Ask HN: Why crypto is rising so fast when its not creating value?
We all talk about how startups and companies create value, how monetary system backs value in the form of money to be able to exchange it.
Why cryptocoins are rising so quickly when they are actually not creating any value? Or do they create value?
152 comments
[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 265 ms ] threadIt’s the new form of gambling.
edit: in reply to rhizome below: yeah, I bought drugs, money, goods, etc... But I also lost money when the US Gov messed with BTC-e [1]... I hope that Biden doesn't get too stupid with his regulations.
(Hacker News didn't allow me to reply to a reply to my own comment: https://i.imgur.com/rd8qH08.png)
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BTC-e
With that said, there’s quite a lot going for Ethereum and defi as a sector. Major tech players like Google are funding many web3 startups. Facebook is fully embracing the “metaverse,” whatever the f** that is.
Tesla is trading at some ridiculous multiple of earnings for the same reasons. Yes, there’s likely much future value in Tesla and web3. But the rapid recent growth is mostly indicative of the fed money machine going brrr.
Zimbabwe had hyperinflation. Zimbabwe had a $100 trillion dollar bill:
https://www.dallasfed.org/assets/documents/institute/annual/...
If we had 20% inflation per year for the next decade in the US that would be high inflation but wouldn't be hyperinflation. We are nowhere near that.
I wonder if the crypto bubble creates a "wealth effect" that makes people feel richer, spend money, and drive inflation.
By all means use it as whatever indicator you like, but lets stick to the facts.
Of course, that's not the only thing that determines stock price.
Your word salad is your own, not Greenspans.
> I wonder where that perceived value comes from?
I believe that is the holy grail of investment. There are many different models that try to approximate it.
Greenspan has never said that "excess capital flowing into stocks can be viewed as a form of inflation".
Higher price of stock being a potential indicator of inflation (due to the wealth effect, etc) is very different to it "being a form of inflation".
Anyway, I don't care to continue this discussion as is. Please feel free to post references backing your redefinition of economic terms if you wish to proceed.
If the price of stocks goes up without revenue going up that just means people value future consumption more and present consumption less. That has absolutely nothing to do with inflation. If anything, it's disinflationary.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/24518/24518-h/24518-h.htm
I see it as the future of the web. There's a lot of energy coming around the concept of Decentralized Apps. or Web 3.0, today we have web 2.0 with large centralized websites ran by huge tech monopolies. Regardless of your political affiliation, you probably dislike them. Though the exact reason you hate this is probably different.
Web 3.0 offers us a way out... and crypto is one of the critical underlying infrastrcuture components. A lot of people see things this way, and are trying to get in early on it. Chances are the markets will crash before the majority of people understand what web 3.0 is. But while the market is down, a lot of cool stuff is going to be built, and when more people start to discover it again, the market will shoot back up. This cycle happens every time we make progress. Of course, the markets are pretty amateurish right now so we also tend to overshoot it, leading to huge bull markets and big crashes.
IPFS content addressing, .onion sites all work without any need for cryptocurrencies.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooko%27s_triangle
Could just buy & ride ETH to the end.
You mean to say dweb creators more often than not _choose_ to use eth instead of their own tokens?
When the floor represented by underlying value is not very significant compared to retail price, then the sales bonanza should be expected to propagate further along a chain of middlemen, so more fun for more enthusiasts the more valueless you can get.
I don't think currency is just a confidence game. The most important thing is that the currency is actually used to make transactions that are meaningful to human life. A currency that isn't used to exchange goods is just a collectible. There is no such thing as an abstract "store of value" that has no actual utility other than as a store of value. Crypto will fail when people tire of owning the collectible and want to exchange it for something useful.
I think this theory is nonsense but it's true that if enough people believe it, it can become sort-of-true for a while, until it's not anymore.
The sad answer is population growth. The optimistic answer is that the person ate the potatoes which gave him the strength to harvest potatoes in 30 years. The realistic answer is that you should have no expectation that you ever get any potatoes back as the potatoes have spoiled and nobody is exerting additional energy to counteract the loss.
Millions of people use cryptocurrency on a daily basis to make transactions that are not only meaningful, but absolutely critical to human life. Here in New York I personally know more than a dozen people who regularly send cryptocurrency to their families in other countries. It is cheaper, easier and faster than using banks and legacy money transfer vehicles like Moneygram or Western Union and it has the added bonus of not being saddled with the red tape or regulatory requirements that go along with these institutions.
