from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is anyone else glad the crypto market is crashing?

by blueberrychpstx on 5/12/22, 4:45 PM with 629 comments

• by IAmWorried on 5/12/22, 5:06 PM

  It's less that I'm glad the market is crashing, and more that I'm glad that the insufferable crypto bros are finally getting a punch to the mouth. Seriously, these people are the worst. Your average "crypto investor" has no skills, no mathematical foundations, nothing. Except for pure stupid luck, and the ability to spew inane crypto babble 24/7. And yes, they think they are much smarter than you, because they achieved better financial results than you did while only doing 1/1000 of the work to get there. I truly hate the fact that these people are so rich. It makes me want to move to Alaska and just try to ignore society for the rest of my days.

  This came off as pretty bitter. I apologize, but I am bitter, and I'm having a shit couple weeks.

• by gsibble on 5/12/22, 5:37 PM

  I feel bad for people losing money, but crypto has not lived up to its potential at all, remains a solution looking for a problem, and is an environmental disaster.

  I used to be a huge believer. Brian Armstrong gave me my first Bitcoin in 2011 at District in SOMA. Electricity was included in my rent so I bought 10 video cards and mined for about two years on 5 systems. At a company I founded, I use Bitcoin to pay for food and drinks. According to the Barista, I was the first person to ever pay for coffee with Bitcoin at Coupa Cafe (despite having to stand there and wait 10 minutes while the transaction cleared).

  But nothing has come of it. All the years of promises and applications, nothing. Ether DApps, sure, but how much of the modern internet runs on those? I also mined StorJ and Monero for years. Apart from a way of making money and storing value, crypto is useless. Processing fees are way too high to even be considered as a replacement for payments not to mention other barriers such as the ability to integrate with antiquated point of sale systems entirely designed around credit/debit and cash.

  So I put all of my holdings into a retirement account and don't worry about the price. But I've given up on crypto and everyone who babbles on endlessly like they know something I don't about how it's going to change the world. So even if Crypto loses its value some, I'm glad because the lack of easy, effortless gains will disappear for a lot of those people and most of these short term hucksters will fade away. I'll gladly exchange crypto's price for less crypto bros. My cost basis is around $150 so I have a long ways to go before I care that much.

• by jonathan-adly on 5/12/22, 5:25 PM

  It's a Macro crash. SP500 is down -%5 YTD. Meta -37%, Netflix -65%. Lots of pain spreading. You shouldn't gloat or be happy. Give it a couple of more months like this, and lots of the HN audience would be worried about layoffs.

  The security of your average software developer job is strongly tied to market cycles.

  If you want a place to direct your hate and bitterness, I would do it at the architects of the BOOM/BUSTS cycles that keeps happenings and destroys people lives.

• by joezydeco on 5/12/22, 4:54 PM

  I'm glad that a long overdue reality check is coming. But I'm incredibly sad that many, many small fish will lose their entire life's savings in the hours and days and weeks ahead. I've already seen random social media postings of attempted suicides, or talk of it. We will lose actual human beings in this.

  And, what's worse, is that the real grifters and crooks will walk away clean once again. There isn't enough time or justice in this universe to nail them all and that's a crime in itself.

• by mordymoop on 5/12/22, 6:11 PM

  I'm genuinely confused. This current crash is not nearly as bad as several recent crashes. The fall in price in the big coins (Eth, BTC) seems downright modest. A bunch of new meme coins got obliterated, which is also normal and completely predictable. Why are people treating this as if it's going to be the fall of crypto? Because a peg broke? Have people not heard of Mt. Gox?

• by protastus on 5/12/22, 6:39 PM

  Bitcoin allowed me to quickly send money to a war zone (Ukraine) without dependency on a banking system. Wiring money overseas is a slow and precarious experience even in the best circumstances, and I was stoked to bypass all of that. That's innovation.

  Then there's a surreal amount of noise. The hundreds of altcoins, the blockchain buzzword, insane speculation, insane energy use and carbon emissions, drama about losing funds.

  So yes, I'd like to cut down the noise so we can focus on the innovations.

• by paxys on 5/12/22, 5:14 PM

  Bitcoin is at $30K. I'd hardly call it "crashing". It has erased its gains from the last year, sure, but so has the broader stock market. And "growth stocks" are performing a lot worse in the same period.

• by vmception on 5/12/22, 5:11 PM

  I’m really excited about it, I do take issue with people still not knowing what parts of crypto aren’t crashing and are working very well. To me that still seems intentional, but at the very least its annoying.

  People dont know why “Magic Internet Money” - a stablecoin - is a meta-meme on re-appropriated skepticism of all crypto while being designed decently well, much better than TerraLuna (overcollateralized, compared to "partially collateralized as a last ditch effort that predictably failed"), MIM is holding its benchmark price through this stress test so far.

  Same for DAI, which has a similar but older and more convoluted design than MIM, and less native collateral choices.

  All while neither of these are perfect. None of these are a model decentralized stablecoin (for those that dont want a central company being able to freeze some funds, but I understand thats a feature for some market participants).

  I like that the shakeouts and implosions will cause great discount prices. “Discounts” because many implosions force selling that pushes a price down beyond the rest of the market’s feelings, and when that selling stops (which can be transparently seen), the prices reach back to the level people were willing to pay. A chance I am sometimes willing to take.

• by haunter on 5/12/22, 5:17 PM

  Look at the Terra sub or the replies on Twitter to the official account. Normal people losing all their life savings and a lot of them are contemplating suicide. It's actually really really sad.

  https://www.reddit.com/r/terraluna/

• by macksd on 5/12/22, 7:05 PM

  I'm pretty perplexed by what crypto has become in practice. All the big selling points for me are that it's a currency (that almost nobody uses as a currency) with mathematically-ensured security (which goes away if, like many people, you're holding a lot of wealth in a centralized exchange that tries to dumb everything down for the entry-level consumer) and controlled inflation (which is defeated somewhat by the massively fluctuating prices all driven by hype and speculation) and the potential privacy (which is really only there in some currencies and / or if you never use any other currency) and lack of government involvement (which goes away if the government can tell you've been using crypto and decides to tax it like a security).

  In the end, it's a bunch of crypto bros who want to show how much they don't depend on the government suddenly realizing that FDIC-insured accounts were actually developed for a reason. It's people calling dibs on numbers. And yeah - the blockchain has led to all sorts of interesting ideas, but the money you pump into the currency du jour isn't really worth anything once people move on to a new trend, or once your exchange is hacked, or whatever.

  I've been getting told for months that I'm missing the train and making a bad decision by a guy who bought BTC at 60k and told me "everyone" was saying it was going to go past 100k. And apparently I was a fool for investing in property and a diversified stock and bond portfolio. So yeah - I feel somewhat vindicated right now.

• by devKnight on 5/12/22, 4:55 PM

  NFTs are basically tulip mania and beanie babies all over again.

  I've been wondering when it would crash, didn't expect it to happen this quickly. NFTs i mean.

• by kiernanmcgowan on 5/12/22, 5:30 PM

  Crypto and other speculative assets are reasonable investments when inflation and interest rates are low - this allows toleration of high risk profiles. When inflation/interest rates rise, theres generally a cash exodus to safer assets.

