Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

Comment by potatolicious | Hacker News Reader

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I'm just pissed that we wasted all of this time and money on this crap.

IMO the past ~10 years of the VC industry has been one of the biggest collective wastes of time and resources in the history of computing. We came into this with the goal of creating the next Google or the next Apple, and we exited with... what exactly?

Investors of every stripe collectively lost their gourds and poured hundreds of billions into unsustainable companies that have never found their unit economics (and likely never will) like WeWork, Uber, and Lyft. After that whole scheme started unwinding they then collectively poured more hundreds of billions into something even worse - rather than simply losing money on useful products, they decided to simply lose money without even bothering with the product part of it. The result is years of tulip-mania that just set an unholy amount of money on fire and fleeced innumerable retail investors' savings.

What if we poured that collective funding into producing... well, actual businesses? Delivering products that actually improved people's lives? Delivering products that at least make money?

All I see from the past 10 years of the industry is the missed opportunity and what could have been. How many groundbreaking products would we have today if we put the money into... well, not this?

I suppose it's not all bad - there have been some promising companies that actually deliver products for profit that came out of this era (see: Shopify, Stripe) but I can't help but wonder where we'd be without this entire misadventure.

John Mills about 150 years ago put it very well:

As a rule. Panics do not destroy Capital ; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works.

His full comments can be found at https://archive.org/stream/oncreditcyclesor00manc/oncreditcy....

I cannot think of anything as hopelessly unproductive as what has been spent on cryptocurrency. To name just one example, as https://www.nrdc.org/stories/crypto-has-climate-problem points out, the electricity used for mining bitcoin is on par with that used by Sweden. And all of this energy goes to produce...what?

> We came into this with the goal of creating the next Google or the next Apple, and we exited with... what exactly?

The free software activists would like to have a word with that and the VCs really don't care other than making money. So it is futile to believe that they would ever change or even when after 37 years the free software movement has been hijacked by 'open-source' which the same companies like Google and Apple getting away with that.

Generally they failed to stop closed-source software and systems from proliferating and existing and the fact that some of these engineers who were formerly part of this movement jumped ship to Google, Microsoft and Facebook tells us that it hasn't gone the way they envisioned.

Just like how the free software movement failed to stop closed-source software, the anti-crypto folks will also suffer the same fate and will realise that it's futile to try to 'destroy' all cryptocurrencies and their projects. That view to even think of trying to destroy all of it is just as delusional as the pro-crypto maxis thinking that it will take over the current system, even post regulations. Co-existence is most likely outcome from this.

> I suppose it's not all bad - there have been some promising companies that actually deliver products for profit that came out of this era (see: Shopify, Stripe) but I can't help but wonder where we'd be without this entire misadventure.

The fact that Stripe, Checkout.com, Shopify and MoneyGram are using cryptocurrencies not only have legitimised some of them of having a valid use-case, it says that they are going to be still around for a long time. Not all these crypto projects or companies will survive, but only a compliant few will still be around; almost the same outcome as the dotcom bubble with a wipeout of many frivolous companies and a remaining few surviving.

But this isn't really new; this is what the managerial class of the 1970's and their deregulation enablers in the Reagan era wrought, multiplied. What if nearly every large American industrial corporation hadn't been financially engineered into oblivion in the 80's and 90's? What if private equity hadn't been allowed to turn healthy brick and mortar retailers into debt-riddled zombies over the past four decades?

You could’ve said almost the same exact thing in 2001, after the dot com bubble well and truly burst. Pets.com was a laughing stock. So was that stupid Super Bowl commercial where they shot a hamster out of a cannon.

Turns out those companies weren’t wrong. They were just 20 years too early. And one or two of them even survived and thrived. (Amazon.) Also we got a lot of fiber laid that turned out to be useful.

I think it’s a similar situation here. If we knew a priori which uses cases and companies would work out we’d only fund those. But we don’t. So boom, bust, repeat. Humanity moves forward. Of course, as you said there is collateral damage. And externalities.

Yeah, but buying things online and having it shipped to your house was so very obviously useful and something that should exist, and you didn't have to be a PhD to realize it then. Pets.com was clearly not a bad idea. But I haven't yet heard of a crypto use-case that is obvious, at all.

Um we came out of the 2000s with incredible tech progress. Smartphones, social media, etc… the 2010s have given us what? Fake internet money that will soon be worthless, incremental improvements? Nothing new happened.

Hopefully there will be a bunch of descent GPUs dirt cheap so at least we got that.

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