
It can all go to zero - kirillzubovsky
https://www.feld.com/archives/2018/01/can-go-zero.html
======
aitrean
Time for the monthly cryptocurrency panic thread. While I fully agree that
most cryptocurrencies are grossly overvalued, these articles always pretend a
20% selloff is the beginning of the end, when, in crypto land, 20% selloffs
are a pretty standard bad day for the market.

~~~
saas_co_de
The way I understand it bitcoin is guaranteed to go to zero by design because
there is a fixed limit on issue and so eventually there will be no incentive
to mine and the network will collapse.

~~~
NathanKP
Actually Bitcoin has transaction fees for exactly this purpose. The idea is
that once all the coins are mined the primary way that miners make money is
from the fees that people pay to miners to get their transactions recorded in
the blockchain.

For reference a lot of times you currently have to pay a fee of >$10 to get
your transaction recorded in the blockchain, and estimates of around $10
million a day in transaction fees go to miners.

Of course its questionable whether fees can actually support the ecosystem,
but it is designed into the system.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Yes, miners will receive transaction fees. But have you run the numbers on how
much those transaction fees would have to be to match the current block
reward?

The endgame seems completely untenable. No one is going to pay a huge amount
per BTC transfer. So what do you think will happen to all those miners, with
all their mining equipment?

We currently have a monstrous block reward every 10 minutes, and yet tx fees
are already $10 to $20. Imagine how much the fees will be when there's no
reward.

~~~
mial
If I understood the system correctly, at that point mining would become much
less profitable so a lot of miners would stop their operations. In that case,
difficulty would automatically decrease at the same rate as miners quit, and
at some point it would become somehow profitable for the remaining miners to
subsist on transaction fees.

~~~
sillysaurus3
Note that difficulty adjustment happens every 2016 blocks. If the miners all
decide to call it quits shortly after the previous difficulty change, the next
2016 blocks might take far longer than 10 minutes per block.

Which of course means the next difficulty adjustment would take far longer
than two weeks to trigger.

------
VMG
If Bitcoin goes to 0, I will buy all of it and display the Trezor that stores
it in a museum

~~~
Retric
If people stop mining it then you can't buy it. Remember, with the current
design if hash power suddenly drops enough then the network just stops.

~~~
singularity2001
Wow so it can you drop to zero in a very real sense before it even drops to
say $40?!?

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _Wow so it can you drop to zero in a very real sense before it even drops to
> say $40?!?_

Markets crash discontinuously. It was trading at one hundred, it was trading
at one hundred, it was trading at 99, it was trading at 2. Go on GDAX and look
at the order book. Lots of demand priced close together at the top of the
book. As you go down, the bids are further apart.

As a first-order approximation, that's a decent view into what would happen if
a massive bought of selling hit the exchange.

------
cableshaft
So many people love to parrot the 'It'll go down to zero!' line, especially if
they don't have skin in the game, but there's pretty much no way. Specific
cryptocurrencies, sure they could potentially go to zero. I'm watching one
right now that's looking pretty darn close. But this entire industry? I don't
think so. It's too late for that.

Too many players, too much ease of access, too much of the potential has been
demonstrated at this point. Could it go down 50% or more still? Yeah possibly.
I sat through 2013-2015 when Bitcoin had fallen from $1200 and got stuck in
the $180-$300 range for two straight years.

I don't think that's going to happen again, not least of which because there
will be people like me that would be happy to buy and hold until whenever it
goes back up again at that price, but sure, it's possible.

But zero, or close to zero? No. Even this guy's example of his company was
only one company, not the entire stock market.

~~~
overhang
Were you around a few years back to see real estate values drop from $300K to
$25K? I saw that. And we are talking about a physical property.

$25K is not zero, but it would be hard to distinguish the effective difference
if you're leveraged $250K.

So, as with any investment, if you're spending monopoly money on
cryptocurrencies, scoff away. But if your retirement depends on it...

