"I accept that I have lost all of our users a lot of money, soz". There's a lot of vulnerable people losing a lot of money on crypto, I've yet to see how any of this is good for society.
I feel absolutely no sympathy for people who lose their money in crypto. If they're truly "vulnerable people" and they're dumping their savings into crypto, they deserve the expected outcome. Same for people who spend their rent and food money on scratch-off lottery tickets. Take some damn responsibility for your actions.
Nowadays though, the crypto folks are running huge ad campaigns in mainstream media at least in some places (the ad campaigns were huge when I recently visited South America). The consequence is that innocent people who happen to be financially uneducated and perhaps a bit naive are sucked into this stuff, and it is our duty as a society to protect people from that.
Not everybody can be an expert in finance, and not everybody should be! That's the point of division of labor. That's why a moderate amount of regulation that protects non-experts against being taken advantage of makes some sense.
Meanwhile in the consumer protection paradise of the EU, I went to watch the Giro d’Italia bicycle race and there were ads everywhere for the “Official Giro NFT.”
The beast hungers for the many…
>Do you really believe that it is a good thing that they are getting scammed out of what little they have?
Do you really believe that's what I said? I said I have no sympathy for people who choose to lose their money in irresponsible ways. I believe people have agency and they should be held accountable for their decisions. That's part of being an adult. The alternative to that is: daddy government tells everyone what they're allowed to do with their money, because nobody has any responsibility.
It's a layered preying system it's taxi drivers suddenly making bank from crypto and telling other taxi drivers to join in (as I've seen happening in Brazil). It's a lucky hippie artist stumbling upon a pump-and-dump group when researching stuff for a residency, making bank and explaining to their family how they can also do it. The hippie then starting a community in some tropical paradise and funding it with the schemes they barely understand while helping his friends to join on the pump-and-dump.
People are more willing to join if they can see someone they know recommending them some strategy to make money. A lot of people will think it's iffy and miss out, and feel pretty down when they see others that weren't so smart joining in the hype and making bank. So they might join as well.
If you go to any poor country with internet access right now you'll hear about crypto. In ads, from taxi drivers, from tourism workers, etc., a lot of vulnerable people to be preyed upon and sustain the scam for a little bit longer.
The scammers don't really need to run the scheme anymore, it's self-perpetuating, a meme.
A stochastic system of preying upon financially illiterate, desperate and/or greedy people.
Sure, are you in favor of prosecuting the innumerable influencers who convinced them in the first place? Surely they had agency in deciding whether to illegally shill scams or not.
I do not feel for the wealthy boys whom have been taking advantage of essentially free money (ridiculously low interest rates for way to long) that speculated on crypto for basically bragging rights.
I always felt crypto platforms should have put limits on accounts. A few grand at most.
If they crash--I will bet it's due to wealthy boys gambling with crypto.
Basically the only members of society that could get those 0 few point loans were the wealthy.
It seems like they didn't even believe in the movment? All they wanted was a quick buck, and bragging rights at the hootenannies they frequent.
It's the poor people, and middleclass, whom were tired of .0025% on their cd that were enticed.
Sure they should have gone with a Vanguard----but didn't really have enough to invest to make it really worthwhile.
Crypto seemed like the better option besides Lottery tickets.
The poor/middle will be able to collect a bit of interest on CD's with rates rising. I would love to get 5% on a CD.
I have no clue to whether crypto will live, or die. I still regret not buying the three graphic cards I had in my Amazon Cart a few years ago though.
I was so close to building my rig, but thought you guys were right, and crypto was a bad bet.
I have found you guys wrong on pretty much every prediction, but believe you on crypto.
Irregardless of who wins, crypto wasen't a crazy idea. I just have a feeling the wealthy boys ruined it for everyone, as usual, by being greedy with their huge leveraged transactions.
The US has a culture that likes to blame working folks when they screw up and to some extent it's good for everyone to have a culture of individual agency - you want people to feel that they have control over their fates and work toward better themselves and their families.
