[lifty]

Question for the crypto skeptics of HN. Do you think this cycle the whole crypto space goes down the drain never to be heard of again? Do you think the whole space is a fad or do you think there are patches of values underneath the froth? How do you see the space evolving? Thanks!

[ceejayoz]

There will always be new victims ready to hear "this time is different".

[blitzar]

Let me just see if we can validate this comment ...

People bought luna 2.0 within days of the collapse of luna 1.0 - check

[xtracto]

Its wa quite sad actually. I like the blockchain technology and its properties. I like things like hyperledgrler and the like.

But at the same time it's disgusting the current state of the crypto wars. All that is happening is due to greed. People are greedy, crypto "companies " are greedy and everyone wants to become rich without effort. There are VERY few projects that really want to develop technology. And those are also hijacked by greedy people to play as casinos.

I really wish the crypto space would crash and burn, BTC to hobdown to $100 and similar, so that all that noise goes out, and people go back to scam penny stocks or Amway, and leave the development of blockchain technology alone.

I remember when Wikileaks started accepting bitcoin. Satoshi very well mentioned that it was not ready. I am sure he was surprised by the craziness that came of it. Becoming exactly the thing that it was supposed to fight against.

[ATsch]

I think a similar thing as with the ICO boom will happen: The current mechanisms of fraud (ICOs) will become regulated, so the industry will move on and create new ones (NFTs, DeFi/"yield"). This cycle will continue until the SEC stops listening to smoothtalking lobbyists fearmongering about the SEC blocking "important innovation" and decides to fully pull cryptocurrency into the banking regulatory framework. At that point, lacking the ability to do things that are illegal to do for good reasons, cryptocurrency becomes pretty irrelevant.

[giaour]

I believe we're seeing the end of "retail crypto." Just like agricultural futures, crypto will continue to exist but will mostly be known outside of institutional trading as a good way to lose your shirt.

As far as underlying value goes: one thing we've learned from the constant scamming is that a protocol designed for trustless interactions will inevitably devolve into purely adversial interactions. Consider it a social application of Gresham's law. Central banks, multinational corporations, and others who can marshal the resources to perform extensive audits will probably use smart contracts on a proof-of-stake chain for large, adversarial transactions that occur outside of any one nation's jurisdiction. Everything else will continue to be based on trust, just like it always has been.

[aaaaaaaaaaab]

>Central banks, multinational corporations, and others who can afford to marshal the resources to perform extensive audits will probably use smart contracts on a proof-of-stake chain for large, adversarial transactions

Arbitration at the highest echelons of power is done with weapons. I don’t give a shit about what your blockchain says when I can force you to the negotiating table Commodore Perry style.

[giaour]

> Arbitration at the highest echelons of power is done with weapons

True, there is an implicit threat of violence when parties interact at that level. But there is also a hope on both sides that if all the rules are followed, violence will not be necessary even if one party gets the better of the other. E.g., the central banks of unfriendly nations transact with one another according to international norms and rules, even though either side could escalate to "kinetic" reprisals. The force of norms and rules is strongest between parties with balanced power (otherwise the stronger side can just pull a Commodore Perry like you say).

[New_California]

> Do you think this cycle the whole crypto space goes down the drain never to be heard of again?

No. The crypto/scam space will be back because people love to gamble and love the concept of easy money.

> Do you think the whole space is a fad or do you think there are patches of values underneath the froth?

There is crypto/scam space and there is Bitcoin/Monero space. The actual decentralized cryptocurrencies are widely used where fiat system fails, like on DNMs.

[amalcon]

I think basically the whole space is a fad, but fads don't usually disappear entirely. Beanie babies were a fad; they are no longer a fad; this doesn't seem to affect my niece's enjoyment of the beanie baby we bought for her last year.

My approach is to stay away until the fad dies, and then look to see if any part of it is useful to me. The last time I made a serious evaluation of something in that space was Bitcoin; it didn't serve any use case I had; but maybe there's been some innovation in the space that is hard to find behind the fad hype.

[bena]

Regardless, I think bitcoin survives. I don't think it has patches of value, but I do think others think that it does.

I think eventually bitcoin fills the same space as "no programming knowledge required coding tools". Every few years it'll spike as this time they know went wrong the last time. And then the inevitable happens.

[aaaaaaaaaaab]

Unfortunately scammers will always find new suckers for their ventures. People lose money to pyramid selling/MLM scams in real life all the time. Cryptocurrencies just made it possible to recruit suckers on a global scale.

Unless governments step in and ban them, there will always be new crypto scams.

[timkam]

I think it is way too early to discard the underlying technology and I think/hope that parts of the open source ecosystem will survive. Reckless speculation being the current primary use case does not mean there won't be any societally more beneficial use case in the future.

[rsynnott]

This feels a bit more likely to be the end than previous collapses (last time round, the ecosystem wasn't advanced/broken enough to show the sort of contagion hitting it now). On the other hand, never underestimate the ability of fools to be parted from their money; see NFTs, for instance. It's quite likely that there'll be another crypto-y... thing along sooner or later.

It's notable that classical Ponzi schemes come back in the real world from time to time; they just need a very light reskin, and people buy in again. Plausible that the same happens with crypto to some extent.