~~~
charlesdm
$300k to $25K? That seems awfully cheap. Where did prices drop so much?

~~~
adventured
Condo towers in Miami that were being put up and finished as the crash
arrived, were often entirely empty and couldn't find any buyers. You could buy
cheaper units for $30k to $50k. It was common to see 50%-70% haircuts, drops
from $180k to $90k etc. Over six years (2003-2009), Miami added 23,000 condo
units for a city of 400k. In Dec 2008, nearly half of those remained unsold.

Las Vegas saw some similar action. It suffered the worst overall top to bottom
crash of any major city in the US.

~~~
kingnothing
Atlanta, and the surrounding suburbs and exurbs, saw significant drops like
this as well in many neighborhoods and cities. Same with the Jacksonville, FL
area.

------
S_A_P
Ive some positions in different cryptos. I bought them with the same mindset
that I use when I go to a casino. What do I not mind losing? Its just one more
investment vehicle that I plan on riding out for the mid to long term. I may
win, I may lose but its not the only horse Im betting on.

~~~
Method-X
Yup, this is definitely the right mindset to have. I've been involved in
crypto since 2013 and I've found the key to making money is not drinking the
kool-aid. Sell when you're happy with the return you've made. Investing in
crypto is a little like playing poker.

------
imharvey
[https://i.redd.it/twe79v68sea01.jpg](https://i.redd.it/twe79v68sea01.jpg)

Will the history show the future again?

~~~
rpedela
What a misleading chart. It makes it seem like the market drops significantly
every January. Yet if you look at a chart of the entire history of Bitcoin,
you realize that Bitcoin has never dropped as much as in the last month or so.
Not even close.

------
maxxxxx
This reminds me so much of the .COM bubble. Same kind of discussions. I think
there will be a place for cryptocurrency but before that has been established
there will be a lot of people taking a lot of pain. People who have bought
them a few years ago will only take paper losses but now there is real money
flowing into this.

~~~
tbabb
I have seen comparisons to the .com boom/bubble, and I don't buy it.

There was a lot of economic movement while _the entire economy_ moved over to
the internet. Those who didn't adapt failed. Those who tried models which
didn't translate also failed. Lots of experimentation, and lots of reinventing
things from scratch. So lots of failure and lots of speculation-- but
ultimately around a real sea change.

I don't see how blockchain tech could have a technological / cultural impact
on that scale. It has _some_ value, and it will find its place in mainstream
society, but I don't see how/why the market needs to test everything against
it to reinvent itself as was done when the internet came to the fore. I could
see that for _sure_ with AI, but blockchain? Seems pretty specific and
limited.

Much more hype and much less substance than the .com revolution, IMO.

~~~
CPLX
I keep asking people this simple question, which goes something like this:

Before the internet, I would wake up in the morning and have to go to a store
and buy clothes, then the travel agent to book flights, then Blockbuster to
get a movie to watch. After the internet I could wake up in the morning and do
all that myself. That was valuable.

Before smartphones I would wake up in the morning and print out my airline
tickets, then call a taxi service and have to explain to them where I was, and
I couldn't tell where the driver was if I didn't see him.

OK, got all that?

Now, with cryptocurrency I will wake up in the morning and do what? I could
send money to buy drugs, that's a pretty killer use case. There are some
things like transferring money out of a war torn country that maybe it would
help that have some value, but I'm not in a war torn country. So... where's my
killer use case?

It's important to note that all the internet/smartphone examples above are
INCREDIBLE use cases, and that's just scratching the surface. Booking travel
used to SUCK now it's better. I can get books instantly. I can collaborate on
music or video production across the country. And so on, these are big deal
things. There are TONS of examples. The business opportunities here were
utterly massive. Nearly everything people and businesses did on a daily basis
changed in consequential ways due to the internet in ways that opened up
opportunity for profit.

And even with that said most of the people who saw the promise of the internet
in 1997-2000 and put money into passive investments got creamed.

