It is another level. So many people missed the bus and are just salty or frustrated. I am so surprised that this happened given all of us are in tech (and have good income and awareness of blockchain) and it would have made sense to invest just a bit in all these years to see where that takes us.
Now it is all about how Bitcoin is a ponzi, key reason for climate change and solves no issues whatsoever. Maybe all those things are correct (I don't know) but it sure was a good way to make a lot of money -- and most of the people here just missed it.
And this hate is not new. Look at this well commented thread from 2015 when Bitcoin went down to $180 and HN is still filled with comments like that this is not surprising and they don't see it coming back from hereon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8884838
> But because we engineered a way to magnify the wealth of the people who need it least
I feel like this is an argument against money, not necessarily cryptocurrencies in general and even less against Bitcoin specifically.
Yes, creating opportunities will lead to people who don't really need it taking advantage of those opportunities. But, it also means that people who really need opportunities can take those too, as it's a open network.
So yes, richer gets richer while the poorer is getting poorer. At least cryptocurrencies are leveling the field a bit, so the the poor has a bigger chance out of poverty. As someone who used to be poor, I welcome the new War In the Status Quo.
So what, you made money off of trading it like a commodity and that makes you correct how exactly?
You just brush aside the opposing viewpoints without speaking to them or acknowledging that they have merit. You also don't think it's possible that you don't actually understand what is happening with bitcoin and you got lucky? You don't know what the end state is, no one does. Winning money at roulette doesn't make you a profit that saw into the future.
This is a strangely offensive comment. You stated that all negative commenters are just bitter for having missed out. The other comment said "No, here are my legitimate reasons for not liking bitcoin". You respond claiming that that's just proof s/he is a h8t3r, see 2018 where similar arguments were already made.
Have you considered that there are indeed legitimate reasons not to like bitcoin, like those outlined by the previous commenter?
Or e.g. I think the detachment from the nation state is a dangerous element that will foster a race to the bottom on taxes, environmental standards, etc as capital gets even more mobile and untraceable than before. A small crowd gets the benefits and many many miss out with underfunded schools and healthcare...
The fact that everyone is still talking about Bitcoin as a commodity that others have "missed out on" shows there's still something huge missing. Nobody is talking about using Bitcoin to pay for goods, it's all about price movements and making profits. It's the ultimate meme stock. But that's not what the dream of Bitcoin is, and as far as I can tell it's failing at what it was meant for.
Just so sad when I read takes like this from uninformed people.
Bitcoin is NOT about payments. Just stop saying that. Bitcoin is store of value. When you think about Bitcoin the closest analogy is gold. Sure it is more volatile but it is a 10yr old asset. If you look at the long term trend (past 10 yrs), your value only increased.
Edit: actually you've been breaking the site guidelines so shockingly and so frequently that I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I don't understand - is your logic that frustration means you didn't make money? If you made money off bitcoin would the hate be more or less warranted? I'm confused.
Logic being if you held bitcoin you would be incentivized to read more about it and learn vs. being ideologically opposed and dismissing it like what no-coinists here do.
I don't understand - the two things you are saying are not mutually exclusive. You could hold bitcoin, make money off bitcoin, understand bitcoin and still be ideologically opposed.
Yes you can. But those are the minority. People who are ideologically opposed typically don't invest in bitcoin - and over time become salty as they realize what they missed out on.
I agree that there's quite a bit of hate, but as an early cryptocurrency enthusiast, I've been turned around. I really hate how it's become a useless space full of speculation, all everyone seems to talk about is how to pump prices.
I can't remember the last time I saw a story about a new payments processor, or an actually useful thing. It's all "price price price" these days.
> all everyone seems to talk about is how to pump prices.
To me the shark jumping moment was when Coinbase and many other "crypto banks" reworked their UI/UX around presenting your holdings as a "portfolio."
When I log into my bank I don't see my "portfolio of USD." I see my account. I'd see USD in my "portfolio" if I had a Forex account, but then I'd be trading currencies not banking them to use as currencies.
It's a pure admission that for the vast majority of its user base the sole purpose is just to play pump and dump games.
The only group I see routinely using cryptocurrencies as actual currencies are online black market users and sellers, and they do so for an obvious reason that outweighs the downsides. Many of them have moved to Monero and Zcoin too since those actually have decent privacy. (Not foolproof, but decent.)
