[icu]

My biggest takeaway right now is to study the crypto firms and projects that are having trouble as a way to abstract what red flags to look for.

For example, with Terra the abstraction was that pegs don't work as we've seen many a time, especially when Soros broke the BoE. I took a small bath with my Terra holding and life goes on. I can do that because I didn't use leverage, I can lose everything I put into crypto, and I diversified my crypto portfolio. Moving forward I'm staying away from projects with a "stable coin" component as I don't think the fundamentals work.

If anyone has come across an analysis framework for other crypto projects please let me know.

[shafyy]

I do have a great analysis framework for crypto projects:

  "is crypto project?" -> "stay away"

[icu]

Sure I get that, but I'm old enough to remember the .com crash carnage and people saying that the web was a total waste of time etc and look how wrong they were.

I think that the future is a probability distribution, and there is a non-zero probability that crypto doesn't die but keeps growing. Therefore, I'm not all in, but I'm not all out.

[DannyBee]

Old enough to remember that, but not old enough to remember have been times that it turned out everything was a fraud or scam. It sometimes turns out an entire industry/etc has no clothes. :)

If your goal is "avoid frauds/scams", then the framework you were given works for sure (of course, it trivially works for anything).

If your goal is "make money", then investing in frauds/scams can in fact be quite profitable and then you are a bit stuck.

If your goal is "make money while avoiding anything that appears to be fraud/scam", then, honestly, at this point, i think that brings you back to "avoid crypto projects".

While there are obvious scams/fraud, there is also much higher than normal probability (relative to regulated stock markets, etc) that anything you choose is scam whether it looks okay or not.

Remember that one of the fundamental reasons that regulated markets exist is to be able to tell (with high probability) what is a fraud/scam not due to required disclosures, etc This is because otherwise it can be remarkably hard to tell anything but the obvious scams.

Since crypto is a non-regulated market, finding/identifying scams is, by definition, a crapshoot. The only ones you will identify are the ones that are obvious scams.

[Tesl]

I was there too and basically nobody said that. Crypto being "like the early internet" and "people said that the web was a waste of time too!" are the biggest crypto lies ever told and repeated. Absolute whoppers.

[tluyben2]

There were definitely a lot of people saying that, usually after losing a lot of money with crazy investments that 'could not fail'. On actual 9/11 (that's why I remember it very well; during the meeting the CEO's secretary came in and told about a large attack on the US), I was at a large Dutch client of ours who said they will cancel all internet projects and move back to Windows only software. The CEO had lost millions listening to his accountants and investing in World Online [0] and had no faith anymore this 'web thing' would go anywhere. A large insurer who also was our client, scrapped the webbased employee benefits project they started in 1999 in favour of a Windows client.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Online#Post_IPO

[icu]

I exaggerate, but in the run up neighbours were telling everyone to just buy Microsoft, and everyone tech adjacent I knew was trying to make an e-commerce website. I was just graduating out of university and web dev jobs evaporated. Many e-commerce companies went bust, or were acquired (my gf at the time experienced layoff after layoff until she went). At that time everyone I knew was not thinking about doing anything web related.

Probably the smart money knew that the builders who kept going had a chance to run up when the market came back on the excitement of what they built, but my social circle were not privy to those conversations.

[skeeter2020]

>> neighbours were telling everyone to just buy Microsoft

Healthy dividends and massive growth; you should have listened to them!

[capableweb]

Seems peoples perspectives are different, who would have thought?

Personally, I was working with computers back then too, and most people who also didn't work with computers at that point always asked me "When are you gonna get a real job?" and told me "the Internet is just a fad".

But again, your experience could very well have been different.

[c1sc0]

I was there too and clearly remember two things:

First. "Web dev" positions evaporated & I actually took a "stable" job at a university vs. staying at the failing internet investment firm I was working for as a developer. For a while tech was definitely "uncool", especially to those who were in it for the get-rich-quick angle. I hope the same will happen to crypto: an exodus of the scamsters.

Second. I remember thinking "so much potential destroyed by those damn suits" ... micropayments, banner ads, Ecommerce, online auctions, peer-to-peer file sharing' encrypted email, shopping bots ... we had all this wonderful tech but none of it came to fruition because of the inflated expectations / greed.

The greed of the dot-com bubble set tech back for about a decade & I expect something similar will happen now with crypto. Maybe we will finally have the breathing room to do something cool with the tech?

[SketchySeaBeast]

The internet had obvious and wide ranging use cases that were immediately apparent to everyone. Blockchain tech has at best a series of edge case applications for record keeping. I don't think they are comparable at all.

[capableweb]

> The internet had obvious and wide ranging use cases that were immediately apparent to everyone

In hindsight it might seem so, but it really wasn't. Most people who didn't already see these "wide ranging use cases" thought the internet was mostly about shady stuff.

[danaris]

You can keep telling yourself this to convince yourself that crypto will be as big as the Internet someday, but it is absolutely not the case.

Sure, there were some old fogies (actual advanced age not required, but common) who thought in ~2000 that the Internet was nothing but a passing fad, but anyone with actual sense—including many, many people who were not at all financially invested in tech companies—could see that there was plenty of real substance there, however overly-inflated some valuations were at the time.

