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Bernie Madoff has died

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Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#171

Post by karpour »

dboreham wrote: post #101
user-the-name wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin may or may not intentionally be a Ponzi scheme. But that doesn't matter, because functionally, there is no difference between an intentional Ponzi scheme and Bitcoin. Bitcoin trading is a negative-sum game. All winning that anyone gets comes out of the pockets of newer investors. There is no net inflow of value or money that could cover the gains people make trading, other than the money being put in by other…

Bitcoin is as much or as little a ponzi scheme as things like the US dollar.

This is a comment someone who doesn't understand how Bitcoin fundamentally works would write. Just because people like to call it a cryptocurrency it does not have much in common with the US Dollar.

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#173

Post by hobs »

i_haz_rabies wrote: post #170
ginko wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the corporate equivalent would be the forced shutdown of all company infrastructure for N months.

that just burns all the regular people working regular jobs at that org.

So fix the social safety net, too big to fail is not something we want to have, especially when it comes to actively harmful companies...

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#174

Post by shawnz »

saalweachter wrote: post #137
kolinko wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you just redefined a the name „Ponzi” to mean something else than the commonly accepted definition.

Here, let me google that for you: https://www.google.com/search?q=ponzi+scheme+definition Pon·zi scheme /ˈpänzē ˌskēm/ noun a form of fraud in which belief in the success of a nonexistent enterprise is fostered by the payment of quick returns to the first investors from money invested by later investors.

There is no nonexistent enterprise in this case. Nobody is claiming that the returns of cryptocurrency speculators are coming from a business venture.

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#175

Post by cmurf »

cogman10 wrote: post #127
mpalmer wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time is the only asset we all mostly have in common. If your laws and the enforcement thereof are just (big if), then why shouldn't the punishment be exacted in a way that generally affects everyone equally? Beyond that, prison is inhumane as a rough function of where you are. Maybe you're thinking of a particular prison system. How does it fix anything? It should primarily be a deterrent, and secondarily a way to pr…

I have a sneaking suspicion that if more billionares spent time in prison, we'd see massive reform on the prison system towards the humane.

Rich people already go to low security VIP prisons. Visits with family in parks, better food, internet, and everyone is non-violent. Billionaires aren't put in general population.

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#176

Post by SilasX »

kiba wrote: post #98
cletus wrote: post #30

Here's the one lesson I really want us to all learn from this: the only thing the rich fear is prison because prison robs them of time. Fines are just the cost of doing business. There are many other scandals: the whole subprime disaster, pollution from plants and the like where no one went to prison and people really should've.

What is this obsession with jailing people? Prison is pretty inhumane, especially in the context of a limited lifespan. Even if we're immortal, it's still inhumane. Moreover, how does making people go to prison fixes anything? It's just a way to assign punishment and blame people.

Yes, most US prisons are inhumane. That doesn’t apply to the minimum security resort prisons that white collar criminals get sent to.

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#177

Post by i_haz_rabies »

hobs wrote: post #173
i_haz_rabies wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that just burns all the regular people working regular jobs at that org.

So fix the social safety net, too big to fail is not something we want to have, especially when it comes to actively harmful companies...

Jailing the people responsible seems like a way better option than putting potentially tens of thousands of people on welfare.

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#178

Post by baq »

john_moscow wrote: post #167
ryandrake wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Corporations (which are usually the payer of fines for bad behavior) don't fear prison because they can't be physically imprisoned. You can't put Exxon in jail. And, lawmakers deliberately make it so damn hard to pierce the corporate liability veil and hold shareholders or directors personally liable for the corporation's actions. So, we need to both move more towards prison and start digging in to which actual peopl…

>Joe Bigshot, former SVP at BigCo, was sentenced to 5 years in jail, and had to sell two of his nine houses to pay the $20M fine" is much better. Well, they sort of do that in Russia. So the CEO/founder of almost any sketchy company is a homeless person that signed the paperwork in exchange for some free vodka. Didn't particularly solve the problem. Corporate fines just need to be sufficient to make such "business" u…

oh, regulators are playing the market both ways. congressmen and senators don't have any issue with trading options.

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#179

Post by paulgb »

saalweachter wrote: post #97
tim333 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin isn't really a ponzi scheme though, just an asset that gets bid up. In a ponzi you pay in x and are promised x+50% or some such and the scheme fails when there isn't money to pay out x+50%. With bitcoin you buy for price x and sell for price y which may be higher or lower. Different thing. It can't fail, just go up or down in price.

Eh, I'm comfortable calling Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme because all profits extracted by early investors come from later investors. That's, like, a very specific and applicable definition.

In the book Lying for Money (which I recommend to anyone), Dan Davies makes the point that “paying off early investors with later investor’s money” isn’t sufficient to make something a Ponzi because that’s really the nature of nearly all financial fraud (cheque kiting, for example).

I think we agree on the mechanism at play though, it’s just a semantic distinction.

Re: Bernie Madoff has died

#180

Post by JKCalhoun »

robotcookies wrote: post #120
krupan wrote: post #54

I was wondering how he got into this, did he set out to run a ponzi scheme from the get go? Interesting to see that it was not like that. He was running an honest fund that ran into some trouble during a down turn. He convinced himself that he could just fudge things a little, just until the downturn passed and then he'd go straight again. Of course he never went straight again. Life lessons for everyone there.

Madeoff's claim has always been that it was meant to be a temporary, short term thing and he believed he could get himself out of it before anyone else realized his fraud.

Yeah, that's a weak defense.

I mean, "meant to be a temporary" means he knew it was wrong/illegal.

He gets no pass for that.

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