It is sticking your head in the sand to write off all the criticisim as coming from salty losers late to the game.
In my opinion Bitcoin is the modern day tulip. It has no real value (note Bitcoin is not blockchain, which is a useful technology), uses tremendous amounts of real world resources and is in a massive bubble and will eventually burst leaving us all worse off.
Sure, some will and have prospered, but there is net loss of value for society.
This is all independent of whether one is peronally invested. I don't happen to own Bitcoin, but I do own shares of some companies that I actually want to see fail. But it is a sort of a hedge.
That's not something I disagree with. I do that. But via traditional means (I generate something of value and get wealth in return), not solely by using my wealth to generate more wealth.
I hate bitcoin because you can only participate (and become more wealthy) if you're already fortunate/privileged enough to be wealthy. It's just another thing that helps increase the divide between rich and poor.
It is absolutely not - where did I say it was? But you do invest your money in stocks or bonds don't you? Why couldn't you have invested 1% of your capital in BTC in 2018? Just treat it as one of those investments which went well?
I understood bitcoin from the beginning when I was first exposed to it, and I chose not to mine it or buy any. I hate it. I am more forgiving of POS coins, but I am still waiting for a time when they are used to pay for things, not as a MLM scheme. I think equities are a better way, overall, to buy and hold.
Of course people around here are salty. The majority of HN users are people who are working hard trying to do useful work, while in cryptocurrency there are a bunch of people getting rich off scams or just HODLing a token.
What makes it worse is that these people who just got lucky think they're changing the world and are a part of some kind of movement. Some are evangelical and almost self-righteous about it. Some sound like cult members.
Just admit you won the lotto and stop perpetuating obvious nonsense.
The thing I find most obnoxious is the sector of the Bitcoin cult that talks about how they're going to destroy the useless legacy financial industry... when what they are doing by getting rich off a value-less token is everything they hate about financial capitalism distilled into its purest form.
Bitcoin is a reductio ad absurdum of financial capitalism, not a revolt against it. If it actually "took over" it would invert all financial incentives so that simply holding deflationary tokens became the safest path to profit, disincentivizing investment in any kind of productive work.
Financial capitalism and Wall St. get a lot of hate around here too for the exact same reason.
Edit: everything I hate about Bitcoin I also hate about much of conventional financial capitalism... but I don't hear very many Wall St. tycoons pretending they're changing the world or creating some kind of utopia. Many of them will flat out admit that they're purely mercenary. It's more honest.
Side note: I wish the ones who caught the bus could reveal how early they got on it. I play the wishful thinking game in my mind all the time. I have some but not enough, which I believe is the general sentiment everywhere.
You can look at the blockchain directly to see who holds what for how long. I doubt anybody who bought a significant amount early on would ever reveal themselves publicly.
Great thing about Bitcoin is you don't need to argue. Don't even tell people you're into it. Just buy a little every week if you agree with the philosophy behind it.
> So many people missed the bus and are just salty or frustrated
This is such projection. I have 0 regrets about not buying into Bitcoin (or any other hyped up blockchain tech). It represents the absolute worst of capitalism, selfishness, and anti-intellectualism. I sleep soundly at night having had 0 involvement. Also perfectly happy in my decisions to avoid: buying a lottery ticket ever, joining any MLM in existence, working for a hedge fund, hoarding XBoxes to re-sell them, etc.
> Now it is all about how Bitcoin is a ponzi, key reason for climate change and solves no issues whatsoever. Maybe all those things are correct (I don't know) but it sure was a good way to make a lot of money -- and most of the people here just missed it.
Annnnnd exactly demonstrating what I'm referring to. "These criticisms might be fully correct. I don't know! But it sure was profitable!" What a disgusting way of looking at the world.
There is a sizable portion of people on HN who understand the value proposition of blockchain and invested and / or work in the space. We just get downvoted and drowned out by a vocal group of toxic no-coiners who hate this tech with great passion. I think HN is a little more curious of the tech, especially with NFTs lately and artist interest. But overall still the worst place to talk intelligently about this stuff.
These numbers are ridiculously low. Here is what a typical FAANG setup pays you in the bay area (Source: I have worked in a couple of them):
IC5 Eng (~5 yrs exp): $350k/yr all in (cash+stock+bonus)
IC6 Eng (~9 yrs exp): $550k/yr all in
IC7 Eng (~12 yrs exp and you are exceptional): $800k/yr
As you go from IC5 to IC7, your stock and bonus goes up (as expected). A typical IC7 will earn around $250k in cash, ~25% bonus (on the base cash salary) and the rest in stock.
