Which is why I already just assume everyone who doesn't do this but makes claims about a certain coin is talking out of their ass.

HN was almost always negative about the crypto currency hype. Even when shitcoins were at ATH. So, no. The criticism is not after the fact.

> If these people really could foresee these events happening, then they could have made a lot of money by taking short positions.

Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent has been a cliche for almost a century. That is to say nothing of the absurd cost of taking a short position and the counterparty risk of dealing with unregulated exchanges.

> As far as I’m concerned, you don’t say anything unless you put your money where your mouth is.

The motivation for a lot of us was to prevent our less sophisticated friends and family from blowing up their savings. The idea that one shouldn't be critical of obvious scams unless one has a financial interest in them is not a particularly well thought out take.

I don't think anyone genuinely believes this. But as long as everyone knows the game, but the peg holds and their bags are pumped, then nobody cares.

I guess that at least 2 types of people. On one side you have the pump-and-dump experts, they buy early and then promote the new crypto-coin. The second type are the wannabe, people that see some new crypto-rich guy in the news and feel that they are losing an opportunity. People that have no knowledge about what a crypto-currency really is, that is not interested in long-term but need money now, people that listen to the pump-and-dump group to get their information. YouTube, Twitch, ... are bringing complex speculation devices to average citizens.

I would blame the lack of regulation and the lack of public education.

Perhaps you don't understand it either, if you think it has failed.

"Few understand" is a meme and said tongue in cheek, but there's truth to it. To actually understand Bitcoin and crypto, you have to spend 100+ hours on it. Of course few put that kind of time in. Most default to either a blind acolyte or naysayer, depending on whether they got in early or not, or depending on what position is popular with their political tribe.

That's definitely crypto, but you also just described half of HN.

I think you'll find many of the "crypto crowd" strongly disagree with your assessment.

In fact, reality on the ground highly suggests it is indeed at least partly up to them.

This is probably where the fundamental "talking past each other" happens on forums like HN.

Undoubtedly many are, probably even a majority. But what makes you say everyone is? To me the probability of that is close to zero.

I can't speak for HN, but any financial instrument that can't be easily differentiated from a ponzi scheme should be assumed as one unless proven differently. I think that's just investor due diligence frankly.

That's exactly how you know you've got it. The difference is that you didn't feel the heat of FOMO convincing you to dive in without an understanding.

Because the vast majority of people doesn't understand anything about it. And most don't want to because they've already made up their mind. You just have to look at any thread about crypto and it's full of misinformation and idiotic takes from people who obviously have no idea what they're talking about. E.g. threads on some kind of centralized exchange scam that has with comments like "I thought crypto was decentralized" or "I thought blockchain solved this" - Everyone likes to have an opinion on crypto even when they're completely uninformed. Of course it doesn't help that 99% of crypto projects are scams, but that doesn't make the underlying protocol a scam.

AI doesn't really have that problem. You don't need to understand anything about how models work to use an LLM. AI also doesn't have payments built-in at the protocol layer, so it's much harder to scam people with AI. But crypto is fundamentally different. It doesn't have easy-to-understand apps that make you more productive like an LLM does. It's highly political and ideological and operates on a layer (banking) that most people have never had exposure to and don't think about in their daily lives.

> burning a ton of power for dubious results

You realize that pretty much all crypto projects are built on top of Ethereum or Ethereum L2s which barely burn any electricity, right? There are (nearly) no projects built on Bitcoin because well, you can't really build anything on Bitcoin.

But only bitcoin bidders need to admit that they love lording their “smarts” over others? Seems like you are doing it yourself.

I haven't touched ETH or the DAO personally, but it is unfair to label every investment in them irrational. Over the past 5 years cryptocurrencies have provided multiple opportunities to convert, say, $10k into $100k or even $1M within a year or two; once your networth exceeds a certain amount, risking 1-2% of it on an opportunity like that is arguably wise - i.e. would be worth repeating - even if it does fail spectacularly.

It is certainly true that as long as that reasoning delivers 10-100x+ returns to some of the people some of the time, a giant fount of speculative money will continue to moisten a lot of scammers, con artists, and insufficiently-careful SW developers though.

The more I talk to crypto/NFT people, the more I’ve realized that they’re looking at the same historical events but walking away with completely different take-aways.

For example, they wouldn’t look at the Beanie Baby bubble and think of the people who invested a lot of money and had nothing to show for it after the crash. They’d look at the price charts of Beanie Babies and pattern-match that to NFTs with an assumption that they’re early in the game. Just sell before the line goes down and they’re going to be rich!

Maybe because people here are more likely to understand it?

Edit: added a missing quote

I agree with you on that. Never mind the money laundering, the criminal extortion, the unfettered grift, the ponzi schemes, the lack of regulation, smart contracts which aren't, securities sold in exchanges that aren't secure, the gross misappropriation of other's work making profit in NFT's as genius level crypto godhood, and the never ending supply of pretzel logic to convince others that while 90% of it is all shit, the 10% that isn't justifies crypto's entire existence.

Is that because they're blinded by their own technical abilities? Or do they realize its all a fraud as well and trying to make a quick buck before the regulator's swoop in?

I don't see you addressing this in your post, so I thought I'd ask.

Do I understand correctly that you (saying either/or) feel it's a binary choice?

Because I definitely disagree, there's a multitude of reasons why people buy crypto, and there's also a lot of variety in the measure in which they buy.

That follows from what you said before. I have yet to see anyone not a scammer who understands them but still thinks they are great.

And I say that as someone who’s vastly more into crypto than the extremely anti-crypto HN.

That old Upton Sinclair quote comes to mind: the finance guys are making a ton of money getting people to ante in and when you buy a cryptocurrency the only way you get your money back is by talking it up so anyone who's already in has a big incentive not to ask questions.