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Comment by llamataboot | Hacker News Reader

It has only just begun...

It’s all a house of cards.

I spent a little time in the industry and the most prominent voices are just snake oil salesmen and charlatans now. Anyone who truly believed from the beginning made so much money that it’s not worth the risk for them to be publicly involved in the community.

It became an MLM for bros and basement-dwellers alike to gamble their stimulus checks on.

At least a house of cards has actual cards supporting it, it's not clear what's supporting cryptocurrency.

The latter answer is simple. Tether and other stable coins printing money from nothing. They have statements that they are backed as equivalent to dollars but it is utter nonsense.

Just yesterday tether printed another billion usdt.

They were openly proven to have only 3% of their currency backed by USD by the NY AG but everyone just ignores that judgement.

They never held under audit, have proven to not be backed by USD and refuse to disclose their holdings. Their CFO is an Italian surgeon who sold pirated copies of Windows.

When eventually that falls, the entire space I figure will implode.

The good news that their bank Deltec's chairman created Inspector Gadget, so when trouble looms he can just "go go Gadget helicopter" and fly out of trouble!

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-my...

Tether is propping up shitty exchanges/casinos — not cryptocurrency.

There are enough correlations to show Tether magic money being used to prop up btc, eth on these shady exchanges.

It is obvious they are using fake magic money to prop/inject into the eco-system.

When btc, eth props up, everything else tends to as well.

IDK how it's not obvious to you unless you have some financial incentive to ignore the obvious.

To you, does "prop up" mean "act as the only value behind", or "noticeably increase the price"?

This may be where we diverted from each other.

For me it means both. I know absolutely that btc/eth didn't grow organically to the levels it did without significant propping from tether and manipulation from exchanges.

NFTs pointing to URLs of images of those cards.

Not a crypto optimist at all, just trying to be objective. For both crypto and gold, the price is supported by the amount of people willing to buy it as a store of value (yes, gold is also used for jewelry and some manufacturing, but that's a secondary use).

Crypto is new, so it's mostly recognized by early adopters - people that are more likely to change their mind in the changing circumstances. There's also a lot of the "get rich quick" crowd, money laundering, illegal purchases, and other activities there, but these are all the factors that support the price of crypto.

So yes, it's extremely volatile. Yes, its price depends on the mood of lots of moody people. But it's still a valid commodity backed by human greed.

Gold's intrinsic value is what makes it a store of value. Bitcoin doesn't have that directly - the coins directly don't have any value, but the ledger and mining technology behind it has real value as invented knowledge because it was novel at the time. That's like saying gold has intrinsic value because there are manufacturers of jewelry, but not because of the physical properties of gold.

IMO bitcoin can act as a commodity, but it needs more participation and infrastructure (importantly, the internet) to realize that. Mining bitcoin is cheaper than mining gold though, so that should be a good hint that if Bitcoin is any kind of store of value, it should end up cheaper than gold.

Maybe... from what I see (which is limited), "crypto" is feeling the same downward pressure that other stocks like tech are feeling (someone just posted an article about that). But people still haven't come around to the "this is just BS" phase yet that needs to happen. All crypto under current operating models is worth zero, it doesn't need to be marked down, it needs to (and will) be recognized as a scam and written off. I don't see progress towards that out of any of the news I've seen.

I don’t understand the go-to-zero case. Surely an open source, permissionless financial system has some value? There’s tons of value being captured in closed financial systems.

Surely an open source, battle-tested, massively widely used operating system like Linux has some value? There's tons of value being captured by closed operating systems.

But there is tons of value being captured by closed operating systems?

Windows is closed source and quite a profitable part of Microsoft’s business.

Sure, but it’s value is half of what it was this time last year.

When it returns to "original" value +30%, will you return to this thread?

Or are you only interested in discussing this when you can take a victory lap?

I’m not “taking a victory lap”. You have a tech that supposed to be digital cash with gold properties that is insanely volatile, often takes a long time to settle and features opaque gas fees, etc.

It’s a cool experiment, but it’s almost like Uber - something with great promise that delivered something lesser.

Refreshing HN to find more signs of the cryptocalypse has definitely become a guilty pleasure of mine the last few days. I really don't wish for it, because so many people would get caught in the crossfire, but there's still that fascination for the 'train wreck in slow motion'.

As a climate scientist (currently non-practicing) the cryptocalpyse is something I deeply wished for. If you want to make Ponzis that’s fine but there’s no reason to ruin the environment to do it. Tulips were a truly green asset bubble, maybe we could do them again. I feel sorry for the folks losing money, but not really because they still have more assets than I’ll ever have.

the stock market crash indeed... looks like the market won't recover for 20 years

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