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Comment by cableshaft | Hacker News Reader

So many people love to parrot the 'It'll go down to zero!' line, especially if they don't have skin in the game, but there's pretty much no way. Specific cryptocurrencies, sure they could potentially go to zero. I'm watching one right now that's looking pretty darn close. But this entire industry? I don't think so. It's too late for that.

Too many players, too much ease of access, too much of the potential has been demonstrated at this point. Could it go down 50% or more still? Yeah possibly. I sat through 2013-2015 when Bitcoin had fallen from $1200 and got stuck in the $180-$300 range for two straight years.

I don't think that's going to happen again, not least of which because there will be people like me that would be happy to buy and hold until whenever it goes back up again at that price, but sure, it's possible.

But zero, or close to zero? No. Even this guy's example of his company was only one company, not the entire stock market.

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Were you around a few years back to see real estate values drop from $300K to $25K? I saw that. And we are talking about a physical property.

$25K is not zero, but it would be hard to distinguish the effective difference if you're leveraged $250K.

So, as with any investment, if you're spending monopoly money on cryptocurrencies, scoff away. But if your retirement depends on it...

$300k to $25K? That seems awfully cheap. Where did prices drop so much?

Condo towers in Miami that were being put up and finished as the crash arrived, were often entirely empty and couldn't find any buyers. You could buy cheaper units for $30k to $50k. It was common to see 50%-70% haircuts, drops from $180k to $90k etc. Over six years (2003-2009), Miami added 23,000 condo units for a city of 400k. In Dec 2008, nearly half of those remained unsold.

Las Vegas saw some similar action. It suffered the worst overall top to bottom crash of any major city in the US.

Atlanta, and the surrounding suburbs and exurbs, saw significant drops like this as well in many neighborhoods and cities. Same with the Jacksonville, FL area.

Detroit. And they haven't yet recovered. Real estate has negative worth in some places because the legal obligations to raze the site imply costs greater than what the lot and "improvements" are worth.

Are they still worth $25k? Or are they now back until to being over $300k?

You still have a house to live in, no matter what it's worth. I've never thought you should see a house as an investment, and 2008 proved that.

I don't have monopoly money in crypto, in fact I just cashed enough out to put a downpayment on a house just yesterday (fortuitous timing), but I understand how volatile the market is and I only invest what I can afford to lose.

Honestly if crypto did lose 95% of it's value overnight, I'd still keep on buying, and just wait until the market recovered. I don't want that to happen, I'd love for it to go up forever without ever dropping, but I understand that's not a reasonable idea, especially after sitting through the last two major Bitcoin crashes.

> You still have a house to live in, no matter what it's worth.

Maybe. If you actually own the house, sure. But many people had a mortgage, lost their jobs, and they couldn't afford the mortgage any longer. Additionally you can borrow against the value of your house. But since that house was practically worthless, they couldn't borrow to get through the job loss.

But that's the point, you're not invested in cryptocurrencies in general as much as most people are invested in 1 or 2 or maybe a small handful. When tech crashed did the tech sector basket go to $0? Of course not and no one contends that it would, but did a lot of people lose their shirts on Pets.com? You bet.

Well that's why it's common knowledge in the stock market to diversify your portfolio, and they call it a portfolio, not a single stock, and why so many people invest in mutuals.

There's not an equivalent to mutuals in the cryptoverse yet, but there will be.

I've made quite a few small bets on various alts. I'm taking the black swan approach to them. Quite a few could drop to zero in a couple years but I'm betting at least one of them will make enough of a profit to eclipse my losses in the others. If one of them had been Raiblocks, that already would have been the case ($0.10 cents to $34 in 3 months...crazy). It missed my radar because the aggregate site I check didn't include it.

There's not an equivalent to mutuals in the cryptoverse yet, but there will be.

Working equivalents already exist.

At this point crypto mutual funds don't really make sense. They all fall and rise together for the most part.

That's a good point, and I think part of that is in order to get most alts you have to first get either bitcoin, ethereum or litecoin (or a couple others) first. Hopefully that either won't be true forever, or we'll get to the point where we stop using USD as the basis of comparison for all the currencies.

Stocks are an investment, currency is a medium of exchange and hopefully a stable one.

Something that you want me to use to buy things with should not be so volatile that it goes from pizza to luxury home in less than ten years years. If I had some bitcoin "lost in the cushions of my couch"from that era I would be a rich man today.

Crypto currency has become a massive misnomer. To that end I'm not sure WHAT it is any more because if it isn't stable as a currency and it doesn't have intrinsic value then what good is it?

Crypto is being treated as an asset, not a currency, by most major governments that have weighed in on the matter. Assets can be invested in, bought and sold, and traded for other assets.

And assets are worth whatever other people are willing to pay for it. My friend sold a digital-only World of Warcraft character to someone for over $2000 once, and for the longest time there was a sub-industry based around buildings of employees playing the game to get and sell World of Warcraft gold, so much so that it got its own term of 'goldfarming'.

Crypto has value because other people are willing to pay the asking price for it. If that ever becomes not the case, then it's no longer an asset. Could that ever happen? Possibly, and I'd say definitely for certain coins. But now that this idea exists in the world of programmable tokens that can be exchanged quickly and cheaply and decentralized public ledgers, I don't think it's ever going away, not totally.

It was a lot worse than that. Most of the financial drop did not occur in the junk dotcom stocks, that's a myth.

Cisco went from ~$550 billion to ~$50 billion.

That was a real business with billions in profit. That single drop is nearly greater than the value loss in all the junk dotcom stocks combined. There were dozens of real businesses that were massively over-inflated, from Intel to Microsoft.

Oracle went from ~$200 billion to ~$35 billion. Again, another very serious business with substantial profits.

So how about Bitcoin goes to $3,000 to $6,000 and stays there for ten years? Impossible! everyone will cry.

Comparing cryptocurrencies to actual companies isn't fair. A lot of companies that went bankrupt (aka worth $0) had assets. Those assets were worth something and were probably sold off and used to pay debtors.

What assets does a cryptocurrency have? What value is actually there?

It's also not fair because a company can actually "go away" as in they sell the building and stop operating.

You can't really do this with bitcoin. It's never going to "shut down".

True - it's society's value on the exchange of bitcoin to $USD that could go to $0. The ledger of all those transactions would still be out there.

If nobody mines it then it really can go away.

If everybody woke up at once, came to their senses, and realized bitcoin was all just a waste of time and literal energy, and turned off their machines, bitcoin would be "shut down".

Nope, because then the next day someone would start mining again in the hope that people would want BTC someday.

That is a wild assumption.

It takes a cynical person indeed to think that Bitcoin is “a waste of time”. Love it or hate it, it’s an amazing idea.

Waste of energy, however, is harder to argue with. Hence PoS etc.

This is why some people think it could be a perpetual ponzi scheme/bubble... price goes up, people get interested, price shoots up, more people get interested, price drops down, a lot of people lose their shirts, but other people will think, "Oh, Bitcoin is cheap now, I should get into that!". I guess until you run out of people, or until it's ruled "illegal" that the pool of people shrinks.

> But this entire industry?

What industry is that? Don't confuse a handful of exchanges, speculators, con-men and marks with an 'industry'.

What would the price be if all the speculators pulled out, and only the people who genuinely use bitcoin for transactions remained? Why couldn't this happen to all the major cryptocurrencies at the same time? In fact, if it happens, isn't it likely to happen to all at the same time?

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