Hacker News

Does it make sense to talk about "the government" in this age? It probably misguides us more than informs us. I've always felt the perception of government at the time is closer to our perception of the captain of the local football team - at best distant and upholding the honor of the village, at worst a thief with a title - rather than how we view it today. Authority of information lay with the church. Maybe replace by "Persons of wealth in positions of power"?

>It should be a story about governments misallocating resources. That's it, but people quit. Keep twisting it into a story of psychology and mania which it was not.

The fact that it's marketed as a story about psychology and mania rather than government policy gone awry is arguably itself a story about psychology and mania.

People have a need to feel like the forces that control them know what they're doing.

Using your reasoning a large number of collectible items should be worthless. What really makes an NFT different from a Pokemon card, a Birkin bag, or even an original Monet? My guess is that the seller has to have some sort of authority and established reputation for these kinds of artificially scarce luxury goods to maintain value.

Exact same argument for crypto though. It is all just supply demand. BTC has much more demand currently and likely more sustainably. Alt coins are just less popular. It is all just supply vs demand.

>> All you “own” is an entry on some ledger, which doesn’t inherently give you ownership over anything else.

No different from bitcoin...

I'm not really convinced that people thought there was "anything else", it's just that people thought that the entry on the ledger was going to increase in value, even from some of the stupifying initial values.

I own several NFTs that are important to me, and they're worth every penny I paid. I never had any illusions that I owned anything other than a historical footnote; I think that this sort of ownership is meaningful and important.

It's much more realistic to me than "buying a song" from one of the corporate music distributors. "Owning" a song seems to be much more of a misunderstanding of how data works in a digital world than owning an entry in a ledger.

The Hunt Brothers (re)learned this with silver in the 70's. (80's?)

What's the pyramid scheme here? The Netherlands are the top producers of tulips today, seems like a sustainable business. A temporary inefficiency in markets does not make a pyramid scheme.

The article suggests people genuinely believed a tulip was, implicitly for the foreseeable future, worth more than e.g. a house. That suggests it was some sort of mania over rationality.

The NFT thing is comparable. I think most of everybody investing understood that they were worthless and that it was a bubble, but there was a remote chance that it wasn't a bubble and even if it was a bubble then you'd still a reasonable chance of making a profit, and even if you didn't make a profit then you'd stand an even more reasonable chance of getting out with fairly minimal losses. Nobody thought there was any remotely high chance of a poor quality rendering of an ape being worth more than a house for the indefinite future. It was just speculation, sometimes poorly and sometimes reasonably measured.

NFTs

I'm all for shitting on hyperscalers, but let's not compare LLMs to tulips/NFTs.

Many such prominent examples such as Thinking Machines, SSI and AMI Labs and many others like them.

Of course, the only reason for this 'valuation' is because of the founding team but that is just not enough.

This is still a crystal clear bubble.

- You can send any amount of money to anyone in the world very quickly and cheaply, and nobody can stop you.

- No government can dilute it or limit its supply.

Stuff like that. Maybe that matters to you, maybe not, but BTC was created because that didn't exist. And even if you don't use it, you're living in a world where financial institutions have to live alongside an alternative that does these things, for whatever that's worth.

Convert it to drugs. With the right combination, you can talk to Mr. Bitcoin.