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It's an everdupe at this point, turning the front page into a bitcoin price tracker which is not particularly interesting
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
It’s plausibly the collapse of the largest ponzi the world has ever known, by lrders of magnitude. Madoff was $60 billion. Crypto was $2.6 trillion at its peak.
This article itself doesn’t add much but having the ones with analysis pop up frequently seems valid. Very interesting to watch this in real time, as in 2008.
Ponzi doesn’t quite fit and my hope is some day crypto will be known as a Nakamoto Scheme.
Double entendre of dupe here? :)
I have no horse in this race but it seems like a lot of people are rooting for as much pain as possible for Bitcoin as that justifies/makes people feel good for missing its bull run.
Also it’s not just Bitcoin falling in a vacuum. The entire US and European stock market is absolute garbage too (housing showing cracks as well) so it’s hard to blame Bitcoin alone although it has undeniable failed as an inflation hedge.
I disagree.
Bitcoin is hugely wasteful. Estimates on the power usage of the Bitcoin network have it using more energy than Sweden.
Now that might be fine if it provided more than a modicum of utility but it doesn't. The only use case I've seen is to bypass laws on where money can be moved. Some of this is moral (eg totalitarian governments with capital controls on the poor) but most of it isn't (eg scams, ransomware, otherwise illegal gambling, drugs, child abuse material and so on).
I'll agree there's probably a little schadenfreude here because of how many Crypto Andys have pumping crypto so hard for many years pretty much for no other reason than their own gain.
Most don't believe in any utility here. It's just a get rich quick scheme. AGain, that would be fine if it wasn't so horribly wasteful.
> I have no horse in this race but it seems like a lot of people are rooting for as much pain as possible for Bitcoin as that justifies/makes people feel good for missing its bull run.
I for one am a supporter of progress in finance, no matter the medium, but the crypto fandom is so incredibly insufferable, full of snobs, tech-, environment- and money-illiterate folks that I might as well watch the bubble burst and cheer.
I had plenty of opportunity to "get in" on the bitcoin - I did some trades back when it was in 1000$ range and thought it was an interesting peace of tech with potentially great future.
I even did a POC of a smart contract back when ETH was <100$.
Ever since then I've seen very little practical applications and soo much bullshit - I would never "invest" into anything crypto related even if the payout was guaranteed - for the same reason I wouldn't go work for a betting company, hack people for money or run scams - that's not how I want to make money, and I do feel contempt for that entire "movement".
A lot of people are rooting for Bitcoin to crash so it will stop pumping carbon in the atmosphere like a middle sized country.
I think it depends on your perspective. If you believe the options are bitcoin goes down or bitcoin goes up, then you're rooting for more pain if you're rooting for bitcoin to go down. But if you believe the options are bitcoin goes down now or bitcoin goes down later, then bitcoin going down now is minimizing pain.
I bet I could've made a lot of money as an early adopter in Herbalife or Amway too. I don't care that I missed out and I'm not jealous of those who did get in. I don't want to be near it and I hope they collapse too.
> as that justifies/makes people feel good for missing its bull run.
That is the same argument that 'people wants to reduce inequality because they hate the rich'. It appeals to feelings but it is a not very realistic nor useful explanation.
> The entire US and European stock market is absolute garbage too (housing showing cracks as well)
If my house losses it's value, it's still my home. If bitcoin losses their you just got a very long number.
> seems like a lot of people are rooting for as much pain as possible
No, some of us are very pro-Bitcoin, but we love seeing the bubble pop so that it can return to its correct use-case: as a currency, not a speculative risk asset.
Personally I'm not /rooting/ for it to go to zero. I just don't see how you can value it.
The fact that it's worth $20k is as arbitrary as $60k.
When it was a toy and people were buying pizzas with it I can sort of understand that as a bit of fun, but beyond that I just don't see the value. And if there isn't value it's just pure speculation hoping there's a bigger fool than you so you can take a profit.