  Monetary policy for the past decade has made it "reasonable" to take a much more risky portfolio stance, that situation has changed, and everyone is realizing it at about the same time.

  And so we're seeing the paper tiger of crypto valuations - once the market situation changes such that crypto is too risky, everyone leaves and dumps what they have. It just took 10 years for people to learn that the hard way.

• by Mehringotio on 5/12/22, 5:17 PM

  I follow climate change for a while.

  Especially the co2 concentration in our air, wild fires, droughts etc.

  I'm looking forward to burning less resources for just hashes.

  I'm also getting tired of having the same fruitless discussions.

  There are a lot of people who have never thought about a ton of implications of crypto.

  Real issues are ignored, unknown, or just never even mentioned.

• by Patrol8394 on 5/12/22, 5:56 PM

  I have been sitting on cash since end of last year, I am finally seeing opportunities to buy at reasonable price: stocks and crypto.

  Stocks, cryptos, houses: people kept buying no matter the price, even though, it was so obvious that those prices were not sustainable.

  And we are finally seeing a proper correction. I think, houses are next in line.

• by spaetzleesser on 5/12/22, 5:16 PM

  I am not happy that it’s crashing. As always it’s the little guys losing their money while the big guys are walking away with tons of money. I would celebrate if the big crypto players list their shirts. They lose a little but still walk away with huge ill gotten gains. P

  We have created a culture where quick money gets celebrated and regular work doesn’t pay off anymore. It’s no surprise that people get sucked into get rich quick schemes.

• by dahdum on 5/12/22, 5:20 PM

  Bitcoin hit nearly these lows twice last year in January and July. The crypto market has always been highly volatile, crashes are routine.

• by topherPedersen on 5/12/22, 6:36 PM

  Cryptocurrencies have become stocks without companies behind the ticker symbols. People took the stock market, tossed out the businesses, and just kept the casino part of the game. I know this is sad to say, but most people are dumb, lazy, impatient, greedy, and tend to take the path of least resistance without much caution or thought. The same people that weave through traffic and cause car accidents are the same people that lose all their money in the stock market, crypto, and get rich quick schemes.

• by runjake on 5/12/22, 6:44 PM

  Despite having money in the crypto market, I don't have an opinion or real emotional response to this so-called crash.

  If you're glad the crypto market is crashing, I think that speaks more about you than the crypto market.

• by asdff on 5/12/22, 7:10 PM

  I'm not really invested or care for crypto, I'd rather it not be around. But I don't see how this is any different than when bitcoin hit $17k and also "crashed" and everyone talked about how this was the end and crypto had a good run. Then it got even bigger. Now that you have institutional investors in this pie and not just those dudes you knew in college, its not going anywhere. People are automatically putting retirement contributions into crypto. The shitcoins come and go but things like bitcoin and the other major major coins will probably always be around with appreciable volume unless there is regulatory crackdown imo.

• by ugjka on 5/12/22, 5:18 PM

  Proof of work has to die, unless you can actually do useful "work" with it instead of brute force cracking hashes

• by AnIdiotOnTheNet on 5/12/22, 5:11 PM

  While I experience some small schadenfreude over the situation for a wide variety of reasons, my hope is that this will finally bring GPU prices back to some semblance of normalcy. However, this is not my expectation. Partially that is because of continuing supply issues everywhere, but also because now that cryptobros have driven the prices so high we've reached the "that's just what it costs" stage on $1000+ GPUs.

  Well, that and perhaps a lot less wasted energy and environmental damage.

• by redox99 on 5/12/22, 7:54 PM

  I don't think it's nice to have posts on the front page basically celebrating other people's misfortunes.

  The only thing that could be celebrated is if crypto mining capacity were to lower. But this aspect isn't even mentioned. And although the most valued coins currently rely on PoW, PoW isn't something intrinsic to cryptocurrencies. It's something we should move away, the same way ETH is planning to do.

• by mathgladiator on 5/12/22, 5:19 PM

  I'm not sure. If it all goes to zero, then I'm out $40K in various coins and $5K in $COIN. That was my FOMO limit, and given how skeptical I am of many of the claims it will have been an education.

  I find Bitcoin itself to be interesting, so I intend to hold as I suspect a crash will come with regulations. Regulations may be the thing to save it in a way, but who knows.

• by hristov on 5/12/22, 7:15 PM

  I am glad. And it is not because of schadenfreude either. I believe that crypto has actually been a serious contributor to inflation through the use of electrical power for "mining" crypto.

  It is no coincidence that last year when bitcoin achieved unheard of highs and many obscure cryptos, including at least one that was started as a joke, achieved multibillion market caps was also the year when many power companies around the world found themselves suddenly without the ability to provide sufficient power to demand.

  Sure there were other reasons. But crypto was part of it. And probably the most important part because it is the most drasticaly rising source of power demand.

  You see power demand is usually not that hard to predict. It depends on boring slow changing factors, like population numbers, number of households, GDP, average temperature, etc. So power utility commissions and power companies had a relatively easy time predicting demand and keeping up with demand.

  Then crypto comes. And then the price of crypto skyrockets to the point that people can really print money by plugging in computing devices in their wall sockets.

  All of a sudden power demand goes up much faster than power companies can handle. And we have high power costs, power outages etc. OF course there were other factors, such as extreme weather events, etc. but the higher power costs persisted even after the extreme events were over.

  There are official estimates floating around the web that crypto uses about half of percent of worldwide power. I suspect the real number is much higher. Crypto power use is hard to estimate because a lot of crypto power use is done secretly.

  If bitcoin actually crashes to very low numbers (like 3 digit dollars), then we will see a dramatic reduction of power use, and all the experts and power utility commissions will be surprised how much power crypto was using all this time.

• by progrus on 5/12/22, 5:16 PM

  Don’t tie your personal happiness to this, because then you’ll be sad when it goes back up.

• by cableshaft on 5/12/22, 7:08 PM

  Not here. A correction was overdue, sure, but I never hope for full on crashes, especially the people it hurts, as dumb as it may have been for them to FOMO entire life savings into coins not tested by time. I'm not a bitcoin maximalist, but there's only a small handful of coins I feel comfortable putting more than ~$200 into.

  Of course I have a decent amount invested in these things, but it's not a huge deal, I got in long enough ago I'm still way up, just wish I stepped on the sidelines a few months ago instead of stubbornly staying in like I did the last two market cycles. But I never put in anything more than ~2% of my paycheck into it. I waste way more money on two or three takeout meals every week.

  Even with these crashes, my piddly crypto purchases are still outperforming my 401k, and I'm putting about 7x times more into that every paycheck.

• by flyingfences on 5/12/22, 5:30 PM

  Yes, I'm glad for the opportunity to buy more Bitcoin at this discounted price.

• by monktastic1 on 5/12/22, 5:12 PM

  I'm happy that people are seeing that it's not as uncorrelated with the larger market as people thought, making it less exciting as a hedge. (Of course, we need more data to be really confident in this correlation, but the perception will be there nonetheless.)

• by nonameiguess on 5/12/22, 5:16 PM

  I'm not a fan of crypto, but don't get happy when any market crashes. The worst part is the very few big-time Bitcoin evangelists I knew personally got into it super early, for no better reason than it seemed to pattern match their Randian Objectivist proclivities and they really hate the Fed, people with little to no technical background who had gotten by in the past via things like couch surfing with women who had money, playing poker full-time, and taking glamour shots of teenage girls they found on the Internet. Those people were in early enough that they're still rich almost no matter what. It's only the late stage investors getting crushed.

