7 ms·
I've been reading a lot of the Coinfessions account on Twitter. It's where people post crypto horror stories anonymously. It's weird to think that they "genera
by kyleyeats 4y ago
I've been reading a lot of the Coinfessions account on Twitter. It's where people post crypto horror stories anonymously.
It's weird to think that they "generated" 1.8bn. If I made 1.8bn selling sandwiches, you could probably find evidence of it somewhere, like in product packaging in dumps. But here the only thing left behind is a bunch of guys going "Yeah I left my position open and drained my life savings by accident."
Like, every bit of that money represents money that someone else lost, and basically nothing else. I can't wrap my head around it.
- klyrs 4y agoFirst off, I'd like to commend you for using landfill volume as a proxy for productivity. It's refreshingly honest and I wish economists would take note. That said, there are last-gen GPUs and ASICs going to landfills. Some people are actually getting paid to make the inputs to the otherwise-ephemeral pseudocurrency. Not to mention all of the CO2 released into the atmosphere... you can't see it but that $1.8B put it there.
- dougmwne 4y agoAnd the paper clip factories churn on.
- samwillis 4y agoDo not click this link, you will loose at least 6hrs of your life: https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html
- honkler 4y agosome use freight activity as a measure of economy, atleast "real economy".
- RC_ITR 4y agoAnd therefore completely ignore the 50% of the global economy that is services.
- dsfyu404ed 4y agoPeople doing "economist things" but with money at stake (i.e. financial analysts) already do that stuff.
- samwillis 4y agoMy pet theory is that the massive excess in GPUs from the crypto explosion are being fed back into the AI explosion we are seeing now. In reality I wander how many former mining GPU farms are now doing AI training...
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- WeylandYutani 4y agoAll of the crypto companies have had layoffs since the crash. The big exchanges are downsizing- but obviously there's still some money in it.
- a4isms 4y agoIn the movie “Quicksilver,” Kevin Bacon plays some kind of (commodities) trader who lost an enormous amount of money betting the wrong way and retires from trading to become a bike courier. He has a friend over at his loft, and while looking at pictures from his finance days, she asks, “What happened to all the money?” His reply is a classic: “It’s still there, it’s just in other people’s pockets.” —— That’s all I see in crypto speculation. It’s a game that involves shuffling money between players, without actually creating new wealth. (Also, the casino is betting against you and sometimes isn’t satisfied with their rake, so they “rug pull” and leave everyone holding worthless chips. But that is another issue.) This is very different from, say, selling software that runs a business. Your software is not just transferring money from your customer to you, it’s literally creating new wealth by making your customer more productive.
- jaywalk 4y agoAnd the "new wealth" being "created" for your customer comes from... other people's pockets.
- eldritch_4ier 4y agoThis is obviously not true. If there was no new wealth in the world than there was 50 years ago, we wouldn’t be so much more well off despite have billions more people.
- wmf 4y agoNew wealth is being created in the world but not by crypto.
- darepublic 4y agoIt's definitely subjective. I.e. if we harm the livability of the earth to create new tech saying there is more wealth is not false per se but based on your pov
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- FatActor 4y agoI get tired of hearing day after day about billionaires making not just billions, but 10's and 100's of billions without doing much of anything except having impeccable timing... and a lot of money to invest.
- _8j50 4y agoYou ever heard of the lottery? Guess what? Every bit of it is money someone lost and half of it funds your government. Wait till you hear about options trading and people committing suicide over bad trades.
- brianwawok 4y agoYou aren’t wrong, but people have very different mindsets. People play the lotto for fun. They think hey maybe I’ll get lucky and win. Sure there are addicts , but I don’t think default behavior is “if I play this I’ll be rich “ Crypto is literally “if I trade this I’ll get rich”. But, both are roughly 0 sum games in the end as you rightly pointed out.
- _8j50 4y agoThen their mindset is the problem, not everyone else or the crypto ecosystem. The risk behind the volatility and instability is your responsibility to understand. No one is deceiving or misleading people about these risks. If there are "get rich quick" schemes around crypto, I agree they should be prosecuted for fraud.
- acdha 4y ago> No one is deceiving or misleading people about these risks Almost everyone in cryptocurrency has deceiving prospective buyers for years. You can still find people shilling the long-term value of Bitcoin and until the crash you could throw a rock and hit someone claiming NFTs were an investment or saying that it was just like the stock market. That was the source of so much of the opposition on HN: it’s not that it was new but that it was being sold as something it transparently wasn’t, and perhaps 5% of the people in the field could engage intellectually with people who asked about fundamentals. Had people been selling digital lotto tickets, far fewer people would have objected because the risk and benefit profiles would have been accurate.
- brianwawok 4y agoTell me how many articles you can find on the web about how Crypto is the path to get rich. Now repeat the search with Lotto or Slot Machines. The information out there is not at all unbiased or fair.
- theragra 4y agoStrictly speaking, this is not true. Crypto is used by many countries with tight/problematic banking regimes to send/exchange money. Ironically, both by Ukrainians and russians, for example. Another thing is buying drugs on the darknet. Whatever your opinion of that is, the fact is crypto has some usages, though not a lot rn.
- colordrops 4y agoThose are pretty big use cases but not "authorized". Nevertheless, they are real use cases.
- kumarvvr 4y agoAs long as crypto is touted as "investment", this is bound to happen. Crypto isn't about mining anymore.
- loandbehold 4y agoIt's actually worse than that because of cost of mining. It's a negative-sum game. People who lost money paid those who made money plus they paid for a bunch of useless computations.