121–130 of 194 posts
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And a related question, which I'd love to know the answer to: What are the other major uses (excluding speculation) of BTC?
Sending funds to family in a different country. It's a use case I have not had experience with but which I think makes sense.
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I don't need the government to protect me from myself. Adults should be able to make their own decisions
Predatory companies love people like you. Now people have lost their homes and grandparents are being swindled out of their retirements – good thing the government allowed companies to do whatever they want! Corporations are awesome! It was pretty cool when the banks told people they were qualified for loans, knowing they shouldn't be, then used that to their advantage to steal those people's houses. Fuck the governm…
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Predatory companies love people like you. Now people have lost their homes and grandparents are being swindled out of their retirements – good thing the government allowed companies to do whatever they want! Corporations are awesome! It was pretty cool when the banks told people they were qualified for loans, knowing they shouldn't be, then used that to their advantage to steal those people's houses. Fuck the governm…
Predatory investors love people like you. They get higher returns and much better negotiation power because some people advocate to take down their competition!
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Most ICOs look like fairly blatant fraud. We have laws to protect people from even subtler forms of fraud. The fact that they allow this stuff to continue is as amazing to me as some of the scams going on.
Before they can stop it, they need to learn enough to learn how to correctly characterize it, without hitting non-fraud in the process. That's easy to do in an HN comment box, with nothing at stake if you get something wrong, and all the ambiguity of English working for you. It's somewhat harder to do when you require legal precision and are interacting with trillions of dollars worth of existing market.
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Isn't a co-op that's run as a dictatorship basically a corporation? The whole point of having wealth is that you can choose how you spend it. If one person chooses how to spend it, you don't actually have the wealth, they do, and it's not much of a co-op. If multiple people choose how to spend it, then you run into all the coordination-of-disparate-interest problems common to co-ops, communes, clubs, and other social…
> Isn't a co-op that's run as a dictatorship basically a corporation? In double-entry land, the ownership of labor is diluted every time new capital is contributed. Obviously people contributing capital should get rewarded, but the fact that causality only runs in this direction is super broken. Whereas in triple-entry land, capital can get diluted every time you add new labor. This works because the technology allow…
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Except we have entire sets of laws and systems to try to control and expose the risk of other investments. ICOs are the Wild West, with the added benefit that they’re totally intangible so you can’t even be stuck holding the bag.
Ah, yes, and the government knows best, right? If there's a law, then it must be safe and good for everyone!
But with laws at least I know that they met a base level of not ‘a cartoon mafia hiding under a table giggling at the idiots buying our scam’.
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Speculate and day trade, just like 1999! Only it's people talking about their cryptocoins instead of their AOL.
I wonder how many people from that era survived ahead or at least intact vs. losing a packet. I assume some lucked into bailing at the right time but I'm guessing not a lot. I'm not sure I'd have expected to see day trading touted as an investing approach that should be encouraged.
The bill was largely footed by large numbers of people who knew nothing about the technology. I know one person who founded a router company in 1996, IPO'd in 2000, cashed out his shares for ~8 figures right before the market cratered, and is using that to fund his second startup. I know another person who invested in all sorts of dot-coms in 2000 and lost her entire inheritance & life savings in that (and a few real-estate purchases in 2007). I'd bet that the second group outnumbers the first by a large margin, but people in the first do exist.
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I wonder how many people from that era survived ahead or at least intact vs. losing a packet. I assume some lucked into bailing at the right time but I'm guessing not a lot. I'm not sure I'd have expected to see day trading touted as an investing approach that should be encouraged.
A fair number of people got out pretty far ahead. Occasionally you'll run across a local business in Silicon Valley that makes no economic sense (eg. a nightclub, or a meadery, or a rug merchant, or a restaurant that never seems to have customers) and then you find out the owner was an early Netscape employee or rented space to Paypal in exchange for equity. The bill was largely footed by large numbers of people who…
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I don't need the government to protect me from myself. Adults should be able to make their own decisions
The track record of humanity's decision making indicates that your statement is not accurate for a significant portion of the population.
Does that also apply to "democratic" processes?
Should only "accredited citizens" have the right to vote?
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I wonder how many people from that era survived ahead or at least intact vs. losing a packet. I assume some lucked into bailing at the right time but I'm guessing not a lot. I'm not sure I'd have expected to see day trading touted as an investing approach that should be encouraged.
A fair number of people got out pretty far ahead. Occasionally you'll run across a local business in Silicon Valley that makes no economic sense (eg. a nightclub, or a meadery, or a rug merchant, or a restaurant that never seems to have customers) and then you find out the owner was an early Netscape employee or rented space to Paypal in exchange for equity. The bill was largely footed by large numbers of people who…
I was more talking about day traders specifically. I suspect most of them burned up their capital at some point or other. And a lot of this is probably related to the maxim that when taxi drivers start offering you investment advice, it's likely time to get out.