By 2000, we already had, very firmly-established, companies like Amazon and eBay, that were clearly worthwhile Internet marketplaces making it vastly easier to buy & sell things.

In 2022, the most "firmly-established" things we have in the blockchain landscape are the cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, whose sole purpose is to be a different kind of money and/or speculative vehicle. Effectively the only people pushing these things are the ones who stand to lose lots of money when they finish crashing.

[capableweb]

> You can keep telling yourself this to convince yourself that crypto will be as big as the Internet someday, but it is absolutely not the case.

I own zero cryptocurrencies and would rather see the entire ecosystem crash down just to bring the people behind it back to reality. I'm just writing about my experience from the perspective of someone who experienced the "beginning of the internet as mainstream media" for the ones who didn't.

[giaour]

I was young at the time, but this doesn't match my recollection. Everybody thought businesses whose value was measured in "eyeballs" were scams, but the internet was well established in industry, government, and academia.

Yahoo and Amazon didn't look fundamentally different from Pets.com to me at the time, but they managed to survive.

[SketchySeaBeast]

I think we're probably disagreeing on "immediate", I was thinking by the time of the late 90's. You're right, it would have been less obvious when it was a pile of universities communicating together. But regardless, by the time of the dotcom crash my family in rural Northern Alberta had the internet.

[splix]

The thing is that those are not crypto projects.

They are just traditional wall street finance pretending to be crypto, just by saying they make money in crypto space.

[typon]

I think its better to rip the bandaid off using this approach rather than suffer through another few years of these scams and trash. Just declare this whole crypto thing as a failed experiment and move on.

[bhaak]

Terra was no stable coin. It was pointed out constantly that it can't work as an algorithmic stable coin. But the shill army was strong.

There's an even easier metric for measuring crypto project. The bigger and dumber the shill army the more shady the project.

[icu]

Thanks for your comment. Any chance you could please point me to the sources that constantly pointed out it wouldn't work?

[bhaak]

Besides Reddit, Crypto Twitter was very vocal.

So vocal in fact that the man himself was quite annoyed to constantly being told that UST can't be stable: https://twitter.com/stablekwon/status/1462063962506338318

Do Kwon in general was a red flag. There are a lot of strong opinioned and self confident people in crypto. But when the representative of the crypto project is a toxic participant of the space, you should think really hard about putting your money into such a project.

For example: https://twitter.com/stablekwon/status/1396735774737928192 (note, this tweet was after the whole disaster, losing billions weren't a humbling experience for him).

If you decide to put money into crypto you need to do your own risk management. I especially look how dissenting voices are treated.

A good starting point is Eric Wall https://twitter.com/ercwl. He's not a maximalist of any coins and as such is often very critical of projects and gets a lot of flak for this even though he usually has a thorough explanation how he gets to his conclusions.

[zeven7]

If you're looking for a place with a community you can ask about those things I recommend, /r/ethfinance. I decided against using Celsius after asking around about it there. There's also been good discussion about what makes a good stablecoin over the years. Hint: Stables like DAI are a completely different thing from what Terra was.

[icu]

Thanks. I also evaluated Celsius (and others) but decided that I couldn't determine counterparty risk after reading their terms and conditions. In the end I stayed away because of that.

[tenpies]

Another fantastic metric: compare the returns for storing or staking your crypto with them to the current sovereign interest rates.

Is it offering Argentina/Turkey returns? Then they're probably the Argentina and Turkey of crypto.

[youessayyyaway]

Rate of return is a remarkably good metric for identifying scams.

If they offer more than ~12.5%, run away. Avast, ye salty dogs: a piece o' eight ain't worth losing yer shirt over.

[zeven7]

IMO your number is still too high

[youessayyyaway]

My actual red-flag point was closer to 8-9% pre-inflation. But that is less amenable to pirate jokes, and you can get I-bonds approaching 10% from the government now.

[rvz]

> Moving forward I'm staying away from projects with a "stable coin" component as I don't think the fundamentals work.

Not all stable-coins are the same. Out of all of them USDC seems to be the strongest out of the rest of them and is more likely to survive in the long term out of the others.

That does not mean you should put your whole savings into it. It is still very early for stable-coins. I would rather wait for regulatory clarity to define a set of rules that will wipe all the meme-coins, tokens, copy-paste projects and any crypto project that doesn't fit the incoming regulatory framework for crypto and only then will stable-coins like USDC will improve.

Regulations for crypto is inevitable and is only going to make some coins that are compliant stay for much longer and separate the non-compliant ones into obscurity or non-existence.

[icu]

I kind of agree, but at the risk of being completely wrong, I think in the future central banks, or global financial institutions backed by central banks, are probably going to be the issuers of stable coins.

[GTP]

...And then we're back to fiat currency again.

[rvz]

Yes. No single cryptocurrency replacing and taking over the entire financial system or a complete destruction of all cryptocurrencies.

Instead having both a co-existence of stablecoins like USDC on multiple blockchain technologies and CBDCs operating on the same form of blockchain and DLT.

Only the blockchains that fit those requirements of ISO 20020 will indeed continue to survive. A disappointing and upsetting result for both the absolutist crypto-maximalists and the absolutist anti-crypto crowd.