It might be odd but I find Python so disrespectful to embedded devices. It pains me to think of all of the excess work those tiny things will do forever because of a very poor language choice.
More seriously, I think the long term effect of this will be truly catastrophic. There is an unfortunate effect whereby a tool's simplicity is able to attract newcomers to the space - which is great - but then severely limits progress by boxing them into this very small, simple, framework. It's very awkward when smart people and even professionals spend a lot of time fighting against the simplicity of Arduino or using weird, esoteric hacks as if it makes them a guru, just because it's all they know.
There needs to be an offramp. Micropython is the opposite - it's a one-way freeway to the middle of nowhere. It should be banished. So much human potential will be capped and wasted by this move.
I respect your opinion but I disagree wholeheartedly, and here’s why.
The introduction and support of MicroPython doesn’t mean the original “lower level” languages are unsupported. Code that “smart people and professionals” have built will continue to run.
Instead, you’ve opened the ecosystem up to new and creative ways to use the platform.
Raspberry Pis were created in part to help kids learn to program. That low barrier to entry didn’t stop “smart people and professionals” from being able to take that platform to build incredibly cool things.
If someone offered you 1BTC for $10k right now you would bite their hand off. At $14k it would be still some of the easiest money you've made in your life.
Even if you have the most cynical opinion of cryptocurrency, you must admit it's alive and well. It is as long as there are enough people who believe that it is - and your honest answer to the above would reveal that you know that to still be very true.
Sure, I’m not stupid. I would turn around and sell it to some other fool. And thats the problem. There is honestly no price I could buy it at where I would be willing to hold.
You say you can't understand, but the chart you yourself posted (to illustrate price volatilility) also shows a 12,000% increase in price in less than 8 years, up to today.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results, but maybe that, the improbable 12000%, is the thinking that you're trying to understand?
That's my point - given the extreme volatility (and the fact that it was trading below $1K less than 6 years ago) why would anyone think there's some floor below which the price of BTC will never fall? Please don't bring up mining costs, which are completely irrelevant here.
You're making a stronger counter argument than you think. BTC only gets a 12,000% increase because you recruit a bigger fool to pay $16,059 than the fool who paid $16,058. The only value that you've offered here is that you can eventually find a fool big enough to pay $1,925,760.
If it hits x sell. So if I was given a coin currently "worth" $15,000 for $5. I could set a stop loss of $6 and always make a profit since my initial investment was $5. Asleep, awake, doesn't matter.
Set multiple stop losses? $6, $5.99, $5.75, etc, etc. if one fails one of the others will catch it. Hell as long as it sells before $5.01 I'm profitable. Simple as.
That’s not how stop losses work. If things are falling fast enough, You could have one trade at $7, and the next trade at $4. Sorry, you still lost money.
And it's the same argument as Santa Claus in the movie The Elf. So long as enough people stand in Central Park singing the same song, all is well, just be sure to leave before the party is over, the Clausometer goes to 0, and the police horses trample you.
Oh absolutely. Had I known the absurdity of crypto would still have been going on this long, I would have set up a bunch of rug pulls and run away with the money.
Interrst rate hikes kill zombie companies. Scams put dumb people under the lash of their betters.
> Scams put dumb people under the lash of their betters
Continuing this line of thought, isn't the next level of "betters" the people who would readily employ violence to get retribution on those who scammed them? Or even those who would just employ violence to take what they want in general?
I can understand the law of the jungle as-it-currently-is point that boils down to "lol normie rubes fell for advertising", but extrapolating that out into an overarching moral judgement makes no sense unless you're also repudiating the specialization of labor that has led to most of our current prosperity.
Right. When we talk about laws not getting enforced leading to people doing bad things, we're talking about you. You seem alright with that, which I've already noted.
It doesn't feel different. The evangelists will hurt and the whole crypto industry is set back, the cynics gloat and revel in the schadenfreude and claim for the 748th time that crypto is dead... Until 12 months later when we do it all over again.
It's not the biggest, it's not the first, it won't be the last, it's nowhere near the most catastrophic. At least let the dust settle before making such bold declarations. Any such declaration at this point is more hope than expectation.