• by scottLobster on 5/12/22, 5:22 PM

  I'm down about half of the 1% of my savings that I put in carefully selected crypto in the off chance that it actually lived up to its potential, and I'll hold because there will probably be at least some bounce on the other side of this. So I'm not "glad", but I'm hardly ruined by it. As for the people who bet their entire life savings on it, fools and their money soon parted. Part of being an adult is that if you're a fool, it's on you. For every person doing things right with a legit sob story there's at least 10 who only make their situation worse regardless of any support they're given

• by rland on 5/12/22, 7:39 PM

  I don't particularly like cryptocurrency. It's clear that the utopian vision has not panned out: these aren't currencies, they're securities.

  But seeing people lose their life savings is just sad. I completely understand people's rationale for taking the crypto bait. Many people bought into something that they didn't understand, motivated by the "standard" financial system failing them completely.

  Read some of the replies to this status: https://twitter.com/stablekwon/status/1524164780189126657

  "I put my life savings in because I trusted you. Putting good yield on binance for locked period, now that billions of dolar have been locked this happens and thats the day before my locked period is over. now i put two stakes of max 30.000$ =60.000$ an thats my life savings ... I feel terible now. I really hope you can understand, I trusted you. No one is telling me now what is going on. I took a loss,my life is ruined"

  Another

  "please hear me Do kwon tell me everything will be okay if I just keep DCA Luna is not going anywhere it was my choice. I spent two years putting everything I had into it and my family and I suffered because of it and I have a few hundred left I'm not selling. Just give me hope"

  Another

  "Too late, everything built up, from 15k invested to 75k, to 45k end of last week to final 0 today and a fkin credit card debt for the final roll of the dice, no bear market DCA for me now fk"

  Another

  "I lost everything my apartment my house my money everything is gone someone help me"

  This isn't joyful to watch, it's sad. As it turns out, the return on cryptocurrency isn't good, when you factor in the risk. The biggest bummer about this is that it was entirely preventable: we have an existing framework of securities regulation, created when all of this (suicides included!) happened with traditional financial instruments 100 years ago in 1929.

• by hindsightbias on 5/12/22, 4:53 PM

  You just don’t get it. Bitcoin performing worse than the stock market is a feature!

• by Terry_Roll on 5/12/22, 5:13 PM

  Is anyone surprised considering some central banks are going to be launching their own crypto? Its almost like the secret experiment with crypto is over, and I'm saying this as one of the first bitcoin miners.

• by jeffwask on 5/12/22, 5:19 PM

  Anything to put an end to an "investment" that literally burning the candle at both ends as it destroys power grids and spews pollution. It's tough to spend money when you destroy the planet.

• by resfirestar on 5/12/22, 5:20 PM

  I doubt it's crashed forever, I think a lot of what we're seeing right now is because of the long overdue reckoning for the "stablecoins" that people have been treating as if they're worth $1 despite knowing it was a lie for years. That destabilizes the markets really badly since so much trading either used them as USD stand-ins or used the credit mechanisms they enabled to push up volumes. People didn't stop believing in magic, that's a longer process.

• by braingenious on 5/12/22, 5:27 PM

  I’m glad because this has allowed me to finally convince one of my elderly relatives to divest a big chunk of their savings from this garbage.

  I can’t even begin to imagine how many nontechnical older people that downloaded TikTok to follow their grandkids have fallen for these bullshit pump and dump scams. I wonder how much of the real money that’s in crypto actually comes from utterly clueless people that are being actively exploited by a small handful of crypto “influencers.”

• by wollsmoth on 5/12/22, 5:24 PM

  I'm a little worried about how much of a position some of my friends have taken these digital coins but otherwise yeah. This party is going to end some time and unless you got in super early, I just don't think you're going to get rich. You might as well just learn how to options trade if you want to get into high stakes legal gambling.

• by ISL on 5/12/22, 7:05 PM

  Weapons are instruments of fear; they are not a wise man's tools.

  He uses them only when he has no choice.

  Peace and quiet are dear to his heart.

  And victory no cause for rejoicing.

  If you rejoice in victory, then you delight in killing;

  If you delight in killing, you cannot fulfill yourself.

  https://www.wussu.com/laotzu/laotzu31.html

• by kissgyorgy on 5/12/22, 7:13 PM

  Yes, absolutely! The most people actually using crypto for payments are scammers and criminals (ex. ransomware), most of them is bad for the environment (huge energy consumption) and NFTs are basically a huge scam for non-technical people. I hope all these criminals go broke and there will be finally some actually useful things can happen.

• by senectus1 on 5/13/22, 1:02 AM

  I definitely get a sense of schadenfreude when i see the particularly toxic communities in the crypto market suffering.

  but i don't particularly want to see cryptocurrencies fail in general.

  I think atm I see this a a "reset" or cleansing. There was too many obvious scams and well dressed and marketed pyramid schemes. This will collapse a lot of them.

• by wonderwonder on 5/12/22, 6:51 PM

  Crypto is fascinating to me as its the first truly social media driven financial market. If twitter died tomorrow, most crypto currencies would go to zero or would start at zero and stay there. Just as social media surfaces the worst of society, crypto currency often reflects that. I do think there are interesting use cases and i do invest in it as a portion of my retirement. I have never felt joy at someone else losing money as at the end of the day many of these abrasive personalities are just reply guys living lives of quiet desperation hoping for some attention and a small chance of exiting the rat race. Majority of them are dealing in very small volumes and are fueled by hope. Why would I wish loss on these people? The truly successful crypto bros are likely still very wealthy and will weather the bear market. Its the small time average investor that serves as exit liquidity.

• by seydor on 5/12/22, 7:19 PM

  No. A bunch of ultra-rich VCs were bored of having too much money and pumped up a crazy web3 thing. This was their "Squid Game" moment where they create the games and put millions of clueless kids to run like rats around their pyramid schemes. I somehow wish the VCs would lose their money instead of millions of kids.

• by alkonaut on 5/12/22, 7:54 PM

  Sure. Because most of it is scams. And because I don’t think there is a status quo that needs disrupting. I find the idea of widespread anonymity in the larger economy downright scary. I can’t see anything that is interesting, cool or necessary that needs it.

  I also fail to think any of the tech built on/with crypto (and blockchains in general) is even vaguely cool or exciting. I don’t think expensive apes are an abberation in an otherwise promising field, I’m convinced it’s just apes and scams all the way down. Artificial scarcity, pyramid schemes, pump and dump. Whether it’s coins or apes it’s the same thing.

  The promise (or threat, if you see it from my POV) of actual widespread use in society to challenge traditional systems and industries like credit card companies is perpetually just over the horizon. And as soon as it really does have an impact it’s obviously going to be outlawed.

• by aww_dang on 5/12/22, 6:50 PM

  Please consider building. Create the change you want to see.

  >I'm hoping this crash and those in the future rid the space of the toxic backrooms these $30,000 jpegs provide access to and get us to collectively work on building really exciting cool new things.

  Which part about current valuations changes your ability to create?

