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In 2022, Web3 went just great

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Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#131

Post by JumpCrisscross »

JeremyNT wrote: post #104
riffraff wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But people were gambling and making bad financial decisions before the 2008 crisis too. The crypto schemes are very often rehashing of old scams and mistakes, they are not qualitatively different from penny stocks pump and dumps, pyramids and MLM schemes, ponzi schemes, tulip/cabbage patch/whatever mania, etc.

The crypto thing has always been about front running regulation and overall awareness of the grift. Whereas most people understood that traditional ponzis and gambling often end with criminal charges and/or financial losses, in 2021 crypto could still tout "line go up" since the other shoe hadn't dropped yet. The layers of obfuscation involved in crypto schemes meant that normal users had essentially no way to compre…

There is also, particularly post 2008, an exaggerated sense of criminality in our financial system that made people who otherwise would have moral qualms about what they’re doing embrace or even work in crypto/web3 because, in their minds, everyone else is scamming anyway.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#132

Post by Analemma_ »

simplify wrote: post #100
pavlov wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the good old “communism would work perfectly but the Soviet Union was doing it all wrong” style argument. Blind faith in an economic theory against all empirical evidence is a dead end.

Blind faith how so? I merely stated a technical fact. Blockchain is programmable money; they could have programmed a system such that FTX could not run away with user funds – there are defi systems that do this already. But they didn't. Instead, FTX used crypto as a means to transfer funds into their own, centralized custody. Not much different from a bank wire. This isn't a "communism would work perfectly" style arg…

What the parent is saying is that "Real X has never been tried" is a common dodge for people defending the indefensible, because it's unfalsifiable. It also fails to take into account human preferences that are preventing Real X. FTX wasn't centralized because they were mustache-twirling villains who hade decentralization, they were centralized because that's what the market demanded, because DeFi is impossible to fucking use so nobody does.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#133

Post by JumpCrisscross »

subradios wrote: post #109
Lendal wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we need to look at this from the perspective of a society and ask ourselves what else we could have done. Obviously there are a whole lot of people in society completely lacking in common sense and critical thinking skills, while at the same time mass rudeness seems normalized too. Is this a failure of education, or parenting? Or has it always been this way, and the only difference is the way we communicate w…

What happened is that crypto is very cool. There's a not unwarranted perception amongst people in the United States at least that banking regulators are conspiring (or prospiring) to create the financial meltdowns we see, and give people with the right connections privileged seats at the table when it comes to markers. This is, to some degree, true - Quant traders in finance work with data that is literally unavailab…

> but when it comes to crypto sophisticated quants and Joe Bogsly are operating on a level playing field

Pretty sure Tether isn’t operating on a level field with Joe Schmoe.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#134

Post by chasebank »

HN_is_for_gemes wrote: post #98
Eisenstein wrote: post #13

I would feel bad for people who lost money in crypto if every time I tried to warn them during the bubble they wouldn't have said 'have fun staying poor' and called me ignorant. It is tough to remain motivated to try and convince people that they are making bad decision when they actively berate you. It feels like telling someone about to jump into the shallow end of a swimming pool from a balcony that they are going…

[flagged]

I too made a bunch of money on BTC but in the end, it was just gambling. Got lucky, nothing more, nothing less. I did not know anything, the future just landed on what I thought would happen. Survivorship bias at it's finest.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#135

Post by input_sh »

Recursing wrote: post #75
simplify wrote: post #21

I'd be curious to see the source on those numbers and how they're broken down. For example, Terra/Luna was a spectacular crypto failure. FTX, on the other hand, was just plain old fraud, not really related to crypto itself.

The FTX fraud is not even part of the counter https://web3isgoinggreat.com/charts/top There's only the relatively small (!) $370M hack

Explanation as to why it's not there:

> I've erred on the side of not including in the grift counter/leaderboard $ amounts for collapses where the actual loss is still pretty unknown (ex. Terra collapse, FTX)

> This is confusing, so I'm deciding whether to start including them or just add an explanatory note. Thoughts?

https://indieweb.social/@web3isgreat/109615135588334219

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#136

Post by AlexandrB »

simplify wrote: post #100
pavlov wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, the good old “communism would work perfectly but the Soviet Union was doing it all wrong” style argument. Blind faith in an economic theory against all empirical evidence is a dead end.

