171–180 of 411 posts
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> It would be like setting up a front-end to receive investments, and then depositing the money with Madoff. I'm not saying it's a legitimate business, just not a ponzi. So, it’s neither legitimate nor a Ponzi. Cool, what is it then?
IANAL, but anything between fraud and gross negligence I guess.
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Promising a guaranteed 15% return is fraud. There is no place in reality where you can * guarantee * that kind of return.
For the sake of being a pedant, your statement is incorrect: the U.S. federal fund rate was 15% in 1981, making CDs and T-bills yield 15% APY for the products bought that year. So that kind of return has a place in reality. Granted, those were different times, different economic climate and exceptional fed actions. What you probably mean is that promising anything that exceeds SOFR + say 2 percentage points has a ris…
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Given you could get ~20% on anchor, why would you invest in something with lower return with no a priori reason to believe the returns are safer?
If a 20% better ponzi is better than a 15% one, again, I ask, why not a 1,500% one? There's new shitcoins born every day, promising these kinds of returns.
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I didn't invest because it was only 15% gains. Sad, but true. I actually read them their material & saw it was based on Anchor Protocol. When I saw that it was based on UST, and I couldn't figure how UST was backed by anything I understood, I opted out. One of the few times in crypto where I felt "do you won research" paid off for me.
> I didn't invest because it was only 15% gains I'm confused. Were you looking for a cryptocoin that was promising 1,500% gains? Anyone promising a safe 15% return in a world where your savings account earns 0.15% interest is trying to rob you.
From their website, is this really a sufficient disclaimer? > Stablegains is not a bank and the assets stored in your Stablegains account are not insured by any private or governmental insurance plan (FDIC or SIPC), nor are they covered by any compensation scheme (including FSCS). There is a range of safeguards in place to help secure your deposits, however holding and depositing stablecoins with Stablegains and thir…
The last few weeks (months, really) has highlighted an incredible lack of discernment in the VC-verse wrt the thing we call web3. Now. I have no experience doing what YC does and don’t claim to, but the jig here was so transparent that the smallest drop of “street smart” should’ve been enough to set off some alarms. We’re approaching a point where being passed over for “culture fit” is a compliment. Hopefully the emb…
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I think this is something like AI -- where people who are calling it "AI" are often sales people/hucksters (I mean this as little a pejorative sense as possible), and the people calling it "ML" are the practitioners/people you should be listening to. Once a phrase gains mainstream adoption and starts to rapidly lose meaning, I find that people who care dearly about that thing start calling it something else. That sai…
As someone who went heavy into crypto/web3, it does pain me to admit that there really are no use cases besides making money. Which isn’t a bad use case by itself, but after using practically hundreds of protocols and projects, there’s not a single one I’d use if there was no prospect of making money off of it. My dApp usage has cooled off almost completely. And all data shows that this is true for most others as wel…
And by "making money", we really mean transferring money from gullible and/or desperate fools to unscrupulous insiders.