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TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

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Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#241

Post by pastacacioepepe »

pa7x1 wrote: post #240
pastacacioepepe wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working real hard for the past 10+ years and I have very little to show for it yet. In the meantime a couple of friends who never worked got rich(er) just because they bought a few thousands $ (money borrowed...from their family) worth of crypto at the right moment. What is this bullshit? Why am I even busting my ass trying to create value, when I could just buy shitcoins and become a millionaire? I don't t…

I have long-suspected that a significant part of the hate for crypto from tech-literate people is resentment for not figuring out the success of something they were equipped to have seen earlier. And here is a little snippet of it at work. > If your friend only had $5k in total and threw them all in Terra then I guess the lesson he got in the crash is way more valuable than any savings he might have kept. He would ha…

Nah. You're just projecting your fears on me.

> So if they lose money, they deserve it.

I didn't say that. Just that it was bound to happen sooner or later. It's clear though that as with any other Ponzi scheme, there are people who join early and profit and people who join late and give all their savings to the early comers. OP's friend is one of the late comers. My friends are early comers.

> If they win money, they don't deserve it.

Again, never said this. I'm just saying that it's a lottery and that it's crazy to have masses of people betting their future livelihoods on this Ponzi scheme.

By the way yes, I don't think you really "earned" your wealth if you got it on the lottery or from your parents. Sue me. Or better, get to work and earn your wealth.

> resentment

No resentment. Just pity for people who think they earned and deserve all they have, when in fact they've just born in the right family, in the right place, at the right time.

> I guess we should just send the money to you.

Keep your lottery money. As I pretty clearly stated, I want to earn mine with actual work.

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#242

Post by pototo666 »

pastacacioepepe wrote: post #239
pototo666 wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that crytpo is not pure lottery. It's a risky investment. As every assets, crypto can be over-valued or under-valued. As someone from China, where central government limit foregin currency exchange, Bitcoin is a god-given tech. I'm not arguing for its value and i don't mean to persuade anyone. This is my opinion. I believe in its value. And guess what? I miss the crypto train too. And I have zero crypto…

> I would argue that crytpo is not pure lottery. It's a risky investment. Unless you have funds to throw on it and you become rich without ever moving a finger. I mean yeah, congrats for your ability to "see" the future, but I struggle to understand how you created any value, how there's anything more than luck and income inequality to support a case for your new wealth to be legit. You're just extracting value from…

> China is doing well and the rest of the world is considering limitations on crypto as well.

Well, it depends on how you view the condition. I believe that a citizen should be able to change any local curreny to foreign currency. If citizens are not allowed to do that, they are exploited by the governemnt, who can simple print money to finance its corrupted operation. And that's what happen in china.

I don't care about the price of bitcoin. I care about the ability of moving my money wherever I want.

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#243

Post by imtringued »

jmyeet wrote: post #31

I occasionally get asked by relatives and friends of what to invest in. Now I'm no expert but I guess in the valley of the blind the one-eyed man is king. Thing is what I tell them seems to bore them because, well, it's boring. My advice is basically this: Put your money in a broad index fund and don't look at it for 10 years. In giving this advice you start to realize it's not what people want to hear. It's not that…

Wealth concentration happens when the long term return on capital exceeds the growth rate of the economy according to Thomas Piketty.

The wealth obviously concentrates with those, that have the most assets and least amount of spending in relation to their total income.

When you think about this, this system is inherently injust if rNow, under this perspective you have found the secret cheat code on how to get richer automatically. There obvious problems for every day people. Exponential growth is really slow in the beginning so most people never get to the point where their money is growing as much as a get rich quick scheme would promise every single year.

The other problem is that they are human beings that need food and shelter which means living expenses are a big portion of their income meaning they don't have much to invest in the first place. It would be better if you didn't have to pay capital gains to the rich.

However, if you are going for that living off other people's work strategy, you should be aware that the road is long and the rewards are only reaped at the end. Oh, and everyone will hate you.

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#244

Post by forum_ghost »

KMag wrote: post #161
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is ‘Hyper supportive’ a synonym for ‘universities realized they could make more money by making things easier’?

Isn't it still the case that nearly all med schools in the US are capacity constrained anyway? There's no sense in pandering for extra students you can't take on anyway, especially if it harms your program's reputation. More likely, they realized some aspects of med school nearly amounted to hazing, with little demonstrated educational benefit. (Again getting back to American culture's tendency to conflate difficult…

Yes, the supply is capped by residency spots available.

They reason they became hyper-supportive is because admissions have become insanely brutal, most poor performers have been screened out before they even apply. The marginal benefits of making the program even harder likely amounts to nothing more than hazing.

It’s simply politically untenable to kick out students during the program, given the already artificially constrained supply of newly minted physicians and regional shortages of talent.

