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Comment by shubhamjain | Hacker News Reader

I wasn't there when the first dot-com bubble happened but having read about it, all the recent developments seem to be vaguely similar to that time. Burgeoning exchange prices with no solid fundamentals, inexperienced people launching their cryptocurrencies, everyone expecting to get rich quick and people trying to get on the bandwagon to avoid missing out. The last bit is crucial because that's what drives most bubbles: everyone wants a share of the next big thing.

It seems the tech bubble that is being predicted for the last decade would manifest itself in a slightly different form. I doubt that the end-result would be anything different than a crash.

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Amazon (1994), Google (1998), Yahoo (1995), PayPal (1998), Mozilla (1998) and tons of other companies that are well known powerhouses today were all birthed in that era.

While I do agree that there are a bunch of socks.com (1997) token equivalents, some of these technologies will change the internet for decades to come.

I just wish I knew which ones :).

I think a lot of the technologies and ideas are going to be important, but I don't think any of the current cryptocurrencies have long-term potential.

You can't pivot a currency the way you can a corporation, and I think that will make a difference in how long cryptocurrencies last.

If you really wanted to make a ton of money on cryptocurrencies, you'd develop the Google to ETH's Ask Jeeves.

I don't have the time to actually make a client -- but there's definitely some low-hanging fruit in terms of improving the marketplace. Satoshi proposed a brilliant solution to a distributed trust problem -- and we'll likely use the kernel of that idea for a long while to come -- but that doesn't mean the first generation or two of implementations are going to be long-term survivors.

In the dot-com bubble, there is a huge difference between the underlying technology and all the failing dot-coms. The bubble grew, and burst, because of the many companies that had little other than Internet buzzwords and got crazy valuations. Those went bust but the Internet as a whole only continued to grow and become increasingly important.

With crypto currently, there is a similar pattern. I follow the Ethereum ecosystem closely, and there's an incredible amount of projects that just say they will do something with crypto and blockchain, and they get millions or tens of millions - and in the most ridiculous case, you have Golem with its 0.5 billion valuation. The projects that aren't outright scams still rarely have anything functional and worthwhile, just like the many dot-coms of the 90s. But the underlying technologies, the blockchain as a concept and the blockchain-as-VM the way it's being done with Ethereum and NEO, I think those are incredibly significant and not going away.

And there are probably a few crypto projects around now that are going to end up being significant (just like the dot-com bubble also gave us Amazon and Google, it wasn't all failures). One such project I like is Sia. It's not too hyped up but it solves an interesting problem, and it actually works.

There is a term here that is misused. The world «currency» has nothing to do with this, otherwise very nice and genuine technical artifact. The people who coined the term definitely have no clue about economy and how currencies work.

If those were called «crypto-highly-speculative-assets», that would have been a totally different story. But "Currency"?! That is way to off.

It's a potential storehouse of value (currently) that could transition into a currency (medium of exchange) if adopted as such.

Genuine question: why is Bitcoin, for instance, not a currency? I understand it's obviously not a fiat currency, it's not backed by any state. Bitcoin is, though, in circulation, is convertible into numerous goods and services, or can be used to stockpile value. Bitcoin is extremely volatile but I don't think that precludes it from being a currency.

In terms of currency, the bitcoin has the same attributes (all you have listed) like any other asset. The Apple stock, for instance, classifies for a currency in the same way the BTC does.

Obviously words are a matter of intersubjectivity; we can only understand them from their use, so anything can be money if enough people call it that. If you want to understand why cryptocurrency is not a financial asset, that's because it's not a liability of its issuer. And of course, cryptocurrency is not state money because you can't use it to pay taxes. It seems to me to be most like a sort of nonconsumable commodity, which is strange enough.

Again, this can only work if a quite strong parallel economy develops, where everything is in BTC. Well, for that to exist, it needs to get to a comparable level of a real state economy, and this is pretty damn hard. That, in order for you to have a stable exchange rate when you need public services, like health services or to pay taxes. Otherwise, just having always to exchange your BTC in the de-facto currency so you can do your daily stuff, that is just not money. You can call it whatever else you want.

>Again, this can only work if a quite strong parallel economy develops, where everything is in BTC. Well, for that to exist, it needs to get to a comparable level of a real state economy

I think this is too absolutist. I don't think BTC or cryptocurrencies in general, to be successful, don't have to have do all of that __today__, or at all. They just have to chip away along the margins, as they have so far in order to become more attractive to people to use for exchanging goods/services. In the US, I could only pay for my electricity usage in USD, in Indonesia, I can use BTC. People speculating on BTC face similar risk considerations as people speculating on any asset.

>That, in order for you to have a stable exchange rate when you need public services, like health services or to pay taxes…

In any system of resource allocation, you need people to buy into it and stay invested, and as I can see, the balance sheets of "real state economies" are having a hard time getting people to stay invested through typical means that states have established channels. Unless one thinks that continuously selling T-notes to CB's or private investors by collateralizing ones taxation ability through typical channels, or CB's buying up all corporate stocks/bonds will be enough to win the hearts and minds in the long run…

>Otherwise, just having always to exchange your BTC in the de-facto currency so you can do your daily stuff, that is just not money. You can call it whatever else you want.

As an expat living abroad, this isn't really issue since I need to do it anyways to convert from whatever currency you have to what you need to use, and ones habbits are reaptible enough that you should be able to get a good guess to withdraw enough to cover a period of time to minimize the inconvience. And there's increasingly more options in how to go about this than there was say 5 years ago. I think there is more freedom by being able to be exposed to numerous amounts of currencies to be able acquire/leverage goods and services than just being locked into just one.

During the dot-com bubble the underlying technology was the internet. Today we take this as granted, but for the most this was something new and mind blowing in the late 90's.

Heh. Flooz would be the perfect candidate for an ICO and a cryptocoin. I wonder if they could get Whoopy Goldberg to promote it again?

(This is a joke.)

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