[airza]

I think the killer app for crypto (money laundering/buying drugs online) will provide some kind of cushion against going straight to zero. But that is a much smaller cap.

[dig1]

I'm not a crypto/finance expert, but the current crypto space reminds me of the early US "Free Banking" era. Too many players, wild west, many earners, and many losers. There is a tech & concept value in crypto space, so I don't think it will go down the drain. It will take time to stabilize, just like US banking sector.

[mjthrowaway1]

Depends entirely on the regulatory framework. Up until now crypto has been largely unregulated. With regulatory I don’t think it will be as volatile/attractive.

[hotpotamus]

I'm as skeptical of crypto as anyone, but I do think of it as an actual innovation of an asset class, and so I have to imagine that it will remain in some form.

[orwin]

Until 99% of people understand that money is a mean of redistributing the production, it will come back. Id give cryptocurrencies 4 years after peak oil

[harambae]

Peak oil is projected to be around 2040 by most predictions, so it'll be a while if so.

[romanovcode]

> How do you see the space evolving?

Same as MLM/Hype evolved to Crypto/NFT. Some new pyramid will come in place for the next generation.

[bikeshed]

Do I think it will? No; there's always another sucker ready to lose their life savings.

Do I hope this will be the cycle though? Oh absolutely.

[O__________O]

Blockchain, cryptocurrencies, DAO, etc — are here to stay.

Even with the market as is, today it’s still a trillion dollar industry.

[DannyBee]

This argument is always very funny to me.

History is rife with hundred-billion dollar industries destroyed in very short periods of time, across multitudes of field types.

For example, i've watched fields created by single legal opinions, grow to many billions, and then get destroyed overnight by a different legal opinion. All in the course of 10-15 years.

The amount of money in it is just not a sufficient condition for it to stick around. It certainly helps, mind you, but there will always be somewhere else to put the trillion dollars.

[O__________O]

Do you actually have specific notable (and comparable) examples of technology based industries that reached relatively the order of magnitude crypto has that were rapidly killed off?

Otherwise, as is, your response to me is without merit.

[DannyBee]

Someone gave you one. Here's another: Software patents were judicially created in the US by a single fed circuit opinion. The field wildly expanded to many many many billions of dollars until a single supreme court opinion.

While still kind of alive (mostly legacy lawsuits), the vast majority of the value was rapidly killed off post supreme court decisions (and AIA)

This kind of thing happens all the time - in software, in pharma, in ...

As I said, value helps in some sense, but just because there is a lot of money in a thing simply does not mean it will remain.

FWIW - your comment very much comes off as the typical "crypto folks ignore roughly all history" stereotype that it gets painted with -

[O__________O]

Billions, even 10s of billions, is not comparable to trillions.

None examples so far have provided independently source of valuing industries claimed, nor to my knowledge have any of the industries cited have as many direct customers.

Feel free to provide specific (and comparable) examples.

To be clear, just trying to be objective. For example, NFTs alone for living artist easily surpassed the billion made in non-NFT sales for living artist; sure NFTs were 30-40% behind in total volume, but that’s largely for dead artists.

Further, you keep bring up legal changes, but I am not aware of any pending legal matters that might have a substantial impact on the use of the technology itself; further, crypto is global and clearly adapted to legal changes including all out bans in China.

[DannyBee]

Hahaha. So you are combining all of the different types of markets/etc in your case, but not in the case of comparison? And then just discounting them anyway with no reason why. Saying "it's not comparable to trillions" is both wrong and useless - it is not a reason, it's an assertion, and one not backed up.

I'm not going to continue this, because you are definitely one of these folks who seem to believe crypto is unique in value and capability, that somehow make it not capable of failing (but can't explain why other than "when you add up all the theoretical money involved in tons of distinct markets and uses that somehow relate to crypto it's a lot"). This is IMHO distinct failure of objectivity and imagination.

The entire stock market failed enough in a single day to wipe entire economic segments out and then continued to die - 2 day loss = 25%, 3 year loss = 89%. Eighty nine percent.

It's so amazingly naive to believe that in the thousands of years of human history that nothing like crypto has happened, that large scale markets on the same order of magnitude of crypto markets have not failed, etc, that i don't even know where to begin. Then going further and just asserting anyone who starts to provide you examples is wrong/incomparable without even a single sentence that backs up why, makes this a pointless conversation.

You don't want to understand, you want to win.

Have a good one.

[giaour]

There were billions of dollars funding work on paid network traffic prioritization in the 90s and early 2000s. Then the whole field was banned in 2005, and it evaporated. The ban was lifted in 2008, then reapplied, then lifted again in 2014, then reapplied in 2015, then lifted again. Vast amounts of money flowed into and out of the sector at each reversal.

[rsynnott]

Don't see what technology has to do with it. All sorts of weird financial instruments are created, grow enormous, and then either are banned, or scare people enough that everyone stops using them.

[O__________O]

From OP comment, “ Do you think this cycle the whole crypto space goes down the drain never to be heard of again?”

Obviously the tech is part of the “whole space” and not a fade; didn’t even bring up encryption, which is the fundamental core of crypto. Sure encryption might be ban, but if you think governments will apply that to themselves, that’s obviously not a common or reasonable position.