Housing and stocks at least have something tangible behind them. You may disagree about the correct value, but it is most of the time non zero.
>The entire US and European stock market is absolute garbage too
When markets grow by 20-30% a year, it's "wonderful". When they get corrected by 20% it's all of a sudden "absolute garbage".
Markets finally get back to a resemblance of sanity. Why people believed that double-digit growth without creating added value is somehow the new normal is beyond my understanding.
It's not about the money, it's about a scam finally unravelling and preventing a scam from doing future harm.
Even if someone missed the Bitcoin bull-run, they could have easily joined the stock market bull-run.
Maybe HN should incorporate a price ticker? /s
I appreciate that we get to look down upon the "fools" losing their shirt but there probably more appropriate places to do so.
Yes, we warned them. Yes, we told them that it was all greater fool theory, but remember it's usually the average punter who got in just before* peak hype that loses everything. And they don't really deserve it.
Those who fooled them do, but they're often the ones offloading their bags to the next.
* Just before because they're the ones who hit 60% gains and didn't sell, and risk chasing that high all the way down.
Maybe these waves of new lows stories will counter-balance the fomo-harvesting 'new all time highs' that were suspiciously absolutely everywhere.
I really really don't understand how anybody can look at a long term graph of bitcoin price and still think people were "tricked" into anything. It's... I don't know, I firmly believe there a lower limit of due diligence needed for something after which "tricking" just isn't a right word. You google "btc price" and you get a nice graph with all the info you need.
They could be mistaken - or not. Right now odds are maybe 4:1 for each price peak to be surpassed in about three years. Even if it won't and it turns out to be a bad investment, the odds make it a pretty legitimate decision, right or wrong.
The thing to watch is the hashrate, once the bigger miners start pulling out it will get interesting.
If larger miners pull out, what will that mean for the smaller miners?
Controversial take, but the amount of salty comments on crypto here always amuses me.
You're only going to see the salty and bullish takes, the truly neutral have nothing to say about it.
Where's the take? As it stands it's a silly flame-bait.
Anyone that uses the word "salty" makes me think they're 16 years old.
That word along with "cringe" desperately needs to get removed from the lexicon.
Hypothesis: if, as some have asserted, the BTC market is driven by the Tether market, then BTC dropping might be related to the recent wobbling of Tether USDT, which never quite regained $1 peg.
If Tether is about to go the way of Luna and Celsius, then it may be that one of the major remaining purchasers of (heavily discounted) Chinese property bonds is about to go away. We have already seen a couple small runs on the bank in China in recent weeks. Perhaps we are about to see more?
Whether the above hypothesis is true or not (and I am not attached to it, as I own no BTC nor USDT), I suspect that one way or another, the crash of BTC is going to have knock-on effects on the rest of the global economy. Remember, at the beginning of the GFC not many people in Greece or Iceland or Spain probably thought that American housing bonds had anything to do with them...
> I suspect that one way or another, the crash of BTC is going to have knock-on effects on the rest of the global economy.
I highly doubt that because there just isn't enough volume in BTC compared to what the rest of the world transacts in other currencies. It may affect the price of drugs for a while.
Considering that you're pricing it against a spreadsheet stored in a DC basement, maybe backupped in some Jersey data center, it's indeed doing poorly. Cheap USD and free (i.e., unregulated) derivative markets are doing the rest. Speculation is the lifeblood of commerce. There are some who rejoice at the sight of it.
If I understand correctly, the actual cryptography in cryptocurrencies isn't terribly interesting.
Blockchains are, however, trying (or claim to be trying) to solve the Byzantine Fault Tolerance problem, which has no known efficient solution.
Is that correct? Are blockchains an actual area of research for folks studying distributed systems in CS Departments?
There are a couple of blockchain projects doing BFT development n the first one I read about was AntShares (now Neo) doing delegated BFT. There IS some interesting R&D happening, but most if it is lost in the get-rich-quick noise. Also Zk-SNARK research is interesting . Monero and Zcash technology is also quite interesting ,and can go beyond cryptocurrencies.