Now, in all seriousness, what's my morning going to be like with crypto as a
mature technology, how will it be different and better and why will I care?
When will this happen, why hasn't it already happened, and how are all these
people going to profit from the change?

~~~
maehwasu
An anti-pattern that I see on HN is very smart people spending lots of energy
thinking of all the ways that something can't work. Whenever you have a tough
problem, there are usually only a couple ways it can be solved, and infinite
reasons it's hard to solve.

The fact that your imagination can't come up with killer use cases does not
mean that those use cases don't exist. It means you haven't exercised your
imagination very hard.

Further, if I think I know what crypto's killer use cases will be, also think
that I can prove concept as to those use cases within 1-2 years, and I have
enough money to fund that process, why would I explain those cases to you?

If you're constantly waiting for concepts to be proven, you'll always feel
behind the curve and wondering why others have way more money than you, even
though you're way smarter than they are. Imagination, vision, and the
willingness to push beyond initial analysis are probably worth 20-40 IQ points
in terms of lifetime earning potential.

~~~
cableshaft
Very insightful. It's all too easy to assume there's no use for something
because you haven't seen it yet. There was a time when it didn't seem like
there was going to be any commercial use for the internet either.

In fact, I read a book written in back in 1914, about the history of aviation
up to that point, that was talking about planes being used in WWI, and a
sentence struck out at me that said something like "It's not determined yet
what, or if, there is any commercial use to planes as of yet, but their use in
warfare is clear."

Obviously in hindsight it's clear that there are tons of commercial uses for
airplanes, but back then it wasn't proven yet, and the writer apparently
didn't have the imagination to even make a prediction on it.

~~~
CPLX
This is patent nonsense. In 1911 the US government started extensive trials of
using planes for air mail delivery which were an obvious success by the
following year.

The benefits of manned flight to the military, and having a spotter above the
battlefield, let alone flying weapons, were massive and immediately apparent
to a child.

Maybe some writer was trying and failing to make some kind of point. I don't
know the guy.

None of this really changes the point that ten years into cryptocurrency the
only genuine killer use cases are contraband and speculation.

~~~
cableshaft
You're right, I misremembered the quote. I looked for the quote and I think I
found it. This was in the book "Aircraft and Submarines The Story of the
Invention, Development, and Present-Day Uses of War's Newest Weapons" by
Willis J. Abbot.

"In 1917, at the time of writing this book, there are probably thirty distinct
types of airplanes being manufactured for commercial and military use, and not
less than fifty thousand are being used daily over the battlefields of Europe.
No invention save possibly the telephone and the automobile ever attained so
prodigious a development in so brief a time. Wise observers hold that the
demand for these machines is yet in its infancy, and that when the end of the
war shall lead manufacturers and designers to turn their attention to the
commercial value of the airplane the flying craft will be as common in the air
as the automobiles at least on our country roads."

I think what happened is that I was marveling that I was reading a book where
it was talking about the history of aviation before there were actual airports
and consumer uses for planes, and I was essentially tying that in with
'commercial' in my memory of the passage. Up until this point in the book he
hadn't mentioned any real commercial uses, but further investigation revealed
that there were actual commercial flights as early as 1914, so I was wrong
about that as well.

Nevertheless, most people back in 1917 would not even begin to imagine where
commercial flight would lead us to one hundred years later, especially with
space flight, jumbo jets, super sonic jets, drones, etc. Give crypto one
hundred years and I don't think anyone will still be saying "cryptocurrency is
only good for contraband and speculation". Give people the chance to build the
infrastructure around it.

------
rsuelzer
There are so many glaring issues with BitCoin that it's insane that there are
people who are dumb enough to buy it at these prices. 1) 96% of it is
controlled by 4% of people. That means if it were to become a currency 96% of
the wealth in the world would have to be given to 4% of people either through
goods or a fiat currency. 2) It's just a matter of time before enough people
lose their private keys that the total number of coins in circulation reaches
0. Already, something like 30% of current coins are considered "lost".

~~~
ejanus
But US wealth is controlled by less than 1%. So, what is the difference

~~~
georgeecollins
Wealth <> currency

~~~
ejanus
Some math ?