  Dislike "crypto-bros"? Fine. I'm not sure who that is, but they are neither here nor there. Do you give them control over your creative endeavors? If so, why?

  Perhaps a less charitable interpretation might be: You're not interested in building at all. In lieu of creation, you blame "crypto-bros" for what you dislike in the space.

  There are plenty of alt-coin communities if you are looking for alternatives. There are thousands of cryptocurrencies with different energy consumption patterns and market valuations. Choose one that fits your technical and ideological needs.

• by musesum on 5/12/22, 5:21 PM

  In March of 2000, I registered the domain "TheTulipFund.com" [1] with a manifest of goods used to pay for Tulip bulbs infected with the crazed virus, which was lifted Levine's book[2] on viruses. It started as a joke around a dinner party about buying up dead dot coms. At the time, my company was preparing to go public in April. The joke was on me.

  Meanwhile, NFTs -- I have to wonder what's different.

  [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20020928142349/http://www.thetul...

  [2] https://www.amazon.com/Viruses-Scientific-American-Library-B...

• by Tade0 on 5/12/22, 5:31 PM

  I would actually prefer for it to continue seeing how many scammers pivoted to crypto.

  I hadn't had a question from my mother about the legitimacy of the spam she's getting in months.

  Also, from all this drama, a whole culture emerged:

  https://youtu.be/5-h_-OuGMnE

• by cattown on 5/12/22, 6:42 PM

  Oh yeah baby! Here's my top 5 reasons...

  5. Crypto bros deserve a punch in the face. If you don't feel that way, it's probably because you're a crypto bro. The world is secretly (or not) cheering for this to all burn to the ground because it's easy to perceive people who promote crypto as obnoxious swindlers. Really, they are. Sorry, if this isn't a good reason, but I'll just spill those feelings out right there before making some more reasoned arguments...

  4. Crypto not useful in a real way. Speculative investing, money laundering, hiding wealth, pyramid schemes. I'm a tech guy and I have no idea how I would go about acquiring crypto currency then using it to pay for something tangible of real value without eating an exorbitant amount of fees and taking my chances moving stable fiat currency in to a highly volatile asset. I know here are exceptions, but let's be real, crypto in 2022 is about creating shady financial tooling.

  3. Crypto's externalized costs make it expensive to society while providing little benefit. Graphics card shortages, energy usage and global warming, brain drain from other real tech problems, aiding and abetting criminal activities like money laundering. What are the benefits that make up for any of that?

  2. People losing savings sucks, but the longer crypto insanity goes on the worse that's going to be. Taking a statistical view, unsophisticated investors almost certainly will be taken advantage of in unregulated markets. The longer this insanity goes on the worse that's going to get. End it now and fewer real people with real savings are going to get hurt.

  ... and the real reason we should all be excited about...

  1. I used to be excited about blockchain technologies. I think there are some really great uses for them. But then speculative investing in crypto became a craze and that kind of swamped out everything else interesting. If speculative investing becomes no longer feasible, hopefully we can start to get some focus on some of the more interesting and beneficial applications.

• by vegai_ on 5/12/22, 5:11 PM

  If you think this constitutes a crash, you haven't paid any attention to how crypto markets behave.

• by holysantamaria on 5/12/22, 7:57 PM

  Every single bitcoiner I know keeps selling me a world where everyone will be free from central banks, free from "the banking system"(tm), free from taxation, free from states.

  They buy bitcoin to destroy the central banks, the states. The corrupted ones. They are on a crusade and at the top of this very new world : them. One day they will dominate the society. We poor ant-sheeps will continue to struggle while they golden eagles will have almost unlimited satoshis in their wallet that they will have earned so hard by pressing some buttons on a web app.

  So yeah I somehow like to see their dreams taste a dose of reality. Bitcoin is a shitcoin too despite them chanting otherwise. And don't get me started on NFTs or other cryptos...

• by thefz on 5/12/22, 8:18 PM

  Yes. I want some common computer components to go back at normal MSRP. Also bitcoin at least was good on paper but instead of liberating the common folk ended up in the hands of the same big investors all over again, polluted and wasted a lot of resources.

• by RichardHeart on 5/12/22, 7:33 PM

  Yes, I am. I called the top on roughly the day over a year ago. You'll be mad about this part though. It will find a bottom. I will buy that bottom. And it will make new all time highs. Then a few years after, you can post your anger / relief thread cycle again. It keeps oscillating higher and higher. There's some real innovation hidden in the mess, and it still truly is the best performing asset class that has ever existed in history. BTW, everything is crashing, so hopefully you don't own any of those things, or someone else's post about being happy the things you owned crashing might seem crass to you right? lol.

• by nivertech on 5/12/22, 6:02 PM

  It's not even started crashing.

  Dogecoin's "market cap" is still over $11B.

  https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dogecoin/

• by anm89 on 5/12/22, 5:47 PM

  You are comparing the worst of crypto markets to the best of traditional markets. NFTs are like the equivalent of Peloton in the the traditional world. A nonsense concept made to raise capital from people who like a shiny narrative but can't be bothered to think through the details.

  Yeah a lot of dumb hype settled in crypto, crypto is naturally suited to that and that's never going to change. But there's plenty of dumb hype in markets that should know better.

  Anyway crypto doesn't seem to be that different than the world around it and it has performed drastically better than traditional markets since the bottom of march 2020

• by cwkoss on 5/12/22, 7:10 PM

  If everyone thinks this is an existentially large drop, from a historical perspective, now is probably a fantastic time to buy Bitcoin.

  I think DCA-ing into ~1% of net worth held in crypto over the next few weeks would be a pretty solid trade.

• by ortusdux on 5/12/22, 5:30 PM

  I only care in so much as I might be able to get some graphics cards at MSRP soon.

• by nashashmi on 5/12/22, 6:49 PM

  It was always bound to happen. The crash. The question was always when. I thought the crash was over last Feb. Boy am I wrong!

  Another theory I had about two years ago, was inflation was getting sucked by inflating crypto. Now real life inflation is happening and so crypto falls. This was predictable too. The question Wa a matter of when exactly will the pandemic end and people will start enjoying life.

  Thats what happened. So don't look at it as omg crypto falling. It's just an economic shift.

  New question: what will Future savings look like? Need to brush up on economic theories after world wars for insight

• by UncleOxidant on 5/12/22, 6:43 PM

  > Obviously it's bad if people lose their entire life savings

  Honestly, I don't feel too bad for people who put their whole life savings into crypto. Never put all of your eggs in one basket as the old saying says.

• by cryptica on 5/12/22, 5:47 PM

  I'm glad that it's crashing in spite of a large chunk of my portfolio being in crypto. The degree of complacency in the space had gotten absurd and completely detached from any economic or even technological reality. Current top projects seemed to intentionally squander all the money which was invested. It was so bad, it looked as though the biggest investors wanted them to waste the money.

  I'm also glad that the stock market crashed too. I hope it all goes to 0 and new, better projects and companies can grow out of the ashes. It's scams all around.

• by adra on 5/12/22, 8:02 PM

  I hate the miss-allocation of funds toward things that are objectively worse for the world. At least with loss-leading-mega-projects and rampant corruption, some of the money cycles back to contribute to society. I just see crypto a net tax on society in the wasted electricity, hardware for more novel uses, and the shear number of people being thrown at building a better pile of crap to extract money out of. Finance is and enough for that, but at least they tend to invest in things that often make people's lives better in some way .

