Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dlau1 3081 days ago
Keeping track of crypto amidst all the hype recently, it's abundantly clear to me that the recent explosion of speculation based trading is a signifier that cryptocurrency is a bubble just waiting to burst.

I don't think this is bad in any right. It looks (and I grew up in the bay area through turn of the century) just like the dot com bubble. The promising part of this is that the underlying technologies being developed, a way to distribute information and business logic in a way where there is an indisputable fully traceable truth, is huge. I think of blockchain-like platforms like Ethereum as the ARPANET to our internet. The opportunities to supplant existing fully centralized systems such as stock exchanges, escrow systems, supply chain/provenance tracking, etc. with a fully decentralized or hybrid approach is huge.

In the end though, I think it will come down to where governments draw the line in the sand. The sad but true reality is that the regulators with the guns will always have ultimate power.

1 comments

The interesting thing is to cash out now- and invest into the amazon of cryptocurrency, when all is going down.
If anybody knew what the Amazon of cryptocurrency is, we'd all be investing into it.

For all we know that crypto is here, it just hasn't been evenly distributed yet.

I’m pretty sure that’s what Ripple is trying to position themselves as. Whether they pull it off, who knows.
Every crypto is trying to position themselves as the survivor (by way of real world 'utility') for when the bubble bursts. They all want to be Amazon, rising from the ashes of a crashed market.

Ripple's underdog challenger, Stellar XLM, is trying to claim the same mantle. So are thousands of other 'utility coins', of course, including ETH, XRB, VEN, ICX, and even the "privacy" coins, like Monero.

The fact is this is uncharted territory. We don't know for sure whether we're at the leading or trailing edge of a bubble, and we don't know for sure that any, some, or most crypto will still be around in 5-10 years.

Interesting times!