Now those $2M houses don't sound too expensive right?
The competition for these roles is extremely intense. Even doing well isn't sufficient in pandemic times. The baseline of prepping every night + weekend for 3+ months still isn't enough to guarantee you'll get in. Get unlucky and join an org like Ads at FB and you're gonna be miserable AF. Add in the general huge amount of luck that is involved with what interviewer you get, the hiring environment going on, and it's possible you'll spend years in purgatory waiting to get into FAANG.
I think if you're really into spending your free time doing competitive programming, reading about system design, and making sure to have some interesting tech on your resume then it's not a big deal. Personally, I'm not any of that - so, getting into FAANG has been a real PITA. I still try but it's sooo painful now. The difficulty has just skyrocketed for someone who doesn't do those things in their free time.
Ads org is big but the general take I get is - the WLB is bad and there is a lot of pressure to deliver. I'll quote blind too: "It's great. Satan himself writes your evals."
I was in ads and I would disagree with this. Ads is a great place to be if you are data driven and are in FAANG - who enjoy excellent competitive advantages.
> Even doing well isn't sufficient in pandemic times.
Ask anyone hiring at a FAANG co and you will find that it's a massive struggle to hire now. Pandemic isn't making anything harder for applicants and, given the relative success of tech during it, may be making it harder.
> Arguably if you need to prep that much it might not be a good fit. YMMV.
Dear candidate - do not pay attention to this person’s comment. This behaviour is called gatekeeping (not withstanding the backbone-free cop-out at the end with the “ymmv”). It does not account for varied life circumstances & starting points. Prep for as long you need to - and more importantly - want to. In the interview the duration of prep won’t matter.
Prepping for 3+ months is definitely not the baseline. I'd really need some convincing that you're getting any real incremental benefit past a week of interview prep. There's not that much ground to really cover and at some point you're just solving different versions of the same problems over and over again.
A majority of the time is spent on the "LeetCode grind." You can evaluate your own progress while you solve practice problems by checking time and checking how many solutions are correct on the first submit. Most likely 1 week would barely be enough to establish your baseline performance per category (DP, trie, etc.).
Worth keeping in mind lots of engineers in the bay area are working at startups for lower salaries (closer to median in this chart), bodyshops, and large companies that are not known for as good pay.
Also at higher levels it's not just the number of years you work. Average Joe with 9 years of experience is not going to be IC6 - the yoe:level relationship is also governed by pedigree, network, career history (where, what), projects led, previous roles, etc.
No, they are expensive. Consider average software eng pay for Duolingo (Pittsburgh) is ~180k/yr total comp, but houses there go for like $120k. IC7 is like top 5-10%. Also, CA income taxes are high.
I'd need to study math just to get a managerial job that doesn't use any of these math and academic skills. I'd need to answer questions like, how many marbles would it take to reach the moon. I'd be surrounded by aspie workaholics who rank low in creativity, high in analytical skills and are fully deficient in sense of humor. Literal-minded math nerds fronted by a smattering of HR people who portray the company as enlightened and woke. And all that, I can live in a high-tax, car-oriented, earthquake and drought and mudslide and forest fire-prone state that decriminalized shoplifting and prevents rezoning to solve its housing issues.
Oh my God, where do I sign up?
I'll eat my downvotes and live in my crumbling NYC neighborhood with a semblance of mental and cultural diversity. A lower salary but a good one, and I don't have to work for advertising monopolies run by marketing people.
Ok, I get it. You need to be contrarian and repeat some California is bad talking points. But let’s be honest, life in California is way better than NYC. Nobody sipping Russian river pinot while overlooking Lake Tahoe has said “I wish I was in NYC”
I was harsh but replying to the, we make so much more money here, original post. My point is there's more than money for consideration, a very pedestrian observation.
All that said, if the news reports are any indication, there are a lot of people exiting California for other states, so a lot of contrarians.
I do love the Sonoma Chardonnays myself, the Cali Pinots are a lot riper/sweeter than the Burgundy ones.