• by can16358p on 5/12/22, 7:22 PM

  I'm glad that the over-populated bubble is shrinking.

  The scams and low quality projects will die and true web3 projects that aren't only for quick cash but for actually building something will stay.

  Just like the dotcom boom.

• by incomingpain on 5/12/22, 6:36 PM

  Crypto is crashing, but so is everything else. Gold is down 8% in the last month. Silver is down 20%. Virtually all stock exchanges are down 15% or more. Bonds are still losing money in real yields.

  This is all happening at a time of high inflation and so the measurement of that crash isn't even net of inflation. Gold is actually down 16%. Stock exchanges are actually down >20%.

  Crypto crashing isn't a factor at all, this is global economics collapsing.

  Oil is way up. Food is way up. Fertilizers are way up. Looks like major military mobilizations are happening to me.

• by NKosmatos on 5/12/22, 7:37 PM

  I’m not glad, I’m a little bit disappointed that such marvelous software tools (blockchain, crypto, algorithms, protocols…) are being used as profit/investment tools, like stocks, forex, commodities and all the rest. I wanted a market/ecosystem where the cryptocoins would be used to make our lives easier, free from banking restrictions, cheaper than existing systems and serving a good cause. Instead I see people investing in every shitcoin/NFT that pops up, with the hope that will get a 1000x return :-(

• by LeifCarrotson on 5/12/22, 6:03 PM

  I feel bad for those who lost on a risky bet.

  I am, however, looking forward to replacing my 970 with a more modern graphics card! Haven't seen the pallets of 3080TIs showing up on eBay yet, though...

• by r3trohack3r on 5/12/22, 7:52 PM

  For a different take - I’m generally happy when things go on sale.

  Until I’m living off of my investments, it’s generally in my interest for the prices to be low.

  This is true for company stock programs. Yeah - it can be painful to watch 3 years of options go to zero, but if I’m being given $N in options every vesting period, that just means my next vest is going to be great!

  Crypto is no different. If I’m dollar cost averaging into Bitcoin, crashes are in my interest and rallies are less than worthless unless I’m planning on selling.

• by agentultra on 5/12/22, 7:20 PM

  Yes. It's been a lovely week so far.

  I'm mad as hell that people got taken in by it. Increased suicide rates, broken families, lost homes, etc. It is infuriating that the people behind this are going to walk away without a single scar or regret. It's been a giant con from the get-go and it sucks seeing so many lives ruined over it.

  However I will dance on its grave and laugh as it all burns down. If it wasn't going to be put down it would destroy itself eventually. I'm here for it.

• by nightski on 5/12/22, 7:37 PM

  I'm so excited to hear what you have been building that is so revolutionary while you lash out at others who might want to create something you don't enjoy.

• by karmakaze on 5/12/22, 5:34 PM

  I'm more glad that companies that were profiting from crypto are losing more than the consumers invested in it. I would prefer if crypto values slowly levelled off, fell, and stabilized. That way it would reflect what it can be: a stable but less convenient/spendable cash, which is where we are at.

  If we get higher transaction throughput or less energy consumption with similar guarantees, the value should go up again to reflect that ability.

• by breakds on 5/12/22, 5:12 PM

  But everything is connected. Beware of the fluctuation/crisis in the other markets which might be triggered by what's happening in the crypto market.

• by Joeboy on 5/12/22, 5:25 PM

  Is it crashing? USDT seems to have recovered its peg, for now, and BTC is trending up since this morning. I admit I was hoping that wouldn't happen.

• by NelsonMinar on 5/12/22, 6:23 PM

  The sooner the crash the less overall harm it will do. Right now the crypto sector is still small enough it probably won't demolish the world economy the way the 2008 debt crisis did. Although it's already bad for some countries foolish enough to get in deep, like El Salvador.

  The big one is going to be Tether. When that inevitably fails I think it will kill 80% or more of the cryptocurrency market.

• by acchow on 5/12/22, 7:21 PM

  I myself was a big believer in Bitcoin and its ability to transform internet transactions. However, I believe Bitcoin and other crytocurrencies got taken over by get-rich-quick MLM pyramid schemers. It can't be a useful blockchain until it shakes off all these get-rich-quick people and settles around some stable value (no, 10% MoM gains is not stable).

• by otikik on 5/12/22, 7:51 PM

  I am ambivalent.

  On one hand the schadenfreude is high, not going to lie.

  On the other hand I liked that they were all in the same spot. Every time crypto dips down, or there's a rugpull or whatever, I am afraid they'll jump ship to some other area that they'll ruin for everyone. Or worse, they will move to many different areas, spreading the greedulousness all over the world.

• by sumitb on 5/12/22, 6:14 PM

  I made some money in 'crypto' over the years. I had always thought of the whole phenomenon to be one sustained by less than average white men / boys giving away their historically dubiously gotten privilege to slightly smarter Asian/Russian fraudsters. As a trained computer engineer, I am sad that the technology is deficient.

• by dathinab on 5/12/22, 6:34 PM

  Better crashing now then later when the bubble is even bigger.

  But tbh. crashing earlier (e.g. pre-covid) would probably have been even better.

• by notacoward on 5/12/22, 7:23 PM

  I'm glad that it's becoming a lot less likely for new people to be sucked into the insanity. As long as "number go up" there will always be a bigger fool, and so the cycle perpetuates itself. When number go down, the supply of new fools becomes much smaller, and maybe the whole scam will recede into memory.

• by mcguire on 5/12/22, 5:50 PM

  The short answer: It's financial engineering. It hasn't invented anything cool since the credit default swap.

• by recursive4 on 5/12/22, 5:44 PM

  Some lessons require pain in order to be learned; the difference between investing and speculating is one of them.

  In parallel, there are communities of builders working on the post-jpeg future. Check out https://partialcommonownership.com, for example.

• by princevegeta89 on 5/12/22, 5:50 PM

  I am glad that crypto market is crashing and the utility is going down. In my POV, it is just a leeching virtual asset without a governing body behind it that makes crime easier to conduct. In addition, it is also bad for the environment and it's volatility tells me that it can never be used as a legal tender.

• by boeingUH60 on 5/12/22, 6:18 PM

  Personally, I don’t have any shred of empathy for people who bet their hard earned money on silly coins.

  If they had won (in the greater fool game), most of them would have celebrated all the way and deluded themselves that they were savvy investors.

  Play stupid games, don’t be surprised when you get stupid prizes (e.g, losing your life savings).

• by at_a_remove on 5/12/22, 5:42 PM

  No, not especially. If you don't care for it, ignore it.

  And if you think that a crash is going to clear the way for anything you want, there's a principle from PT Barnum about sucker production. The get rick quick schemers will "pivot" to something else.

  Some higher-end video card prices will go down. That'll be nice.

• by CodeWriter23 on 5/12/22, 5:25 PM

  A bunch of numbers stored on a computer without a sizable military force backing them are worthless? Who knew...

