[simple-thoughts]

Prediction: El Salvador will look genius in the next Bitcoin cycle. Other emerging market central banks will proceed to copy their model creating the next cycle’s peak. Once they stop buying, the market will crash again creating either a global depression or a bailout of the btc economy by USG, causing a repeat of the bank bailout that spawned btc in the first place.

[smcl]

I admire your optimism, but I can't get on board. It would be naive to deny the growth of cryptocurrencies over the last few years, but it seems like the people who were meant to make money have since cashed out, that everything's peaked and turned a corner and the general public have turned against it (due in no small part to a few many shitcoins, rugpulls, scams, BAYC, and a couple of defunct exchanges). I'm sure crypto will live on in some form, but it won't explode again like it did before. I don't know who is left to fuel the next bubble.

[mattmanser]

Unfortunately I don't think the public will stay turned against it.

Pyramid and MLM schemes exist and thrive today despite widespread knowledge of them and how they work.

So I think shitcoins will have their day again, they'll just have new branding.

[drekipus]

Finally, my time to jump on the bandwagon of wealth distribution

[jimcsharp]

People talk about crypto cycles like they talk about metal cycles and I'm not sure how to distinguish the two (and that's why I'm not invested in either).

[strangescript]

It's almost as if all publicly traded markets are ponzi-schemes on some level, but with better regulation.

[benj111]

On some level yes. If you're day trading.

But you are actually buying a slice of a company and its future earnings. With bitcoin what are you actually buying?

[WHATDOESIT]

What are you actually buying while Forex trading?

(I'd really like to know. To me, BTC trading and Forex trading sound exactly the same.)

[smcl]

I mean on some level if you're doing this kind of trading then yeah BTC/ETH/etc trading is similar to trading real currencies. I think the difference is that the real currencies have a well-known utility at the moment - they're a means of exchange for goods and services. If you're selling EUR to someone, the chances are they're using that EUR to pay for these in the eurozone. If you're buying USD, you're also likely to need that to buy USD-denominated things.

If you're a forex trader, you're trying to make money from people's need to use these currencies.

If you're doing that for crypto, you're doing that but for people who are just also buying and selling crypto - not actual goods or services.

[benj111]

Well I don't do Forex trading but you are buying a currency backed by a government. My understanding is it's closely linked to interest rates.

[scotty79]

> it seems like the people who were meant to make money have since cashed out, that everything's peaked and turned a corner and the general public have turned against it

Every 4 years it looks like that. And yet the next greed fueled ascension comes around like a clock. Each next one smaller than the last one.

Next one will come around 2025 but this time it's going to be just few hundred percent.

[smcl]

Eh there might be another bump. But as long as it's a space for scammers, pump-and-dump schemes, shitcoins and bullshitters it's just not for me. A pretty ridiculous amount of money has been sunk into making cryptocurrencies look like a big thing, instead of actually solving the problems that prevented people from actually using them. That makes me think that deep down the cryptocurrency people aren't that serious about their projects becoming actual currencies, and that they simply see them as a way to get rich quick by selling something they know to be ultimately worthless. Quite a few people have gotten rich (hello, Do Kwon!) so there's a chance it could work for those founders. But as a potential end-user, nahh no thanks I've seen enough

[anonymouswacker]

The "space" for a cryptocurrency is a Venn Diagram solely occupied by one circle: Bitcoin. We're seeing a culling of these shitcoin also-rans, which took the money from the late-coming naive while enriching the early wave of speculators, like any other common pyramid scheme.

[smcl]

Amazing. When the crypto world get bored of minting apes and such maybe they'll try to actually bother to try making bitcoin into something that can be used day-by-day. I don't think they will though. I think it'll remain only a speculative asset whose price jumps erratically to-and-fro until people get bored and move on to the next shiny thing.

[scotty79]

So you are opting out of Bitcoin because other cryptocurrencies exist?

[ericmcer]

My Coworker said this exact thing to me in 2019, that now was the time to buy because not many were talking about crypto and many had written it off, but that it worked in 4 year spikes. Wish I had listened to him then haha.

[scotty79]

Best times to buy bitcoin was in 2011, 2015, 2019, 2022 ... roughly every 4 years. Exactly at the time HN thinks bitcoin is dead and burried.

And best times to sell (if you needed to sell) was in 2013, 2017, 2021 ... so I think the next time will be around 2025.

Every cycle swings less (in term of percentage change) so the next one will be just few hundred percent (troth to peak) and following ones even smaller till bitcoin will become yet another random walk asset like stocks.

[px43]

Recognize that every two years for the past 10 years someone has posted basically the exact same thing as what you just posted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbZ8zDpX2Mg

[smcl]

If a snarky YouTuber doing the “this one time at bandcamp” voice is the best argument, I dunno what to tell you. To borrow his condescending tone, he is making the argument “you think line go down, but line go up!” the latter half of which is the title of Dan Olsen’s high-profile video of the cryptocurrency boom.