~~~
georgeecollins
Total wealth of US households = 84.9 T
[http://time.com/money/3919690/americans-total-net-worth-
reco...](http://time.com/money/3919690/americans-total-net-worth-record/)

Total amount of US currency in circulation = 1.2 T
[https://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed01.html](https://www.newyorkfed.org/aboutthefed/fedpoint/fed01.html)

Any way you want to figure it, the amount of wealth that exists does not
correspond to the amount of currency in circulation. Both can go up and down
independently of each other.

------
nlh
The chances that BTC (or any given crypto asset) goes to zero right now (or in
the near future), with the information we CURRENTLY have, are low...market
gyrations will happen, things will fluctuate +/\- 20, 30, 50%, maybe they'll
all go up 10x, maybe 100x, etc.

As long as folks believe there's a get rich quick possibility (or believe in
the viability of crypto assets, or whatever), things will keep on as they've
kept on.

HOWEVER: What that line of thinking misses is the possibility of new,
external, market-shocking information. I don't know what that is or could be
(the ol 'we don't know what we don't know'). Maybe someone discovers a massive
and fundamental bug that renders them useless. Maybe quantum computing
advances faster than we think and factoring large numbers becomes trivial.
Maybe ______, maybe _______, maybe maybe maybe.

THAT is what could bring it all to $0. That's what you should be worried
about. That's why this isn't a sure thing for ever and ever.

~~~
coldcode
I've always wondered what Bitcoin would be worth if (1) Nuclear war destroys
the internet or cloud servers (2) Mining costs more than its worth and no one
mines any more (3) It becomes impossible due to legal or other reasons to
convert bitcoin to a real currency without extra-legal efforts.

~~~
qsucvatz
If mining is too difficult,the difficulty drops, until a single PC is finding
every block on schedule. I'll mine, so that won't happen.

~~~
nlh
So I guess I'd say my point is that you say "I'll mine, so that won't happen"
NOW, which is both fair and rational. But let's say tomorrow we discover a
critical vulnerability in the bitcoin source that's been overlooked and causes
the whole thing to be destabilized and, effectively worthless. Everyone moves
on to BTC 2.0 (or whatever the fork is). Will you still mine original BTC? No.
Why would you? It'd be a waste of resources.

------
api
I think a big problem is that people are conflating two kinds of value. One is
the technical value of block chain and other distributed consensus algorithms.
The other is the monetary value of block chain backed assets.

The latter could indeed crash without impacting the former. Advances in the
former that solve cryptocurrency scaling problems could even _cause_ the
latter to crash by reducing artificial scarcity. Unlike gold there is no real
objective scarcity here. It's just software.

"Bitcoin is a major innovation" and "Bitcoin is a bubble" can both be true.

BTW...

I'm waiting for someone to explain to me why this kind of appreciation in
value is actually a desirable thing in a currency. It makes Bitcoin _less
useful_.

It's similar to housing. How is housing being more expensive a good thing?

------
askafriend
I'll bite. This article isn't terribly useful and doesn't really put forth any
new ideas. Most people are aware of how much risk is involved in the space.

------
otakucode
A few months ago I listened to an audiobook about Long Term Capital
Management, both their rise and their spectacular fall. Their largest error
was one I could easily see causing a catastrophe in cryptocurrency markets.
Some call it a "liquidity crisis" but really its a matter of no one being
willing to buy. LTCM was witness to a situation where it was positively
idiotic for everyone to be getting out of the market - but they were anyway.

Humans are skittish, irrational creatures, especially in large groups. If you
operate on the 'rational market' hypothesis, you're wrong. Plain and simple,
just wrong. That's not how it works, or how it has ever worked. Panics happen.
People hurt themselves in order to limit their exposure to even manageable
risk.

But, their main insight stands, really. If you can hold long enough, things
converge. It's the 'hold long enough' bit that can sometimes require a wait
that costs more money than there is in the world.

------
rsuelzer
I see Dogecoin is no longer at it's 2 billion dollar market cap. When my dad
asked me if I thought BitCoin was in a bubble, I told him that the fact that a
parody coin had a market capitalization of two billion dollars seemed to
indicate that something was off.

