>There's a lot of vulnerable people losing a lot of money on crypto

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.

Unfortunately, we've reached the point where it's not so simple anymore. Sure, there are assholes who deserve to lose their money, and I had the same attitude about some of the past crashes of BTC.

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.

In Bangkok, ads for crypto everything and NFT stuff are ubiquitous. One of the biggest campaigns says “Join the Crypto Revolution.” I’m sure a lot of people are buying into this lottery who really should not.

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…

Have you seen time square anytime over the last 2 years? its atrocious, worse than the ICO days

Nope, I’m going to NYC soon for the first time since 2000… Times Square is not on my bucket list but I will keep an eye out!

Better now than later. The longer this illusion takes to unravel, the more innocent people will get sucked in.

If you're stupid enough to buy into crypto because of big fancy ads with dork ass actors then I simply do not care if you lose your shirt.

May I ask - do you have first-hand experience of poverty? Do you understand what that means, and why these people may be more susceptible to make mistakes like this? Do you really believe that it is a good thing that they are getting scammed out of what little they have?

Yes, I grew up poor in a single parent household. Generic food brands at discount grocery stores, clothes from thrift stores, etc. I know what being poor is.

>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 doesn't need to be mutually exclusive. Did these people ultimately make the decision themselves? Yes. Do people know that those in poverty are prone to being nudged to make these sorts of "investments" because of the psychology behind scarcity? Also yes. I certainly have sympathy that they're preyed upon.

Do casinos prey on the vulnerable? Does the state lottery? That's not where I draw the line for "preyed upon." When I think "preyed upon", I think of a con artist who is orchestrating bad situation to make it very difficult to escape from. That bar is much higher than what I see with crypto.

Preyed upon can use a multitude of psychological biases as tools for the deception. Crypto does that, it masquerades as this new exciting thing that's making a lot of people a lot of money. As any gold rush would tell you, greed will push people to their psyche's limits, they will fall more easily for scams given that the return might be enormous, friends will betray friends to invite them over to their scam being run in the midst of this chaos of greed.

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.

Casinos absolutely do. There's a litany of stories about casinos enabling gambling addicts by offering them free rooms, drinks, food, flights, whatever it takes, to keep them coming back because they know these people have a psychological condition which they can profit off of. It's exploitation.

Active vs passive is where I draw the line. Passively being enticing is not the same as actively coercing someone to do something. If passively enticing is considered preying, then the number of things in the world that "prey upon" people goes up by orders of magnitude. Fast food restaurants are now preying upon people by posting delicious advertising. It becomes a meaningless term.

> I believe people have agency and they should be held accountable for their decisions.

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.

You said they deserve it, most people think it's good when people get what they deserve. You see my confusion.

You can believe that someone deserves negative outcomes that are the direct consequences of their bad decisions, but also think that neither their decisions nor the consequences are good.

> I feel absolutely no sympathy

Is there a question in there?

I feel for the poor, or middleclass, person who is losing on crypto.

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.

There's an old joke - "When you owe the bank $1M and can't pay it's your problem, but when you owe them $1G it's theirs." (Like I said it's an old joke ;)

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.

I feel like you have the quote backwards

and also need to update the amounts

Because its still a very relevant and not old joke that is told with updated amounts

The quote is the right way around: if you owe a million dollars ($1M) and can't pay, they'll foreclose your house and other assets and recover some of their money - it's entirely your problem.

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.

They may have thought G meant thousand. That’s not what I thought but it’s the only number that I could think of. Didn’t think it could mean a billion.

G is the SI prefix for "Giga", meaning 10^9. So, 1Gm is the SI representation of "1 giga meter = 1 billion meters", for example. It's most commonly used in computing, e.g. in 1GHz = 1 billion Hertz. You may have also seen it in power output numbers, such as saying that some power plant produces 1GWh annually (1 giga watt-hours = 1 billion watt-hours).

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.

Sure, but when people talk about money, a G is usually a thousand (not talking about financial terms, just common usage)

aka "I just lost 3 G's on UST"

When's the last time you interacted with a human? $1G = ? Or $1000 at best.

Giga dollars? Get out more dude.

This was a fairer take when there weren't elected officials and sports stars hyping crypto.

The immediate effect is that money is transferred from people who are bad at predicting the future to people who are good at predicting the future. Not in every case, of course, but in aggregate. This is probably good for society, as it puts more capital in the hands of people who will invest in things that succeed rather than things that fail.

"This is probably good for society, as it puts more capital in the hands of people who will invest in things that succeed"

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.

It’s of course very complicated, but the hypothesis is not implausible. A recent example is Twitter. Musk spent a ton of money to buy it, which will probably improve the service, while Musk himself doesn’t gain much physical resources in the exchange. (If he succeeds in fixing Twitter up, he would get a status boost, but that is counterbalanced by the deboost he’d get if he fails.)

We can stay basic. If wealth inequality and the benefits people like Musk get over others isn’t an enormous problem in and of itself. it breaks any data or evidence based notions of “people who are good at betting on the future” and so on. The powerful are the ones who influence the future the most. Protected more, etc.

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.

> The immediate effect is that money is transferred from people who are bad at predicting the future to people who are good at predicting the future

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.

> The immediate effect is that money is transferred from people who are bad at predicting the future to people who are good at predicting the future.

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

“This is probably good for society, as it puts more capital in the hands of people who will invest in things that succeed rather than things that fail.”

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.

That's incredibly naive.

Economic natural selection?

Who is on the other side of transaction? Isn’t it some other [equivalently vulnerable if things don’t go their way] people?