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Cryptos make rich people richer, and are sold to poor people the same way lottery tickets are. ”Look at old Pete here, he used to be a loser like you, but he be

by nikanj 5y ago

Cryptos make rich people richer, and are sold to poor people the same way lottery tickets are. ”Look at old Pete here, he used to be a loser like you, but he believed and now he’s got $millions in the bank”

adventured 5y ago
> and are sold to poor people the same way lottery tickets are. Crypto has never been heavily marketed to poor people. They don't have the capital to buy in at any meaningful scale. The lottery ticket appeal is that you might win $10k or $1m off of a $1 or $2 ticket. There is no mass scale marketing effort pushing $1/$2 of Bitcoin or Dogecoin to poor people with that con-pitch. To this day poor people have barely any stake in the crypto world. For crypto, the lottery players are the small contingent of middle class persons that bother with it (which still isn't very many). Actual lottery tickets on the other hand, are prominently marketed to poor people all over the place, front and center in many common stores. Walk into an average convenience store or liquor store, you're telling me they have a large display of dozens of cryptos with updating price quotes appealing to poor people about how big the prizes are and how they can win a million dollars with a $2 ticket? Nope.
- alex504 5y ago
  They are marketed to people in my experience who are relatively poor. I know a guy who has a problem making rent who has all of his savings (about 1k) in dogecoin or other gambles like individual stocks. I have also met a ton of service people like bartenders and waiters who are involved in crypto. I have also met quite a few software engineers who are not poor but don' have nearly the level of wealth of the people manipulating these markets who have gotten involved with this stuff. These people aren't poor but relative to the scammers they are, and when they lose money in hurts. I know one engineer for example who lost his life savings on some alt coins in this mid thirties.
- joshuahaglund 5y ago
  I know liquor stores with crypto ATMs with displays. If you log into paypal, you can buy crypto. They're absolutely marketing to people with not much money.
w4llstr33t 5y ago
A poor person could've invested $50 in Bitcoin when it was priced at $1. That poor person would now be a millionaire if they would've held on to that since. It is not all rich people marketing to poor people, or at least it didn't start that way. I don't disagree in terms of rich people controlling the crypto ecosystem now. That is one aspect I'm not liking about crypto right now. Too much manipulation, although I think that's at least partly coming from the traditional institutions jumping in and playing the games they do with traditional markets. Plenty goes on behind the scenes in traditional markets, even though they are regulated, and yes, crypto has less regulation, so they probably can get away with more. I love crypto technology but I think there's stuff going on behind the scenes that regular folk have no idea, and I'm starting to wonder if the grand ideas crypto people have are incorrect. I think the way it will succeed is when big institutions accumulate enough and then it's in their interest to manipulate the crypto market up. I.e. see banks in the Big Short accumulating enough of what Michael Burry was betting on all along, and at that point they revised the indices that track the housing markets, since it was in their interest to at that point. In the end I don't think crypto is much different than what goes on in equity markets now. Rich people and big institutions control that market too. Meme stocks are essentially also lottery tickets. Way out of balance P/E ratios mean traditional fundamentals are out the window. It's all about momentum and trends now. The one difference, and a benefit I see for traditional markets, is the government will bail them out. The government would be fine if crypto crashes. I think that's the scary part about investing in crypto, but there is also higher potential for upside in crypto markets.
throwawayswede 5y ago
What are you trying to say? - Business and work in general makes rich people richer. Remember that rich is very relative. You are a very wealthy person compared to a random person in some countryside in China. - Considering the previous point, are you saying that people who have some money should not do anything to make more money? Should they stay the same, or should they become poorer? What do you advocate to do this? Prevent them from working? Take money from them forcefully? All I hear from people in the crypto world is that you SHOULDN'T invest if you don't have money you're willing to lose. Crypto investment is a dream only for delusional people who want to get rich quick. If you do that then lose your money, you don't get to complain. You're free to choose, if you choose wrong, lose, and then not take responsibility for your choice and blame others, then you're truly a loser.
- qeternity 5y ago
  I’ll take issue with your last point. Many in crypto are evangelical about it, but follow up everything with a “DYOR” as if that absolves whatever their statement was. Michael Saylor, the most visible corporate Bitcoin warrior, advised people to mortgage their homes and borrow as much as they could to buy Bitcoin at the literal top of the market (to the day). The number of people in crypto who believe in a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist world are on the order of 0.01% - the millions of retail traders punting Dogecoin around are just trying to get rich and don’t give a damn about the tech or some greater cause. And that’s because that is how crypto is actually marketed to the masses.