Here's one personal anecdote. Several years ago I attempted to send a small amount of money ($50) to a friend in Ecuador via Moneygram. When my friend went to pick up the money, it wasn't there, so I called Moneygram. They proceeded to ask me a series of questions about why I sent the money, who I was sending it to, and a variety of other intrusive questions that (in my opinion) they have absolutely no right to ask. If I had sent that money in crypto, I would have paid less of a fee and had confidence it would arrive without going through the third degree by a middle man.
I find that wealthy people, those with deep ties to traditional banking systems and those who don't value their privacy are the ones who have the biggest problem understanding the value in cryptocurrency. They don't see the need to operate outside of a system that works very well for them. For many, the system doesn't work well, or efficiently, and crypto offers a valuable alternative.
This situation feels unsustainable. Traditional institutions don't ask questions because they love getting into your business, they ask because of AML and KYC regulations. If crypto eats the lunch of these traditional institutions because it doesn't have to follow the rules they do, things are going to come to a head sooner or later.
Yeah people have been saying this about bittorrent for about 15 years too: since it's illegal it'll have to a stop because the government will end it. And yet take a guess how I just watched HBO's Succession?
I could believe that having someone else hold your bitcoins and allow an easy webpage interface to break the law will end.
If I were a speculator, that instability would be attractive. But I'm not.
Real money is backed by your obligation to pay taxes in that currency.. not popularity or confidence.
Many areas today have local currencies, which are not accepted by any government for taxes. Prisoners use things like cigarettes as currency. On the island of Yap they used giant stones, which nobody attempted to tax.
According to David Graeber, money actually arose as an abstraction of debts. You can have debts between people without having taxes.
This didn't happen in a society that didn't have money. Prisoners have an approximate idea of how much a cigarate is worth in dollar terms and how much they're willing to pay for..a phone call (?)
> David Graeber, money actually arose as an abstraction of debts
Yes. I think you're drawing the wrong conclusions from that chapter of the book. The money that we have today is an IOU from the reserve bank which is backed by an iou by the government. And since taxes are essentially a form of debt on the citizen's part, you pay taxes and all this should cancel out.
Needless to say, none of these ponzi coins are of this design
That seems like a tautology.
> The money that we have today
Well yes, I didn't claim cryptocurrency works like the money we have today.
However, no given individual has to accept the currency and has to owe anything to anyone. Because there aren't any explicit agreements or written contracts between parties anyone can back out at any instant. That is why gold is so highly speculative. Nobody really knows how much stuff you can get out of it if you were to trade it for products and services.
Except, nothing forces people to spend their money so the barter transaction may never conclude which allows economic imbalances to build up over the short term which violentely resolve themselves through a crash. Inflation could be interpreted as a tiny crash every year that rebalances transactions made in the economy.
I think there's a conflation of value and value in a particular moral dimension here.
You raise some good points, though. I personally am probably coming with an unspoken understanding that 'given that something fits into a legal and moral structure, and we accept a certain definition of using something by choice as value' then paying more for that thing implies more value. Facebook is probably a good example of something in the grey area, connecting people has value, but generating demand is questionable, spreading misinformation is likely a large net negative.
The construction “NFTs are highly priced, thus they are desired, thus they are good” is full of holes. If I have a phobia of spiders, and a corresponding desire to eradicate them, does it follow that eradicating spiders is good? If I got my wish, I and the rest of the world would be worse off for it, but my desire exists none the less.
I have a feeling that whatever definition you're using for crypto to say it isn't valuable could also be applied to an awful lot of startups and more generally to current stock market prices...
Very comfortable saying that my definition of value is opposed to many companies and startups
This is only true if you define "value" to mean "people are willing to pay money for it."
But that's a useless and circular definition. It's only tolerated because assuming that money is a proxy for value was useful for making crude models in economics.
> If I'm willing to pay for something then it must have more value to me than the money I am paying, otherwise I wouldn't pay for it.
I disagree. People pay for stuff of no value to them all the time, for various reasons. That someone is willing to pay doesn't automatically mean it has value to them, although it does heavily imply it.
The real problem in the world of crypto is that it's gone through many boom and bust cycles without real innovation to match. The future of what crypto could deliver is as speculative now as it was five years ago.
