<story><title>PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv</title><url>https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/paypal-bids-500-million-to-acquire-crypto-startup-curv-report/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ceilingcorner</author><text>I have no interest in cryptocurrencies and I don’t own a single cent in any of them. But the continual barrage of hostile comments in every single HN article looks mostly like groupthink to me.&lt;p&gt;Clearly cryptocurrency will continue to play a growing role in the future. Denying this seems simply delusional.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ahelwer</author><text>I think it&amp;#x27;s an interesting example of people being too close to something, technically, to really see its totality. I&amp;#x27;m a distributed systems person so I basically blew off Bitcoin two bubble-cycles ago because of the 3 tx&amp;#x2F;sec issue and the obvious deficiencies of the proposed lightning network workaround. I also took an in-depth look at a cryptocurrency with a supposed better protocol (Nano) and was very unimpressed - they didn&amp;#x27;t have a real solution to the network partition double-spend issue (a coin with a similar protocol, IOTA, solves this with a centralized &amp;quot;coordinator&amp;quot; node that they swear will be removed any time now... it won&amp;#x27;t). So I found myself in the interesting situation of knowing more about these things than 99% of people with money in them, but missing out on the large gains in value. There is a probabilistic protocol I legitimately find very interesting (Avalanche) that might succeed on a technical level, but analyzing these things at the technical level hasn&amp;#x27;t really meant much so far.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s possible this is an enormous bubble that will all go to zero. Of note is that the entirety of Bitcoin&amp;#x27;s history fits within this larger bull market we&amp;#x27;ve been in since 2008. It will be interesting to see how cryptocurrencies fare in the inevitable wider market downturn, whenever that happens. Regardless it&amp;#x27;s probably a good idea to hedge against your own ignorance by putting 1% of your money in or something like that.</text></comment>
<story><title>PayPal Bids $500M to Acquire Crypto Startup Curv</title><url>https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/paypal-bids-500-million-to-acquire-crypto-startup-curv-report/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ceilingcorner</author><text>I have no interest in cryptocurrencies and I don’t own a single cent in any of them. But the continual barrage of hostile comments in every single HN article looks mostly like groupthink to me.&lt;p&gt;Clearly cryptocurrency will continue to play a growing role in the future. Denying this seems simply delusional.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>PragmaticPulp</author><text>Cryptocurrency isn’t going away, but it’s dishonest to pretend that it’s not without major problems such as the energy consumption issues. The popular narrative has also become almost indistinguishable from a pump scheme, where we’re all supposed to buy and home (never sell) until we’re all rich.&lt;p&gt;If cryptocurrency becomes commonplace, it likely won’t look anything like our current crypto infrastructure. The problem is that this isn’t what all of the current holders want to hear, because they only want people to buy into whatever crypto they personally hold. This makes it difficult to have honest conversations because so many of the participants are biased toward convincing others to buy into their investment while ignoring anything else.</text></comment>