  - w4llstr33t 5y ago
    Michael Saylor did say that, it's true. I am posting this, which is the original video, since I see the other comments link to a reddit post which has a modified, sensationalized version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgqC5_eugJI&t=4470s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgqC5_eugJI&t=4470s I take issue with him telling individuals to accrue debt to acquire Bitcoin (companies I have less of an issue taking debt on). That's also the least reasonable part of the interview though. I think overall he makes a lot of good points as to why Bitcoin makes sense in the majority of the interview. However, I'm not one of those crypto people that only looks at one side of this. Yes, sometimes ridiculous things are suggested, but there is some good to this technology, too.
Tenoke 5y ago
Some crypto like Dogecoin sure. However, some crypto is bets on tech - e.g. those that try to achieve something like DEXs or synthetic assets - not that different than investing in stock or startups.
leppr 5y ago
You're talking about fixed or restricted-supply cryptocurrencies, which do indeed almost always have some Ponzi aspect. These might represent a majority of the current cryptocurrency landscape, but isn't close to being a fundamental truth. Algorithmic stablecoins like RAI[1] don't have a Ponzi component to them, for instance. You use the dApp and that's it. [1] https://reflexer.finance https://reflexer.finance
- arcticbull 5y ago
  It's Russian Nesting Ponzis. Reflexer is collateralized by ETH which is traded 65% of the time against USDT which is backed by chewing gum and hope. This USDT trading determines the price of ETH which in turn determines the collateralization rate of RAI.
  - Y_Y 5y ago
    a.k.a Matryoshka Pyramid, Financial Sierpiński
    - arcticbull 5y ago
      Those are both brilliant, btw.
  - leppr 5y ago
    > Reflexer is collateralized by ETH which is traded 65% of the time against USDT which is backed by chewing gum and hope. This USDT trading determines the price. What kind of logical fallacy are you trying to make here? If someone sets up an exchange for bananas/pokemon cards and it ends up grossing a majority of the global banana trading volume, that doesn't mean the price of bananas is suddenly backed by pokemon cards. Furthermore, the mechanism through which Reflexer maintains the stablecoin's price is independent from the collateral asset. It works just as well whether the collateral asset is traded against USDT or fiat.
    - solveit 5y ago
      No, but if you had a banana farm you would be very very wary of pokemon cards turning out to be a ponzi. Bananas are nice and would be worth something regardless, but would they be worth quite as much if people weren't fraudulently printing pokemon cards to buy bananas? How much of the perceived value of bananas is a mirage caused by fradulent pokemon cards? We may never know before the house of pokemon cards collapse and the rubble clears.
agumonkey 5y ago
A large chunk of society works this way. How many products are only trying to make crowds spend money uselessly so a group of educated wealthy people make another profit (until the next trend). Crypto is yet-another-trading-market nothing new expect maybe marketing)
- imtringued 5y ago
  Crypto is money but this time I'm the one in power instead of the government! There are entrenched powers in the government system? No problem, we can become the entrenched power in the new cryptocurrency! Literally nobody in the cryptocurrency space is thinking about how to make fiat fair and sustainable because they actually like the flaws of fiat and just want to amplify them for their own benefit.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    I find that native. People with billions have more power than me on bitcoin, they can play me like a toy. cryptocurrencies aren't perfect, maybe better than fiat .. and that remains to be seen IMO, it's only 10yo.
  - mikeblackson 5y ago
    What would make fiat "fair" in your opinion? The only thing I can think of is stopping the constant debasement that the poorer holders are unaware of.
    - jokethrowaway 5y ago
      Backing fiat with real assets stored somewhere (not necessarily gold) I don't think cryptocurrencies solve anything though, they're equally not backed and they don't even have weapons or an economy behind
      - mikeblackson 5y ago
        How do you make sure fiat is backed by the necessary amount of real assets? Without a concrete safeguard, we would eventually fall back into the debasement scenario again. I believe this is the problem bitcoin is attempting to solve. The asset/value is inseparable from the monetary network which makes it easily auditable.
hellbannedguy 5y ago
Every retail instition I know of, and appears on CNBC (a place that bankers, hedge fund guys, Jimmy Prop guy Cramer (I actually feel for Cramer. I had no idea he was having migraines over half the days in a month.), etc.) are creating their own crypto. They are all believers now. It does seem like they are just in it to take money from the Retail Investors investors though like they always do. Meaning I have seen to many Bull to Bear Markets, and when the switch happens--it's the Retail investor that looses everything. (I guess we will know how it all turns out in a few years. If I had Bitcoins, I would sell. The competition is almost exponential. New crypto are coming on daily. Every money licker wants their own crypto.)