The post was asking if value is created and I think that my argument that the market price of doing things in the ecosystem having a real world cost translates to it having value is correct. There are plenty of insanely wasteful and horrible companies that create real value in the world.
Crypto still looks and smells like a huge sham, tho, so I’m inclined to agree with your other points.
You're looking at a more absolute definition of value that has little to do with the price of things. That's a worthwhile discussion as well but has little to do with OP's question.
My problem with that definition is that it's a tautology, and therefore holds little actual meaning and provides no insight.
"Why is that valuable?" is not a question meaningfully answered by "because people want it". That answer only begs the question. Everything that has value to people only has value because people want it.
That's not a tautology because it's two different things. If they were only paying for the currency, that could be just a speculative bubble. If the price is based on people paying to issue transactions, that's a price built on actual use.
Economics defines value as that which a rational agent is willing to make a sacrifice for, and the degree to which something is valued by that actor is exactly measured by what they're willing to sacrifice.
Why is this not valuable? Or, rather, what might a better definition entail? A precise formulation isn't required, I'd be happy to see a rough sketch of necessary and/or sufficient conditions.
Particularly, I think it's important to delineate whether 'rationality' allows for arbitrary actions, decisions, and desires. I do include these qualities in my notion of rationality, so long as the actor can rationalize the phenomena to themselves (even if this rationalization is based on nothing more than their ability to do so).
Given this notion of value and rationality, yes: I can very easily allow for NFTs ('useless' though they are) having value.
Do you mean 'rational' in terms of 'every action or desire is reducible to some unknown deductive logic'? In which case, I agree that everyone is somewhat irrational and furthermore that nobody could ever be rational. 'Rational' in the game theory sense? In which case, I see no reason to say that everyone is irrational instead of allowing for the mathematical notion imperfectly capturing reality.
It is possible NFTs do have value in the sense of being good, but them being priced highly does not give us useful signal there.
I suppose my biggest gripe is this: how do you construct a notion of rationality which allows for some people to be perfectly rational sometimes, imperfectly rational at other times, and others to be rational never, while allowing for real flaws in reasoning and the absence of perfect information? (this is, to me, a rough sketch of some necessary/sufficient conditions)
And, again, the notion that something is 'clearly false' at some point presupposes perfect information about the context within which the belief is held.
The subdomains on ENS (which are all sitting on the .eth TLD) are also going to be in good hands; surely. /s
Just look at the disaster that the ENS domain holders are experiencing by wasting thousands on gas fees just to claim ENS tokens. [0]
[0] https://twitter.com/ensdomains/status/1457862602239926274
It means that it is useful for those who can afford the absurd gas prices for just about any operation on Ethereum than those who are sending small amounts to perhaps test before permanently sending their money to a dead wallet and paying the gas fee too.
So it makes sense for someone to pay >= $1,000 in fees to approve and move / swap $1 - $100 worth of tokens? That is not 'real utility'. It makes it really useless.
That's like arguing that all container ships are useless because I only order a few dozen small packages a year.
The gas prices are set by supply and demand so the value created by the gas prices must be an acceptable cost for the amount of value the transaction is creating.
Just because something is cost prohibitive at your scale doesn't mean it is for everyone.
So I can use Ethereum to pay for my groceries then? Everyone needs to eat. It's creator painfully admitted that gas fees should not be at those prices in the first place.
Good to know that you can't even send a test transaction these days.
When rollups plus sharding get it to tens of thousands of tx/sec in a couple years, we might see other applications take hold.
Expensive Ethereum leads to expensive gas prices. If you want to play an NFT game then the speculators are just middleman that want to insert themselves between you and the game.
No gambling gives you possiblity to do 1000x but crypto does and for so many times over the years. To anyone that says ponzi, what do you think Financial system with fiat money is? Does anyone even here mention how boombers and very rich families get 100m or many times bigger loans with stocks for very very low interes rates? why are they allowed to and what are they risking, exactly? is there even a risk?
Not that there isn't small cases for remittance and illegal things.
The other side of this is that certain crypto markets are highly liquid, and liquidity is sticky. Sure, they're subject to high volatility and intense drawdowns, but being a focus of trading is something that lingers a long time. Most traders don't care about fundamentals. This is just another place to speculate to them (that's not a value judgement on my part), and the best places to speculate are places with lots of other participants.
