> Nobody chooses to be a fool

Dogecoin is at least honest, so many other "jokes" including Bitcoin, contemporary art, some stocks etc...

If people want to play a game of musical chairs, I rather prefer this game to be called exactly what it is.

It surprises me to see so many warnings about Dogecoin and so few about Bitcoin for instance. People actually believe there's any relevant difference?

Contemporary art isn't a joke, it's a money laundering scheme.

It's a mainly tax deferral/evasion scheme, far less a laundering one.

And a Veblen good. Really if you want to avoid tax there are easier ways.

They don't understand they are playing musical chairs. They think they are investing.

The difference is Bitcoin is much more widely used for payments. It now has a second layer payment protocol, which makes transactions fast and cheap, while remaining permissionless. And yes, it is useful. I just recently contributed to an imprisoned political dissident in my country. If made through regular credit card channels, that contribution could land me in jail.

It can still end you up in jail once your regulating authorities catch up to the technology. It's a distributed ledger. This should translate to "queryable public datastore of your financial transactions" in your head.

Just look at how the U.S. IRS is starting to get a subpoena process off the ground with regards to identities of wallet holders from exchanges. Even though the glacier doesn't appear to move, I assure you, it most certainly does.

Never make the mistake of assuming just because something is new meaning it will always remain that way, and if your nation state is cracking down on political people non grata, they may have no compunction with figuring out who was behind those transactions with or without your help.

This is ironically why cash not in a bank vault is the king of anonymous, difficult to trace financial activity. No paper trail.

Note: Of course banks and regulators know that too, and capital markets will do anything to make sure the maximum number of people entrust their finances to an institution to a loanmaking institution. People don't realize that ease of transaction and traceability is in and of itself a populational control mechanism.

There are privacy-focused coins, like Monero, which are developing some pretty awesome tech

For what it's worth, I do feel the same way about bitcoin. I just feel like the argument is even more clear when discussing dogecoin. I also think that once you reach this conclusion on dogecoin it is easy to think "Well dogecoin is basically bitcoin, so..."

What is your opinion about Ethereum in this case?

I'd need to know more than I do about Ethereum in order to have a solid opinion. My current impression is that Ethereum tries to provide some value or innovation in the form of distributed computation, which is good, but also that there is no useful program being run on the distributed computation layer.

I haven't looked too much into it, so maybe I'm wrong about the useful program thing, but to my knowledge smart contracts are mainly used for creating digital tokens and things like that. Maybe Ethereum could be a useful way to conduct raffles, lotteries, or sports betting.

If you know more about Ethereum could you point out any useful applications that use it?

People choose to behave foolishly all the time. It's not hard to follow a rule "I am not smart enough to guess profitable investments, and I should invest only in simple things like major investment funds". If you can not figure out this rule yourself, there are literally hundreds of "for dummies" books and thousands of advisors that would tell you. If you think you can do better, it's your choice. You may be right, or you may be revealed as a fool - in any case, the consequences are yours, not somebody else's.

To be fair, there are just as many books and “investment gurus” out there trying to convince you that you can beat the market if you follow their advice. Your “rule” might seem obvious for those who already implement it, but it’s actually difficult for many people to follow because it requires having a certain level of both self-awareness and knowledge of investing.

And, while most of the consequences of poor investment strategies do fall on individuals - at least superficially, both the hyper-social nature of our species and the political/economic structure of our societies ensure that those consequences frequently extend far beyond them.

You're right. I did mean it in the gentlest sense, that someone who can afford to lose a bit perhaps should. Maybe that is too much faith that it will at least end up in circulation on something more useful. I have little use for fraudsters and those relying on huge differentials in knowledge. When it comes to ordinary people investing their transfer payments on something they may not understand actually can shrink 90% in 2 hours with zero recourse, it becomes a serious wrong.

I've been following since near the beginning, and my circle's rather techy so they largely get it. But I'm not sure what the average person today understands about something like Bitcoin and similar, technically or financially. I've struggled to inform myself before. I looked into the protocols for some decentralized exchanges and I noticed that it's hard to find much about them because in-depth or neutral discussion is buried under a pile of buzz and hype. The biggest advocates promise the Moon, sometimes literally.

Perhaps public education of some kind could help, so that more people understand risks and unknowns? When everything that comes up on cryptocurrency is from the biggest stakeholders in the game, people will not be getting a fair understanding.

Nobody is permitting anyone to take their money but themselves. And beyond that, there are ample resources to learn how not to behave like a fool in the markets. And even further beyond that, there are plenty of fools that are good at one thing and do well with it, taking away the opportunity to try their hand at something they might be good at to save people who were too busy watching tiktok to save themselves is not how you create a just society.