Blind faith how so? I merely stated a technical fact. Blockchain is programmable money; they could have programmed a system such that FTX could not run away with user funds – there are defi systems that do this already. But they didn't. Instead, FTX used crypto as a means to transfer funds into their own, centralized custody. Not much different from a bank wire. This isn't a "communism would work perfectly" style arg…

First, you can't program the fiat you need to buy BTC or other tokens at an exchange to have this property - so you're always going to have to trust someone with your money, at least for a time.

Second, if these defi systems exist, why are so many still keeping their money on exchanges like FTX/Binance/Coinbase/etc without such protections? I suspect it has to do with convenience or maybe cost - smart contracts require "gas" to run, no?

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#137

Post by BlueTemplar »

JeremyNT wrote: post #104
riffraff wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But people were gambling and making bad financial decisions before the 2008 crisis too. The crypto schemes are very often rehashing of old scams and mistakes, they are not qualitatively different from penny stocks pump and dumps, pyramids and MLM schemes, ponzi schemes, tulip/cabbage patch/whatever mania, etc.

The crypto thing has always been about front running regulation and overall awareness of the grift. Whereas most people understood that traditional ponzis and gambling often end with criminal charges and/or financial losses, in 2021 crypto could still tout "line go up" since the other shoe hadn't dropped yet. The layers of obfuscation involved in crypto schemes meant that normal users had essentially no way to compre…

That would still have been appropriate for... I think the previous bubble was in 2017 ?

This time, as the FTX mess shows, the blame is on """regulators""" and """sophisticated""" investors completely failing to do their job.

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#138

Post by BlueTemplar »

1270018080 wrote: post #80
riffraff wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But people were gambling and making bad financial decisions before the 2008 crisis too. The crypto schemes are very often rehashing of old scams and mistakes, they are not qualitatively different from penny stocks pump and dumps, pyramids and MLM schemes, ponzi schemes, tulip/cabbage patch/whatever mania, etc.

They're not saying it's different, but that people are more desperate to latch onto get rich quick schemes now than they would've been pre-2008. Which is why crypto was huge. If this movement happened in 2005, maybe there wouldn't have been enough desperation for it to hit critical mass and blow up in popularity.

Well, the thing is that bitcoin happened as a reaction to 2008...

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#139

Post by AlexandrB »

fallingknife wrote: post #49
colesantiago wrote: post #9

I urge lawmakers to completely regulate this so called 'crypto industry' before this number goes to $14B or higher in 2023. Crypto, NFTs, Blockchain and the rest of this nonsense should never have existed in the first place. And yet we enter another year where there is still no legitimate usecase for all of this whatsoever.

Some of what is in the article is about exchanges losing massive amounts to hacks, in which case I would be inclined to agree that regulation of this space is needed, at least as far as ensuring customers get their money back in this case. But most of what is in there is about things like stealing Bored Apes, which is basically just phishing, or NFT value collapse, which is just a speculative bubble popping. In the f…

> ...or NFT value collapse, which is just a speculative bubble popping.

> And in the second, that's just a standard bubble. No fraud involved.

I disagree. There are plenty of shitty coin/NFT projects marketed using celebrities/influencers where the project founders have no intention of delivering on their promises. They're just there to pump and dump, which is a type[1] of fraud.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump

Re: In 2022, Web3 went just great

#140

Post by subradios »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #133
subradios wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened is that crypto is very cool. There's a not unwarranted perception amongst people in the United States at least that banking regulators are conspiring (or prospiring) to create the financial meltdowns we see, and give people with the right connections privileged seats at the table when it comes to markers. This is, to some degree, true - Quant traders in finance work with data that is literally unavailab…

> but when it comes to crypto sophisticated quants and Joe Bogsly are operating on a level playing field Pretty sure Tether isn’t operating on a level field with Joe Schmoe.

You misunderstood what I am saying. I am suggesting that quants and financiers have no special, privileged access to information. You can make spooky suppositions about Tether fraud, but if millions of documents disclosed didn't reveal a fraud after the whole community pored over them - it's at least as good as any other financial product.
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