> If you've been honestly working on the assumption that it is, then you deserve to lose your (real) money to some crypto VCs on an island somewhere.
The sad reality is that many poorer and financially illeterate people have been tricked by VCs and other grifters into this with billions of dollars spent in advertising. So, no, they don't deserve to lose their money to these assholes. These assholes need to be prosecuted, fined and put to jail if necessary.
I actually hate people disavowing themselves of responsibility here. While there is definitely some shady stuff in Crypto (particularly NFTs, which seem to be 99% scams), there's a certain level of personal responsibility required here.
People saw the meteoric rise of Bitcoin and got a serious case of FOMO. Everyone wanted to be on the next Bitcoin. This, ultimately, is the American Dream: to get rich by doing nothing other than getting lucky and being able to say how smart you are. Not by creating any kind of value.
People should be honest and admit (at least to themselves) that they didn't understand what they were investing in let alone believe in it fundamentally. They just wanted to get rich.
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.
It's amazing the gymnastics people will do to shift responsibility off the supply side and onto the demand side. No, lying should not be rewarded. Ponzi schemes should not be rewarded. Currently, they are. Yes, we need more responsibility -- on the supply side.
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.
I don't think saying people need to take responsibility for their actions removes blame from the supply side. I think the underlying point trying to be made here is that both are at fault. I mean, with crypto, you are the supply side the moment you buy in, and are just as complicit in the Ponzi scheme as the guy you bought from. Being more ignorant than the other players buys very little sympathy from me when you're both playing the same game with the same information available to you.
That's not what the post you replied to said at all and you are being intentionally obtuse. There is a reason the SEC exists. It's not to keep people from making bad decisions.
Well, it sort of is. The rules about not lying to investors, having accurate financial statements, and so on, are to help them avoid making bad investment decisions. The "accredited investor" limitations are supposed to make it harder for unsophisticated investors to lose their money.
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 no, it's not. The SEC is there to protect investors from malicious actors to allow them to make informed decisions not based on lies & manipulation.
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.
Non accredited investors aren't allowed to invest in many things where the seller of securities is telling the truth. Most startups in the US under most scenarios cannot go around pitching non accredited investors.
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.
Why are they gatekeeping? To protect 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.
this is about as logical as saying "just because we signed a contract doesnt mean I need to uphold my end of the contract. you should have known I wasnt going to be able to fulfill my end of our agreement"
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.
Yes but the thing is that you know that this "asset class" is unregulated - in fact it's one of its strongest selling points and one of the traits people tout as a benefit - it should be abundantly clear that "non-scams" are the exception not the norm.
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.
Regulation has almost nothing to do with it. Regulation is a means to make accountability scalable. you could write a never ending list of possible regulations, but the ones we settle on are the ones we need due to the ways people end up abusing a lack of regulation. It does not absolve the abusers of accountability.
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.
Regulation or lack of it doesn't fundamentally change contract law. So, it's not the same thing. People who say financial markets shouldn't be regulated are not saying you shouldn't be able to litigate.
We need laws protecting people for malicious actors with significant funding who target people that lack knowledge on deeply technical topics like investing.
I get reminded of the crypto.com commercial with Matt Damon that pretends as though buying Bitcoin is some grand adventure for those brave enough and looking to prove their masculinity.
We might not. People could learn from the long history of people being conned. I know zero about cars - if a guy knocks at my door tomorrow telling me I can sign a contract and get a brand new porsche delivered next month for an upfront cost of $10k, my lack of car knowledge isn't a problem. It's a no.
The empathy goes both ways. Many people who oppose regulation like this don't oppose it because they are happy for "dumb people" to lose money. They truly believe that there is so much regulation these days that people aren't faced with conmen often enough to wise up to it. A person offering you "product insurance" at the checkout is conning you. The car dealer is trying to con you. Anyone suggesting you can double your money fast is conning you. If you are a woman, there is a decent chance the random guy buying you a drink is just trying to bed you. It's useful to come across enough folks trying to con you so you realize it's a thing. Then when the guy proposing some complex financial proposition knocks at the door, you don't need to know anything about finance to know there is a good chance it's a con.
That's not empathy though. The thing is, a lot of folks will get conned over and over, especially as the times change and the cons evolve.
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.
You also didn’t mention his idiotic statement of equating the “American Dream” to getting lucky and getting rich when in fact the American dream is about having the opportunity to work hard, buy a home and have a decent life for you and your family.
They are not that different. The "exit plan" for the American dream is retirement and trying to save a lot of money for retirement is perfectly normal. It's very sound, conventional, boring financial advice to save and invest for retirement.
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.
There is room for many versions of the American dream, America being a big place and all. America has a rich history of both hard-working middle class aspiration and con-artistry and get rich quick schemes. They are both pretty resounding cultural themes here.
Unfortunately it's not an idiotic statement. Look at all the people playing the lottery and buying crypto. It does appear to be the true american dream.
> First, I have never actually seen any comments here disavowing themselves of responsibility.
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.
No, half of this thread believes we should protect people from predators. The other half feels that people who can't recognize predators are natural and deserving prey.
I want protection from myself because society is impossibly complex for a single mind to understand.
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."
> even if the scammers get prosecuted--possibly even go to jail--you're 99% likely never getting your money back
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".
> 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.
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 100% agree and this is something that libertarians and anarchists gloss over completely.
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.
It’s true upending our system would be the death of it
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
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 failed to see any of these warnings you're talking about in any of the Superbowl ads.
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.
> Yes and everyone warned everyone investing in crypto that it could go from hero to zero instantly. I cant believe anyone didnt know this risk.
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.
There's a slight problem in your use of "everyone". You, personally, don't know or have sampled everyone. You are using it as a indication that "people warned" and "people should know", given people warned other people.
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.
It should be pointed out that casinos are only required to post odds for perfect play in games that have skill (e.g. poker, blackjack). Therefore, your poker odds would be based on the rake.