Also I'd like to add that the only thing speculative investing has in common with gambling is that risk is being taken, it isn't gambling, and speculation in cryptocurrencies is certainly not a zero sum game.

There are at least two kinds of fools. Perhaps you are thinking of "ignorant fools" - people who could know better but don't. There are also people who basically just can't know better.

Chris Sacca, who went on to become a billionaire investor in companies like Twitter, tells a funny story [1] about how he made foolish decisions in the stock market and lost a ton of money. Over the course of his career he reverses his fortune and becomes rich. The message of the story is something like "Don't stop grinding or hustling" or something like that. I think he's a good example of the ignorant fool that I imagine you are thinking of.

There's another class of fool though that basically cannot know better. This could include a wide variety of people, mentally unwell, gambling addicts, desperate people, elderly, people with an IQ of 80, etc. These people flat out are not going to read books on investing, or whatever mitigation path you would recommend to the ignorant fool, and if they did, they might not understand them or be able to use what they learned effectively. This is something like an "inherent fool" that I was thinking of.

What proportion of people who are going to lose money on dogecoin are ignorant fools, for whom this will be a valuable lesson and a stepping stone on their way to better living, versus inherent fools for whom this will be a setback in an already challenging life?

I can't speak for all cryptocurrencies in general, and I can only share my opinion, but I'm pretty confident that coins like dogecoin are certainly zero sum games. The best argument I can make for this is that zero value is being produced from dogecoin. Money is being put in, eventually people will want to take money out, but with no value being produced all the money that comes out of the system will come at the expense of those who put money in. It's kind of the quintessential example of a zero sum game.

I'd compare it to the company Coke. I can buy a share of Coke like I can put money into dogecoin. Coke is going to produce cans of sugar water. People are going to buy that sugar water, putting their money into the system, and, crucially, never expecting to get it back. They put their money in so that they can consume the value that is the can of sugar water.

This addition of money to the system, and the consumption of value, are what makes owning Coke not a zero sum game. Money games into the system from participants who do not expect their money back. As a shareholder of Coke, some of that money will come to me. I can own my share of Coke and benefit from the increased value that comes from the value Coke produces and the money of people who consume that value.

Conversely, dogecoin doesn't produce any value. You can move dogecoins around, but nothing is getting made and nothing is getting consumed. Every participant who is putting money in expects money back. There is nobody analogous to the person buying and drinking the Coke. Worse, everyone is hoping for MORE than the money they put in to come back.

As a simple matter of math, there is no real way for this to work so that everyone, or even most people, can benefit. If someone makes money, then someone else loses it. In this way, dogecoin is not at all investment. You aren't putting money towards a company or a venture, you are just buying lottery tickets that may or may not be worth more later. It's a gambling game of musical chairs.

1 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYffNTLL7go

When you say "inherent fools" what I think of is "some people are too stupid to be in charge of their own lives." Call me an optimist or a utopian, but I don't think that's true, and even if it is they still have a right to try, and even if they don't, the onus is still on them and nobody can change that. If they're inherent fools no amount of nerfing is going to protect them from tanking their own lives. It's like mandating tags on chairs that tell you not to eat the chair fabric. It's catering to the lowest common denominator. Do you want to live in a world where all of us, even you, are herded like cattle in some futile attempt to prevent people from behaving in ways that aren't good for themselves?

Some speculative vehicles are not zero sum games because they have one or more of the following characteristics: they are an experiment in some technology or tool that can benefit all people, or the simple fact that they exist is useful, or they enable capital to be allocated more efficiently. Almost all speculative assets have the last trait, all currencies have the second trait, and right now as far as speculative assets go, only cryptocurrencies have the first trait.

When you say "benefit" you mean to get profit. But "benefit" can mean much more than that. The benefit of the invention of electricity cannot simply be attributed to the amount of profit made from it, or the amount used by the purchaser. It has a myriad of less tangible yet more impactful benefits, such as it helped humanity understand electromagnetism and it helped humanity get out of the mud. The same applies to new ways to abstract value. Would you say the concept of money has value beyond simply who has how much?

I think there is a compromise between nerfing the whole world and herding everyone like cattle, and allowing people who aren't well equipped lose more than they can afford in speculative gambling. As I mentioned before, I don't think I have this compromise worked out, and I don't know what the answer is, but it feels wrong to leave things at "Caveat emptor".

One idea might be some kind of test. Can you pass a basic financial literacy test? If so, then maybe you should be allowed to gamble even on high risk things. If not, maybe finance isn't for you right now. When you pass the test you get a license and need to provide that license when doing KYC checks with financial institutions.

I think we'll just have to agree to disagree on the question of whether all people have sufficient mental equipment to handle risky financial decisions.

