[AndrewStephens]

The difference is that house prices were for material objects that people actually need, and sales are supported by a huge industry of agents, lawyers, and governments to facilitate the safe transfer of houses.

None of that exists in the crypto space. The exchanges control the price and regularly trade against their own customers, and recent events have shown that they are all co-mingled and propping each other up.

Exchanges going down is bad news even if you keep your coins in your own wallets. With the exchanges gone, actually using your coins will become much harder. Worse, as power consolidates among fewer exchanges the price becomes even easier to manipulate.

[datadata]

An important reason that house prices went up in the years following 2008 is because the federal reserve printed over a trillion dollars to buy mortgage backed securities to add liquidity to the housing market [1]. Houses have a real value, yes, but that value was propped up well beyond the fundamentals (similar to crypto) and got a "bailout" (which crypto will hopefully not get).

[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WSHOMCB

[BoiledCabbage]

The Fed printed money to prop up the price of derivatives, not the price of house. Huge difference. Houses themselves fundamentally have intrinsic value as an asset.

A currency has no intrinsic financial investment value. Especially not an arbitrarily created crypto currency.

The only reason it's price would go up is people speculating that someone else will want to speculate on it in the future, and will pay a premium to do so.

We all know what it looks like when the future speculators dry up.

[datadata]

> The Fed printed money to prop up the price of derivatives, not the price of house.

I'm not sure your point here. Derivatives absolutely are a driver on the price of the underlying assets. Derivatives are what inflated the housing bubble prior to 2008.

I generally agree with you that homes have an intrinsic value, and that currencies do not necessarily have that. But that intrinsic value of homes was probably around the bottom of the 2008 housing market, not the top. On either side of that, home values exceeded the fundamental value due do manipulation or excessive leverage. In my mental model, fundamental value merely establishes a price "floor" of a market, but beyond this price floor every market is subject to mania and bubbles. For housing, the fundamental floor is non zero, for crypto, you could argue that it is zero.

> The only reason it's price would go up is people speculating that someone else will want to speculate on it in the future, and will pay a premium to do so.

This is true for housing also. Having a intrinsic value does not mean that housing prices should be expected to go up forever. As a clear counter example, deflationary goods like computers have a clear intrinsic value, but are not a good investment as they will almost certainly lose value.

[BoiledCabbage]

> Derivatives are what inflated the housing bubble prior to 2008.

Yes derivatives are a big part of what inflated the bubble prior to 2008, but the fed purchasing them didn't do anything to maintain home prices.

The combination of (ARMs + low interest rates) and lenders being able to immediately flip mortgages to other to be combined in CDOs and other MBS derivates inflated housing. Lenders could make loans that they knew borrowers could not repay, but because it would be off their books before that time hit they continued to make them. Derivatives inflated the bubble.

But as rates continued to rise, ARMs began to reset, and buyers at the new prices dried up, prices began to crash and people began to walk away from homes. This immediately dropped home values and caused MBSes to devalue quickly. Demand for MBSes dropped immediately. Lenders stopped making loans because they realized they could no longer flip to loans to others to securitize them. As nobody wanted to buy a MBS now. This dried up the demand side, plus foreclosures added to supply side.

The fed stepped in and began buying close to worthless MBS for way above value not because of any impact on the housing market (overall MBS demand was still enormously down), but because they were buying them above their value to prop up the market so financial companies could still price them to "market" on their books and (via façade) maintain their capital requirements. They also purchased them to help inject capital into the markets and take more MBS off their book. The fed purchased these to prop up the financial system - it had nothing to do with home prices and had little impact on home prices. Lenders stopped pushing unviable loans to borrowers because they now held the risk. And they would hold the risk regardless.

The fed didn't prop up the housing market in 2008, they propped up the financial markets because so many people tried to get rich quick off mortgage backed securities and the bubble burst.

The bubble is now bursting in crypto. As you said, the floor for crypto (with little to no intrinsic value) is zero. The only question is how close to it's intrinsic value will it fall.

Wall St. pushed hard to keep MBSes unregulated, they formed a bubble and then fell back to close to their intrinsic value. Their intrinsic value was maybe 30% off of their peak value. (Maybe a bit lower, but due to the illiquid nature of housing the market never fully fell to it). So now crypto also unregulated has pushed a bubble, how far does it have to fall to hit its intrinsic value?

[datadata]

You are making this too complicated. If the fed did not buy any MBS, what would have happened to home prices in the long run? Financial markets would have failed, and then home prices would have plummeted.

[BoiledCabbage]

That's not propping up the housing market.

That's like saying "Avoiding nuclear war is propping up the housing market. If we have nuclear war then society ends, the population collapses and the housing market with it. So avoiding nuclear war is propping up the housing market."

It's a terrible analogy to attempt to make. And it's wrong.

[rglullis]

> None of that exists in the crypto space.

Bullshit. It exists, it's just that the UI/UX is awful and most people in the developed world have no need for it. But they do exist. My work on hub20 [0] is exactly that, to have a system that would let people and communities create their actual self-custodial "crypto banks".

[0]: https://hub20.io

[AndrewStephens]

I should have made myself clearer - none of that (agents, lawyers, etc) exists in crypto _apart_ from the exchanges, which are meant to facilitate the transfer of crypto assets.

The two problems with this setup are:

* The exchanges are dishonest and unregulated.

* The exchanges are exploding like a chain of firecrackers.

So crypto is going from a state of having most transactions go through dishonest exchanges to being in a state where people own crypto but trading will become almost impossible.

Is the price going to go up? Will it go down? It doesn't matter, since without exchanges you can't actually use it for anything.

[datadata]

Exchanges don't need to act as long duration custodians for them to serve their purpose or be profitable. Exchanges will make a profit from trading fees. They can attract capital and liquidity via market maker fee rebates. You can trickle your capital through an exchange to make a large trade incrementally and only ever risk an arbitrarily small percentage of your total capital. There are ways to run exchanges in a much less sketchy way, that while not perfect, would make the kind of horrific abuse of customer funds that FTX did not possible. For example, merkle tree proof of reserves.

[rglullis]

> since without exchanges you can't actually use it for anything

Before repeating your baseless argument, please read about my project. Start with the about page. Understand that we can have global commerce with crypto without the big centralized exchanges. It's only an issue of scaling down and accepting that even though "trust" is needed for efficient transactions, this can happen at a much lower level.

[notch656a]

No one 'needs' more than like 1% of a house. I have lived for months out of a bivouac, about $100 worth of nylon.

A house is 99% crypto and 1% "need."

Crypto follows a similar trajectory. The vast majority is speculatory and un-"need"ed bullshit and a tiny slice is stuff where it has a comparative advantage to traditional finance/money.