Unless it becomes practical to pay for something with cryptocurrencies (which for me should be the primary use case of any currency) they basically seem used by people who want to time buys and sells according to the current boom/bust or pump/dump cycle.

[px43]

For millions of people, crypto-currencies are the most convenient way to buy lots of things. I've been buying things regularly with cryptocurrencies since 2011. Domain names, video games, hosting, consumer electronics, clothing, airfare, etc.

2017 marked a pivotal point where Bitcoin specifically abandoned catering to the brick and mortar and e-commerce use cases, and started focusing on large scale financial services. It was a frustrating development for sure, but people all over the world are using various smaller cryptocurrencies to buy groceries every day.

Cryptocurrencies might not be useful for you specifically, and that's fine. Maybe you're not one of the various under-served target demographics. Complaining about that though is a bit like complaining that Yen is useless because you live in the US and none of the businesses you frequent accept Japanese currency. It's undeniably a trillion dollar global economy that provides a massive amount of value to millions.

[smcl]

Well that's kind of a bad comparison, since Yen isn't my local currency and yet it has been useful to me when I was visiting Japan. I could buy it for a reasonable price in my current country, in basically any airport or bureau de change around the world. I could easily withdraw Yen from an ATM when in Japan, could buy things anywhere in the country with Yen and then switch back the couple-thousand I couldn't spend at Duty Free when I returned home.

Hearing that crypto may not be for me is quite surprising. It is advertised to me all over the place and the various stereotypical "cryptobros" seem curiously keen on people like me buying into the ecosystem, and appear to be very generously interested in helping me go "to the moon" etc. I've no idea how you're doing those things with crypto. I guess you have to go pretty far out of your way to buy, for example, airfare with a cryptocurrency or make otherwise really inconvenient trade-offs. I guess you might be semi-forced to use it due to, for example, living in a country with a currency which is more unpredictable than BTC then I think that's more of an black mark against the local currency than it is a feather in BTC's cap...

[px43]

> I guess you have to go pretty far out of your way to buy, for example, airfare with a cryptocurrency or make otherwise really inconvenient trade-offs.

Eh, not that hard really. Expedia started accepting Bitcoin in 2014.

https://www.expedia.com/Checkout/BitcoinTermsAndConditions

> "cryptobros" seem curiously keen on people like me buying into the ecosystem, and appear to be very generously interested in helping me go "to the moon" etc

Yeah fuck those people. I've been in the space since 2009 and I've never once recommended to any friends or family to invest in cryptocurrencies, and in my experience, the vast majority of people in the space are the same way. The "get rich quick" types who treat all of life like one big MLM have always been reviled, but none of that is unique to cryptocurrencies. Shady hucksters and con men have always existed, and always will.

[jinzo]

They invested US$100 million (and currently that's around US$50 million). The next bond payment (2023 note that they are trying to buy back now) is due in January and that alone is US$800 million. So, their investment should yield really high returns for it to even make a decent dent into the first bond.

From all the fanfare around them, I was sure they had to invest more. But after looking up the numbers, this looks like a publicity stunt more than any serious investment. Also 20% adoption when it's mandatory to support it, is quite interesting too.

[el-salvador]

> They invested US$100 million (and currently that's around US$50 million). We are a small country, for comparison the largest public hospital budget is about US$60 million per year.

> The next bond payment (2023 note that they are trying to buy back now) There are two bonds which they are buying. The 2023 one at 91 cents per dollar, and the 2025 one at 51 cents per dollar.

> this looks like a publicity stunt more than any serious investment.

El Salvador has a very good PR team. So many announcements have their own publicitiy students. Teven produce different material targeting different foreign countries. It's always interesting to see what each to see what PR message each country gets.

For example: Targeting those who didn't agree on vaccine mandates in English Speaking Countries (Australia/Canada/UK):

https://twitter.com/CanAlbertaHuman/status/14784727600660725...

https://twitter.com/LowCard_Hunger/status/148358166523034010...

Targeting those who wanted vaccines in neighboring countries (Honduras):

https://twitter.com/radioamericahn/status/140378336359768474...

https://twitter.com/gotvhonduras/status/1402268608068268041

[bastawhiz]

If El Salvador looks like a genius and their poorest citizens come around and get on board, the next crash will cause a humanitarian crisis: the poorest of the world will literally have given money to the rich who were able to get out of the market fast enough.

[SilverBirch]

Let's be clear about this, unless El Salvador is in a debt crisis. They won't own any crypto by the next BTC cycle because they'll have gone bankrupt, sold off any crypto assets they've got, taken significant bailout money from places like the IMF. They don't have the luxury of sitting on BTC and riding the wave, they are bankrupt. They have $100m of BTC and they need to pay $800m by Jan 2023. And their debt is trading at something like 30 cents on the dollar because no one believes they can pay.