But if you twist your society sufficiently that enough average folks sink under the barrage of predatory kleptocratic institutional behavior, then it's no longer just their problem. You might find yourself no longer living in an "advanced mixed economy/democracy" but rather something much less fun.
and also need to update the amounts
Because its still a very relevant and not old joke that is told with updated amounts
If you owe a billion dollars ($1G) and can't pay it back, then the bank will work with you to try to get the investment back on its feet, as they will certainly not be able to recover any significant amount of it forcefully. It becomes their problem.
Of course, in computing G is also sometimes used to mean 2^30. The ISO has allocated the prefixes Ki/Mi/Gi (Kibi, Mebi, Gibi) for that use, so technically my machine has 16 GiB or RAM, which is slightly more than 16GB of RAM would be.
aka "I just lost 3 G's on UST"
Giga dollars? Get out more dude.
This argument doesn't clearly stand on its own in my opinion.
It starts with the implicit assumption that profit is in fact a determiner of societal good, that a soup kitchen which gives away food is not doing any good since they have no profit, while an HFT firm who notices some minor inefficiency in the stock market and makes billions is doing lots of societal good, that the government maintaining roads is less good than a contractor who is able to profit 5x as much by over-charging the taxpayer.
I think the increasing wealth divide is clearly good for the rich, but I question if it's good for society as a whole.
How many people would be able to buy their own version of Twitter that is analogous to their net worth in the way Musk did? Not that many people. Your average person isn’t getting the sort of loans or interest rates. Or other supposedly good at predicting the future but again they are also the most powerful. Like the $7B+ Musk has raised from other investors so far.
After the crypto bubble collapses, I think what we'll discover is that it was a great mechanism to transfer wealth out of people who badly want to predict the future to people who have so much money that they don't really care how it plays out - it's just some small percentage hedge of their gigantic portfolio.
This is one reason bubbles are so harmful to regular people - if they join in, they could lose their shirts. But the truly wealthy are just picking between years of underperforming returns vs risk.
No
The effect is transfer money from unlucky to lucky fools. Nothing in that is good for anything, not even the "lucky fools". You are lucky once, not next time.
Being a fool is not shameful. But you need to know yourself and stay out of speculative markets
interesting how in your model wealth inequality doesn’t affect society at all. if one guy has a trillion and everyone else has a penny, it’s good for our society, bc he will invest in things that succeed, because no one else has a chance to succeed.
try not to, as with everything else.
> Also, that statement implies that these are all honest efforts, not scams.
it doesn't imply that at all. it implies that its an individual discernment issue. anybody can still go blow it all on a casino or Reg CF securities offerings, unless they are richer, then they have a few additional choices to blow it all.
That implies all risk is the same, which is a way to normalize scams, negligence, and irresponsibility. Casinos and regular security offerings are generally honest about what they offer and are regulated.
I think "whataboutism" describes the situation well. See it a lot with the crypto crowd. Clearly a lot of cognitive dissonance going on there.
For example: UST [0] - anyone can mint UST by burning $1 worth of LUNA, or mint LUNA by burning $1 worth of UST. With a bit of deductive reasoning, it's pretty clear that in a "race for the exits" scenario, infinite LUNA will be minted, driving the price of UST to zero.
I really hope this argument is made in court.
I wish it was possible to replicate this visibility for other investments - the lengthy "disclosures" are no where near as useful as full visibilty into market mechanisms, and real time data on assets / liabilities.
We're going on 10+ years of failed cryptoscams now and people on the internet are still saying goofy stuff like this as if it has any meaning whatsoever in the real world or are in any way similar.
It’s hard for me to see how any levels of the stack have improved, and 100% am sure consumers and investors have become less discerning, not more over crypto’s near 15 year history.
Which is what I like most about that ecosystem, just do it, accept the consequences, rapidly iterate to something more resilient