I'm very pro blockchain tech, and I'm glad this "winter" is coming so that all that noise is reduced and good interesting projects get more visibility.
There's a little known project called selfkey who have been developing some interesting "Sovereign digital id" stuff. Pretty early but interesting.
Just get away from the "money money money" stuff and you can find some interesting projects.
It is an actual area of research, mostly around scalability.
I don't know what happens in computer science departments, but you can watch Ethereum be developed in the open. They cite the research they're implementing.
For example: https://notes.ethereum.org/@vbuterin/proto_danksharding_faq#...
I'm not quite smart enough to follow all the cryptography, but there are a lot of unsolved problems being worked on. It seems that doing trust and accounting at global decentralized scale is trickier than chaining blocks together.
Also , the basic cryptocurrency stuff is basic PKI with signing. Plus a version of Kademilla plus a database linking records with hashed previous records and the infamous PoW. Nothing really fancy computationally.
The "genious" of Nakamoto was to put all the existing parts together. But hashcash was there, kad/BitTorrent were there, chained append only DBs were there, etc.
What I'm most curious about is what the knock-on effect this will be to crypto businesses. From what I hear, a few pension funds invested into Bitcoin. Wondering how that'll turn out...
Generally a pension would put 1% or less to such investments. So while the absolute value of the loss may be large, the percentage of portfolio loss will be little.
The loss of S&P and equities at large impacts them much more greatly.
A pension fund with significant Bitcoin exposure is not 'investing' they are recklessly endangering the funds they have been entrusted with and the fund managers ought to be held personally liable.
Most pension funds probably had an exposure somewhere on the order of 0.05% AUM or less so it should have no significant impact. It's the crypto hedge funds and other businesses that were holding huge chunks of BTC/ETH that are in trouble.
The store of value argument is now dead.
Definitely feel bad for all the people duped into thinking BTC is a hedge against inflation.
And the "will enable low-fee microtransactions" argument has never panned out either.
oh no! anyway.
Still $18,300 to go. Getting closer, at least.
I'm a huge bear, but thinking its going to zero is crazy. Even beanie babies retain some value. And crypto still has utility as a transaction medium for illicit exchanges.
There is unfortunately a fair amount of intrinsic exchange value in its use for illegal trades (drugs, CP, etc.) and tax evasion. So it won't ever drop to 0.
Unless governments actually start to do their job and stop all transactions to the fiat-crypto exchanges. They are literally being used to bypass international sanctions and fund all sorts of trafficking and cartels.
Bitcoin is here to stay. You're mixing up shitcoins and other ponzi-like schemes.
As with any new & emerging technology, blockchain ecosystem hosts various (intentional or unintentional) FUD and malicious coins that are backed by nothing and often run in a ponzi scheme manner. These coins will eventually crash and disappear.
Bitcoin's intrinsic values are similar to other asset classes, plus, its also decentralized and censorship resistant.
Anti bitcoin people are pretty toxic.
What an amazing invention to have the absolute truth published every 10 minutes.
Back in the day before naval armies, merchant ships used to have to carry their own cannons and couldn't max out their payload with goods.
Bitcoin has a neat feature of not requiring armies or vaults to protect itself. Is it a currency? I think not but it is many things all the same.
The people who focus on the price haven't seen the forest for the trees.
I am dying laughing right now. Sitting here with popcorn watching all the ponzi-coin bs burn
This is a very good buying opportunity, because this is mostly caused by overleveraged people and institutions having to liquidate into thin markets. Too greedy people are now wiped out. This gives an opportunity for those who have been wiser and have spare cash around. If you decide to buy, buy only the amount which you wouldn't need in a couple of years, taking into account increasing living costs and coming recession.
Obviously, buy bitcoin only. Other coins can have their few months of fame but then fade away.
The price can still go lower, but I think we're quite close to the bottom of this cycle.