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If a million fools cause a systemic risk in the economy when their money gets lost or stolen, no, it turns out that there is a level of collective responsibilit

If a million fools cause a systemic risk in the economy when their money gets lost or stolen, no, it turns out that there is a level of collective responsibility.

jessaustin 9y ago
That's a nice thought, but it's not what happened when the fools crashed the "real" economy. Still zero prosecutions!
- michaelchisari 9y ago
  I thought crypto was supposed to be a better system.
- Daishiman 9y ago
  That the available protections don't cover the entire history of every possible financial scam or system risk doesn't change the fact that regulations have effectively kept a lot pump-and-dump scams and securities fraud at bay.
  - jessaustin 9y ago
    Above you were talking about "systemic risk". Is that something pump&dump can cause? Those seem to be just plain old frauds...
branchless 9y ago
Where is the risk to the real economy? No fiat was destroyed.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
CryptoPunk 9y ago
They're not children. I would strongly caution that we don't have a moral right to forbid them from using their own money how they wish. To think one does have that right is conceited, and the road to social ruin. And with respect to the 'systemic risk' argument, a million fools squander billions on state-run lotteries, and probably trillions on frivolous consumer goods, every year. I'm sure our system can withstand a few hundred million dollars worth of losses in cryptocurrency hacks. It's also not clear that it is actually in the long term systemically harmful, given there is at least some technological innovation, especially in the areas of distributed computing architectures and web security (there's never been a better bug bounty or a canary for un-known security vulnerabilities than cryptocurrency on a target hard drive), being generated from this activity.
- Daishiman 9y ago
  The state-run lottery is so because the profits go back to the system, which means that as a method of social ruin it at least subsidizing the rest of the social services. About the second point, in the dot-com boom, billions of dollars in value were destroyed by people doing the same kind of speculation as they're doing now with crypto. At least a lot of that money paid for labor and assets. What do ICOs actually leave behind? And what actual, useful innovation of blockchain technology has any uses whatsoever? Man, it's been over 8 years since we have cryptocurrencies as none of the tech's transcended that niche.
  - CryptoPunk 9y ago
    The dot com boom also spurred enormous tech development, and any government effort to curb it would have been a sweeping/imprecise measure that would have stifled the good (e.g. the early Amazon) with the bad (the 90% of firms that were crap). Moreover, a valuable lesson would have gone unlearned, leaving the investing public in its more naive state where it is more dependent on the publicly funded risk assessment that regulatory agencies do. This socialization of due diligence is going to create moral hazard, which is an economic inefficiency. >And what actual, useful innovation of blockchain technology has any uses whatsoever? People are able to move value in situations that they previously could not. Spin off benefits include the creation of a hardware wallet industry, an enormous amount of knowledge gained by cryptocurrency users on computer security, and greater public attention to monetary policy. I would argue that it has pushed PayPal and the credit companies to up their game and offer faster/cheaper services, but that's more speculative. I believe the big benefits of cryptocurrency are yet to come. They represent a paradigm shift and paradigm shifts take a long time to materialize. To give you an example, e-commerce took a long time to move beyond the realm of fantastical claims about its future promise to actual large-scale real world utility.

If a million fools cause a systemic risk in the economy when their money gets lost or stolen, no, it turns out that there is a level of collective responsibility.

jessaustin 9y ago

That's a nice thought, but it's not what happened when the fools crashed the "real" economy. Still zero prosecutions!

michaelchisari 9y ago
I thought crypto was supposed to be a better system.
Daishiman 9y ago
That the available protections don't cover the entire history of every possible financial scam or system risk doesn't change the fact that regulations have effectively kept a lot pump-and-dump scams and securities fraud at bay.
- jessaustin 9y ago
  Above you were talking about "systemic risk". Is that something pump&dump can cause? Those seem to be just plain old frauds...

branchless 9y ago

Where is the risk to the real economy? No fiat was destroyed.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

CryptoPunk 9y ago

They're not children. I would strongly caution that we don't have a moral right to forbid them from using their own money how they wish. To think one does have that right is conceited, and the road to social ruin. And with respect to the 'systemic risk' argument, a million fools squander billions on state-run lotteries, and probably trillions on frivolous consumer goods, every year. I'm sure our system can withstand a few hundred million dollars worth of losses in cryptocurrency hacks. It's also not clear that it is actually in the long term systemically harmful, given there is at least some technological innovation, especially in the areas of distributed computing architectures and web security (there's never been a better bug bounty or a canary for un-known security vulnerabilities than cryptocurrency on a target hard drive), being generated from this activity.

Daishiman 9y ago
The state-run lottery is so because the profits go back to the system, which means that as a method of social ruin it at least subsidizing the rest of the social services. About the second point, in the dot-com boom, billions of dollars in value were destroyed by people doing the same kind of speculation as they're doing now with crypto. At least a lot of that money paid for labor and assets. What do ICOs actually leave behind? And what actual, useful innovation of blockchain technology has any uses whatsoever? Man, it's been over 8 years since we have cryptocurrencies as none of the tech's transcended that niche.
- CryptoPunk 9y ago
  The dot com boom also spurred enormous tech development, and any government effort to curb it would have been a sweeping/imprecise measure that would have stifled the good (e.g. the early Amazon) with the bad (the 90% of firms that were crap). Moreover, a valuable lesson would have gone unlearned, leaving the investing public in its more naive state where it is more dependent on the publicly funded risk assessment that regulatory agencies do. This socialization of due diligence is going to create moral hazard, which is an economic inefficiency. >And what actual, useful innovation of blockchain technology has any uses whatsoever? People are able to move value in situations that they previously could not. Spin off benefits include the creation of a hardware wallet industry, an enormous amount of knowledge gained by cryptocurrency users on computer security, and greater public attention to monetary policy. I would argue that it has pushed PayPal and the credit companies to up their game and offer faster/cheaper services, but that's more speculative. I believe the big benefits of cryptocurrency are yet to come. They represent a paradigm shift and paradigm shifts take a long time to materialize. To give you an example, e-commerce took a long time to move beyond the realm of fantastical claims about its future promise to actual large-scale real world utility.