Black Jack is playing against the house and you can calculate perfect play. Poker is played against peers and perfect play does not exist. I think poker is a lot closer to speculating on crypto or stocks. Companies can disclose their transaction fees but it is impossible to calculate your expected return on investment. This is why there's almost always terms of service or disclosure to that extent
The best poker ai, as far as I’m aware based on things shown on hn, don’t consider past opponent behavior when making decisions. It’s effectively just a lookup table of hands and bets. Not perfect play but generally better than humans.
Perfect play, by definition, evens out. If everyone plays perfectly, then the ev should be zero (modified by position around the table). So it should balance to zero if everyone plays an equal number of hands from every position. The payoff would be adjusted by the rake.
To your question above, the answer is better than all levels.
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.
Perfect play would take into account the meta game as well.
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.
That word "fault" is doing a lot of work. Strictly speaking, no, that bit isn't a fault, it's a great success. They did exactly what they set out to do.
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.
It's a relatively mainstream opinion that yes they are. Casinos are not allowed in some places, many individuals who could choose otherwise explicitly choose not to work for companies involved in gambling.
My morals don't personally draw that line but it's common enough that you can't dismiss it as preposterous.
> I actually hate people disavowing themselves of responsibility here.
I believe that everyone should do their own research etc but there's a reason there are laws against fraud. There are a lot of people who would get taken advantage of by the unscrupulous if we just decided that it's all about personal responsibility. Yes people should not have the expectation that they will get rich quick but there is also no reason to allow them to be blatantly ripped off either.
If tether haven't maintained the level of reserves they need to maintain the peg (and honestly I can't see how the possibly could have adequate reserves) then it seems a pretty straightforward case of fraud.
> and honestly I can't see how the possibly could have adequate reserves
Not even close, even now. And the earlier stuff was almost insulting. Like the claim in 2019 that they were depositing $3.5 BILLION, per WEEK, into a bank, a deposit rate that would exceed AT&T, Samsung, Alphabet (Google).
Hah. No. The bank "deputy CEO" (who was 33) in an interview noted that the Bahamas had two banking licenses. But couldn't name them. And in any case, wasn't sure which his bank had, but he knew they had one of them. "And possibly the other".
The American dream is to make it through hard work, what you are referring to is simple greed and laziness and it’s been around since humanity attained consciousness.
> Now that's the actual con, or at least a pipe dream. Hard work is never enough.
This seems like a bad faith, intentional misunderstanding of the concept of hard work. You're right, mindless hard work (with no proactive consideration for your own life trajectory) is not enough to "make it". If you take the first minimum wage job you find and you work hard at that job for 40 years, you're not going to make it. That doesn't invalidate the American Dream. The American Dream isn't "if you work hard, the American Dream fairy will appear and present you with a house, a car and a white picket fence", it's "if you work hard at making it, you can quite easily make it". This presupposes that a given worker will take responsibility for their ability to earn, and be willing to course correct if they are not on a good path toward "making it".
> Luck plays a huge factor but few who get lucky, and then rich, will ever admit to that part.
Nonsense. The goal of the American Dream was never to be Jeff Bezos. It was to live a comfortable life. In that sense, the American Dream is being realized by the vast majority of Americans every day. The median income of a middle-class household in this country is 78K,[0] which puts them in the ~94th percentile in global income.[1]
The Pew Research article you are quoting show a considerably shrinking middle class over the past decades with a stagnating income: „Median income of the
middle class in 2016 is
about the same as in
2000“.
I admit it. Many of my peers do. Luck is fickle and hard quantify. Effort and decision making less so. It is at least obvious why people have such a bias.
This is propaganda based on a mix of the Protestant work ethic and stoicism in an effort to keep the populace compliant and malleable. This is why political parties are constantly in the business of creating wedge issues to distract people so they don't figure out their lot in life is determined by their material conditions.
Which is itself propaganda from other religious sects of note who got so fast and loose with doctrine they allowed salvation to become pay-to-win (indulgences), and corruption to become so endemic, even members of the faith started nailing protests to doors, or schisming due to overreach by the theocratic edifice.
If uou're going to make a historical argument, please follow through.
From wikipedia [0]: "The American Dream is a national ethos of the United States, the set of ideals (democracy, rights, liberty, opportunity and equality) in which freedom includes the opportunity for prosperity and success, as well as an upward social mobility for the family and children, achieved through hard work in a society with few barriers."
I suppose I'm wondering if the definition of "hard work" has shifted. In the '50s and '60s was "hard work" like 60 hour weeks and "hustle economy" type of stuff? or was it just "doing a good job" 40 hours a week?
I think to some extent it's always depended on who you talked to, but "hustle culture" as we know it today definitely wasn't part of the ideal of the American Dream at any point before the '90s, at the very earliest.
The Steinbeck that your are (mis)quoting is from the 30's.
Misquote because Steinbeck was talking about how the majority of the ""socialists"" at the time were "most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?'"
So the feeling of entitlement is much older and across political lines.
I think thats another facet of the dream. The theoretical starting point of the American dream is probably the immigrant who comes to the country and has nothing. So that would be an achievement compared to that starting point as well.
This is how almost every con works. The people who fall for advance check scams think they’re getting easy money and the greed clouds their judgement. It doesn’t absolve the perpetrator.
I'm honestly surprised at how many people have this overly simplistic binary view of the world.
If I openly leave a gold bar in the back seat of my car and don't lock the car and then park it in a major city it will get stolen. Is the thief to blame here? Absolutely. Could I have done more to protect my valuables? Absolutely.
So with any scam, you can say the scammers are bad (which is true) but the scammed could also have done more to protect themselves. Both of these things can be true at the same time.
I've seen no better example of this than Russia's unjustifiable invasion of Ukraine. Is Russia the bad guy? Absolutely. Have the US (through NATO, primarily) and Ukraine made mistakes along the way too? Absolutely. Does this make the US and Ukraine responsible for the invasion? No.
