Hacker News Reader

Comment by brianmcc | Hacker News Reader

>> you are in a very small minority of the world population

Really? So EU, UK, USA, China, Australia, with stable currencies, are a small minority..?

Sorry but countries with wild instability are the minority and frankly gold would seem to be a better store of value if that's anyone's concern. Crypto remains speculation i.e. a gamble not a store of value.

View on HN

After 2022, you still think that these countries (EU, UK, etc.) have a stabile currency? Well, that's some serious positive thinking. I'm still curious to see how people will react when we get a real crash within the next few years.

If the major currencies fail/drop 50%+ per year in N years, crypto value will be screwed too, even more.

Because all those major currencies are backed by huge economies and militaries and whatever's needed to prevent those people from starving.

As usual, it's great to have diversified assets, but that's not really a viable option for the average person that can barely pay their rent.

The worst inflation the UK and EU saw in decades saw their currencies lose 10% of their purchasing power in a year due to an energy price spike caused by a war (and the unwillingness of the central bank to take drastic action to counter it).

Also over the course of 2022, BTC lost more than half its purchasing power, meaning that anybody in the UK or EU that used it as a hedge against inflation got severely burned...

> EU

In 2013 the government of Cyprus decided to seize money directly from people's bank accounts. I would not call that stable.

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/03/everyth...

> China

In 2022, when some Chinese banks decided to freeze depositors accounts for shady reasons and debitors planned to protest the issue, authorities used Covid codes to block them from accessing the banks. That also does not seem stable to me.

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-bank-protest-stopp...

If a government decides you'll get a haircut, you'll get one, even if they have to take out the sheep shears to do it.

The Cypriots who preferred to store their cash in their pillow did not get the haircut though.

That opens you up to the "gun and bag" risk, though.

Who wouldn't empty their regulated bank account in order to get their kidnapped firstborn released?

You forgot the truckers in Canada last year

The government has the ultimate say!, what happens if they order all ISP's to stop traffic to BTC trading sites (or even shutdown internet if it wills) Solutions like the great firewall exists that constantly "learn" and will lock you out immaterial if the government decides so.So the argument that BTC / Crypto will take me to the moon (SafeMoon) is wishful thinking

If your government decides to kill the internet, I think that's a very good reason to try to emigrate. The fact that China is doing it, may make them look powerful, but it also makes them look tyrannical.

Emigration is a serious and non-trivial matter. Do you have any idea on how expensive, and in many cases risky, it is?

https://money.cnn.com/2017/05/08/investing/china-eb5-visa-tr...

https://www.propublica.org/article/operation-fox-hunt-how-ch...

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/china-ui...

You're speaking as if the second largest crypto exchange hasn't just collapsed, and had turned out to be stealing all of its customers' money.

That's not the point. Everyone knows that crypto is full of scams and everyone tells you that you are supposed to hold your own keys instead of leaving coins on an exchange. Almost nobody tells you that keeping coins on an exchange is good practice.

And yet, there are many times over more people using exchanges than holding their own wallets. I don't really care about crypto-in-principle, when crypto-in-practice is anything but safe.

The average person has no idea what you’re talking about when you say you have to hold your own keys, and would be absolutely screwed if/when they lost them.

Getting locked out of your own crypto wallet is a much more significant threat than government seizure for 99% of the global population.

You're speaking as if gambling with other people's money was something new https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=...

That's quite different, and virtually no one lost their money in that it was simply stolen by the owners of an accredited brokerage/exchange/bank, like what happened to FTX. And FTX wasn't simply gambling with other's money, they were defrauding their customers (to whom they claimed they are holding all of their money in custody) and also directly embezzling this money for their own gain (houses, publicity, illegal political investments).

Replying to myself to point out: "fluctuations" and "stability" are not mutually exclusive. Largely stable ecosystems do see occasional volatility but remain mostly stable.

UK for example did indeed see a few weeks of high volatility, which mostly stabilised and indeed recovered in large part once the right wing nutjobs were duly defenestrated.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com