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The Investors Who Still Think Crypto Can Make Them Rich
- tnel77 4y ago“Still” I’m sure this’ll be unbiased journalism!
- woodruffw 4y agoThe very first sentence adequately substantiates “still”: the segment shed a trillion dollars in stated value last year.
- sacrosancty 4y agoSo less than the 2008 stock market crash, yet people still think they can get rich on the stock market. You're making the mistake of being wowed by a huge number without knowing what its size actually means.
- tnel77 4y agoIf stocks go down and you hold long-term, ultimately selling for a profit, would you describe that as “investor ‘still’ thinks he can make money on stocks”? I respect that most of crypto is a scam, but it’s upsetting that a place like HackerNews can’t even acknowledge the good ones.
- woodruffw 4y agoNo. Let me phrase this in a sensible way: if a trillion dollars in stated stock market value evaporated over a year, I would not be remotely surprised at the WSJ putting out an article with "still" in the title.
- v0idzer0 4y agoThis has happened many times and neither you nor WSJ would dare make such an arrogant prediction in regards to equities
- woodruffw 4y ago"Still" is not a prediction.
- modeless 4y ago"If"? The market cap of the S&P 500 fell many trillions last year.
- tnel77 4y agoStocks are good, so this okay. No scams or shenanigans in the stock market.
- komali2 4y agoI'm not on board with cryptocurrency at all but didn't SPY just lose trillions in value and is in the process of maybe recovering?
- angry_albatross 4y agoWhat do you consider to be the good ones? I think it is likely that whatever argument you would give for most of crypto being a scam probably also applies to the ones you think are good. Crypto has caused us all as a society to waste a huge amount of electricity for very little tangible benefit.
- tnel77 4y agoPersonally, Bitcoin and Ethereum are the only two that I truly trust, but I’m always willing to learn about new projects. Edit: I look forward to seeing where we are in the crypto space in 15-30 years. Looking back, I expect it to be funny hearing over and over “look at all the energy we wasted” as people shook their fists at the sky.
- angry_albatross 4y agoWell, I would disagree that Bitcoin or Ethereum are doing anything useful for us. Bitcoin fails as a currency due to being impractically expensive and slow to perform transactions with. In addition, since there is no central organization to help with fraud protection you end up with a very difficult interface to use, and many ways to accidentally lose your money with no recourse. The code is easy to copy, so you end up with a mess of competing forks with no incentive to converge. I guess we'll just have to wait and see how it goes. I expect it to be funny looking back in the sense that we wonder why people ever thought that bitcoin had value.
- tnel77 4y agoI feel like the Lightning network addresses the ease of use and transaction cost issues, but I agree that there is still work to be done. Regardless, this is the part where I’d tell one of my friends that I’ll buy them a beer if they’re right. Time flies so I’m sure we’ll get our answer soon enough.
- angry_albatross 4y agoThe main problem in my mind with the Lightning network is that in order increase transaction speed, it is reducing the decentralization by requiring participants to trust the other network operators that they create channels with. For the lightning network to really scale to a global payment system, we would need large central hubs for the payments to route through and you would end up with a poor imitation of the centralized banking system that bitcoin is attempting to avoid. This page is a good collection of issues and criticisms of LN: https://github.com/davidshares/Lightning-Network https://github.com/davidshares/Lightning-Network
- duxup 4y agoWas it?
- tnel77 4y agoI was not able to read the pay-walled article.
- thomasjudge 4y agoDo you see that archive.is link up there?
- tnel77 4y agoWhen I typed my original comment, that wasn’t there yet. I will have to read the article now that the archive link is posted. Thank you for pointing that out.
- nadermx 4y agoPaywalled, but based on the title. Crypto isn't going anywhere, love it or hate it. Edit: read it. Says will mostly only buy and hold bitcoin specifically.
- sebastien_b 4y agoSo it’s staying flat? Cool.
- Alupis 4y agoWe've been through several boom's and busts for Bitcoin before (and let's be honest, all the rest of crypto rises and falls with Bitcoin). I see no reason to assume this current bust is permanent. The last major bust, I lost confidence after a long while and sold off at considerable loss. That turned out to be a massive, life-changing mistake. Oh well, you can't live life regretting missed investments.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- roflyear 4y agoMmm, I think you shouldnt blame yourself here. You probably did a rational thing. BTC largely seems irrational.
- alchemist1e9 4y agoOk I’ll take the bait > BTC largely seems irrational. I’d be interested in which parts are irrational.
- angry_albatross 4y agoMy argument for why it is irrational is that bitcoin as an asset has nothing backing it. It does not produce anything, it is not a liability on anyone else's balance sheet, and it can't be used for anything other than hoping that a greater fool than you will pay you more for it in the future. Yes, you could say some similar things about government currency, but in that case there is a large organization that is motivated to keep the buying power of the currency relatively stable. Traditional currency also has the benefit of being much easier to transfer between people, unlike bitcoin which cannot scale to serve the needs of the population due to inherent limitations of the technology.
- JesusLovesEwe 4y ago[flagged]
- yieldcrv 4y agoThe last month in crypto has been pretty wild. - Checks VV? Mooned. - Blur airdrop? Lots of people farmed that pretty late and still cashing in. - New issuances still doing good, oversubscribed. - Non-token based products making good revenue. I dabble in many markets around the world, alongside various parts of crypto. One thing I find interesting about crypto is that you can make these whole revenue generating businesses without incorporating anything, and not incur personal liability. There's insatiable demand from people used to spending to access random projects. That's usually the hardest part of any business model.
