731–740 of 890 posts
This is additionally a reminder that crypto currently holds a fairly irreconcilable catch-22. "Freezeable" tokens completely defeat the purpose of a decentralized currency. Why create nodes/verifiers etc if a wallet can be unilaterally frozen, either under pressure from gov't, community, or another entity. However NOT allowing freezeability allows for massive hacks, either by insiders, poor security, or sloppiness. S…
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well you have to draw a line somewhere. Call it something else if you want to criticize it. Like a bunch of fools racing towards a cliff. But if they're honest about something being a scam how can it be a scam? Seems like a paradox.
Literally only a paradox in places like Hacker News by people who are motivated to question calling crypto a Ponzi. I've got bad news. It is still a Ponzi if people are "honest" about it being a Ponzi, it is still a Ponzi if it started out as an investment idea and it went Ponzi as losses added up. Arguing that clear Ponzis aren't really Ponzis due to some kind of semantic rules is a gigantic display of "copium". The…
It literally isn't. Please go back to the definition, which requires a specific type of deception. If you wished, perhaps you could call crypto some kind of gamble, confidence game, or other category of scam.
> Arguing that clear Ponzis aren't really Ponzis due to some kind of semantic rules is a gigantic display of "copium".
From your tone it seems like you think I'm trying to defend crypto in this thread. I'm not. I'm trying to defend the meaning of a precise and descriptive term so that it doesn't get watered down to the point of being synonymous with "scam". Because if that were to happen, we would lose a useful phrase in the English language.
It really ticks me off when people knowingly use terminology incorrectly like this out of anger. Just call crypto a scam or a con if you want. There's no need to let your anger leave a mark on the English language itself.
> And the CEO of JPMorgan has described crypto coins exactly as a "distributed Ponzi scheme" before Congress.
Well he was using the term "ponzi scheme" incorrectly then, and should have used a more general term like "scam". Really, this isn't hard. Just read the definition.
It's also worth noting that JPMorgan executed their first trade on a public ("crypto coin") blockchain last week, so maybe he ended up changing his mind? Or maybe there's some internal consistency with JPMorgan investing effort in things they believe to be ponzi schemes - I'm not one to try to make that distinction.
> If you wind up paying out redemptions with new deposits as fast as you can, right before you fail hard, then it was a Ponzi all along. That's it. That's the definition.
That's not even how cryptocurrency works. Not even beanie babies or tulips worked like that.
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> No one expects a multi-billion dollar exchange to vaporize over night. Except for everyone who has? We don't expect banks to vaporize because they're FDIC-insured with extreme regulations on their lending/investing, highly regulated. But crypto exchanges are the wild west. Totally vulnerable to both hacking and ponzi scheme fraud. Essentially zero regulation or customer insurance. And "vaporizing over night" is how…
I should have said most people, not no one. The reality is most people outside of the HN bubble trust billion dollar companies. Crypto or otherwise. And when I say trust, I don’t mean in the sense that they think the company is doing any moral good, but that they expect a product or service in return for payment. You don’t question that the gas you purchase at a gas station is in fact gas, and not water. Why would a…
Ooh, I have an analogy! If I park my car at the airport while I go on vacation, I expect it to still be there when I get back. I don’t expect to return from my trip and discover that the airport let the car rental company use it while I was away and now it’s gone because someone crashed it.
On the other hand, someone in this thread pointed out the yield that was offered to customers with FTX accounts. [0] I would be more suspicious of a parking lot that said, “Hey, you can park here for free. In fact, do you have any other cars? If you park them all in our parking lot, we’ll pay you $x per day!”
I built a little tool that tracks the transaction networks of several top tokens.
If anything: Highly entertaining, I see a LOT of weird stuff.
It's called Pudding (because that's where the proof is) at https://alexisrondeau.me/pudding/
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Luna was quite bad, but it was pretty straight-forward path to death that everyone saw from a mile away. Not many people predicted that FTX and SBF will fall from grace within a timespan of 48hrs. The whole thing is also so full of scandals, theft and corruption we will be reading about this in the news for weeks to come. mtGox was so early in crypto, there wasn't any institutional capital or major players, mostly re…
I suspect this will be the catalyst for “regulation clarity”.
I can’t imagine a series of actions that would be more destructive to the industry. The actions don’t make sense unless they were taken to maximize the potential fallout.
The deep regulatory and political connections are also interesting…
This last week has been a rollercoaster. I've been in crypto since a long time ago and have seen quite a bit, but this FTX implosion takes the crown. And to be honest, I don't think its over.
Another interesting thought I keep going back to is .... since crypto is really zero sum, who the hell was on the other side of these horrible trades that has billions now?
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I think MTGox was actually worse just due to the small size of the market then and how much of a joke their security was. FTX just seems like a fleecing job that tons of crypto exchanges and businesses have pulled off. MTGox was sheer incompetence.
I would consider the moral failure of SBF to be worse than the incompetence of Karpeles. Also, SBF was a billionaire hobnobbing with politicians and celebrated by Forbes. Karpeles was some confused dev on his computer who loved his cat and wanted to build a coffee shop. SBF's failure is going to have larger consequences outside the crypto sphere.
SBF just stumbled into money and spread it around, like the Oculus guy.
Can someone deeper in the space explain the series of transactions from "letssavecrypto.eth" to the FTX Drainer address? Seen here: https://etherscan.io/address/0xaa16547cdc32268542145d3401120... My guess is its a way to communicate a message via txn data.
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I've been in cryptocurrencies/blockchain since 2012. I "missed" the BTC boat and got into ETH early. I'm of the thought that CeFi services like Ftx, Nexo, Coinbase and similar are stupid. The only thing that should exist is simple Exchanges between Fiat and cryptocurrency. But everything else is just a scam IMHO. Why would you do a CeFi in crypto , when theres more TAM in doing it normal FIAT? Because you want to Avo…
> I think the right price is around $600, Why $600 and not $351, $17, or $15,000? What fundamental reason is there for any specific price?