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Comment by jrmg | Hacker News Reader

That assumes you are able to hold a short position for the indefinitely long irrational period in which the bubble can grow unpredictably large and your gains increasingly negative. It’s therefore also irrational to take a short position.

The sensible thing to do was to stay away - and I think it’s perfectly fine for people who did so to smugly say ‘I told you so,’ presuming they did indeed do that.

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Surely if you believe crypto is coming to an end in the next few years there is some way to profit.

Not buying and keeping your currency elsewhere may just be a totally reasonable alternative.

People that are anti crypto are of strong conviction. I am sure they wish they could have their Michael Burry moment — if only it wasn’t for the damn volatility.

Maybe people don't want to play a zero-sum Greater fool game. There are better ways to spend one's time.

Like spending many hours commenting on such topics on Twitter and HN?

I could take bets on the next mass shooting, too, but I prefer not to make money off of some things that I can nonetheless statistically foresee.

I made 18k betting Trump would lose the presidency with Polymarket. I literally took money from the world’s biggest morons. Feel pretty good about that.

In 2020, a lot of swing states were close, and there was a big shift towards Trump in election results vs. polls. He might have won had he not gotten covid.

You never know how long they’re going to be able to prop up the scams. Additionally, many of the big exchanges, being unregulated, are alleged to (either directly, or through large players they’re associated with) manipulate the market and trade against customers. Front running, etc.

Put up a large short position, and soon enough there will be a pump and dump to liquidate it. And if you do make money, have you noticed that these exchanges often go down for “maintenance” when big price movements are happening? There’s no guarantee you’ll be able to close out a position when you need to.

The only way to win is not to play.

I have been consistently wrong about when various scams have exploded, both thinking that they would explode earlier than they did and that it would take longer. If I'd tried to short the crypto crashes so far I probably would have lost money overall even with just the ones where I was correct about them going to zero.

With a lot more research I perhaps could be net positive, but I don't actually want to spend a lot more time digging into something that I consider stupid bullshit.

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.

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