~~~
koonsolo
While on one hand I agree with you, on the other hand, remember the million
dollar web page? In the end it was worth a million dollars.

So who's to say a parody coin isn't worth that much? It certainly caught
everyone's attention.

But yeah, it is questionable, and a serious indicator there is a lot of "me
too" money in the cryptocurrency space.

------
seannyg
What is the general thinking on what the right properties of cryptocurrencies
should be to give them nonzero value? (e.g., cheap, low volatility, low
transaction cost (in time and expense to transacting party), reliability of
transactions, lack of central authority?)

To motivate this, there are many reasons for gold to have become the physical
currency of choice, outlined here:
[http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25255957](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25255957)

I would imagine that the long-term cryptocurrency will have comparable
benefits (whatever those benefits are for cryptocurrencies).

------
flowctrl
Another new year, another market correction.

[https://twitter.com/cryptozerp/status/953324474077769728](https://twitter.com/cryptozerp/status/953324474077769728)

Good time to go shopping!

~~~
diimdeep
yes
[https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/702obx/bitc...](https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/702obx/bitcoin_major_corrections_september_2010/)

------
amelius
> It can all go to zero

But there is more room to go up than to go down :)

------
test6554
Lately, nothing makes me snicker more than google search hits like this:
"Dogecoin price | index, chart, expert analysis and news"

------
pwaai
I think this summarizes the entire situation of the past 24 hours after China
has banned its citizens from foreign crypto exchanges

[http://archive.is/2018.01.16-165846/https://twitter.com/AntP...](http://archive.is/2018.01.16-165846/https://twitter.com/AntPoolBITMAIN/status/953273283524227072)

Just looking at r/Poloniex it doesn't seem like quick customer turnaround is a
thing.

~~~
narrator
Every bubble has money coming from somewhere. The mortgage bubble had all the
BBB- derivatives that were ridiculously underpriced turning trash into
treasure.

Bitcoin is all about money trying to get out of China. There is a bit of
people in countries with trashy currencies trying to save, some illegal
commerce and some greater fool speculation on top of that, but that's not a
lot of money comparitively. As China squeezes the vice, it's going to slowly
suck most of the air out of the market.

~~~
rlucas
Why do you think the mortgage derivatives were broadly speaking underpriced?

There are a lot of kinds of risks you can buy that exhibit "picking up dimes
in front of a steamroller" risk, and are priced fairly. That is, 99% of the
time you get a free dime...

~~~
narrator
Seems AIG was the designated bagholder and lynchpin of the whole thing. Many
derivative buyers got 100 cents on the dollar on all their derivatives they
bought from them because the government picked up the obligations.

------
tribby
the idea that blockchains with utility are valued as a % of BTC is the real
insanity. IMO the nature of crypto-panic will change quite a bit when fairx
and other similar "every shitcoin is a cash market now" exchanges get off the
ground.

------
singularity2001
with transaction times of several minutes (hours?) how can people even trade
that stuff?

------
singularity2001
it might even go to minus one if there is another bug in ethereum. jokes aside
it can't go to zero because I will buy all bitcoins once it goes back to
$0.01/BTC, where it was just some years ago.

~~~
overhang
And then it will well and truly be stuck at $0. It would be foolish indeed to
buy a coin of any cryptocurrency when all the coins are held by one
individual.

------
hateduser2
Sorry but his was just a bad article. I like it for generating discussion
about the topic but it’s contents were without insight and seemed mostly just
to promote the author. Made me lose most or all respect for them instead.

------
SurrealSoul
Every year for the last four years, bitcoin went down -20%~ or so in the 3rd
week of Jan. I don't know why everyone freaks out this week

Honestly, the history and trends are there, its just a thing that happens
every year, I dunno man

~~~
egeekuk
Maybe the credit card bills that people ran up in December have come in, and
they're selling their holdings to settle them.

~~~
SurrealSoul
the common theory [for the past four years] is that chinese new years is
coming and its for red pockets

------
cantrip
Author publicly admits to giving insider trading advice.

