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Of course if you are filthy stinking rich, it's because you participated in a distributed scam in order to defraud money from those "bandwagon shirt-losers."
by harryh 8y ago
Of course if you are filthy stinking rich, it's because you participated in a distributed scam in order to defraud money from those "bandwagon shirt-losers."
- sneak 8y agoWhat precisely was the scam? Who and how was I scamming by mining coins with my GPU and some open source software I saw on slashdot that are now worth several thousand dollars each?
- ForHackernews 8y agoYou sold something of no value to Greater Fools.
- rjakobsson 8y ago”of no value” :) ?
- cjhanks 8y agoThe scam was not by all btc pioneers. In the last year, there were a lot of holders creating marketing networks filled with misinformation and half-truths. That convinced a lot of people with little financial education and little understanding of the technology, that growth was imminent. All the while, the marketeers screaming "buy buy buy" were selling their btc on exchanges at insane rates. If you're just some guy mining, nobody thinks you're the problem.
- wpietri 8y agoWere they any BTC pioneers who objected strongly to the hype? If not, then I'd say they were at best complicit.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- wpietri 8y agoDid you sell any?
- wolco 8y agoIt's not a scam just a bad investment. Those using bitcoin for payments saw a utility not provided by other solutions. Those investing are a different class of users. Most purchased after hearing get rich stories.
- tptacek 8y agoWhat investment scam can you not say this about? People in boiler room operations pumping up bogus pharmaceuticals --- for example --- aren't themselves drug researchers and can, of course, tell themselves that they worked not on a scam, but on a product that didn't in the end worked out and simply turned out to be a bad investment.
- baddox 8y agoSurely you can’t call something a scam unless lying was involved. Plenty of bad investments or financial choices don’t involve lying.
- tptacek 8y agoHow are the people in the boiler room "lying"? They're not drug researchers. They have no idea if what they're pushing is a good investment or not; all they know is that it's weird that they've somehow got their hands on it, rather than JPMC or GS. The situations strike me as fairly analogous. We have no trouble calling penny stock pushers dialing for dollars exactly what they are, but when it comes to "cryptocurrency", we're all supposed to keep our mouths shut. That makes no sense to me. What's scary is, the instinct in a lot of places will be to take the analogy and unwind the other side of it --- maybe we should reconsider the morality of the boiler room operations! Maybe they're doing a service after all! Caveat emptor, after all!
- DenisM 8y agowolco's point, I think, is that BTC "was supposed" to be a payment mechanism, not a store of value. Those who used it "as directed" ended up no worse for it, while those who "invested" lost their money, but "it's their fault". Please note the ample use of quotes on my part.
- 21 8y agoYou mean, like pension funds trading the stock market?
- JBReefer 8y agoHow are _pension funds_ scams?
- 21 8y agoI didn't say pension funds are scams, but that pension funds make their profits from trading against non-knowledgeable people (like GP implied bitcoin traders do)
- nradov 8y agoMost pension funds are long-term investors and do very little active trading. Their trading counterparties are generally just as knowledgeable as they are.
- harryh 8y agoNo. Not at all like that. The stock market is people trading ownership stakes in corporations with actual value under a regulatory regime that implements proper safeguards.