Please, for your own sake, get out of this binary thinking.
Disavowing responsibility from the scammed actually does people a huge disservice. It's not victim-blaming. It's a teachable moment.
I didn’t mean to deny that the victims don’t bear any responsibility, just that, because time is zero sum, time spent on an issue tends to be better spent in a “binary” fashion (fluctuating through time though, so that integrated it is non-binary).
E.g. instead of having a never-ending discussion on how exactly a perpetrator/victim share blame, we can shelve the discussion on what share of the blame goes towards the victim, and instead focus on how to best deal with the scammers.
If we get trapped in a never-ending discussion on blame sharing, we never get to deal with the scammers through action (this is what I meant by muddying the waters, it’s an involuntary and voluntary phenomenon that can delay action indefinitely).
Victim blaming is wrong, I agree with that completely. But a lot of 'coins' are just paper dreams, and live somewhere on the spectrum of the Nigerian Prince scam. (that, I realize, being the extreme example) I have a hard time feeling sorry for someone that wires $10,000 to a foreign country so that a wire transfer of $20,000,000 can be processed to their bank.
People just don't go around handing out money. Early Bitcoin miners went through the effort of setting up mining rigs (which is no longer practical for an individual). They actually did something, and had some skin in the game. Did they hang on to those early coins until this year? I have no idea.
But people that just buy into coins because OMG its the next big thing, are purely speculating, which is nothing more than a form of gambling. Do I feel sorry for people with a gambling addiction? Yes I do, and I know someone that 'retired early (35)' to play poker professionally.
To much of the coin and NFT space to me smells of a combination of pyramid scheme and MLM. By its very nature it rejects regulation, it is decentralized. Which is one of the reasons, to me, that it is suspect.
Playing poker professionally is not a retirement, and no one really playing poker for income is addicted, I can assure you (at least not for long).
These days, playing live is the only way to get an edge (correct me? Been a while), and that would be a boring, nauseating job, right around the pay scale and routine of “club bouncer” if you’re good.
I played poker for my sole income for three years after college, traveling the world playing online. It was occasionally a lot of fun, morally painful, so stressful and not very well compensated. I would be rich now if I’d gone straight into programming instead of spending my 20s “avoiding work” by working my ass off to monetize my hobbies.
While I’m sure there are live players that earn more than club bouncer levels of money, the only way to do this that I know of is to have access to really big games on an almost daily basis.
At peak covid, all the games dried up and even the pros went slumming. I personally saw Phil Ivey at a 2/5 game (!) at the Aria on a random Monday because that was the only game going and he hadn’t had any live practice in quite a long time.
> But a lot of 'coins' are just paper dreams, and live somewhere on the spectrum of the Nigerian Prince scam.
If social was full of people showing off all the stiff they bought with the Nigerian Prince’s money maybe. Seems more like a lottery to me, but even that feels like a poor analogy.
The difference is crypto has made people wealthy, probably with a large luck component and others want in on that.
Grifters should be punished for their scams, and it's also acceptable for "investors" on these scams to lose their money i think (that's a hard punishment already; no need for anything extra). Thinking of it the other way around: as a society, it wouldn't be nice to bail out or compensate these "investments", as doing so would encourage people to keep doing throwing their money on things they don't have any clue about and expect to be compensated if it turns out bad.
One of the ways that a power structure discriminates against low-IQ people (born that way) is by ignoring their suffering because ‘they deserve it for being stupid/easily taken advantage of.’
Insurance agencies are wrestling with this because as society ages, there are known drops in IQ the make the elderly more susceptible to scams, because low-IQ behavior correlates with high-trust behavior (because they have to rely more on others for survival). Some agencies are offering scam insurance for the elderly.
As we age, the likelihood that we are scammed approaches 1. Scammers take advantage of this situation and society would be better off if scammers were taken care of by the state.
Matt Levine seems pretty popular here and his dumb investment certificate idea, while ofc a joke, expresses the sentiment that maybe it's not possible to regulate everything but some investments (eg nfts) are transparently dumb and if you lose your money on them it's annoying to complain like "how was I, a simple dentist, supposed to know I'd get swindled?!":
1. Anyone can invest all they want in a diversified portfolio of approved investments (non-penny-stock public companies, mutual funds and exchange-traded funds with modest fees, insured bank accounts, etc.).
2. Anyone can also invest in any other dumb investment; you just have to go to the local office of the SEC and get a Certificate of Dumb Investment. (Anyone who sells dumb non-approved investments without requiring this certificate from buyers goes to prison.)
3. To get that certificate, you sign a form. The form is one page with a lot of white space. It says in very large letters: “I want to buy a dumb investment. I understand that the person selling it will almost certainly steal all my money, and that I would almost certainly be better off just buying index funds, but I want to do this dumb thing anyway. I agree that I will never, under any circumstances, complain to anyone when this investment inevitably goes wrong. I understand that violating this agreement is a felony.”
4. Then you take the form to an SEC employee, who slaps you hard across the face and says “really???” And if you reply “yes really” then she gives you the certificate.
5. Then you bring the certificate to the seller and you can buy whatever dumb thing he is selling.
6. If an article ever appears in the Wall Street Journal in which you (or your lawyer) are quoted saying that you were just a simple dentist, didn’t understand what you were buying and were swindled by the seller’s flashy sales pitch, then you go to prison.
"Normal" investing is complicated, and stacked against regular people. Now we're asking people to understand blockchain and cryptography as well as investing. Yet it's sold as democratisation of investing. I mean, seriously.
> "Normal" investing is complicated, and stacked against regular people.
You buy a low-cost index fund (either S&P 500 or total market (Russell 3000, Wilshire 5000)), and depending on your risk tolerance, a bond fund as well.
You can have global diversification with one ETF or mutual fund:
You just delegated the choice of winners and losers in your economy to an elite cadre of individuals, completely disconnected from boots on the ground life problems.