> The fall of Sam Bankman-Fried, and the more-than-likely fall of many more firms in the immediate future, has sapped much of that hope.
> Now it’s hard to imagine a near- or even a medium-term future where crypto has a fraction of the influence it did six months ago.
Is he really that wrong?
The short term future for crypto looks pretty bad, there's no denying it.
I'd say the medium term isn't looking that great either.
...because of FTX? No, because the medium term outlook for the whole economy is pretty bleak, and no amount of rubbing your fingers together and finding some more magical tokens is going to fix that.
I think this article won't age particularly badly. It's basically saying someone screwed up, and they did.
The title itself suggests what reads like "the end of crypto". Investors tend to buy dips and, compared to stocks, it's harder to predict where's the bottom. People are buying BTC's "dip" every second.
And that's the political problem that crypto doesn't solve. In fact it doesn't even address it.
It's an everyone-for-themselves kind of project, in a massively connected and somewhat fragile physical and political ecosystem.
If you're one of the many with narcissistic tendencies who think more imaginary tokens make you a better person, and who resent the very idea of being massively connected - as opposed to a glorious sovereign individual of unlimited power and potential - it's definitely for you.
Which - coincidentally - is why it's surrounded by unsolved trust issues and scams.
But it's a terminal stage of capitalism world view, and on the way out. Not just because it's politically naive, unrealistic, and inherently unstable and untrustworthy, but also because ultimately it's physically unsustainable.
And that ultimately is going to become more and more obvious over the next couple of decades.
If Mt.Gox didn't kill crypto & BTC back in the early days, it's super unlikely FTX is going to kill crypto.
What is also unlikely to change is HN general opinion on crypto :)
There were far fewer everyday people around the ecosystem when Mt. Gox imploded. The number of ‘normies’ that have told me stories of themselves or people they know losing money in crypto has spiked this year, and each big crash there is, the more people who will be burned. So I think it’s certainly possible that the booms will get much smaller as more people check out each bust and as the next big crypto scams blow up.
Wow this is amazing, really goes to show how comical it all is.
I could PROBABLY tolerate all these, if the headlines were something like "Bitcoin reaches all time low and new level of people are discouraged. Retail investors should be extra diligent." but...
"You can <do some fucking stupid thing that I'm not going to do> now"
Feels like its written for someone with the intelligence of a child who doesn't think on their own and needs to be spoon fed what to do. I have no idea how people can stand journalism like this.
This goes along with "Why <really bad thing> is actually good." Makes me cringe to the depths of my soul that even a single solitary person would click something like that.
Isn't this what journalism should be about, though, to journal the news neutrally? I'd be more worried about a bias if someone only writes for one side of an issue, but now it's also bad if both sides can be happy with an author's work?
The big question now is whether VCs will pour billions of USD into pump things back up. The real economy isn’t awash with money seeking higher interest rates the way it was a year ago.
There are so many VCs that invested in blockchain startups. Now their source of money is dried up, I can't imagine they will be able to pump these startup valuations for long. At some point, they have to write it down. It will be the dot com crash for blockchain startups.
I think in terms of potential real-world contagion, FTX might indeed be in a league of its own among the crypto entities that have imploded so far. Add to that the fact that the crypto ecosystem was _already_ under a lot of stress from recent implosions and the generally bad economic mood, and I think we're gonna see some interesting fallout from this.
I think that by itself undermines you all on its own. There are some unique aspects here— crypto had been getting a bit more mainstream credibility and it will take long to rebuild than it did to build, but, as you said, the cycle will only repeat, and every time the collapses get bigger. Totalling up the last few months is topping $2Trillion.
If something is going to change there needs to be a fundamental reassessment of both the tech and the philosophy driving things.
More seriously, I think the long term effect of this will be truly catastrophic. There is an unfortunate effect whereby a tool's simplicity is able to attract newcomers to the space - which is great - but then severely limits progress by boxing them into this very small, simple, framework. It's very awkward when smart people and even professionals spend a lot of time fighting against the simplicity of Arduino or using weird, esoteric hacks as if it makes them a guru, just because it's all they know.
There needs to be an offramp. Micropython is the opposite - it's a one-way freeway to the middle of nowhere. It should be banished. So much human potential will be capped and wasted by this move.