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I've seen hatred of crypto, constant insistence that it's 100% fraud, and claims that it's worthless and will collapse for many years now. In 2019, no one was

• red-iron-pine 4y ago
  This house is garbage, it's gonna collapse. Didn't collapse last month. Didn't collapse the next month. Didn't collapse the next month. Finally collapses the one after. Was it still a POS garbage house? Probably.
• lxgr 4y ago
  If it can prevent any buy-and-hold/long-term retail investors from putting their money into something vastly overvalued, I'd argue that "it will eventually crash" is an extremely meaningful prediction even without a precise time frame.
• Aperocky 4y ago
  You are intentionally mixing up 2 types of prediction and belittling the one that's a more powerful driver than "it will crash on X date". "it will crash eventually" is more important, it results in people staying away/getting out of this market, for good. It's much more powerful than oh it's gonna crash on this or that date.
  • lkbm 4y ago
    To be clear, this is the thread we're in: > > I think everyone was completely caught off-guard by the ferocity and pace of the crypto drawdown. > If you were caught off-guard then you've been sitting in a massive bubble. OP is saying people were caught off-guard by the specifics of the crash. That doesn't require being in a bubble, because there weren't any specific correct predictions that were distinguishable from the specific incorrect predictions. Non-specific predictions may be useful, but they don't prevent you from being surprised by the specifics.
    • arcticbull 4y ago
      Coinbase was caught off guard because they drank the koolaid. You know who didn't drink the koolaid? Cumberland/DRW and Jump.
    • Aperocky 4y ago
      They are very useful when the prediction resulted in not participating in this market at all. For those who are in this market (as Coinbase is), they are useful in terms of planning and setting up a large reserve of rainy day funds - for less risky venture it may not be necessary, but for crypto it absolutely is. Unless plan B is to crash and burn which seems to be the MO for most crypto companies.
• insanitybit 4y ago
  Note that they were all saying "it would crash"
• rsynnott 4y ago
  I mean, if it was easy to time when things would collapse, you could make a lot of money. But it is sometimes possible to point to something and say "that'll collapse, sooner or later, because it doesn't make any sense" where it isn't practical to predict the time of the collapse. People started saying "yeah, there's a problem here" about the Irish property market in 2003 or so. Lots of people were saying "this will crash any day now". For years. Then between 2006 and 2010, prices halved, for broadly the reasons the doomsayers were saying (the global financial crisis was arguably a trigger, but doesn't explain the whole thing). (Also, I would note that Bitcoin did crash in 2021, as well. And it's not like 2022 is likely to be the last crash, either).
• 1270018080 4y ago
  People were calling crypto a scam. Which is not a prediction, just an observation. Trying to market time an irrational bubble like crypto is a fool's errand.
• aetherson 4y ago
  You're being way too kind to the crypto haters, who were predicting crashes in 2014, too. HN has predicted 10 of the last two crypto crashes.