And here‘s the problem with cryptocurrencies: They might have all kinds of use cases, but people just see a quick way to get rich.

I agree with you in general but in my case, Bitcoin had already experienced several booms and I was aware of the crypto-[mb]illionaires back then. Either way, if I would've jumped on the "get rich" bandwagon, I might actually be today.

Don't feel bad.

I made and lost 30k speculating on dumb stuff like Mazacoin and Auroracoin. I avoided looking up any numbers for a long time, but my non-tech friend asked me the other day what it would have been worth. If I had invested 20k of that in the Ethereum presale, it would be worth 30 to 40 million dollars (or would have been when the market was high).

Could kick yourself for stuff like that (I read the initial posts about Eth here on HN, figured it would be valuable, didn't know how soon it would be valuable), but the market was scammy even then. Mazacoin was supposedly going to be the first official coin of one of the Sioux reservations; that was exaggerated, didn't keep it from spiking 10x overnight.

There's nothing special about making a fortune gambling and taking money off other dummies throwing money into the hype. Regular people are getting hurt by this. For every big winner, there's some family who had a dad who mortgaged their house and lost it all. Maybe that's post hoc justification of missing out, but there's nothing to be proud of.

edit: doing the math as of today; $24k would have bought you about 80k Ether at the presale price of 2k eth per Bitcoin (about $600). 1 eth is about $1050 today, at a value of $1k that's 80 million dollars. The fortunes that people can and have made at out of this are absurd.

>> For every big winner, there's some family who had a dad who mortgaged their house and lost it all.

That's silly. Just look at the growth in the total crypto market cap over the last few years (or even over the last six months) and it's clear that this can't be true.

The vast majority of people who have been involved are way ahead.

> The vast majority of people who have been involved are way ahead.

Strong disagree :(

Cryptocurrency investment is speculation in a zero-sum game. Every dollar someone pulls out of the system in profit required someone else to put a dollar in. All those people who sold bitcoin at $19k could do so because there were buyers. Every single one of those buyers lost.

Cryptocurrencies are not shares in a corporation or bonds or any sort of interest or dividend producing financial instrument. Even the ICOs that claim to be so only work when new money is coming in. To get a (real) dollar out of the system, someone else has to put a dollar in. To get more money out of the system than you put in, someone else has to pay. For that person to get more money out, more people have to come in after them and pay. The top of the pyramid gets paid, the bottom is left holding the bag.

The only growth in market cap is new money flowing into the system. Once enough decides to flow out, the gig is up and the whole thing tanks.

I'm stuck on the revelation that the stock markets high valuations was driven by cartel money needing a place to park.

I now assume every bubble serves a similar purpose.

Knowing that, a person smarter and braver than me could be skimming off some of those narco dollars.

> All those people who sold bitcoin at $19k could do so because there were buyers. Every single one of those buyers lost.

Only if they sold. Otherwise they might just wait until the price climbs back.

The price still doesn't change unless new money enters, though.

great comment BUT real world finance works like that too except USA keeps its currency in demand by forcing international trade especially oil to be settled in USD and invading countries who resist. Macro voices podcast went into that in super depth https://www.macrovoices.com/podcast-transcripts/341-anatomy-...

That's assuming the coins have no ongoing value which may not be the case.

People are way ahead on paper, but for them to realize their gains would require a whole lot of other people to buy in. When we look back ten years from now it's possible that only a minority of people will have profited.

I now wonder if there are any surveys of first mover advantage in pyramid schemes, ponzi schemes, bubbles.

SOME ONE made one a fortune during the tulip mania. Right?

How many actual $$$ millionaires are there really? With old currencies in old-fashioned off-shore bank-accounts? After all, it's still the govt controlled currencies that buy you houses, supercars and tropical islands. /s

It's all speculation. There are tons of markets out there seeing similar inflation, though the geek crowd only focuses on the cryptocurrencies.

Like all speculation, for every winner there are hundreds of losers, and hindsight is 20/20 but it's impossible to reasonably predict the future outcome.

Don't worry about it :)

I think, given the extreme bullishness of this area over the past few years, the opposite is more likely true: for every loser there are hundreds of winners.

That's because a lot of current crypto holders are potential future losers. If you settle all crypto in USD today, most people will be left with close to 0.

This is exactly why I pulled my initial plus 150%. I figured if the bubble pops tomorrow I'm still up.

Isn't this insane though? When else would anybody be at a lunch talk where somebody goes over a consensus protocol and the idea would be "holy shit we are going to be rich by buying some tokens". If Dan was giving a talk on some new thing using multilinear maps nobody would say "oh fuck I've gotta get in on this and I'm going to be a billionaire". If Alex was giving a talk about some new way of doing superoptimization you wouldn't be interested in buying "STOKEcoin". Even when Dawson was doing the early stuff that turned into Coverity, nobody looked at the foundational algorithms and said that they should invest in the algorithms. You need to build a company that does something with a product.

Dave is a brilliant guy. But the response to a lunch talk shouldn't be to invest in tokens.

The price has nothing to do with the science. Otherwise, why didn't it explode back in 2015 when SCP was released?

The Stripe blog post mentions OmiseGo. OmiseGo hasn't even launched their product and Stripe is considering using them. That's a little worrying, but suggests it's still early.