Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

One of the things I've learned watching the cryptocurrency saga is this:

It's hard to get money to be productive. It's hard to get a financial system to do anything other than gamble, pump and dump, scam, and make bubbles.

View on HN

"Money" is as productive as the underlying system of production it sits on. You and I can invent foo and bar, with some creative financing sell it to each other for a million dollars, and have a million dollar net worth starting from zero while not producing anything of value. A lot of modern day financial "inventions" seem to be of this kind of "money productivity" with zero net value added to the world.

It's their job. The finance bros aren't engineers, technicians, doctors, writers, etc. They cook up this crap all day and sell it. But this stuff isn't real, because that's not what they do, they don't know how.

Real businesses,, business that have value and add value to the world are not built by bros in suits yelling at eachother on Wallstreet. Businesses are built by the Hank Hill types wearing Levi's and showing up to work in snowstorms and summer heat to load trucks and weld iron. Value isn't created by a stock ticker, it's created with the blood sweat and tears of the common person. Finance bros do not know how to bleed, sweat or cry - so they can't make things of real value.

Case and point, Warren Buffet.

You are correct...and yet, between work and finance, which pays better?

Finance of course. If you're born into that class, then go for it. If you're not, you gotta work first, then if you're lucky and diligent you have a shot at moving up into it later in life. Most average folks of average background can't just decide to be a big finance person on Wall Street. You gotta know people, you know, cronies, cronie capitalism, but it's not just limited to political ties, it's nepotism, etc.

True. In general, we need maximal amount of investment and new credit/money creation going into innovation and productivity rather than financial asset speculation or consumption. If it mainly goes into consumption, we get inflation without growth. If it mainly goes into financial asset speculation, we get bubbles and crises. But if it mainly goes into innovation and productivity, we get steady and sustained economic growth without crises or inflation.

The problem with cryptocurrency is that it is inherently separate from the real economy, and difficult to use for direct investment into real world innovation or productivity. Right now, new money creation in cryptocurrency goes mainly into digital asset speculation, resulting in periodic bubbles, and then failures of centralized crypto businesses like FTX, Celsius, etc.

False. It's hard to get cryptocurrency to do anything productive, it's hard to get cryptocurrency do anything other than gamble, pump, and dump, scam and make bubbles.

But the rest of the economy has been making people's lives better for thousands of years. Would you rather live now, or a hundred years ago? a hundred years ago or 200 years ago? repeat till you're satisfied with my argument. If you hit any snags, just repeat a few times more.

The “economy” you attribute these increases in QoL to is pretty mercurial - are we talking about mercantilism during the 1700s, robber baron capitalism of the 1910’s, Chinese state capitalism of today, or Western neoliberalism of the 1990’s?

The real economy certainly makes things, but it does also evolve frauds; the difference is that they get banned and you have to think up a new type of fraud.

There's also the issue of the "business cycle". Why do we have recessions? What can be done about them? Can we mitigate the damage of crashes? Not a solved problem.

It’s pretty easy. You need rules and regulators with teeth.

Crypto is the ultimate example of financial anarchy. A sector born from online fraud, metastasizing in its peak off of fad investors setting government transfer payments on fire.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com