Symptoms of your decision may include:
Tendency to centralize.
Preferrntial treatment of large incumbents for ease of implementing regulations.
Higher barriers to entry over time.
Decreased feedback loop with regards to reigning in egregious business malbehavior.
Index investing does nothing but perpetuate a small handful of winners, and divests the majority of people from their most important role of being capital allocators.
Part of it, is being bad at it at some point. That's how you get better and increase overall world awareness.
> People saw the meteoric rise of Bitcoin and got a serious case of FOMO.
Something about the chance of life changing returns in intoxicating. Personally I'd be thrilled with a 20% annual return in "normal" investments, but somehow crypto doubling or even tripling in a year is boring because we're all after the 100x+ return. Maybe it's because psychologically it just feels like more of a lottery ticket.
I have a relative in wealth management and went through a period where clients asked about bitcoin frequently. He told me his rule of thumb is: "If you've heard of it, it's probably already too late."
I assume that based on this, you oppose the legal consequences that Elizabeth Smart is facing, and think it's 100% the investor's fault they wrote checks to Theranos.
>People should be honest and admit (at least to themselves) that they didn't understand what they were investing in let alone believe in it fundamentally
But only bitcoin bidders need to admit that they love lording their “smarts” over others? Seems like you are doing it yourself.
Totally agree. We have a regulated financial system. Jumping out and then asking for a public bailout is ridiculous. Those injured should absolutely sue the promoters who encouraged them. But I am strongly against engaging public resources to prosecute.
I think you're overestimating humanity here. There's a reason gambling is typically so controlled / limited. Have some empathy for those who might be a little less "smart" than yourself, ultimately we're just fancy animals.
Our society has made a different call. We have decided that without being restricted investment cons will cause massive harm to society. We decided this because it happened over and over and over and over again.
I guess it's like the 99.999% label effectiveness of hand sanitizer. We all know it's really 100%, but the best we can say is "we see no evidence of one that's not a scam".
Or perhaps every single one has a core of 1% sincere intention at its heart. After all, you can rather confidently say you have a receipt.
>This, ultimately, is the American Dream: to get rich by doing nothing other than getting lucky and being able to say how smart you are. Not by creating any kind of value.
Holy projection batman. I agree that much of crypto is rampant speculation, but pretty much all of the legitimate uses of crypto is done in stable coins. People don't have money sitting in tether because they wanted to get rich.
Not least because stablecoins were meant to be the place to park your money without being subject to the huge +/- swings or risks of almost any other asset. If people are suffering, it’s because they believed the operators of stablecoins when they said funds were in the safest place going. And now look at today: Tether says it is honouring all redemptions as usual — which, as usual, means only redemptions over $100K are honoured. The small fish can go cry, apparently, or try an exchange at the market price whose detachment from $1 is the whole reason for a run on Tether. Take the concept of FDIC insured bank deposits, turn it completely on its head, and that’s what this policy is.
> many poorer and financially illeterate people have been tricked
I’m sorry, but it’s worse than that. Whenever I’ve said “Tether is a scam waiting to blow up, and the evidence is obvious”, none of my smart peers had anything to say, either.
The BTC price is hells high by this fake USD money printer.
The religious (for a lack of better word as it is a religion to believe that cryptocurrencies are inherently better than other assets (outside NFTs) but they do believe that if you read twitter/reddit) people are hodling but all the 'saner' people I know went out in december. There was enough writing on the wall to know that 2022 would not be a good year for some assets (and it's just beginning). Only the real believers are still holding and it's a drama; a friend of mine went 'all in' on Terra and is staunchly 'hodling' because he believes it's the greatest project in finance since humans invented currencies. He has 30+ years work of money in it which is his families money (his brothers and parents gave him their savings to 'invest') etc. But he is not depressed; he firmly believes it is coming back as it's decentralized. There are many of him. MANY.
I mean there are also other stories; an acquaintance (he invested in my business with cash in 2018) got out end 2017 with around 60m$ in cash; he was a waiter making minimum wage who borrowed 50k$ from his family who remortgaged their house (not rich people but at least house owners) in 2014 and gambled his families future and accidentally (he was a real believer, but the 'business scams' around blockchain made him a non-believer) gambled right. It's a weird casino.
Maybe it is my circle (but I read it on reddit all the time the past 10 years though) but the financially illiterate seem far more likely to 'invest' with borrowed money, do not diversify and put 'everything on red'/all-in kind of thing and then don't know what to do when that goes wrong (lie to their spouses and kids about it). An senior sales guy of my (then) company invested ALL his money and borrowed more (totaling many millions) in a Dutch web stock (worldonline) and lost everything; his wife, son, house, cars; basically life.
My issue is that these people are smart, but not "I work at Blackrock as a day-trader smart". In Finance, there are laws against a lot of the easy wins, and now the professionals are entering the Crypto space they're going to run circles around the amateurs.
As in, it's easy to be the best in your local club, but it's a real wake-up call when you try out at a regional.
I'm not sure about that--or at least, the reality seems more complicated.
Terra certainly has an element of complicated financial dynamics behind it such that people who know a little--but not a not--may think it's the greatest idea since sliced bread, and get eaten by the professionals. I agree with you there.
But a lot of the crypto ecosystem seems to be much more mundane than that. As far as I can tell, there isn't any financial wizardry behind NFTs; they're just a sort of weird social phenomena (is it a game? is it a market? is it sports betting?) where you can buy a thing at a price that has no basis in reality except insofar as someone else might buy the thing at an even higher price. I think that many--most?--people "investing" in NFTs realize and embrace the greater fool theory.
But, importantly, it seems to me that a random yahoo might actually be better able to predict when the gravy train will stop than an elite trader. So in some sense, it's quite egalitarian (if also stupid)!
The financial wizardry behind NFT's is the wash trading. A lot of average people looking to get into NFT's simply don't understand that many of the 'success stories' they see of people making big money on NFT's are just wash trading trying to lure in the marks.