L7 is rare though, and most of them have more than 12 YOE (or maybe they have 12 YOE at the company). Levels.fyi seems to only have 38 data points for FB for example (https://www.levels.fyi/company/Facebook/salaries/Software-En...) and 47 for Google (https://www.levels.fyi/company/Google/salaries/Software-Engi...) vs. 490 and 457 L5 entries. It's probably safe to say if you get to L7 you're in the top 5% of engineers at the company and L8 is probably top 1%. So sure, $2M house isn't too expensive if you're both a good engineer and great at navigating company politics and selling\presenting yourself in a way that both gives you high value (to leadership) projects and peer recognition, but most employees won't get there. Going the EM route is generally considered to be an easier way to get to L7 comp.
Says someone who is using 1970s technology called ACH and SWIFT to send money over. At least be aware of what is happening around you before attacking other technologies.
> Says someone who is using 1970s technology called ACH and SWIFT to send money over. At least be aware of what is happening around you before attacking other technologies.
Technology isn't a linear tech tree with newer == better. In some very real ways, Bitcoin is like a a new car design with some interesting new technologies (e.g. a satellite radio receiver) but that doesn't support other technologies like seatbelts.
Dismissing something as "<past-time-period> technology" is lazy. You really need to compare explicit pros and cons.
> Says someone who is using 1970s technology called ACH and SWIFT to send money over.
In Europe SEPA Instant requires transfers take less than 10 seconds in anything other than exceptional circumstances, and costs the same to transfer between any of the 36 member countries.
> At least be aware of what is happening around you before attacking other technologies.
Ironic. So many discussions of Bitcoin's utility implicitly assume that the rest of the world also has the same sort of antiquated banking and payment systems used in the US.
You won't. This is why Bitcoin is valuable since it has stood the test of time and has gained more acceptability. Nanos and other nonsense coins are just trying to attack the emperor in the hope that they come close to it and thus make the speculators a lot of money.
It's weird how hard you go against literally anything except Bitcoin because of your rabid obsession with whatever paltry sum of money you've made over this one dated technologically is. You're literally like a cancer-ridden coal miner coughing his last lung to keep the mines open. Good riddance.
I missed this at the time, but this sort of personal attack is absolutely not ok on HN and will get you banned for obvious reasons. You've unfortunately been breaking the site guidelines in a bunch of your other comments too.
Cardano is the daddy of shitcoins. It is the Ripple of this bull run. Literally the only thing it is being used for is speculation. Everything else is "coming soon".
Earlier I thought it had some obscure use case but this article convinced me that Bitcoin does not deserve the hate it does. It needs more discussion on ways to improve it and solve energy problem! Full disclosure I have 0 bitcoins.
This is compounded by the fact that people don't want Bitcoin to change. The very critics of Bitcoin want it to change to be more useful. Isn't it absurd how there are people (HODLers) that insist that it is valuable and should go up and simultaneously insist on keeping the value of Bitcoin down?
Stop shilling. And to have the galls to say something like Nano has the ability to take on Bitcoin just indicates that you very new to this market - and thus want to make a quick buck by shilling your random shitcoin. The thing which Bitcoin has, and that few others can match, is acceptability from a large swatch of investors and predictable security/emission schedule.
And, just fyi, Nano is not made of users. Go to its reddit and you will see everyone shilling it and having price targets on it. Stop giving such these weak arguments - most of us are in here for the money and don't give two hoots of the technology.
Attacking another user like this will get you banned here. Accusations of shillage are not ok unless you have specific evidence and in that case you should be sending it to hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. Internet cheap shots about astroturfing and shillage are explicitly against the site guidelines because they're so common, so toxic, and typically so completely wrong.
> most of us are in here for the money and don't give two hoots of the technology.
Nice to hear someone say the quiet part loud. Could you tell all the rest of the most-of-us to be honest about that too? It'd save me a lot of time in conversations where people refuse to consider any Bitcoin alternatives because they'd lose money if people started to switch.
> most of us are in here for the money and don't give two hoots of the technology
Monero's technology enables private and untraceable transactions. It's amazing and I own some just because of that property. Seems to be the only cryptocurrency that still aims to be an actual currency.
>Monero's technology enables private and untraceable transactions
Not exactly. The decoy inputs/outputs provide some plausible deniability when you look at a transaction in isolation, but over repeated transactions it gets gradually lost. It's not enough to pin you as a criminal with 100% certainty, but it's enough for the police to keep an eye on you and wait for you to slip up.
Doesn't this require an exchange to provide external information? It is my understanding that it's impossible to correlate transactions using blockchain analysis alone.
