So then they should stay out of the game. I totally disagree that we need a bunch of bullshit laws protecting people from poor decision making.
Demand side already has responsibility and correct incentives: the fools have been parted from their money. Done.
This goes for small things, like NFT ponzis, and big things, like turning housing into an asset class.
When has housing ever not been an asset class?
Real estate is and was the original asset class.
Within the western world, that has always been the primary basis of one’s wealth until fairly recently.
I think the issue is assuming people who get scammed are at fault for something, just because a more paranoid person would have avoided the scam.
Regulation will not stop me from selling a potato for $100. it will stop me from selling a regular potato for $100 while claiming it cures cancer.
Buying a potato for $100 would be dumb, and nothing stops me from doing it
Buying a cancer-curing potato for $100 is not dumb. Believing a potato can cure cancer because someone else is publicly selling it to me that way in full view of the entire world is not dumb. I would think "oh wow, something about this potato must be cancer-curing because surely this guy knows that if he scams me in front of the public then the public will hold him accountable."
So it is now time to hold people accountable
Basically, it's exactly that.
Now one can be informed but also choose to make stupid decisions. People do this all the time on penny stocks, options, etc... The SEC has no interest in trying to stop them, just making sure they know up from what they are getting into.
Other than that, lies and manipulation are part of the equation. It's a bad decision to blindly trust anyone or anything. You can't separate smelling bs from judgement.
The whole concept of an accredited investor is basically saving people from themselves.
The SEC has a pretty ill defined set of risks they are trying to protect people from. People will find ways to lose their money if they don't have a general "wait, do I have a clue what I'm doing here?" filter.
I agree with personal responsibility but not at the expense of communication.
Imagine if every single person who moved a package was required to open the package and confirm the contents. It may be the only way to accept personal responsibility for its contents, but it's dumb. I am telling you what the contents are and if I am lying to you then I need to be held accountable. Especially if the contents are dangerous and I told you they are safe.
If I write "i owe you a billion dollars for your 64 diamonds" on a minecraft sign you shouldn't be surprised if I don't hold up my end of that.
The more a community holds itself accountable without regulation, the less regulation the community needs. If people always avoided unregulated assets because of your logic - we wouldnt have any regulated markets today.
Non-scams are the norm where I come from and with the people I interact with. Maybe it is cultural. Some cultures held people accountable for their bullshit and some didnt... and now the expectations for responsibility are different. "you should expect to get scammed" vs "if you find a scammer we will deal with them"
>If I write "i owe you a billion dollars for your 64 diamonds" on a minecraft sign you shouldn't be surprised if I don't hold up my end of that.
If you take my 64 diamonds, deny me a billion dollars, and then refuse to give the 64 diamonds back.. that is theft. In minecraft, I would then proceed to remove your health bar, take what I want from you, pour lava buckets on your house, etc. And you should not be surprised by that.
Abusing a lack of regulation causes chaos, and hinders the ability of communities to grow stronger. Weak communities enable unnecessary suffering. There is an ethical responsibility to make an example out of people who manipulate communication to scam others. It is one of the few things nature allowed us to have to enable building communities in the first place.
If scamming is currently the norm, then it is currently hunting season.
I mentioned it to another, but have some humanity and empathy for those less "smart" than yourself.
You're still thinking of it as something people can learn, but psychology / history says otherwise.
This is why I say empathy is important. For you, it's obvious. For others, it's not.
In addition, there are other factors at play, like desperation (when you're living paycheck to paycheck, you _want_ to believe there's a way out).
Everyone has different experiences / situations to grapple with, and as a society we should try to help folks find the happy path and protect them. Especially so for those of us who recognize cons!
So I guess I wouldn't understand the "empathy goes both way" statement.
Your points are certainly valid. I don't think either way results in something perfect or even that good.
The "get rich quick" folks are doing basically the same thing but faster and sometimes with less sense. But hopefully with only a small portion of their savings.
Trusting such claims without proof is stupid/financial illiteracy/YOLO investing (pick your preferred term).
Pulling from the comment I was replying to:
> ... many poorer and financially illeterate people have been tricked ...
That's quite literally disavowing responsibility.
> ... but there is an extensive body of law intended to protect people from outright falsehoods
This is true and the law hasn't quite caught up to crypto scams but think about it this way: even if the scammers get prosecuted--possibly even go to jail--you're 99% likely never getting your money back. And even if you do it'll probably be after wasting years on the effort. Obviously there's a deterrence value to prosecuting scammers and I support that hpappening but you'll almost never get your money back.
> Maintaining a certain level of trust is a pool from which we can all draw. It has in fact been shown that growth in low trust economies is systematically lower than in high trust economies.