• by jl6 on 5/12/22, 7:12 PM

  I don’t know whether this is a crypto crash or part of some wider downturn or maybe even not a crash at all, but I think it’s perfectly rational to welcome a market correction. Anything being wildly overvalued or undervalued causes bad decision-making and makes us all collectively net poorer.

• by _Algernon_ on 5/12/22, 6:04 PM

  >Instead, JPEGs and skeuomorphic representations of traditional financial vehicles in web3 space.

  As with previous crypto crashes, the chaff is gonna die, and the grain will remain (Bitcoin, ethereum, maybe a few others). Then a new spike to a new all time high will occur after the next bitcoin halving.

• by waylandsmithers on 5/12/22, 5:37 PM

  Well it definitely makes me feel less bad about the bitcoins I lost back when the price was around $100 :)

• by fabian2k on 5/12/22, 5:20 PM

  If you're convinced that cryptocurrencies are useless and a terrible idea in general, you would expect them to inevitably crash at some point anyway. And if you assume that it's reasonable to hope that they crash sooner rather than later, as the consequences will be lower.

• by Blackthorn on 5/12/22, 5:15 PM

  I just hope this will finally make GPU prices come back down to earth after two generations of nonsense.

• by AlexCoventry on 5/12/22, 6:22 PM

  My theory is that the crash was caused by terra's attempts to defend the UST peg, and now that they have effectively abandoned the peg by halting the terra blockchain, we may see other crypto prices recover. (Not financial advice, obviously. I could easily be wrong.)

• by danschumann on 5/12/22, 7:08 PM

  People who belong trading in the market are the people who can figure out how to make money in any condition. The rest of the people, the long hodlers, will probably be fine. If you hold bitcoin for 2 years, you basically have not lost money since its inception.

• by dandanua on 5/12/22, 6:20 PM

  > it's bad if people lose their entire life savings

  What is even worse is that those life savings will be collected by criminals and personalities alike. I'll be glad only if those people will be put in jail for running all those frauds and scams.

• by throwawayffffas on 5/12/22, 5:52 PM

  Not really it's just crashing because there is derisking going on due to the unstable period we are experiencing along with the upcoming rate hikes, so to me it looks like there is going to be a comeback and no one will learn anything.

• by UncleOxidant on 5/12/22, 6:46 PM

  But, but, Matt Damon said "fORtUnE FaVORs tHe bRaVE".

  Yes, I'm glad this ponzi is crashing. You can feel somewhat sorry for the greater fools, but they're learning an expensive lesson and hopefully will not repeat their mistake anytime soon.

  However, it's not like crypto is the only bubble crashing right now. Stocks, bonds, and (soon to be, but to a lesser extent) real estate - they're all going down in a pretty big way because the Fed is taking away the punch bowl. Yes, it seems unlikely that crypto would have inflated to the point it did without the Fed's easy money policy for the last dozen+ years, but neither would stocks or real estate. It gave us a culture where people thought they didn't need to work to obtain wealth, a few well-placed bets and you were gonna be set. But that mentality is corrosive in the longrun.

• by birthday on 5/13/22, 1:40 PM

  Just from title, I can tell you are unintelligible and uninformed about crypto.

  Tech stocks are crashing just as much as crypto right now. And Bitcoin is trading 30 THOUSAND DOLLARS.

  Would barely call this a "crash that's finally happening"

• by imachine1980_ on 5/12/22, 6:49 PM

  I'm not, people spend they money in this, and now feel that what the spend they fallback money despair in front of their face, alot of people get scamed by very sofisticate scamers in this gold rush.

• by nilshauk on 5/12/22, 5:27 PM

  I’m not happy about people losing money.

  However, I’m happy if this means money will be invested in innovation towards saving the planet, rather than finding new ways to burn resources with proof-of-work-based crypto.

• by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK on 5/12/22, 7:04 PM

  Of course, people are glad. Someone is glad that Bitcoin and Tesla crashed 35% YTD, because they don't own them. I am glad that ARKK crashed 56% YTD because I don't own it.

• by vietvu on 5/14/22, 2:31 AM

  I am. But sad at the same time that this catastrophe has to happen to filter out all those bullshits. Blockchain can be cool, but it really needs to be free of toxic scammers.

• by gumby on 5/12/22, 6:15 PM

  I'm sorry that people have lost a lot of their money but I'm glad there is a reckoning now rather than later when it might have roped in even more people.

• by Saphyel on 5/12/22, 7:56 PM

  I'm not glad of the people got ruined (if that's the case of anyone?) but I'm pleased that I'll hear less often "buy kkcoins!"

• by mknze on 5/12/22, 10:09 PM

  If it wipes out the Ponzi schemes and people learn, then it's a good thing. But, some folks are loosing their shirts and that is never a good thing.

• by root_axis on 5/12/22, 6:58 PM

  > I'm hoping this crash and those in the future rid the space of the toxic backrooms these $30,000 jpegs provide access to and get us to collectively work on building really exciting cool new things

  None of this prevents people from working on cool things, cryptocurrency is just a dead-end technology without much potential to create cool things. I don't think it can be denied that the concept of bitcoin is pretty interesting from a technology perspective, but in terms of practical utility there's really not much blood to squeeze from this stone.

• by JeremyNT on 5/12/22, 6:50 PM

  I really dislike all of these crypto pyramid schemes, which I view as a purely wasteful endeavor that rewards speculation and con artists, but it's far too early to gloat.

  Time and again we've seen dips - and this nonsense always bounces back.

  This looks like an overall market correction, which we're overdue for, rather than a fundamental collapse. Maybe some of the more blatant fraudsters will lose their shirts, but at this point I wouldn't dream of betting against this stuff. It's simply become too big to fail.

• by TekMol on 5/12/22, 5:21 PM

  It only looks like it is crashing when you look at it on a linear scale. Because a linear scale makes the same swings (percentage wise) look larger during times when the price is higher.

  When you look at the Bitcoin chart over the last 10 years on a log scale, you see that a halving over a timespan of 6 months is completely normal given the volatility.

  The volatility has been always like this. The only thing that changed is that the price is at an all time high (in terms of orders of magnitude) at the moment.

• by martini333 on 5/12/22, 7:08 PM

  I don't really care about the price itself. But the thought of some stupid crypto-kid losing money makes me glad, I guess.

• by radar1310 on 5/13/22, 9:01 AM

  Yes it will be wonderful to see a glut of video cards on the market. Hopefully the end of highway robbery is close to an end.

• by bendtheblock on 5/12/22, 6:20 PM

  There is a moral imperative to stop crypto/NFTs/etc, especially from those most vulnerable to it, the young.

  We are putting the planet in peril already without the existence of this pointless technology, which represents the first net-negative invention of Computer Science. As a discipline we must evolve to apply an ethical lens to what we do, just as other sciences have had to do with time.

  I write about this position at webtwoboomer.com, flagged thread here about it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31330281

• by DoreenMichele on 5/12/22, 7:35 PM

  get us to collectively work on building really exciting cool new things.

  What do you all think?

  If it's not your bag, don't put your time into it.

  /2cents

• by 2OEH8eoCRo0 on 5/12/22, 7:21 PM

  We will all pay for it. All these gullible idiots strain the economy and hurts everyone when this happens.

• by walt74 on 5/12/22, 7:23 PM

  Me. I got psychologically raped by bitcoin-rich feminists from Berlin and I hope their shit burns down.