I mean, yeah, but wash trades aren't wizardry. Like, you go on eBay, it's always possible sale prices are someone selling to themselves and just paying the transaction fee. I hope/assume that's fairly widely understood.
The Luna "automatic peg" stuff is genuinely clever, but with genuinely surprising implications (at least for me, a casual observer/layperson) for dynamic instability.
Yeah I mean wash trading isn't that sophisticated, but it is wizardry to the people gettinf fooled by it. The algorithmic peg and other stablecoin shenanigans aren't necessarily that sophisticated either, and yet...
Still, 'smart' is usually not buying at ATH (even a local high) or not having a stop loss if you don't have time to stare at your screen all day and night. I don't know how many people 'woke up' to a 90% dump in terra and were too late to act; that's not smart and you don't have to be blackrock smart for that. This is not exclusive to cryptocurrencies of course; I don't have any, but I do trade other more traditional assets as total amateur.
But yes, I agree with you; they will be taking most the winnings because it's their job. That doesn't mean you cannot make money as an amateur. The real naive people can just send their money directly to the Blackrock bank account; saves a lot of stress.
I completely get your point, and you're correct, but there are layers to it, especially in crypto. And I guess that means layers of fishy stuff.
If your luna stop loss was done in UST, you are also effed, even if you took the precaution of stop loss, because the "stable"coin dipped. Not saying that this was "safe" to do, but there are surely people out there who did this and got screwed, and I guess that would feel terrible.
Absolutely; there are proud whales saying they lost millions and laughing (not sure why) but I am very sorry for the people who lost a few k$ and now are in deep shit because they didn’t understand what they were doing. The ‘how can this be; I will get my money back right?’ type of thing.
You're perfectly describing the sunk cost fallacy. The naifs who overcomitted on a "guaranteed win" investment can't walk back from it because that would mean giving up on a lot (e.g. 50% or more) of their investments, which often as you said isn't money they really had "lying around" (even your retirement fund isn't really disposable once you actually need to retire on it). The failure to achieve the promised growth paradoxically converts them into true believers because they see no way out without admitting they ruined their lives.
A lot of crypto grifters (and even mainstream celebrities) have been actively encouraging these people to sink literally all their capital in coins or NFTs with unrealistic promises and FOMO. They did this because they knew it would work and drive up prices enough for them to be able to cash out by dumping their worthless void money on the unwashed masses.
I think the prevalence and scale of criminal activity through crypto was under appreciated in the mainstream.
Let’s be real, much of the market activity is money laundering, ransomware and other payoffs, and Chinese people bypassing currency controls.
It’s no coincidence that China cracked down on miners and the price dropped a few months ago. It’s plain as day now that with Russia being removed from the internet and most markets, buy-side demand for crypto is sinking.
Indeed. I also have no doubt some early adopters got real rich. But they were the top of the pyramid. The merry go round plays as long people keep joining. Looks like we hit some sort of limit at the bottom of the pyramid.
Now they might find some new investors, but it will only delay the inevitable.
I think religion is exactly the right word. Humans build story's and meaning around otherwise innocuous things. And that didn't just stop with the rise of the secular world.
Yeah, this is the dark side of all this "diamond hands", "to the moon" bullshit. A handful of winners, a majority of losers, and some people going complete bankrupt because they are foolish.
Well, if your 'advisors' (usually indicated in reddit/twitter as people 'much smarter than me' by which they mean devs who work on blockchain projects and 'financial gurus' who post a lot of charts with arrows pointing 'in the right direction' (which wasn't hard the past few years as it was generally just 'up' unless Musk posted something)) say it's a sure thing and suddenly you are at the start of a recession with massive inflation and your entire savings wiped out... It is hard to blame them; saying 'it is only money' works when you have money. Luckily there is quite a bit of help and helplines to talk them down.
I have a hard time feeling sorry for these people. Sure, they may have gambling tendencies, but at some point, one must reckon with the consequences of their actions, and reap what they sow.
Not to mention that many of these supposed victims are arrogant assholes, whom I and others tried to warn in every possible way and we only got mockery and disdain in return.
It doesn't mean many of them are like that because you have dealt with some arrogant assholes. You dealt with a vocal group and that is usually a tiny minority.
> The religious (for a lack of better word as it is a religion to believe that cryptocurrencies are inherently better than other assets (outside NFTs) ...
Outside NFTs? C'mon. Signed JSON blobs with a URL you pay for? All equally worthless.
That's not what I meant; I meant 'they' believe cryptocurrencies are better than other assets (outside NFTs) as in; they ALSO believe those are better than other assets. I wasn't saying NFTs are better; I was actually saying (well meant to say) they are equally superior in 'their' belief.
I believe they're saying that cryptocurrencies aren't inherently better than most assets - but NFTs are such inane garbage that you could argue cryptocurrencies are 'better'. Very much damning with faint praise.
Well now you're getting into what 'worth' means. As a kid I had a bunch of baseball cards that Becketts said were 'worth' $X. I took them to the local shop and they would only pay some value < $X. "But it says right here they are worth $X!" My grandfather was smiling and said you learned a valuable lesson that something is only worth whatever someone will pay.
NFTs are a bit like celebrity signatures. They are worth what someone will pay. If a celebrity verifiably digitally signs something and they only do it once, that is worth something to some people as a collectible. It is not worthless as long as someone is willing to pay something. And, like other collectibles the market can have huge swings and sometimes never recover (like all my baseball cards lol).
IMO most NFTS have a significant amount of flaws that weaken any potential value as a collectible, at least in the current popular implementations.
For one thing, they're by definition tied to a shitty blockchain and you have to deal with any potential bullshit affecting said chain including fees, slow transactions, potential scams, etc. For another, they're not really an object, just a bit of json pointing likely pointing towards a flat image hosted somewhere else (that anyone can freely access via the link). Sure, they enjoyed a brief popularity and lots of media attention, but already the NFT marketplace seems to be waking up to the reality that most of these "investments" will never turn a profit. And that's the real issue I see: most of these purchases were not someone who wanted to collect something, they were made by someone who wanted to invest in an asset that would later be worth something. And so the actual value as a "collectible" has been inflated and is due for a huge crash, which is already happening.
