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Crypto brothers front-ran the front-runners

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Re: Crypto brothers front-ran the front-runners

#21
Things like this truly make me wonder what the whole point of crypto is. On one hand, if it is truly "decentralized finance" and "code is law", then, well, hats off to these MIT brothers who executed their code. I mean, nearly a decade ago the DAO was hacked due to code bugs, and despite the hard fork of Ethereum (which was quite controversial), many people thought it was essentially a fair bug bounty.

If though, crypto requires things like the FBI and the legal system to enforce fair rules for participants, what benefit does it give over "traditional" finance? That is, isn't the whole reason for crypto existing in the first place is that it doesn't depend on governmental backing?

Re: Crypto brothers front-ran the front-runners

#22
post #5

Correct me if my understanding is wrong, but there are no crypto transactions involved with arbitrage in the common case. Arbitrage is concerned with the relative price of two assets, for example BTC/USD. There is no bitcoin transferred from exchange A to exchange B, simply the trade of USD to BTC on exchange A and BTC to USD on exchange B.

The arbitrage is happening on on-chain exchanges which require transactions to work with.

Re: Crypto brothers front-ran the front-runners

#25

Things like this truly make me wonder what the whole point of crypto is. On one hand, if it is truly "decentralized finance" and "code is law", then, well, hats off to these MIT brothers who executed their code. I mean, nearly a decade ago the DAO was hacked due to code bugs, and despite the hard fork of Ethereum (which was quite controversial), many people thought it was essentially a fair bug bounty. If though, cry…

You are so close...... Honestly, crypto was an interesting experiment that has devolved into nothing more than digital penny stocks.

Re: Crypto brothers front-ran the front-runners

#27
post #25

Things like this truly make me wonder what the whole point of crypto is. On one hand, if it is truly "decentralized finance" and "code is law", then, well, hats off to these MIT brothers who executed their code. I mean, nearly a decade ago the DAO was hacked due to code bugs, and despite the hard fork of Ethereum (which was quite controversial), many people thought it was essentially a fair bug bounty. If though, cry…

You are so close...... Honestly, crypto was an interesting experiment that has devolved into nothing more than digital penny stocks.

Yep. And penny stocks are also already digital, for all intents and purposes. So, not sure what remains, apart from long-in-the-tooth unfounded hype and cultists.

Re: Crypto brothers front-ran the front-runners

#28
$28M of somebody else's money seems like a small price to pay for securing enough attention to either address the situation that made this possible, or create a new market in it to close the arbitrage gap...and this is especially true when the "somebody else" got that money in shady-but-not-illegal ways in the first place.

It's like the bug bounty system is built into the code.

Re: Crypto brothers front-ran the front-runners

#29
post #25

Things like this truly make me wonder what the whole point of crypto is. On one hand, if it is truly "decentralized finance" and "code is law", then, well, hats off to these MIT brothers who executed their code. I mean, nearly a decade ago the DAO was hacked due to code bugs, and despite the hard fork of Ethereum (which was quite controversial), many people thought it was essentially a fair bug bounty. If though, cry…

You are so close...... Honestly, crypto was an interesting experiment that has devolved into nothing more than digital penny stocks.

Penny stocks rarely have similar market caps...

Re: Crypto brothers front-ran the front-runners

#30

Things like this truly make me wonder what the whole point of crypto is. On one hand, if it is truly "decentralized finance" and "code is law", then, well, hats off to these MIT brothers who executed their code. I mean, nearly a decade ago the DAO was hacked due to code bugs, and despite the hard fork of Ethereum (which was quite controversial), many people thought it was essentially a fair bug bounty. If though, cry…

The reason for crypto to exist is to be a secondary financial system that you didn't need to be well connected to old-money entities or families in order to "win" from. The 2008 financial crash spurred many anti-capitalist and hyper-capitalist movements, one of the latter being cryptocurrency. They saw how nakedly well-connected people absolutely cashed the fuck out with the near-collapse of the banking system permitting absurd amounts of money to flow to the markets that had created the problem in the first place, and led to tons of well-paid executives being given golden parachutes out of their industry, so fucking rich they would never have to work again. The anti-capitalist response to that sort of thing is "this system is broken and should be destroyed" and the hyper-capitalist response is "how do I get in on this thing" and the truth of the matter was, there wasn't really a way to get in on it if you weren't already in on it. Hence the creation of an entire second financial sector, recreating all of the failures of the existing one, without any of the regulations, and resulting in the exact same outcomes: the little guys get screwed, and the whales sail away into the sunset with unfathomable profits for basically doing nothing.

I'm not saying blockchain based technology itself is useless. Of course it has uses, some really good ones too. But cryptocurrency has always been 100% grift.

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