>Doesn't this require an exchange to provide external information
or a donation address, or a cooperative counterparty when you buy/sell something (think darknet market that got radided, or a payment processor that sells its transaction information).
No - not necessarily. IN crypto, it is quite possible to multiply your money when investing in altcoins - purely based on shilling and positioning with no technology to speak of. This is what the OP likely is trying to do here.
That's because the problem is endemic to the cryptocurrency space. There has been very little serious work done on making any cryptocurrency usable as a medium of exchange, even for projects which claim to have that as a goal. Speculation is about the only activity that's possible for most coins, so that's what people do.
This is a bit off topic, but if you were here for the money shouldn't you just be in the stock market? It seems like the people who really try and analyze it (like in quantitative trading) do extremely well and if you don't have the time for that (who does outside of work), then mutual funds have a great return on investment and are significantly less risky and have a way lower barrier to entry. I am a bit ignorant on the economics of bitcoin (though I have built a miner and did all the merkle tree stuff), but its unclear how bitcoin is better unless you have a lot of capital already and can stomach the risk.
It is clear that you don't believe in Bitcoin ("Bitcoin solves a problem for almost nobody") and thus want to use this energy angle to take it down. Good luck. But if you are more open minded read this thread and educate yourself: https://twitter.com/yassineARK/status/1360343382556483587?s=...
Isn't that the goal of all investmemts? Just admit to yourself that you lost the greatest bull of your lifetime because you weren't smart enough to take the time to understand it.
By the time you understand Bitcoin/crypto, it will be too late for you to make profit from it. Get in now - lot more smarter people are in there and doing wonders for themselves. Look at your friends. Look at colleagues in your company. A lot of them are in. And here you are trying to make sense of it from your perspective. Even Ray Dalio is opening up and fair to say he knows a lot more things about finance and economics than you. Just get in.
I have been in Bitcoin since 2016 and have enjoyed my riches. The next wave of new users will come from institutions. Hacker News audience is not what will pump the price further.
> Think about it - if you had invested at any point in Bitcoin before today, you would have made money. But keep on resisting.
That's irrelevant to me. It's not all about "getting rich". It's not like everyone can become rich off of bitcoin. The only way you make money is taking it from someone else. At the end of the day, real work needs to be done in the world.
... when people make money off Bitcoin, where does that money come from?
At least when the scam is selling shares of an imaginary gold mine, there is hypothetically somewhere for the profits to come from. With Bitcoin, there is only a $12B/year loss to electricity charges and no where for money to come into the system but absurd transaction fees.
My brain hurts when reading these silly replies. It is like you don't want to learn how things work. BTC has value because people assign to it and there is new money coming in (fiat converted to BTC) which is what makes the existing investors rich.
You all do deserve to stay poor and be labeled as #nocoinists.
No it is not sarcasm. You all are missing out on the train going right in front of you. The point here is that you all are not even trying to understand the advantages of crypto - with innovations such as DeFi, NFT and Store of Value. For you, it comes back to Bitcoin wasting energy and the fact that it is being used by criminals. Keep on believing your theories while the rest of us become rich.
Your argument is just appealing to authority. You also assume I don't even have any bitcoin, and that I've never 'gotten in'. None of this answers my original questions as to why Bitcoin is a shrewd investment with long-term potential versus being a Ponzi scheme.
If you had taken some time to read about it, you would know better vs. putting your detailed uninformed comment. I am making an informed inference given the ignorance of your comment that you don't have any bitcoins or else you would actually take some time to research on it.
This is exactly why there are so many skeptics. Too many people trying to sell it as a "get rich quick" investment without downsides while there are so few concrete use-cases so far.
They were all over in 2017 before the price dropped to 3k,I admit I was a bit of a savage when that happened.
In all seriousness with the scam you re running online, be careful and protect your family for when it goes back from 50k to 3k. A lot of people will have lost a lot of money :(
Now it is all about how Bitcoin is a ponzi, key reason for climate change and solves no issues whatsoever. Maybe all those things are correct (I don't know) but it sure was a good way to make a lot of money -- and most of the people here just missed it.
And this hate is not new. Look at this well commented thread from 2015 when Bitcoin went down to $180 and HN is still filled with comments like that this is not surprising and they don't see it coming back from hereon: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8884838
We haven't learned anything? Have we?