I know some are meant to carry benefits towards the holder, like exclusive access to X service or community... that is a small minority currently though, and many of those benefits are shaping up to be just empty promises, and even then an NFT seems like a poor vehicle for systems that could have been done better without any "decentralization" or crypto integration.
You are aware that nft are a link stored in a database and not the picture or whatever. The picture is on a server and can be deleted.. btw did happen en mass.
They have some value relative to the system they are found in. Consider some fungible tokens which still have value. Say gold coins in online video games. These have some value, even when trading them is against ToS and will get you banned. Their value is relative to their usefulness in the game, and as long as the game in enjoyable, people will assign them so value relative to the enjoyment they can extract. Nothing about the game must be engaged in. There are people who live their entire lives without ever touching an MMO, much less a specific one like WoW or Runescape. Yet fungible tokens still have some value within those ecosystems.
Mobile games have taken this much further, with people buying fungible tokens for hundreds of dollars for the enjoyment they get, though this has become questionable as more of the game is engineered towards feeding an addiction which will cause players to pay more for their enjoyment.
The issue is the approximate cap on this value. Even by the inflated standards of whales paying for mobile games, we still see a cap of value around $1,000s for a month of value. Thus an NFT that provides value in a similar ecosystem should be able to max out at a similar evaluation, assuming it is tied to a system with as much investment in the fun as the big hit mobile games (which is often quite a lot of investment compared to what any single player, even whale, is spending).
We see NFTs going for much more than that in systems that have far less investment in being enjoyable, which I think can be contributed to people investing to get rich by selling at an even higher price.
In conclusion, I think that NFTs can have some inherent value, as much as fungible tokens in a game can, but that such value would be far below where the market currently is. Someone should only spend as much on NFTs when the enjoyment they get from spending on NFTs matches the enjoyment that similar amounts of money would bring from their other hobbies.
One of the big appeals from crypto people is essentially “all money is bullshit, so buy my bullshit”. The even nuttier people would position Bitcoin as gold.
> none of my smart peers had anything to say, either.
It's because they know. I think everybody knows that crypto is a bubble. I think everybody believes everyone else that buys into it is dumb, financially illiterate, whatever. The crypto market has been propped up and boosted by an influx of people like that, each one knowing it's a bubble, believing everyone else is an idiot... but still wanting a slice of the pie, just in case there's another big wave coming and they will make it rich themselves. It's an interesting study in idk, doublethink? Self-delusion? Wishful thinking?
Savings accounts are not speculative investments that are expected to appreciate over time. They are for people to store easily accessible money in, so that they can spend it in the future. Nobody is banking on selling their USD to someone else at a 2x markup in the future.
> > none of my smart peers had anything to say, either.
> It's because they know. I think everybody knows that crypto is a bubble.
You're conflating 2 different things. Your parent poster was talking about Tether specificly and why it's a scam. Whether the whole asset class is in a bubble or not is a whole different discussion.
I have been saying this for over five years and never had even an attempt at a rebuttal. Most people in crypto with a clue simply accept it as a fact. USDT needs to die for the market to have any sensibility at all.
Six years ago daily usdt volumes would not break 3 percent of bitcoin trade volume. Now they routinely break three hundred percent. It is an indisputable scam and needs the flush it so richly deserves. And I say this as somebody pro crypto who honestly wants to see legitimate crypto do what it can for the world. Transparently manipulating this market the way it has for so long now is not doing that. We need real prices.
Yeah it's a tricky one. It seems obvious that "digital money" is going to be very useful in a lot of ways, and in the future is almost certain to appear.
There was a very brief period when bitcoin might have been the start of such a thing. When companies were adding support for it, and people were spending 200+ bitcoin on pizza, actually doing useful things like transferring money internationally, etc.
But these days? It's all speculation, gambling, and HODLing to the moon.
Maybe in the future we'll have a cryptocurrency which is actually usable as a currency, spent, and being in circulation, not being mined and hoarded by people who expect 1000000% returns.
This. Bitcoin is essentially the USD + US stock market in 1922. Hard money and unregulated securities markets already broke the world once. The crypto wizards somehow managed to forget a century of hard won lessons.
It was hardly "hard money" in 1922, as the Fed was created in 1913, and the dollar started plummeting. If you want to see what a hard money world looks like, look at the 40 years or so prior to 1913, when most civilized nations were on a gold standard.
We have constant booms and busts now, even though we have more liquidity, people who should know better, math to describe what's going on, 'tools' to try to prevent it...
But the gold standard has its own issues. The gold standard is effectively a system of pegging all participating currencies to one another.
A dollar is X milli-ounces of gold, a Pound Stirling is Y milli-ounces.
They are effectively pegged at an X:Y ratio. But currency pegging has issues in practice, with Governments only able to keep it stable within certain limits. Outside those limits bad things will happen if you don't update the peg ratio. But when using a gold standard, if you have to adjust how much gold your unit of currency is worth, it makes people upset. If you make a dollar worth less gold people with dollars get quite upset. Also if people expect such a redenomination will be occuring, it can cause on run on the gold reserves.
Meanwhile, if you make a dollar worth more gold, you piss off anybody holding gold.
The changing of the ratio is even worse if you are using precious metal coinage that have the specified amount of gold (or silver, for the silver-standard) in them. If the ratio needs to change, now you have all this money with a face value, precious metal content mismatch.
And all this is on top of the fact by using the gold standard, the rate of gold mining can heavily impact the economy.
You mean a half century of closing the wealth gap (while healing from the labor disruption of freeing the slaves), and somehow still managing to go from being a war torn country to world superpower?
