropped this year, you could tell the same to people investing in stocks. I must say though that I don't and didn't own any crypto assets, and am not really well-versed in the web3.0 world, which might be why I am confused by your comment.

SQueeeeeL 4y ago
Bro, you literally just did the pool thing the comment above was talking about

helf 4y ago

Same. I’m one of those lucky few who had futzed with BTC in 2011 when it was almost brand new and then forgot about it till 2019 when it started spiking. I spent two weeks digging through boxes and imaging hard drives before miraculously finding my wallet.dat from 2011 that I luckily hadn’t encrypted or even passworded lol. Had 3.25btc in it (I remembered the .25. The extra 3 were a shock.). I ended up paying for my home down payment with it. You shoulda seen my broker’s face when I showed up with almost entirely crypto to fund the mortgage. It took them several weeks to find a company who would be OK with crypto being fronted. I ended up having to come up with a way to prove it was mine which was fun. Had to back track through the blockchain tracking the history of the transactions, wallet address creation. Show I had the private keys etc. they finally accepted it as after a month of back and forth. Then I didn’t cash out entirely when it spiked to $60k and now I am regretting that lol.

tantalor 4y ago
> shoulda seen my broker’s face... That rigamarole could have been easily avoid by converting the crypto to cash, which is trivial to prove is yours. Did they end up accepting the crypto directly, or as cash? Edit: thanks for the clarification, I didn't realize the issue wasn't with possession so much as provenance.
- dharmab 4y ago
  > That rigamarole could have been easily avoid by converting the crypto to cash, which is trivial to prove is yours. In US law this is a taxable event.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Paying for something with crypto is the same taxable event as converting it to cash. You can’t get out of that.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]

wonderwonder 4y ago

I think you likely encounter the rude people on twitter hiding behind anon. accounts. My step dad lost ~30k in what he thought was a relatively safe investment (earning APY). I did tell him to be very careful as most of crypto to the uninitiated is a scam. He ended up being able to put Ethereum in but not able to take it out. Obviously if the returns appear to good to be true they probably are but this is an older guy with limited financial experience and virtually no technical knowledge. These people sit there on the sidelines approaching a tough retirement watching people get rich or "earning" 15% APR and start to panic that they are missing a once in a life time opportunity and jump in. Its sad.

specialist 4y ago
What concerns me about these scams is the ever increasing velocity. Old timey gambling required cash or collateral. So there was a physical limitation. Day trading and crypto and freemium games fleece people digitally. It's all ephemeral. What holds people back? It pains me to buy a lottery ticket, so I've never been tempted by these scams. But I imagine having everything online hacks player's inhibitors. eg I've read rants about how Robinhood and the like weaponize "dark patterns" to loot their players.
PaulBGD_ 4y ago
Just a heads up, if he's staking the Ethereum directly then the money is still safe. The Ethereum team hasn't implemented staking withdraws yet, which should happen this year: https://ethereum.org/en/staking/ https://ethereum.org/en/staking/
ska 4y ago
> pproaching a tough retirement watching people get rich or "earning" 15% APR and start to panic that they are missing a once in a life time opportunity and jump in. Its sad. New clothes on an age old story.

HN_is_for_gemes 4y ago

[flagged]

remram 4y ago
Not GP, but are we supposed to feel good for you? You're holding what those people lost. Some people got lucky, some people stole, a lot of people lost big time.
- ElectricalUnion 4y ago
  > You're holding what those people lost. Not really, a bunch of "lost" crypto money isn't even "stolen"/"transfered" in the traditional sense, it's just lost as in "vanishes from the world because someone did a operational mistake" gone.
  - remram 4y ago
    I'm not claiming GP is holding all that was ever lost, that is a bit much.
chasebank 4y ago
I too made a bunch of money on BTC but in the end, it was just gambling. Got lucky, nothing more, nothing less. I did not know anything, the future just landed on what I thought would happen. Survivorship bias at it's finest.