The end of the story is that crypto people who stole these billions will do well, and the millions of people who lost their savings because of cryptos (including myself) will have to work twice to make it again.

Enslaved to work because of scams, such a dream world.

An explicit part of freedom is the freedom to make mistakes and suffer horribly for it. This isn't pretty and it is fair to hold it up as an inevitable part of the crypto world - but this can happen and crypto can still live up to its promise. Losing everything is an aspect of unregulated banking.

The argument that the crypto people can make (and I am still one) is that over a lifetime I feel I am certain to lose ~40% of my cash to government inflation (possibly more), people who are incompetent will get automatic handouts every so often to stay in charge & vast sums will go to fighting wars in places I don't want to fight wars.

I'd rather take a system where there is a 10% chance to lose everything and people can only create money according to pre-agreed rules. No stealth taxes, I want to know who is paying and how much. If that involves concentrating the risk it is worth it. Depending on how much you lost you might still come out ahead in such a world.

You’re crazy. Printing money funds socially useful things in government. Losing money to scammers is pure destruction. The idea that we should put up with massive amounts of fraud in order to destroy social safety nets is quite laughable.

Can you think of no other way to fund the government than printing money? Because if not, you aren't trying very hard.

You seem to be taking the position that printing money is the worst form of funding government and we should only do it if there are no other ways to do so. Printing money functions as a distorted but less bureaucratic and less invasive wealth tax. I don’t think it’s especially great but I think it functions reasonably as a piece of the puzzle. Without printing money we need to raise government revenues by close to 50% which is a rather drastic increase in taxation.

> You seem to be taking the position that printing money is the worst form of funding government and we should only do it if there are no other ways to do so.

I'd be perfectly eager to take that side of the debate if you want to argue about it, but that isn't really what the topic was in this thread. I was observing that subjecting yourself to a voluntary wealth tax could reasonably be a worse option than taking a risk of losing everything in one ugly crash.

That isn't a crazy position. It does require a tolerance of risk.

> Without printing money we need to raise government revenues by close to 50% which is a rather drastic increase in taxation.

People are already paying that tax though - the wealth that the government is moving around had to come from somewhere. We know the government isn't creating it otherwise there'd be no need for the money printing to happen. We just aren't sure who specifically is paying how much.

So it would be a drastic increase in observed tax, but probably not a big change to most people's lifestyles.

Losing because of calculated risk != losing because of fraud.

There's no system which benefits from frauds and scams.

You know, as someone who works in technology, I'm becoming more of a luddite as time passes and I'm starting to think the weirdo libertarian goldbugs might be onto something. But there is no silver (or gold) bullet - better to diversify your savings.

It lost 70% of its value before they lost it. (Or, they only lost 30% in the yield farm!)