Even the ones with disinflationary supply suffer from a large wealth concentration as they distribute all or the majority of supply in just the first few years.
If the population doubles, and the 100 dollars remains fixed, the value of the dollar has increased.
If more dollars are not printed to maintain some inflation, people will slow spending hoping for 300 people the next year.
Now, in the case of BTC, it’s not global population that matters, but the population of interested users, which could go from 10,000 to 100,000,000 in months. If BTC can’t be mined fast enough to maintain a balance of coins/users as interest skyrockets, it is, by definition, deflationary.
Why would people slow spending due to a fixed money supply? The money they have now could potentially buy more in the future, but at some point you have to actually buy the thing you need or want. Conversely in in an inflating currency scenario yes I might spend the money sooner than I would otherwise, but then in the future I won't be able to spend it again, why is it so much better that I buy today instead of tomorrow?
I have heard the argument that deflation is just an unthinkable disaster for my entire life but I'm not convinced, rather it seems like a convenient excuse for countries to print their way out of budgetary problems.
> The money they have now could potentially buy more in the future, but at some point you have to actually buy the thing you need or want.
That's the key. With a deflationary currency you want to keep the money, but need to buy goods. With an inflationary currency you want to buy the goods, so you only keep as much money as you need. This means that an inflationary market has shorter dependency chains, less disruptions (because value is more easily predictable) and generally runs more efficiently. Deflationary value incentivizes consuming less; inflationary value incentivizes consuming more. This is why economies grow and produce more value.
Of course this can be overdone by having an inflation that's so fast that deep production chains become impossible to manage, so you generally want inflation that's low enough that investment-based value gain is not affected, but high enough that money is not a viable investment vehicle.
Remember that money is what you have instead of something useful.
edit: For instance, if you have hyperinflation, you cannot buy a fabrication machine for your factory, because the monetary value of the machine grows faster than your ability to save money. The best use of money is always consumptively spending it immediately. This is also inefficient. So you want to balance between those two problems.
> The money they have now could potentially buy more in the future, but at some point you have to actually buy the thing you need or want.
This might be true for food, but a lot of our economy is based on investments and things we don't strictly need. Why would I give money to a startup if I can simply leave it on my bank account and have a guaranteed return?
> Conversely in in an inflating currency scenario yes I might spend the money sooner than I would otherwise, but then in the future I won't be able to spend it again, why is it so much better that I buy today instead of tomorrow?
Because it keeps the money in circulation. You might spend the money, but that money then gets to a business. This business also doesn't want money lying around, so they might, for example, build something. Which gives the money to a building company. Which then gives the money back to the worker. That's a lot of movement and value creation. Also, you really want to spend or invest the money sooner, since you won't get as much for your money if you buy something tomorrow instead. With deflation, this whole reasoning is reversed - why would you spend any more money than necessary, if you can buy much more with it tomorrow? You wouldn't and this kills the economy.
To me the issue is the supply of tokens is not correlated to the actual underlying supply of goods and services in the economy. Tokens should be minted/burned according to the fundumentals of the underlying economy. Hard to do with a single digital currency as there is a whole economy. But viable with ERC-20's, which can be turned into micro-currencies. The great thing about ERC20 tokens, is you can swap them pretty effortlessly. And on a chain like Avalanche, it's cheap and scalable.
The only thing it's useful for is financial crime though - if your problem is just making a payment you can do it in dollars relatively easily and safely.
Payments here in the EU, even between countries, are pretty straightforward.
Transferring money from the EU to UK, or EU to USA, Peru, or Canada get more complicated and expensive though. Those are the kind of transfers I had in mind.
There are transferwise, and similar services, but even so it's not as cheap as it should/could be.
The problem of transferring currencies is that you are always buying through currency traders, who are attempting to make a profit on knowing current exchange rates and predicting near and long term exchange rates.
I was visiting Montreal from the US a couple decades ago, and I wanted to exchange some US dollars for Canadian, and in the financial center, I found five different exchanges with five different rates. I had to walk about six blocks total to hit them all, but the difference between the lowest and highest was significant.
The problem that international fund transfers require currency brokerage is not solved by introducing another currency.
Why do you need to convert currency when transferring to someone in another country in the first place? Because the banking infrastructure in that country is denominated in their currency. Because their bank account only permits them to hold balances in that currency. And because only funds in that currency are guaranteed by the banking laws in that country.
If it weren’t for that, currency conversions could be ignored! If everyone in the world had bank accounts that could handle euros, say, you could transfer funds globally; people could make purchases by transferring euros, etc etc.
In fact there’s not a lot stopping you from doing that. You can have an account denominated in whatever currency you like. Provided you don’t care about things like deposit protection.
And that’s all Bitcoin and other crypto really add to the mix - a uniformly available currency for denominating non-deposit-protected balances.
Yes I thought that so many people that it’s so obvious but they didn’t believe it and still did Invest in crypto. Their FOMO had total control of them. They didn’t want to understand the concept they just wanted to be part of something bigger
or you're just gullible enough to think crypto.com and Inter fan are "the crypto space".
pretty clutch on crypto.com's cringy part, to name themselves crypto dot com. its like they looked at all the people confusing any random bitcoin servicing company for "bitcoin" and was like "you know what would be better than arguing on hackernews about reality? just helping keep confusing them for fun and profit!"
one exchange, a highly lucrative one, bought a bunch of sports sponsorships, due to the fact that they already made a bunch of money, and then advertises itself, like every other company with vertically integrated ad space does.
Every good con relies on greed. The fact that the con artist is a criminal doesn’t make the victim of a con any less greedy. I am thinking of the many crypto fanboys here who have been repeatedly told this is a large ponzi scheme. They had plenty of warnings. I don’t have a huge amount of sympathy for them loosing money. Doesn’t mean the con artists shouldn’t face criminal prosecution (if they broke the law, it’s not a crime to sell tulips to people who think the tulip is worth all of their savings).
> So, no, they don't deserve to lose their money to these assholes.