- koolba 4y ago> One thing I find interesting about crypto is that you can make these whole revenue generating businesses without incorporating anything, and not incur personal liability. Depending on your jurisdiction, you could have some serious criminal liability though. There’s also the possibility of eventually being doxxed and being personally sued.
- yieldcrv 4y agoIt depends on what you do. It depends on what you're imagining to do, in order to write that. Regarding personal lawsuits: In the normal economy, the risk is quite low for being personally sued and being like "whoops, if only I made an LLC in some fool proof way". But its still pretty good advice anyway. In the crypto economy the risk is lower and everything is faster.
- headsoup 4y agoHow is risk lower?
- yieldcrv 4y agoIf your product or service isn't doing anything criminal then private citizens aren't going to be able to subpoena exchanges for your KYC information to move forward with their civil lawsuit against any specific person exchanges don't reliably have your KYC information to begin with and you also don't need to launch your product using a crypto address linked to exchanges for those reasons the risk is lower because the barrier to being served is so high if you really want to, of course you can still place all of this activity behind a LLCs and other entities to raise the bar even higher. but individuals also already understand that so many developers would already be doing this kind of thing that they would already feel discouraged in trying to create consequences in this way
- 3np 4y agohttps://archive.is/ywMGR https://archive.is/ywMGR
- raydiatian 4y agoOh and we’re supposed to trust Wallstreet, where the companies are laying folks off left and right? I’m not saying that crypto is a good space right now but this smells like signaling rather than journalism
- woodruffw 4y agoYou don't really have to trust Wall Street (or even the WSJ) to come to the (not novel!) conclusion that cryptocurrencies had a massive downturn in stated value over the past year. Their overwhelming irrelevancy is frankly a blessing; losing a trillion dollars in most market segments would be a nation-state-destabilizing event.
- zoklet-enjoyer 4y agoLike housing?
- sacrosancty 4y ago[dead]
- rom-antics 4y agoA trillion ain't what it used to be. That's 2.5% of the market cap of the S&P 500. The stock market fluctuates by 2.5% all the time.
- v0idzer0 4y agoThis article is kind of begging for the “I told you so” response
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ghoogl 4y ago[dead]
- ourmandave 4y agoInvestors who can become the new bag holders when the music stops for the crypto ponzi casinos.
- whatever1 4y agoThe middlemen definitely became rich. Ok one of them went to jail, but still…
- MBCook 4y agoMy Beanie Babies will still prove valuable. You’ll see. Any day now.
- TheDudeMan 4y ago> Mr. Johnson is now back to investing, this time only in bitcoin and with a longer time horizon This is the way.
- fuzzieozzie 4y agolol
- headsoup 4y agoSo long as you accept that Bitcoin therefore has no future as a stable currency and will remain a speculative virtual asset. In which case, enjoy the crypto casino
- landoftheice 4y ago[dead]
- alright_scowl 4y agoMade me spit my coffee. Have my upvote, you glorious bastard.
- danielmarkbruce 4y agoThe WSJ isn't what it used to be.
- jongjong 4y agoThe whole financial system is a scam and a pyramid scheme of unprecedented gargantuan proportions. That's why crypto thrives in that environment. It doesn't make sense to say that crypto is a scam any more than it makes sense to say that stocks are a scam. They are both systems of allocation and accounting; nothing more. It always depends on which specific cryptos and which specific shares you're talking about. If cryptocurrency, as a concept, is a scam, then you might as well say that accounting, as a concept, is also a scam. A cryptocurrency is just a ledger of accounts which is extremely reliable and which is open for public auditing. What's bad about that? It sounds like an amazing product, why not use it? The whole thing just turned into a dumb religious war.
- danielmarkbruce 4y agoHow is Apple stock a scam? You own a small part of a business which makes lots of money, they give some of it back to investors every year. What about Coke? Google?
- cammikebrown 4y agoJust read up about stock buybacks for a bit and tell me the whole thing isn’t a rigged scam.
- recycledmatt 4y agoThis is driven by tax policy more than anything. It’s cheaper to make the pool of available stock smaller vs distribute as a dividend. The CEO’s fiduciary duty is to shareholder value. The rest is a game.
- danielmarkbruce 4y agoHanding money back to stockholders isn't a scam. Every stock buyback either a) gives me money if I sell and I get to keep the same % of the company I owned before, or b) makes me own more of the same company. And the tax treatment is better than a dividend.
- Barrin92 4y ago>He poured money into several digital currencies—some $90,000 in all, pulled together from his savings, the proceeds from selling his house, and a business loan. “I took out some leverage, and I just kind of went gung-ho,” Mr. Johnson said. His timing was disastrous, as one currency he invested in, ether, plummeted in price and a pair of coins, TerraUSD and Luna, collapsed. He lost most of his investment[...] This is just nihilism. Tone throughout the article largely paints a picture of disenfranchised people who see no path for career advancement and resort to casino capitalism. Immediately brings to mind the 1920s which we seem keen to be repeating on several fronts. That a non-trivial amount of people resort to what is effectively gambling as a means to build wealth should create some attention. And I think it's time to hold the predominantly very affluent people accountable who peddle these financial instruments to the masses.
- duxup 4y agoIt certainly fits some folks I know who made (for a while) some money and lost some money in crypto. In many ways their attachment seems to be about what they think the ethos of crypto currency is. But their own distaste for the existing financial system is quickly having the worst of it ... reflected in crypto currency. In the end everything is just people so yeah similar things come up. But man they believe.
- patriciaaa 4y ago[dead]
- grapesurgeon 4y ago[dead]