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Comment by fragsworth | Hacker News Reader

The context is tradeable tokens that are built on top of cryptocurrency platforms like Ethereum.

So nonsense squared, then.

There is $30+ billion currently invested in cryptocurrencies. While the masses may still not know very much about it, I think we're beyond the point where any individual educated in how they work can reasonably call it nonsense.

Really? During the housing bubble a lot more money was bet on nonsense. During the first Internet bubble a lot of money was bet on nonsense. $30 billion is nothing for the purveyors of nonsense.

That's a fair point, $30B is certainly not sufficient to disprove nonsense. However, I think it does raise the bar somewhat for the amount of evidence needed to claim nonsense.

For those of us not familiar with this particular financial product (is that even the right term?), could you elaborate on the $30+ billion dollar figure? How do you arrive at that number?

My figure was from http://coinmarketcap.com/ (look at the top)

I rounded down a bit to compensate for some of the lower volume cryptocurrencies and any potential issues with market cap that it might not be reporting correctly.

You can get to $30 billion just by taking the current total number of Bitcoin + Ether outstanding and multiplying by their respective token prices. Admittedly both numbers are inflated some amount due to tokens being unknowingly lost/destroyed, but I think we're still in the ballpark of $30B.

There is also a few hundred million (possibly low single digit billions) of venture capital in startups based on cryptocurrencies.

Do you think the price would hold if mass numbers were converted to fiat?

Of course not, but that's true of every asset. Apple would drop from $790 Billion in market cap to a tiny fraction of that if shareholders started trying to sell their shares enmasse.

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