Yes they do. But for reasons other than that. They also typically have extremely poor risk management (or are completely oblivious to it), and more importantly, they are buying a financial instrument they don’t even understand.
They deserve to lose and those who have 'tricked' them should be prosecuted. We can have both. Culpability of one side doesn't make the other side innocent victims. It's not bad people against good people, it's bad people everywhere in this situation.
There is also an amount of blame on our government and the shameful treatment of educating society. In a Capitalist driven country, as the USA is, the education system's complete lack of common sense financial literacy is a classic recipe for creating scams.
I have a graduate economics degree. I seriously investigated bitcoin and crypto back in '07-'08. There is no "there" there. Cryptocurrencies use an artful abuse of financial terms with their own separate definitions in the cryptoworld. The confusion is intended and part of the scam.
Yes, but.
There were voices of reason and caution the whole time. People would ask me “you know tech stuff what crypto should I invest in”.
“None, it’s not investing. It’s speculation”
You know how many people listened to me? None of the people who asked me for advice, and got the above advice indicated in any way that it would keep them away. There was a lot of greed pushing the clueless into poor choices.
So now who do we blame?
His involvement seriously reduced my impression of him, as in I no longer see integrity in his behavior, more like a skilled actor projecting integrity, and his own being suspicious.
Assholes need to be jailed and we can feel for the greedy people losing their money. On the other hand they wouldn't have shared their gains with us if it went well so they can't expect us to bail them out when it goes bad
This. Exactly this. In some ways, this mirrors the current student debt crisis.
Only 13% of the US population holds student debt, and 80% of student debt is held by earners in the upper 20% of income. But suddenly, we are supposed to cancel all that debt. ?????
Same thing with the market crash in 2008. Oh, we have to bail out all those banks because otherwise pension funds will lose value. Not close completely, but lose value. So a bunch of people with no hope of ever having a pension have to be taxed to bail out existing pensions (in effect). And then AIG having the gall, after effectively failing, and only being propped up by Federal dollars, complaining ten years after that the government unfairly held back some of their profits because the government backing came with stock holdings to back the loan, and AIG had to buy the stock back.
So yeah, Crypto is an issue, but the major banks are also an issue, and people that are stupid (or greedy) about money are an issue.
Agree. The median student loan burden is very manageable-- less than a new car -- and the issue is manufactured for political purposes on the left to turn out younger voters.
I’m not that old, but I’ve already realized that get rich quick schemes sometimes work but ultimately fail for most participants.
People who engage in this stuff get very little sympathy from me. They were complicit in an obvious lie because they thought they’d make some easy money.
There should be a law that currencies are used for legitimate payments for more than X% and otherwise the currencies should be marked as gambling money. How to measure? I don't know, but I'm sure the IRS can come up with something.
To the extent that Tether is anywhere, it's in notorious financial law evasion island Grand Cayman.
It's already illegal to supply overseas gambling services to Americans (Pokerstars). Quite a lot of the crypto world would arguably be ruled illegal under existing law if it was prosecuted before an American court - or a British one, or many other jurisdictions. It's just that there's so much of it, it moves so fast, and has enough legitimate-looking political cover that it's escaped so far.
It’s not illegal to play Pokerstars in America. Its a states rights issue. Some states allow it and some don’t and the ones that don’t could allow it using their various mechanisms for changing the laws (like California’s props or Florida’s citizen ballots) if they wanted to but they don’t. Probably a strong correlation between lottery revenue and online poker being illegal but that’s just a theory without facts backing it.
I think a ban can work quite well as a deterrent. If ThePiratebay/PopcornTime was not illegal, we wouldn't have Netflix&co.
It's not perfect, but I think a ban can be very effective.
Also, I'm tired of hearing cryptocurrency-related stories at social events and in podcasts. If it were illegal, I believe people would be more reluctant in spreading these stories.
There are individual investors who were misled by institutions and grifters. There are also individual investors on this very forum who laughed, taunted, and turned their noses up whenever someone pointed out the fraudulent nature of the entire ecosystem.
The latter are not financially illiterate; they just thought (incorrectly) that they could time the scam better than the other little guys. I have correspondingly less sympathy for them.
>>The sad reality is that many poorer and financially illeterate people have been tricked by VCs and other grifters into this with billions of dollars spent in advertising.
I'm a consumer of tether. I know the risks, and I take a calculated risk in using it for some applications. I perceive almost everything in the space as an experiment, and I'm willing to run that experiment. I personally believe that my sentiment is common among those who use and hold crypto assets. Cryptocurrencies are widely perceived as experimental and subject to large unexpected rice declines, hacks and other risks. That goes for stablecoins too.
I don't want you to forcibly prevent people from making any offer they want to me. By doing so, you are violating my right to free association, and assuming you know better than me what's best for me. I am not a child.
Maybe we can give people an option to suspend their rights as free citizens, and subject themselves to your political camp's centralized control, and leave every one else alone to decide for themselves, in accordance with the basic principles of liberal democracy. Is that a fair compromise, or are you going to presume large sections of your fellow citizens are not only financially illiterate, but also are too poor in judgment to realize they are better off under the control of people like you?
The problem is one of ethics, though: It's one thing to say "I've used it to move money" and "I believe and trust that they have the reserves they claim to have and I'm willing to hold USDT forever". If you just use USDT as a hot potato, your "calculated risk" is meaningless and you should be calling out that Tether is a fraud.
>> And this doesn't only apply to crypto, look at how many countries with currency pegs can maintain that when their economy turns down
> These assholes need to be prosecuted, fined and put to jail if necessary
Who gets put in jail when assholes running a country swindle their people's currency and the peg slips or otherwise they steal from the social wealth of the nation?
The sad reality is that many poorer and financially illeterate people have been tricked by VCs and other grifters into this with billions of dollars spent in advertising. So, no, they don't deserve to lose their money to these assholes. These assholes need to be prosecuted, fined and put to jail if necessary.