Magic Doesn‘t Happen, Especially Not in Business | Hacker News Reader

Magic Doesn‘t Happen, Especially Not in Business

republik.ch

30 pointsramonrue12 comments

I think this guy is very aggressive in this interview, I'm not sure what's the context but he definitely seems pretty fed up with the whole crypto stuff.

To be fair, I think a lot of the promises that the crypto-scene has been making for the past 6 or 7 years (specifically when smart contracts started to be a thing) have not materialised. Sure, people have gotten rich, but they haven't gotten rich in any other way than because they bought in early and everyone wants in as well. And all this money that has poured in has been, in turn, been used in massive advertisement campaigns to prop up the sector even more.

There is value in being able to "own" your money, I do think. But... the real value of that is when your money can be then used in the real world; traded for a government-issued currency. So that muddles things a bit because government-issued money has regulations in place that are in fact quite valuable for society. Governments are already working on digital currency that will offer most of the benefits that MOST people really want out of a "crypto": low fees, fast transfers, being able to have a wallet in your phone. Other than that, the value that people see in crypto is literally "well i pay 50 dollars now and tomorrow i have 500". That is not sustainable.

To me the biggest argument against crypto is the fact that, if it succeeds in what people want, some of us right now might be rich in 50 years whereas everyone being born in 50 years will already have "missed out". In an economic system? That's horrible. That's already what has happened to many of us with stocks and houses and other assets.

Yeah, I don't know. I still see some other benefits to smart contracts... the idea of distributed ledgers and being able to operate on them does sound good in theory but I'm not sure we really do need such degree of immutability. Any technology that truly decentralizes power is not something that you will ever see on a superbowl commercial.

That's a lot of words for saying cryptocurrency is an unmitigated scam.

For more of David Gerard discussing blockchain topics, be sure to follow Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain at https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/

>These people are really fond of the number called «market cap.» All that means, though, is whatever the last price for a coin was multiplied by all the coins in existence. What it doesn’t mean is that you can convert all of them into real money at this price.

What kind of criticism is this, it works exactly the same in the stock market. Jeff Bezos doesn't have billions on some bank account either, and if he tried to liquidate his stocks he'd get pennies on the dollar.

If I own a battleship, its turning radius is a meaningful metric. If I own a millionth of a battleship, I probably didn't buy in on the strength of its turning radius.

Yes but if you buy all his stocks you get a big chunk of Amazon, the company. If you buy up the rest of it held by other people you’d have all of the warehouses, brand equity, employment contracts, software, computers, and inventory. All of it.

The market cap has some relationship (not 1:1 but strongly correlated) to what you’d have to pay to get all that stuff. And if you’d had that stuff you’d be rich. Because those things, together, are intensely valuable and capable of producing cash flow.

By contrast if you bought up 100% of a specific cryptocurrency you’d have nothing. Like absolutely nothing at all.

This is literal. Do a thought experiment and decide what would happen if somehow you suddenly took possession of every single Bitcoin in existence and nobody else could get one without you giving it to them. What, exactly, do you think would happen then?

There are equivalent cases in the meme stock world. GameStop, in particular, had an abnormally high market cap because of anomalous trading. If you hold onto it forever all you have is a dumb little videogame sales company worth a fraction of what you paid for it.

Meme stocks are quite interesting in that they are essentially like blockchain-driven asset bubbles, but without the blockchain. This has many advantages! It’s quite easy to trade stocks.

Well, if you literally owned every dollar in existence, those would become worthless pretty fast, too.

That’s right. And dollars don’t have a “market cap” either.

Nobody “invests” in literal dollars because they aren’t a productive investment either.

That's different from trying to imply that crypto is worthless and can't store value

This fact is actually news to a distressing number of people. Even on HN market cap is talked about like it's a giant corporate bank account. "Trillion dollar company can't do X" is an all too common refrain.

Lots of really lame arguments strung together, not saying much. Of course it's abstract. So is fiat currency since it left the gold standard behind.

He's right about a lot of stuff, but it doesn't add up to the level of confidence he has that this technology is useless forever.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com