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#245

Post by imtringued »

UkrainianJew wrote: post #143
jmyeet wrote: post #31

I occasionally get asked by relatives and friends of what to invest in. Now I'm no expert but I guess in the valley of the blind the one-eyed man is king. Thing is what I tell them seems to bore them because, well, it's boring. My advice is basically this: Put your money in a broad index fund and don't look at it for 10 years. In giving this advice you start to realize it's not what people want to hear. It's not that…

>Put your money in a broad index fund and don't look at it for 10 years. That might be a dead strategy in 2022. After the 2008 crisis the fed discovered a miraculous economic cure: slowly print money and throw it into the economy, so people keep transacting with each other, and the GDP (and stocks) keep growing. Turns out, most of this growth was on paper - fads, speculative investments, overvalued stocks. Now that t…

Nothing has changed. There is still an abundance of capital. Interest rates have known only one direction and that is down.

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#246

Post by WJW »

KMag wrote: post #56
jmyeet wrote: post #31

I occasionally get asked by relatives and friends of what to invest in. Now I'm no expert but I guess in the valley of the blind the one-eyed man is king. Thing is what I tell them seems to bore them because, well, it's boring. My advice is basically this: Put your money in a broad index fund and don't look at it for 10 years. In giving this advice you start to realize it's not what people want to hear. It's not that…

In my experience, it seems that a lot of people have an un-stated gut feeling that "doing something" must out-perform passive dollar cost averaging a broad low-fee index ETF. If we came up with some obfuscated mathematical dance that, if un-obfuscated, were obviously dollar cost averaging in a broad-based low-fee index ETF, I think it would be more popular. Edit: There are also lots of investment strategies where peo…

I once read an article describing this basically as "farming" vs "trapping" tactics. For a farmer, there is basically always more work to do (weeding, sowing, harvesting, maintaining tools and buildings, looking after animals etc etc etc) and often more work directly results in more profit. Trapping on the other hand is not like that. Once you have set your traps, you must now sit still and wait. Checking every 5 minutes if an animal has walked into the trap yet is actually counterproductive.

The premise of the article was that investing is more like trapping than like farming. Since most of us come from societies with a long history of farming and the resulting cultural norms have permeated through said societies, many people feel like they "must do something" to tend to their investment crops properly.

I'll add my own speculation that in many western societies the industrialization and class warfare rhetoric has created a meme that "only work deserves compensation", implying that supplying capital is an unworthy state of existence. (See for example the many posts on HN decrying every single landlord as a parasite on society) If you want to invest but also want to hold on to your identity as a wholesome "middle class" American (definitely not one of those nefarious "elites" you keep reading about in the news!), just sticking your money in an index fund and doing nothing else may feel dangerously capitalist. Fiddling with it gives you some emotional satisfaction back by "working" on the investments.

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#247

Post by imtringued »

biztos wrote: post #219
SilverBirch wrote: post #205

I think we really need to start talking about the broader "why" of why crypto. There's a good reason that we're seeing /r/antiwork and people throwing their last pennies into crypto. People have seen that those with assets got rich and those that work get poorer. There's no point aspiring to a better life through work. In reality what has happened is inflation that we don't measure. Assets are inflated by easy money…

> those with assets got rich and those that work get poorer I think this is the take-away of the modern world economy. If you can somehow get enough money to join the asset-holding class you have a chance, otherwise you have no chance. And even if you can, you're fighting a serious uphill battle against the people who got there earlier and got to that sweet free number-go-up zone while you were still toiling. Right n…

>I think this is the take-away of the modern world economy.

That is how it worked for the last two thousand years.

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#248

Post by carnitine »

bowsamic wrote: post #227
jmyeet wrote: post #31

I occasionally get asked by relatives and friends of what to invest in. Now I'm no expert but I guess in the valley of the blind the one-eyed man is king. Thing is what I tell them seems to bore them because, well, it's boring. My advice is basically this: Put your money in a broad index fund and don't look at it for 10 years. In giving this advice you start to realize it's not what people want to hear. It's not that…

It's ego and over-confidence. People think they can outperform the S&P500. They can't.

Yes they can and many do. It’s just not likely if you’re actively trading.

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#250

Post by burntoutfire »

pastacacioepepe wrote: post #214
SilverBirch wrote: post #205

I think we really need to start talking about the broader "why" of why crypto. There's a good reason that we're seeing /r/antiwork and people throwing their last pennies into crypto. People have seen that those with assets got rich and those that work get poorer. There's no point aspiring to a better life through work. In reality what has happened is inflation that we don't measure. Assets are inflated by easy money…

I've been working real hard for the past 10+ years and I have very little to show for it yet. In the meantime a couple of friends who never worked got rich(er) just because they bought a few thousands $ (money borrowed...from their family) worth of crypto at the right moment. What is this bullshit? Why am I even busting my ass trying to create value, when I could just buy shitcoins and become a millionaire? I don't t…

Every week, there is someone whose lottery ticket wins millions or tens of millions of dollars. It's not fair, but such is life - some people are just more lucky than others. The smartest thing you can do about it is to not dwell on it too much, other people's extraordinary luck does not affect your life in any way anyway.

That also applies to crypto - at any given point in time, plenty of people are investing in crazy speculative schemes. A minority of them win big, while a majority loses some or most of their money. The crypto crowd who bough 10 years ago just happened to select the right lottery ticket, while other people who at that time invested in equally far-fetched ideas (AR startups, synthetic meat, whatever crazy fad that died in the early stages before even reaching mainstream media) lost their money.

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