~~~
gamblor956
Insider information that is publicly disclosed is by definition no longer
"insider information".

Indeed, if this had been an equity, it would have been illegal for him to
trade the equity without disclosing the insider information prior to the
trade.

------
tw1010
I take all my investment lessons from movies.

~~~
freyir
I jump head-first into every bubble because this time it's going to be
different.

~~~
obscurantist
It's different 60% of the time, every time.

------
3cham
yeah, it can all go x10 as well, at least in term of total market cap.

------
oculusthrift
the part that really resonated with me was:

I don’t want to make money on short-term financial trades, but rather by
helping create new things over the long-term.

Anyone else have comments on this? I’ve been thinking this lately as well

------
seannyg
Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies are fiat currencies, nothing more.
Bitcoin's value is dependent not on underlying fundamentals, but rather on
supply and demand. Its supply is limited and will be fixed, but its demand is
based on on its perceived usefulness, either for storing value or making
purchases (maybe other things?). Until we see that it is useful for these
things, we should assume its fundamental value is zero.

~~~
dnautics
you're describing currencies, not fiat currencies. Even gold has limited
'intrinsic' value. Pretty much all of it 'real' applications have acceptable,
cheaper substitutes. Anyone buying gold-plated connectors for their audio
equipment is basically an idiot (source: in high school I used to work for
radio shack)

~~~
seannyg
There are many reasons gold has become a valuable currency: it has a
distinctive density, a distinctive color, it doesn't oxidize easily, it's not
radioactive or toxic, and it's relatively rare (compared to, for example,
iron). Its scarcity and distinctiveness, together with its aesthetic appeal,
have made it a natural choice as a currency. See, for example,
[http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25255957](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25255957).

Bitcoin has none of these properties ,which makes me call it a fiat currency
(like the U.S. dollar). The only difference is that the U.S. dollar does have
transactional value (and limited storage value).

~~~
dnautics
The distinctive color and density are intrinsic properties of gold that relate
to its viability as a currency because it makes gold verifiable. In that
sense, Bitcoin has intrinsic value due to its verifiability as well.

------
fortythirteen
At this point, Bitcoin is not much more than a phantom object. Too overpriced
to use for any reasonable purchase, people are literally trading nothing but
zeros and ones, no more or less valuable than the bits making up this comment.

All that can change, but only if the price drops back down to its 2016 to
early 2017 values, and there are too many people invested at this price to let
Bitcoin survive as an actual currency if that happens.

We crossed the event horizon a couple months ago.

~~~
stcredzero
_Too overpriced to use for any reasonable purchase_

Could one have a cryptocurrency which is always subdividable? Are there any
which already have this feature?

~~~
fortythirteen
It's about transaction fees and computing power. The cost of powering the
computers that verify transactions has to be covered.

~~~
stcredzero
That's a serious design flaw. "It can do it, but it's just too expensive for
anyone to afford to do it," is a design failure condition.

~~~
fortythirteen
I think it's a natural flaw in the mining concept. Any coin that people use in
a real sense will create heavy mining competition. That in turn raises the
amount of computing power needed to successfully mine, meaning that
transaction costs exponentially rise.

~~~
stcredzero
_I think it 's a natural flaw in the mining concept. Any coin that people use
in a real sense will create heavy mining competition._

Are you sure it's not a flaw in pricing/incentive? If people are using a
cryptocurrency "in a real sense" then the public blockchain ledger of a
properly maintained cryptocurrency could be maintained by parties who are
_motivated to get their transaction done._ This is not a natural flaw in the
general mining concept. This is a flaw in Bitcoin's implementation of mining,
due to the circumstance that most miners of Bitcoin are motivated by
speculation in Bitcoin.

------
Vadoff
Maybe if you're holding a shitcoin, but Bitcoin? Nope.

~~~
sputknick
What value does Bitcoin add to society? IF you don't add value, what's the
point of having you around? Bitcoin could absolutely go to zero. I say this as
a holder of some.

