The headline makes it sound like Vitalik is warning that the entire industry could collapse soon, when the actual thing he said was just that if you invest all your money in a cryptocurrency you need to realize that it is possible for it to drop all the way to 0, so don't do that and instead invest responsibility with money you can afford to lose, which is a statement that I think everyone would agree with without thinking it is going to induce panic. (Essentially: this article is horrible clickbait.)

Check out the scams going on in the twitter thread below. I am quite impressed by how convincing it looks; it's very likely that people are falling for it.

https://twitter.com/vitalikbuterin/status/964838207215955969

Think he's trying to give a cautious warning but end up going binary 1 or zero. infinity or zero. Most people who got into the market at good times in 2017 have not seen how insane the market has behaved in percentage term. Bitcoin went from $30 to zero before back then.

Another note, it looks like these days currencies rarely go to zero. last i checked the infamous bitconnect that has collapsed https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/bitconnect/usd is still trading and has value

i starting to think of it like physical coins that goes out of circulation. wanna buy an old franc or roman coin, its worthless but people are trading it for its rarity; or it becomes cheap enough to be speculated again.

This isn't newsworthy enough to get posted on HN. If you follow smart people on crypto Twitter, this is a routine reminder.

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Whilst the reminder of not investing more than you are willing and able to lose cannot be repeated enough times, I do reckon it is important to put things into perspective: A very significant majority of traditional start-ups eventually fail, e.g. these articles from Forbes listing 90% (https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2015/01/16/90-of-star...) and 80% (https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericwagner/2013/09/12/five-reas...), respectively. I consequently do not think a statement like this should be viewed as anything other than a simple and healthy reminder of how failure is inherent to entrepreneurship - something which naturally carries a risk for any investor. It is, however, also worth stressing how this, still largely unregulated, world attracts fraudsters. It is therefore not entirely unreasonable to assume an even greater percentage of projects will eventually hit 0 compared to traditional start-ups, and that investors thus ought to pay even closer attention to what they buy.

EDIT: Downvotes, why?

That usually only happens to scamcoins, especially when there's some sort of exit scam (see Monero Gold). So let's hope he's not talking about Ethereum..

What's he playing at here? The founder of a cryptocurrency should now full well the power they have saying words like this; I know he's young, and I know there's validity to the "don't invest more than you can afford to lose" but a statement like 'could drop to near zero' is almost BEGGING the market to go bearish when you're the founder of a currency.

Buy the rumor, sell the news has never been more apt than it is right now.

In other news the sky is blue

At this point, saying crypto will go to zero is like saying the internet will go to zero, meaning no one will use it. Yes, crypto can drop wildly but the only way they go to zero is if the energy they use for mining stops. Government intervention is not a threat since there are countries that are actively supporting it. The network effect is hard to overcome. Bitcoin and Ethereum are two that will weather just about everything. Also, both bitcoin and ethereum are development platforms which gives them staying power. The price might collapse but they will be around as long as people are willing to join the network to mine it and use it.