One of the things I noticed in the whole Terra/Luna drama is that there were lots of people on Twitter who seemed downright confused. People who didn't know where their money went or why. People who had complicated arrangements where their holdings were in the wrong kind of thing to get the 2.0 airdrop who hardly seemed to understand what they were talking about well enough to ask coherent questions.

Those people make me sad. They got fleeced. Maybe they got lured in by the promise of easy money and should have known better, but that doesn't make it pleasant to watch lambs driven to the slaughter.

The other kind, the ringleaders and the ones gloating "HFSP" during more bullish times. That's comedic gold.

Crypto marketing is now so pervasive, particularly in online spaces, that a ton of people just assume it must not be a scam.

I mean there's a streamer I follow and generally like, but that interviewed Do Kwon on their stream, just a few weeks before it depegged. I wonder how many of their followers were the ones that lost the game of musical chairs. The halo effect is real.

And that's not even getting into the craven scumbags leveraging influencer marketing, like Stake.

HFSP = Have fun staying poor

These two things are related though.

The people with the hubris understand deep down that they are involved in a ponzi scheme, and the only way up and out is to herd the unsophisticated investor. Not that there's explicit malice here (though, sometimes it is), but there's the understanding that driving demand is what drives up the price.

There's a reason that so many fad "investments" follow this exact same path, time and time again.

> Hot take: It’s fine when it happens to extreme hubris with paper wealth. It is not fine when it was someone unsophisticated chasing the herd who lost a meager sum that was meaningful to them. Comedy vs tragedy.

I think this is overlooking why people are engaging in these types of investments to begin with: they're greedy speculators who got caught up in a get rich quick scheme. They don't know what this tech is, why it is or isn't useful, or how it works. They don't know what the investment risks are and don't make any attempt at mitigating risk. They don't seek expert assistance. Instead of doing basic research to make informed decisions, they see dollar signs and yolo with their life savings. I don't feel bad for them in the same way that I don't feel bad for people who fall for 419 scams. If you participate in get rich quick schemes that you don't understand, there is a high probability of getting owned. This exact same collapse in value happened only 5 years ago, how could people be caught flat footed twice?

That take is far from hot. Tragedy has two inputs: What happened, and who it happened to.

And comedy has two inputs: pain, and distance