I know that basically boils down to "it's popular because it's popular," but I do think it's self-reinforcing or self-sustaining. Narratives drove money into crypto and to this high point, but I think these reflexive dynamics are also keeping it elevated
Don't come counter-arguing to me tho, I'm not the Chief Strategy Officer of the Human Rights Foundation, Alex Gladstein is, he makes the argument better than I.
And that's how banknotes came into being
Reserve banks are banks, not their respective countries governments
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banknote#History
The currency that we have today in major economies _not_ controlled by the government. If the government created money, there would be no need for them to tax people/issue bonds
"In the US alone the Fed has bought $4 trillion of bonds in the past 18 months, while the US government is spending $875M per hour in 2021.
This is driving people further out the risk curve, and as we’ve said in the past, “QE Infinity turned your savings account into your checking account, the bond market into your savings account, the equity market into the bond market, the venture market into the equity market, while given rise to the crypto market as the new venture market.”"
Once the crypto bubble took off thanks to this unprecedented bull market, it also attracts many smart engineers, businesspeople and entrepreneurs who jump into the gold rush hoping to sell picks & shovels.
There's one more aspect here. I've coined the term "Bloated MVP" [1] from years of watching startups that lack a coherent value prop, and don't know who their first user will be, and never get any traction whatsoever, but nevertheless manage to raise $millions and suck up smart people's time and energy. I've also spent years founding such companies myself. The reason people work on bloated MVPs is because they don't realize that an idealized abstract vision is very different from a value prop.
So to summarize: The crypto space is a massive ecosystem-level bloated MVP, intermingled with the biggest liquidity bubble of all time, and unprecedented speculation opportunities
[1] https://bloatedmvp.com
However, that leads to the question of whether we need decentralized databases. Networked computing tends to lead to centralization of services, if not at a single node then in a collection of nodes each of which is the best at what they do. Google is for search, Amazon is for e-commerce, etc.
Given the tendency towards natural monopolies, do decentralized databases make sense? They are slower and more duplicative than centralized databases.
Decentralized databases shine when a multiplicity of providers reduces the power of each node. In the parlance of monopoly, the node operators of a decentralized database are price-takers not price-setters.
Decentralized databases make economic sense when the operational costs associated with them are offset by the lower prices on offer compared to a monopolistic price-setter.
However, the tech monopolies currently offer their services free or at cost, with all the efficiencies that come with scale. I don't think we need decentralized databases now.
Still I think it's something good to have in your back pocket if the state of monopolistic software gets worse. I see the crypto market as crowd-funding R&D for something that may be needed in the future.
FYI, there are less than 5000 publicly traded companies in the US but more than 6000 cryptocurrencies.
CoinMarketCap lists 13684, Coingecko lists 10394 - which probably includes a truckload of BSC "shitcoins", getting more by the minute...
Uniswap v2 factory contract returns 55,319 trading pairs.
On the etherscan readContract page for the uniswap factory, the allPairsLength method returns index size.
https://etherscan.io/address/0x5c69bee701ef814a2b6a3edd4b165...
A financial market with zero regulation and full anonymity? I bet it has brought all sorts of normally illegal money movements and transactions to it. Even coordinated pump and dumps are 100% possible without legal repercussions, as far as I understand it.
What does cryptocurrency move from one place to another? Risk, arguably, and it does it faster, cheaper, farther, and more verifiably than cash. That's probably the most amazing service since the Medici's brought modern banking to the world.
As compared to equities. Remember, equities took decades before the academic frameworks were established. _Gentlemen own bonds_ was the wisdom, all the Wall Street traders were the Brooklyn street kids, not he Ivy bankers. Present value sums up all future cash flows and gives it a price today - this is very misunderstood, you find reporters saying 'and they're not even making any money!' but we're valuing the total funds made in the total lifetime, discounted to today (I sometimes think if they'd called it financial relativity or finance-time it would have been cooler). I find it useful to try to think about where the comparison object was at this point in its development.
Early stage investments are not available to most. You must be an accredited investor - i.e. already have a certain amount of wealth, you must be connected - this favors certain schools or ethnographic groups. With tokens, you now have access. You can actually participate early along with everyone else. You can join the Discord, participate, and see it through all its stages. This is tremendously powerful, scary, and transformational.