• by washedup on 5/12/22, 7:41 PM

  It's good. Shake out the leverage, teach some lessons, and the strongest projects will survive.

• by rambojazz on 5/13/22, 2:47 PM

  Yes. It's driven on speculation, and it has the side effect of ruining hardware for everybody.

• by jasfi on 5/12/22, 5:35 PM

  Crashes tend to hurt a lot of people, so no.

  However there's still money to be made. My automated trading web app detected two opportunities earlier today: BTC/USDT and BNB/USDT through EMA cross-overs. Both are still going strong, although the app is still demo-only trading. https://tradecast.one

• by rglover on 5/12/22, 6:56 PM

  Yes, washes out all of the shitcoins and brings people back to Bitcoin—the way it should be.

• by hnthrowaway0328 on 5/12/22, 6:51 PM

  I'm glad.

  Crypto IMHO mostly is a scam. Neither is it backed by real commodities, nor is it backed by violence (think military might). It alone (without converting to other currencies) can make few legitimate purchases. Because it still can make some legitimate purchases, I used the word "mostly".

  The computational power could be used for other purposes.

• by fallingknife on 5/12/22, 5:48 PM

  Very much so, as I sold mine a few last year, and this could create a buying opportunity.

• by some-guy on 5/12/22, 5:10 PM

  This kind of bubble will be back in another form, whether it's crypto-based or not.

• by stefek99 on 5/14/22, 2:36 PM

  Haters gonna hate.

  Builders gonna build.

  The most impactful technology since the internet.

  Changes trust, governance, economy, incentives.

  Changes everything.

• by xlaacid on 5/12/22, 7:53 PM

  I am beyond happy. Its a freaking pyramid scheme- top to bottom. Same with NFT's

• by coding123 on 5/12/22, 4:53 PM

  Lol, I don't think it's a crash. It's probably most likely 2 or 3 whales that have colluded on a correction and re-purchase strategy. I mean I just don't trust any of it any more. It's more or less completely unregulated (not that the regulated market isn't manipulated too)

• by slickrick216 on 5/12/22, 7:27 PM

  Negative comment's here are going to be prime meme material in the future.

• by Taniwha on 5/12/22, 6:13 PM

  I'm looking forwards to buying cheap FPGA mining rigs for my CPU project

• by bluetidepro on 5/12/22, 5:28 PM

  No? Why would anyone be "glad" about this? It says a lot about your personality to be that happy/glad about anything "crashing", whether you agree with it (crypto in this case) or not. Also, just a friendly reminder that NFTs don't equal crypto.

• by conceptme on 5/12/22, 6:03 PM

  A lot of the tech sector stocks are crashing hard too, not only crypto.

• by MisterBastahrd on 5/12/22, 7:13 PM

  There are things that can be useful in the abstract and so antithetical to usefulness in actuality that it's not really worth getting into.

  Like... the idea of using blockchain to ensure a decentralized * network.

  We've HAD them before on the internet. They worked fine as long as the average person knew nothing about them. They don't work when 12 year olds and 4chan trolls and Trump groupies get access.

  Wanna fix social networks?

  Step 1: Recreate twitter.

  Step 2: Make it compatible with user-created subscribable blocklists (and exception lists) that can be shared and modified.

  Step 3: ???

  Step 4: Profit

  You never have to see anything but the content you like, and it's still "free speech" even under the most ridiculous faulty application of the term because the company isn't blocking anyone directly. List owner block someone you like? Add them as an exception.

  Boom, social media solved, at least until people who are REALLY for personal responsibility decide it's too much trouble.

• by Melatonic on 5/12/22, 6:17 PM

  Crypto is highly volatile in general - we have seen this before.

• by bironran on 5/12/22, 6:54 PM

  The word you're looking for is "Schadenfreude".

• by asmr on 5/12/22, 11:48 PM

  The one thing I can’t stand about the criticism towards the present NFT space is when people heavily reduce the current market to ‘jpgs’. you’re not purchasing or trading images, that’s only how it appears.

• by ElonsNightmare on 5/12/22, 6:54 PM

  ...castles made of sand. Fall in the sea eventually...

• by totorovirus on 5/12/22, 6:16 PM

  It's what is called Schadenfreude in german.

• by Volrath89 on 5/12/22, 7:34 PM

  I’m glad to finally be able to enter in it :)

• by beenHot400 on 5/12/22, 5:57 PM

  I would just invest once it recovers again.

• by MrGuts on 5/12/22, 7:28 PM

  If you haven't yet caught on that cryptocoin are Ponzi schemes and a medium of exchange for criminal enterprises, then... you haven't caught on.

• by throwaway743 on 5/12/22, 6:26 PM

  Why ask when you already know the answer?

• by tapper on 5/12/22, 7:38 PM

  Glad it it's crashing I want a GPU.

• by olalonde on 5/12/22, 5:29 PM

  It doesn't help this kind of discussion to put everything under the "crypto" umbrella. There are good projects and bad ones.

• by bacan on 5/13/22, 2:19 AM

  Citadel’s loss is our gain, so…… yes?

• by sys_64738 on 5/12/22, 9:32 PM

  It was always fool's gold to me.

• by whimsicalism on 5/12/22, 5:11 PM

  Crypto discussions are often HN at its least intelligent (from both "sides"), so I hope that this presages fewer of those.

• by colesantiago on 5/12/22, 5:08 PM

  I hope it ALL goes away. I completely hate this space with every vested bone in my body.

  Even if it takes a huge recession to wipe these cryptobros and casino tokens out, I would be glad.

  Obviously would not like the collateral damage that this inflicts on all these so called small 'crypto investors' but as long as this triggers tight regulations to make these tokens, illegal, unusable and banned completely as to make the common person not touch these tokens, then that is a good thing for all humanity and we can start to concentrate on more worthwhile issues.

  I really hope this space gets destroyed sooner than later.

• by gjvc on 5/12/22, 5:38 PM

  yes

• by colechristensen on 5/12/22, 7:00 PM

  Crash was inevitable, I guess I’m glad it happened now vs later when it would be worse.

• by fredgrott on 5/12/22, 7:04 PM

  the phrase Dutch Tulips comes to mind

• by tulsidas on 5/12/22, 5:47 PM

  the planet is

• by fjfbsufhdvfy on 5/12/22, 7:27 PM

  Yes.

• by DeathArrow on 5/12/22, 6:55 PM

  Me.

• by dropnerd on 5/12/22, 8:56 PM

  smells like schadenfreude

• by aaaaaaaaaaab on 5/12/22, 5:59 PM

  Yes.

• by 015a on 5/12/22, 8:02 PM

  Quote I heard at some point (about crypto, and many things): Money is a star which obscures our view of the planets orbiting it.

  Blockchains have many use-cases. The community's insistent push toward tokenization and assetiziation of this technology near-totally obscures the fundamental technology and what its capable of.

  Arguably, it isn't even the tokenization. Tokens make sense. Tokens which have value makes sense. But then enters: greed. It's not just about having a token which has value and can do things via interfacing with the blockchain. The asset has to be an investment. We don't think about ETH in terms of what it can do on the blockchain (utility); we think about it in terms of an ETH:USD price. Its utility is impossible to detangle from Growth; Deflation; my Investment portfolio.

