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Re:The Cryptocurrency Crash Is Replaying 2008 as Absurdly as... by JumpCrisscross on Thursday May 12, 2022 @09:00PM (#31361970)
> How did we reach the kind of socioeconomic climate where people are actually willing to put their hard-earned money into such a thing?

They’re unregulated slot machines. Go and look at the Terra/Luna Twitter and Reddit. It’s filled with casual to addiction-level gambling tells. The responsible ones acknowledge they’re putting a few hundred in and will likely lose it but maybe it goes up. The less fortunate treat it like an investment.

Re:The Cryptocurrency Crash Is Replaying 2008 as Absurdly as... by aeternum on Thursday May 12, 2022 @11:16PM (#31362890)
The regulated companies didn't do much better: CVNA -91% PTON -91% RIVN -90% FVRR -90% HOOD -90% U -85% ROKU, DKNG, RBLX, the list goes on

.. and we call those investments.

Re:The Cryptocurrency Crash Is Replaying 2008 as Absurdly as... by andrew991116 on Thursday May 12, 2022 @11:53PM (#31363125)
Go ask a CFA and they’ll tell you that buying stocks in these companies is not investing, but speculating. Nothing in these company’s fundamentals warrants any investment. If you buy a stock based on the idea that someone will buy it at a higher price without considering it’s intrinsic value, it’s speculating.
Re:The Cryptocurrency Crash Is Replaying 2008 as Absurdly as... by chii on Thursday May 12, 2022 @11:58PM (#31363159)
it's fine to speculate, as long as the person doing the speculating knows what they're doing. The only problem happens when you speculate, but think you're investing.
Re:The Cryptocurrency Crash Is Replaying 2008 as Absurdly as... by yunohn on Friday May 13, 2022 @01:15AM (#31363603)
There’s a difference between equity in badly performing companies, and a Ponzi scheme where “stable” coins that promise a value of 1$ can depeg.
Re:The Cryptocurrency Crash Is Replaying 2008 as Absurdly as... by aeternum on Friday May 13, 2022 @06:41PM (#31373269)
There is a difference, the code for UST/LUNA was open-source and risks were out in the open.

In contrast, a company can hide wrongdoing and you can be left with something like Enron.

Long-term, I'd trust the algos more than the traditional system. Survival is a powerful selector, flawed ideas will be weeded out. Those that remain will be both resilient and transparent.

Re:The Cryptocurrency Crash Is Replaying 2008 as Absurdly as... by yunohn on Saturday May 14, 2022 @07:28AM (#31376908)
> I'd trust the algos more than the traditional system

LUNA being an algo stable helped with nothing. Do Kwon erratically bought BTC at a peak and during this attack, it was "sold" but is now /unaccounted/ for. Further, they minted more LUNA and increased circulating supply from 350k to 7T in a few days.

None of this is algorithmic, but purely (and messily) human-operated.

Re:The Cryptocurrency Crash Is Replaying 2008 as Absurdly as... by aeternum on Saturday May 14, 2022 @07:28PM (#31383726)
Agreed, there will always be scammers out there. Trust the code, not the human shills. Just as with a company, consider who has controlling interest. One advantage of crypto however is that the books are wide open to those willing to look.
Re:The Cryptocurrency Crash Is Replaying 2008 as Absurdly as... by yunohn on Sunday May 15, 2022 @09:19AM (#31387375)
No, my point is that an algorithm can only control very few things - most governance actions are manual and attacks can exploit anything.
Re:The Cryptocurrency Crash Is Replaying 2008 as Absurdly as... by aeternum on Sunday May 15, 2022 @02:52PM (#31389956)
Yes that's fair, but if you choose algos/chains with actual distributed governance then you at least the voting has to happen on-chain so you can sell if you don't agree with the way a vote is going.

You can sometimes do the same with companies but definitely not always.