I do think the concept of money is valuable. To put it in my earlier framework, I think the people who are consuming the value are the people who use money to exchange it for goods or services.

I don't think dogecoin innovates on money though. In many ways, I think dogecoin is a step back from money. For example, our current systems have vastly greater throughput.

Crypto has yet to have a killer use case. Once that comes online, all this future value speculation work will make sense. Likely will be something around payments for AI models.

Look at defi

That’s not a killer use case. Y’all keep saying it is, but it’s not.

Explain?

A use case is a list of actions or event steps typically defining the interactions between a role and a system to achieve a goal. Defi is a system. The role is yet to be filled. It’s like saying check out the Internet, it will change everything.

While true, it takes people filling roles using the system to increase adoption and a killer use case (watching videos) creates a new market in which those roles will expand.

A killer use case is not a cool system, it’s the USE of the system by the role holders.

> I disagree with this. Fools have a hard enough life without permitting predators to take their money. Nobody chooses to be a fool.

And yet, it will always happen. Some of us are fools, some of us will be fools, and some of us will never know how much of a fool we really were. Those will be the lucky ones.

Nature works this way for a reason.

Misguided compassion is a big part of why we are even having this discussion in the first place: people wanting to help wholeheartedly without realizing they are being fools themselves.

Were our previous best intentions not good enough? or maybe were they the cause of it all? Who can tell, who can tell...

People will always be mugged by thugs who are stronger than them, so let’s get rid of all assault laws and shrug because nothing can be done right?

Don't be silly, that would be foolish!

In fact, perhaps a law that prohibits you to get mugged in the first place is in order.

In this analogy I think that a law against is mugging is analogous to a law against financial scams like dogecoin. Of course the existence of the law won't prevent anyone from getting scammed or mugged, but it may reduce the frequency with which people get scammed or mugged, and it may reduce the incentive to scam or mug by introducing the threat of punishment for scammers/muggers.

No, I got it, as sophisticated as it was. But my analogy is this:

A law against fraud is like a law against mugging, you cannot commit fraud and you cannot mug. Both pretty clear and reasonable. But a law against trading because you might get scammed is like a law against getting mugged: YOU ARE NOW FORBIDDEN TO GET MUGGED, problem solved!

Of course people, because they are good hearted and their intentions are so pure, often fail to see the difference. After all, how can anyone be against a law prohibiting mugging?!

>I don't know what a good solution is, or how to stop something like dogecoin without being too paternalistic

"dumb money" IRA? By default you can only invest in index ETFs, but you you can contribute up to 5% of your income per year to a "dumb money" account that allows you to do whatever you want with it.

Just like drivers license. Take a test of basic financial competency and education. Pay 100 bucks for the test. Done.

Some European countries are using a variant of this. When I opened a brokerage account, I had to give an estimate of my level of familiarity with various asset classes and was excluded from trading the ones I am not proficient in.

Unfortunately, the implementation is absolute bullshit. Proficiency is exclusively measured in experience, leading to a textbook example of Catch-22: You can trade precisely whatever you've already been trading in the past.

I do believe that some basic level of understanding of the mechanics of markets and various asset classes should be a pre-requirement, and I like the driver's license analogy: Just like in road traffic, with investment decisions, your actions don't only endanger yourself.

Unfortunately I don't know how that could be implemented without being yet another driver of inequality or being extremely easy to bypass.

Hm, depends on a country perhaps. I did the test twice in Poland, and yes - there were questions about experience, but also questions from knowledge. My guess is that if you fail answering questions about the experience you will get access to fewer instruments, and with time you can get access to more.

The test could be definitely done better though, perhaps closer to the new tests for basic drone piloting.

For basic drone piloting, in Poland at least, you have to take an online course, and then take a test with I think 40 knowledge questions selected randomly from a pool of 90 or so.

You have 90 sec to answer each question, so if you're a good Googler, you can cheat, but really after taking the online course you don't need to.

Took me 2-3h to get my basic permissions to fly a drone. Advanced permissions require a weekend in-person training and a more complicated exam. Still pretty accessible.

I think we could have the same thing with investor qualification - a good test, and also a single "license", instead of each bank implementing their own testing scheme to answer 10 basic questions.

>I disagree with this. Fools have a hard enough life without permitting predators to take their money. Nobody chooses to be a fool.

If you risk more than you can afford to lose an anarcho-capitalist free market economy, then yes, you choose to be a fool. You're choosing to opt out of a regulated financial system with insurance and legal protections into a system whose only rule is "caveat emptor, lol. Git gud noob" because you think it's easy money.

There's a rule in poker - if you look around the table and can't tell who the mark is, it's you.