  ENS is my favorite example. Arguably; this is how domain names should work. A distributed, trustless ledger. Power to the people! And then you realize, it costs $100USD/year to register a domain name. Today is pretty cheap; thursdays are cheaper than fridays, but you should really buy one on a wednesday because that's when gas is at its lowest.

  Why is it so expensive? Because the token is an asset. Thousands of stakeholders, really every ETH user, has an interest in seeing the token go up. Token goes up; utility of the token goes down, as it becomes prohibitively expensive to actually do interesting, real, utilitarian things with it.

  Real world: Assets which have both Utility & Investment Potential are somewhat rare. Cash has little investment potential, but high utility. Gold, Silver, etc; low utility (not zero, but low), classic investment options. Corporate shares? Low/moderate utility; maybe you can use them to vote on corporate direction, but at the end of the day that vote is in service to investment potential.

  It turns out that assets which overload Utility and Investment Potential inevitably screw over someone who needs that utility. They aren't egalitarian, even by the perverted definition of capitalistic egalitarianism. They inordinately favor early adopters and capital holders. The biggest real world asset class which suffers from this: real estate; and our world is observing, in real time, the decades-long consequences of treating housing like an investment.

  That leads me to three conclusions about crypto:

  1. Crypto & Blockchains are too intertwined with money. It will never not be about money. Most will recover from this crash, and still be about money.

  2. Some people say: "How can bitcoin have value? it's nothing. just bits in a computer." That's literally its best feature! Not only is it irrelevant that it can't do anything; it's a good thing. It's among the purest investment vehicles ever created. A store of wealth with near-zero utility. I say let it grow! Every dollar tied up in BTC is a dollar not being spent to make housing more expensive, or grow the tendrils of gigacorporations into every nook and cranny of our lives.

  3. Some people say: "This crypto project will be successful; it's doing something really cool, blockchain for wifi networks, or dogs, NFTs for games, whatever". I disagree. Crypto projects which try to be utilitarian Will Always Fail; unless they can detangle themselves from the deflationary investmentization of their tokens. None do that; all are started to make money; their founders being the biggest holders of the tokens, look for a return on investment of their time and effort. You can't engineer greed away.

  And here's a prediction for the immediate future: The stock markets are red this month, abstractly, simplistically, because of Fed rate hikes. Recent analysis has suggested that the markets have already priced in more rate hikes than the Fed has gestured it wants to do, for the foreseeable future. That would tend to signal that a broad market crash isn't forthcoming; I'm not timing the bottom, or saying we're heading up, I'm just saying that there's reasons to be positive right now.

  Crypto is still dumping; hard. The first reason is the Luna situation, which is REALLY bad, I don't think its possible to understate how bad that is. The second reason is really that last paragraph; value, or money, is a fixed entity. If institutions are seeing positive signs concerning the stock market right now, they're seeing whats happening to Luna, they may be positioning to move capital out of the crypto markets and back into the stock markets.

  Crypto diehards will be unhappy to discover that most coins are correlated with one-another. That's sad; there's an alternate reality where people could lose faith in Luna, but still maintain faith in BTC or ETH, and different coins become inversely correlated.

  But there's another test running in parallel to that: is the crypto market as a whole inversely correlated with the stock market? Over the past eight years, the answer to that has been No; but its also not been tested in the fires of a major sell-off in one or the other. Today is that test. And if the result ends up, actually, being Yes: that's REALLY good. I can't understate how good that is, for both crypto and our economy; it will give our economy another $1T+ alternative store-of-value to bonds, it'll desync boom-bust cycles which lessens the economic impact of recessions, it just gives capital holders optionality.

  What we don't want is: everything crashing at the same time. Crashes are necessary; but its healthier to have smaller, isolated crashes in specific asset classes.

• by helloworld11 on 5/12/22, 6:41 PM

  Oh what a perfect post in which to see all the absurdly emotional, dismissive, ridiculous crypto hate that this site's commentators just can't seem to stop grasping at rise to the surface.... A supposed "hacker" community filled with people who will reach for any convoluted reason they can to utterly sling shit at a whole complex range of technologies that despite its many bad uses has also proven to be a very interesting, impressively developed ecosystem that has also been used by many people in unique ways, often under adverse conditions that the privileged majority of HN readers never have to deal with.

  But hey, let's just blanket claim that it's all a ponzi scheme (despite the definition of ponzi schemes being very clear and very different from the essentials of Bitcoin or Ethereum or many other cryptocurrencies). Or lets go on and on ad nauseum about the carbon burn of BTC and PoW mining (despite many of you working in tech fields where insane amounts of electrical energy and carbon are burned just maintaining billions of people's generally utterly pointless social media posts or cat videos).

  Or how about endlessly sniping about fraud and money laundering on these systems, never mind that the wider financial world is filled with fraud on a far larger scale and that even social networks along with many other digital technologies are enormously used for exactly the same thing. Worth noting here again that there are actually many, many people in the world, people who aren't so nicely blessed by sound government landscapes, trustworthy or functional financial institutions and easy access to bank accounts who already do use crypto in many non-criminal ways (at least morally non-criminal). Anecdote, yes, but I personally know many who do this, and especially among people who I know in developing countries. I've read more than enough to know that the use is much wider than commonly reported. Even Chainalysis has estimated that only a small fraction of all crypto transactions are due to crime and fraud, and their very business is tracking the fraudulent use of crypto.

  And finally, that it's useless because blockchains can be replaced by so many other things, or because DeFi sucks, or because transaction fees, or because "12 years later and there's barely a use case" and etc and etc... Since when does a technology have to be immediately useful and incredible to be interesting? Some of the sniping against blockchain's usefulness reminds me of the mentality behind those who criticized the Dropbox founder's original 2011 post on HN. Furthermore, have so many of you who make the argument about crypto going nowhere been completely blind to the amount of business exploration and experimentation that the wider ecosystem creates literally by the day? Sure, much of these experiments will fail, collapse or include plenty of fraud. So too have many other interesting and now robust technologies over the decades. Frankly, it's a shame to the very most basic idea of the word "hacker" that these negative arguments should be used to totally condemn something like considering how interestingly it's being explored in the wider world.

  I could go on but what's the point? So much of the sniping here deviates so completely from legitimate, reasoned criticisms into irrationally, repetitively emotional hate that it's often like arguing at a brick wall.

• by egfx on 5/12/22, 5:03 PM

  Those $30,000 jpgs will be replaced by $300,000 gifs.

  Remember it’s Bitcoin. What goes down must come up, again.

• by damon_c on 5/12/22, 5:38 PM

  This whole thing was like if there was a jQuery bubble back in 2008 or so. jQuery came along and was amazing and useful and enabled a whole bunch of great new ways to do things and made a lot of stuff much easier.

  Now imagine it also enabled a huge range of financial adventures which got some people rich and some people poor and caused most normal people to hate jQuery. That would be silly. jQuery is still a useful tool. It's not just for pumping and dumping tokens... It's great for manipulating DOM elements too!

  I hope maybe this crash will help people realize that public permissionless distributed databases and the cryptographic primitives that make them secure can, like jQuery, be used to generate new amazing software products that previously could not exist and are not just about get rich quick schemes.

  --edited for formatting/clarity