I 100% agree and this is something that libertarians and anarchists gloss over completely.
Unsure how you failed to read the emphasis on "themselves" in the comment you're replying to, and the line about protecting others.
Half of this thread believes we should protect people from themselves.
The other half believes people should have the freedom to screw themselves over.
Not sure there's much ground for compromise, given the contradictory nature of those positions.
> The other half believes people should have the freedom to screw themselves over.
Nailed it. It comes down to principles. Do you believe in personal freedom? Or do you prefer authoritarian governments?
If I buy edible stuff I trust that it won't poison me or kill me. If I drive a car I expect it respond to my commands and I expect other drivers to have a minimum amount of knowledge that they can actually assume and understand the risks of driving.
The protections that the SEC and other bodies expect in this area are quite reasonable if you understand that there is no such thing as "personal" freedom; your well-being and successes and failures tie into the rest of society at large. Maybe if you lose part of your savings that might be tolerable for all, but if in the process of making a bad investment you leave yourself and your family homeless, get into drug addiction, and create a large burden to those around you, it's hard to consider that to be a simple personal issue.
Look, if someone comes to my house claiming to be raising money for charity and I givethem money, the following statements can all be simultaneously true:
1. I should take responsibility for checking that they represent a genuine charity;
2. If they are a genuine charity, I should take responsibility for checking that most of my gift will go towards the recipients of the charity and not to operating the charity itself;
3. They should take responsibility for being truthful about who they represent and where the money is going.
Responsibility isn't a zero-sum game. We can encourage everyone to have more financial literacy and awareness of scams and frauds while simultaneously holding grifters responsible for their crimes.
I'm not taking either position here, I'm taking both positions. See also "the difference between advice for individuals and codes of conduct for communities."
Our personal advice is to protect yourself from fraud. Our society's code of conduct is, "don't commit fraud."
The point of prosecuting scammers is not restorative justice[0], but instead punative. You want the penalty for scamming people to be high enough that even the scammers that don't get caught move onto a different grift.
Whether or not punative justice works is very context-sensitive. It requires the crime itself to be something done because it makes money - opportunistic crimes or crimes of passion will not be deterred by high punishments[1]. However, I absolutely do buy the idea that scammers are highly-calculating thieves that can be deterred in this way. They operate highly organized criminal enterprises with their own internal and external security concerns, and respond highly to perceived risk of prosecution[2]. This is why they like to target old people, the marks are easier to scam and less likely to admit being scammed.
That's not to say that we should fall back upon the "personal responsibility" angle, either. It's easy enough to say that it only happens to the financially illiterate, or the elderly, or what have you. This is wrong; there are plenty of scammers out there just waiting to push whatever button you have that will make you send them money. The problem with pushing "personal responsibility" as an angle is that it's a victim-blaming narrative, and one that makes it easy to fancy yourself invulnerable. "I can't get scammed, because I took personal responsibility."
DO NOT DO THIS.
You will laugh at the people who bought into FOMOCoin or sent thousands of dollars to a refund scammer... only to click on, say, a fake FedEx tracking link you got e-mailed and wind up getting hit with some 0day malware that drains your bank account or encrypts your files in seconds. Personal responsibility will not save you from your own sense of invulnerability, because there is no level of responsibility one can take that will ensure that you never, ever get scammed. You can only ever make yourself a less desirable mark.
[0] i.e. putting the thing you stole back
[1] Related note: governments love to insist upon high punishments for crimes more often committed by people on the margins of society (e.g. poor/black/Mexican/some other power minority). At one point, we at least punished businesses the same way, but then Enron happened and the US decided killing an entire accounting firm just to prove a point was going too far.
[2] In one revealing case, Youtuber Mark Rober was able to shut down an entire tech support scammer group on Telegram by merely saying he had their dox[3] and was planning to drop them on a few law-enforcement agencies.
[3] 4chan slang for "personally-identifying information".
Terrible comparison.
FOMOCoin is not pretending to be something different than FOMOCoin. When somebody invests in a shitcoin, they know exactly what it is they are investing in.
When you click on a fake FedEx link, you believe you're clicking on a FedEx link. You've been deceived by blatant deception.
A better comparison to your FedEx example: Investor believes they're investing in FOMOCoin when in fact they are investing in SHITCoin or no coin at all. It was a trick.
I assure you, libertarians and anarchists, or at least the ones who have actually bothered to go beyond the surface, are not unaware of this. You're wielding those monikers as if anyone to bear them would be a fool by definition. It is clear low trust has adverse effects on growth. What is not clear is that unbounded rapid growth is a desirable state of affairs, or that an equilibrium is so important everyone must bow before a central authority/planner with a hand on a brake.
There is nuance your comment as written completely neglects.