Cryptocurrencies have the dollar figure, but the real value I'm seeing is in the organization and management structures. You are seeing transparency and participation that just isn't how business is usually done, or maybe ever was. If you join the KLIMA Discord, pop into their #policy channel, they are literally having open C-level board strategy discussions you can participate in.[0]
Tokens now are being used for governance and ownership. This is the DAO concept again, which functions something like stockholders getting a vote on certain things, but in crypto it is being pushed further to have 'only' that group run everything. The other strange thing is, to get these tokens, often you have to be a member or customer. There is employee ownership, and customer ownership. Which is unusual and valuable.
[0] https://docs.klimadao.finance/klima.fi-manifesto
Stacker News (SN) is a place that is at least attempting to have these conversations, though they swing the other way and are actively pro-cryptocurrency, even if the main focus is on Bitcoin and Lightning [0].
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Let me try to actually answer your question.
* Cryptocurrency is creating value
Cryptocurrency offers the possibility of digital money outside of government control. This allows for a variety of transactions that are difficult otherwise.
For countries that have locked out other currencies or whose banking system is crumbling, remittances through Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies offer the possibility of sending cash, even considering the high barrier to entry, the high friction etc. etc. (take it with a grain of salt, but here's an article [1]).
There was been at least one instance where a news organization drew the ire of a government, had their funds frozen and were able to function through the use of Bitcoin [2].
Sex workers now have an option to accept currency with less fear of backlash.
Substances criminalized by local governments are available for purchase with Bitcoin.
To all those that will respond "cryptocurrency is only good for illegal activity", my response is that's precisely why cryptocurrency is needed. For countries with a developed banking system, the need is not so pressing. For places where it's effectively criminal to be poor, then by definition, offering independent financial instruments is illegal.
* Cryptocurrency is being more widely adopted and legitimized
El Salvador has adopted Bitcoin as legal tender [3].
Other countries are expressing interest in adopting Bitcoin [4].
* Bitcoin is working out technical difficulties that will allow it to meet demand
This is the "Lightning Network" [5].
On-chain bitcoin transactions will only allow 3 transactions per second. For comparison, Visa provides around 1700.
The "Lightning Network" and associated protocol is "off-chain", settling back and forth transactions and only commiting a final transaction on-chain.
The analogy is like a bar tab. You go to the bar, give them your credit card and maybe the bar reserves $100 on your card. You buy some beer, you buy your friends some wine, you order some food, maybe your buddy orders you a beer. At the end, you settle up with the bar, with the only reported number being the sum total of all the smaller transactions.
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So, to me, this answers your fundamental question. Bitcoin creates value by meeting a demand, is being adopted and legitimized in its adoption and is working out scaling details. If Bitcoin were a startup, this would be where "the market pulls product out of the startup" phase.
How many articles have you read where people incredulously dismiss Twitter for being frivolous and not making money? How about Facebook? If Bitcoin were a startup, I imagine the narrative would take a much different tenor.
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There is a possibility that Bitcoin and/or other cryptocurrencies could fizzle and die or that what the naysayers are espousing is correct in that they're ponzi schemes/MLMs or some other scam [6] [7] [8] [9] [10].
My opinion is very much no. I'm old enough to remember email, the beginning of the world wide web, the subsequent dot-com crash, Napster, cell phone adoption, etc. etc. Bitcoin provides a novel technology that solves a fundamental problem in multiple different ways.
Bitcoin has the possibility of providing banking to the unbanked. It also provides a way for a global financial system to bootstrap itself without centralized control. From a consumer level, Bitcoin and its associated Lightning network, open a real possibility of micro transactions that wasn't possible before.
I'm a little incredulous as the amount of vitriol directed at Bitcoin from this community and others in the technology sphere. The on...
1.2^4 is ~2x. 10x in 4 years is ~80% APR.
My CapitalOne savings account pays 0.4%; you can open an account with ZeFi today and get 7% - 20 times more - with the same ACH in/out you're used to.[0] If you go full crypto and stay on-chain, you can find the USDC coin - a 1:1 stable coin - paying interest above 12% at many DEXes[1]. The USDC coin is like a mutual fund, it has extremely liquid high quality holdings, is audited, and is exchangeable 1:1 for actual US Dollars at any time [2].
Even better, some of these options let you keep control of your assets (non-custodial).
Because of this, it's inherently obvious to me that the US banks will be completely disrupted by crypto; in a good way for us consumers.
[0] 7% return with ACH https://www.zefi.io/invite/abzqg (Note, this is a referral link) [1] 12% return on USDC https://solend.fi/dashboard [2] about USDC https://www.circle.com/en/usdc