It's not that many of us long-time crypto users want people to suffer, it's the jaded "I told you so" moment.
Many of us have seen many "too big to fail" exchanges fall, have seen 2+ other "crypto bubbles" drop the price by 80%+.
When we told everyone "don't keep your money on an exchange" and "we've seen seen these 'too the moon' skyrocketing prices before - be prepared for the eventual crash" - they laughed and confidently said it was different this time, that we were just jealous, didn't understand defi/web3 etc.
I seriously do not enjoy seeing people suffer, I tried to warn people to prevent them from losing huge amounts of money. But when your warnings were laughed off - it's hard and there's some mixed emotions, and many of us are a bit jaded.
I do think crypto has a legitimate use, but this "buy crypto because you'll get rich" mentality just creates these detrimental hype cycles.
To be fair, ftx as an exchange had none of that Degen culture. They didn’t even have an Earn product with high yield. You could loan out your crypto, but the rate fully depends on how many people want to actually borrow it.
The FTT token itself was only used on the exchange to get some benefits like lower fees or free withdrawals and didn’t give any yield at all when staked.
From a risk averse user perspective and someone working in tech, there really wasn’t anything shady going on to suck people in. So them collapsing hurts and is very sad news for the entire ecosystem
The shady thing in the whole cryptocurrency scheme is the lack of total transparency, aka: lack of regulations.
Without regulations there's absolutely no incentive for them to be transparent, there are tons of perverse incentives to hide and cook the books though.
DeFi products like Uniswap, Balancer, GMX are all 100% open source and transparent. They can't lock customer funds or collapse because the funds are held by code, not humans who can secretly gamble it away.
It's frustrating that centralized opaque companies keep failing and yet people keep trusting them or lumping DeFi into the same bucket when they are night and day different. Decentralized Finance is the point of Crypto.
Nobody was ridiculed for advising people to keep their coins in their own wallet. You were probably ridiculed for saying crypto is a ponzi. But Bitcoin's and Ethereum's prices are consistently higher now than they were 2 years ago. What's the bad outcome you've been warning about that actually happens?
> Bitcoin's and Ethereum's prices are consistently higher now than they were 2 years ago
Which is something that will be true until it's not. Bitcoin dropped around 25% in the last week (though is rebounding a bit this morning). It only needs to drop around 33% from the current price to break your 2 year thing. Anything is possible here (in any direction), because it's an insane market propped up by all sorts of shady bull****
I do not think crypto itself is a ponzi - I think long term it has uses, but not this stupid "get rich quick" bs.
But I was laughed at for saying "don't buy crypto to make money". NFTs can genuinely be useful - but if you're using them with the goal of making money then you're using them wrong. This stupid art stuff and other general stupid "get rich schemes" have obfuscated it's actual usefulness, leaving it overvalued as all heck, and everyone scammed.
The very volatile price caused by this stupid "get rich quick" hype makes it even more difficult to actually use it.
The bad outcome I was warning about was the 80%+ drop. Even advising people to keep coins in their own wallet is commonly dismissed with "yeah but [exchange] does x differently and is too big to fail".
There are lots of dumb HN comments on any cryptocurrency related topic. Most of them don't know what they're talking about. It's one of the topics where engagement here isn't worthwhile imo.
The main technical innovation of cryptocurrency is the capability to self-custody funds. People ignore this at their own peril. That said, bad UX will lead people to do the wrong thing even when their life depends on it, so it’s not a surprise it continues to be a problem.
Though I suppose Jane Street does select for people willing to take massive risk on bets they think they can control. It might have continued to work out too, but CZ saw an opportunity to destroy a competitor and had the capital to carry it out.
Been waiting for years for the obvious ecosystem of fraud and hot air to implode and take with it the unbearable hype that has infected the tech space.
And yes, I believe a little schadenfreude is appropriate, given the circumstances and all the "Have fun staying poor" crap.
Many of us have seen many "too big to fail" exchanges fall, have seen 2+ other "crypto bubbles" drop the price by 80%+.
When we told everyone "don't keep your money on an exchange" and "we've seen seen these 'too the moon' skyrocketing prices before - be prepared for the eventual crash" - they laughed and confidently said it was different this time, that we were just jealous, didn't understand defi/web3 etc.
I seriously do not enjoy seeing people suffer, I tried to warn people to prevent them from losing huge amounts of money. But when your warnings were laughed off - it's hard and there's some mixed emotions, and many of us are a bit jaded.
I do think crypto has a legitimate use, but this "buy crypto because you'll get rich" mentality just creates these detrimental hype cycles.