Not as far off as you might think
But it’s unfalsifiable gibberish itself to believe our system is some pinnacle of human society
Many problems that plague states that lean into socialism can be traced to capitalists meddling in their affairs through international politics
More rules for thee not for me policy by nations of people who would meltdown over externalized forces dictating their way life. Hardly proof in a vacuum socialism is a sign of the end times when it’s held up apes who can’t communicate except by throwing poop
Your truth is rooted in the empowerment it provides you. No one else has an obligation to your figurative sense of power
Is it the casino foult that their customers loose money because the ambient is so inviting and screams wining?
Casinos are very strictly regulated and must post the exact rules and probability of winning for all their games. If the casino lies about the rules of the game or your chances of winning, then yes it is absolutely their fault and they will be held liable.
I'm pretty sure if I followed the Superbowl ads to crypto.com, I would fail to see these warnings.
Yes, for everyone deeply connected online, who has been following crypto for the last several years, of course we've talked about plenty of warnings many times. But the current marketing campaigns are not aimed at such people.
And yes you could be right it’s just my bubble. But it’s still sad that so many people fall for get rich quick scheme.
Clearly not. There's a pretty clear pattern where many (most?) cryptocurrency enthusiasts avert their eyes from anything except the most transient and limited downsides and are can be quite hostile to anyone who's bearish on cryptocurrency. It's got a strong "power of positive thinking" vibe.
Saying you can't believe people didn't know is just showing lack of empathy in how others form trust. Many of those people form trust by looking at a screen and seeing a nice website with nice logins and nice charts. They look at things with dollar signs and say, "that's a good number there". Others dig in and are curious about how things work. Some laugh when people complain about how much power proof-of-work takes and believe it is the eniventible conclusion to why we don't see aliens out there.
Don't be the wurst person. Be the best! See that all humans need our help from an understanding technology perspective. Know that software can be implemented to take away their choices, or give them more choices than they had before.
Are you suggesting that every Casino publishes an AI derived win rate for poker by law?
I still wouldn't call it perfect play because as soon as someone adopts a fixed strategy, the meta game shifts and it is no longer optimal.
If anything, the assumption is equal play, not perfect play
The meta idea is what I first thought. It’s hard to evaluate though. The ai does not adapt, but continues to beat pros, who are welcome to try and adapt.
I’m curious if there are some zany cheese strats against this kind of AI that work reliably but the answer may be no. The only really practical tool you have that could work is a crazy bluff, but I doubt that’s sustainable.
It doesn’t really matter if perfect play is considered though. Games should be rated assuming equal competence. It’s not misleading if in fact your turn out to be a worse player in a game of skill.
My point is that if the casinos have to post odds, the only odds on a poker table are flat (any deviations from 0 coming from skill differences) minus any rake (with maybe some slight variation if the button doesn't go down an even number of times).
The fact that we cannot define perfect play is irrelevant.
But there's always that separate question of whether it's a moral failing to set out to do what they did in the first place.
And then you dig a little deeper and you can ask, even if we grant for the sake of argument that it's a moral failing, is it the state's responsibility to do anything about that?
And then you can dig even deeper, maybe ease off on the deontological ethics a bit, and instead ask, "What's worse for society in the long run: this behavior, or whatever enforcement mechanisms it would take to curb it?" I'd argue that that's a much more edifying way to frame the question.
My morals don't personally draw that line but it's common enough that you can't dismiss it as preposterous.
Amen to this. Too many people in this thread are shouting from the mountain tops that they hate freedom.
If you can't handle climbing a mountain, you shouldn't do it. It's really this simple. If somebody takes on risk and gets hurt it is their own fault.
Since “customers losing money” is the entire business model and what casinos work to optimize, yes, obviously.
First, I have never actually seen any comments here disavowing themselves of responsibility. It is always aimed at protecting others and this is rooted in the obvious fact that a very large number of people are not (and we do not expect them to be) experts in investment. That assets can go up or down is one thing, and nobody can be protected from that, but there is an extensive body of law intended to protect people from outright falsehoods. So I can say, "you should invest in ConCoin, it's going to the moooon" and that maybe is allowed. I cannot say "we have pegged this to the value of the dollar if I know that I have taken no care whatsoever to even try and do that".
Second, refusing to set a floor on falsehoods using regulatory tools makes doing business much more expensive for people who are not scammers. This is a classic "market for lemons" effect. If I have a great idea that I would like to raise money for using, say, a utility token [n.b. not currently allowed] then if the last few such tokens have been exit scams, I will raise no money. Maintaining a certain level of trust is a pool from which we can all draw. It has in fact been shown that growth in low trust economies is systematically lower than in high trust economies.