~~~
logicallee
>What value does Bitcoin add to society?

the value is that you can have anyone in the world murdered without it ever
conceivably getting back to you.[1]

(that value is obviously negative.)

Therefore the appropriate value of bitcoin is $0 because literally all of
society is set up for the exact and sole purpose of ensuring that the
availability of bitcoin is $0.

This is literally the only purpose for which the past 100,000 years of society
have been set up.

That's it. 1) technology. 2) rule of law.

briefly 1 has surpassed 2 but not for long. social progress is worth _way_
more than technological progress.

My price target for bitcoin is $0. That said, an appropriate target is
trillions in market cap and it is likely to get to that price.

\----

[1] While producing greenhouse gasses robbing our children and their children
of the sole habitable habitat in the universe - but that is not enough to make
it illegal.

~~~
stale2002
What about the value of fighting financial censorship?

There are lots of governments and people that attempted to censor perfectly
moral and reasonable transactions.

Just because it is "the law" doesn't make it right.

Do you also dislike Tor because it allows political dissenters to hide from
the government?

~~~
roma1n
"censor" is a loaded term. Why not "forbid"? Also, what if the solution to an
abusive government is not a technological tool but a plurality of governments,
many of which promote (some vision of) human rights? Central power, authority
is not inherently evil.

~~~
stale2002
Yes, there are different governments, some of which are good, and some of
which are bad.

Which is exactly why tools for fighting censorship are important.

To fight the bad governments.

"just make the government better" isn't a solution. People have been trying to
make terrible, abusive governments better for thousands of years.

But until the problem of bad governments is solved, tools to fight those
governments are important.

Just like tools that allow people to engage in anonymous and protected speech
and political disagreement are important.

And right now there are a lot of really freaking terrible governments.

I'd argue that around ~20 percent of people in the world right now live under
a government that I'd describe as "Nazi level bad". (ex, much of the middle
east has laws that literally give the death penalty for being gay. That's Nazi
level bad... ).

When you have this many people living under terrible governments, tools for
these people are extremely important.

------
mtgx
We have this discussion every year when there's a major correction (hint: this
isn't _that_ , this is one of the _small ones_ ).

It seems there are only two types of sentiment in the cryptocurrency market:
_extreme hype_ , where you start seeing mainstream media articles about
"getting rich with cryptocurrencies," and _extreme FUD_ , where everyone that
has never trusted cryptocurrencies starts piling on for weeks about the tulip
mania (we've never heard that one before) and how it will all go to zero _this
time_.

But it never does. Almost every year, cryptocurrencies become bigger, on
average. Small corrections, major corrections/bear markets, and even _super-
corrections_ (2-3 year long bear markets) are all in cryptocurrencies' future.
But cryptocurrencies are here to stay. They won't ever crash to zero.

------
adamnemecek
The comparison with the other company makes no sense. A company has a "single
point of failure". At this point there's waayy too many actors and people who
want Bitcoin to succeed.

The market is huge at this point. Like NASDAQ is like 7T IIRC. Crypto is today
~550B. It was like ~750B not too long ago.

Note how there's no glue joining the idea of the company and crypto. It could
go down but it could also go really up even higher.

It's funny how the one thing that North Korea agrees with the West on is how
dope Bitcoin is. Like in some sense NK, is very vested in this going well.

And re: zero. No, it will never be a literal zero. No buying or purchasing
happens when things are priced at zero.

EDIT: HN seems to be really anti-crypto. I setup a slack channel right now, if
anyone is interested in having a discussion about crypto beyond "what if it
goes to zero".

~~~
api
People made a version of that argument with mortgages and mortgage backed
securities. Mortgages are spread across too many people, too many geographic
areas, etc., and there's no way they'll all decline or default at once.

~~~
adamnemecek
Well they were wrong to make that argument. If for no other reason they were
all spread across too many people IN THE US, which kinda invalidates the
claim.

~~~
paulmd
Crashes and recessions can be global. In fact, economic interconnection makes
that more and more likely. Globalism is not a zero-sum game, everyone can win
at the same time, and in fact everyone can lose at the same time as well.