- spookthesunset 5y ago
  I’ve been watching Bitcoin for like a decade. Bitcoin is the scam that will just keep on going. I have no clue when it will crash for good.
- w4llstr33t 5y ago
  I don't think Jim Cramer is creating his own crypto. Where did you hear that? I don't watch his show but a quick google search produced no results. He has said he has invested in Bitcoin and Ethereum, but also seemed to have gotten out as soon as they started to go down. However, I don't disagree that retail investors may end up with issues with crypto, but I don't think traditional markets are necessarily safe for retail investors either. Big money controls both crypto and traditional markets. Governments can bail out traditional markets, but in the end big money gets most of the bailout, too. Traditional markets, at least right now, are less volatile than crypto, but things like March 2020 show that they aren't for certain, either. It sounds like we don't really disagree though since you referred to watching various bull and bear cycles.
machinehermiter 5y ago
For sure. It really has become a more distributed lottery. The people I know who are obsessed with slot machines and buying lottery tickets are the people I know that own dogecoin. This whole thing gets more absurd as USD Coin and Binance USD climb to the top with Tether. The whole space to me feels like such a massive waste of resources and brain power.
- eli 5y ago
  It's all like that. Dogecoin isn't different from any other crypto in any meaningful way
  - everfree 5y ago
    It's different in terms of inflation schedule, contract support and of course that it's not trying to be anything but a meme. Would you mind elaborating on your thoughts?
    - eli 5y ago
      I guess I just don't think inflation schedule or contract support are particularly meaningful. And Doge is explicitly a meme, but all of them are implicitly a meme. People want crypto because they are bought into the viral idea of owning crypto. Unless you have a ransom to pay, nobody is buying it for its inherent utility.
      - everfree 5y ago
        I've seen people increasingly buy stablecoins to earn interest from lending them (higher rates than a bank or bond gives you), which I would argue is inherent utility. Plus, the idea of holding USD stablecoins in countries with poor banking infrastructure is gaining steam, which is inherent utility.
        MathYouF 5y ago
        My best friend is Venezuelan and I assure you there are real humans in the world who get real value from a stable digital form of currency that doesn't require a central bank account. The only ones they can legally have are ones in their country, and the exchange rate for foreign currencies is a rigged price that doesn't reflect real inflation. They're almost literally financially enslaved to their countries central bank, which devalues their only legal form of life savings by 25% every month by printing more and more (for government members) and no other country will give them banking access but their own, which has regulated against them using any alternative currencies than the one the central bank controls. Just imagine if the US made it illegal to own any currency besides USD, and then started printing so much that you lost 90% of the value of your savings every 3-6 months. They've experienced 10,000,000% inflation since 2014. That would turn someone's retirement account of $5,000,000 into $49.95. The only option there is a digital store of wealth that doesn't discriminate against them based on their citizenship, unlike every central bank in the world. Otherwise, the rug is just constantly being pulled out from under you, and your only legal store of value is the things you can buy in the store and keep in your closet to sell later. Back to a financial system more primitive than in ancient Athens (400BC). Americans benefit from a global banking structure that is rigged in their favor. Their government prints the global reserve currency, most countries in the world welcome them with open arms and offer banking solutions, and their hegemony is backed by hundreds of military bases armed with tanks, airplanes, and soldiers across the world, and miltiary ships across the seas. It's very easy for all the rich tech people in this thread living in stable countries to denounce crypto as useless, because to them, right now, it is. But it is careless to denounce it as a concept. The tweeter mentioned that it is a right wing tool. In the US that has a dirty connotation, and I agree that coming from the US, we can see first hand the dangers of unfettered right wing policy. But people coming from countries that have experienced extreme left wing governments that describe daily common horrors far worse than people peeing in bottles on Amazon's factory floors. A little bit of sympathy for them and the real life saving use case the "right wing" tool of decentralised finance against the troubles they experience could go a long way. All that said, I was very skeptical of the crypto community for a long time as well, because it is most of the same people who do MLM schemes. But real life experience has now made it impossible for me to ignore that the underlying tech has real humanitarian use cases as well, and those should be nurtured.
herbst 5y ago
Jobs, especially it jobs, are Portrait like that too. Yet I know more people who got wealth and crypto than I their jobs.
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matheusmoreira 5y ago
It's true that shitcoins are basically a casino but I don't think it's fair to generalize that to the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. We have real projects that provide real innovations and uses such as Ethereum and Monero.
- eloisant 5y ago
  I still have to see one application of cryptocurrency that wouldn't be better without it. Except for: - Selling/buying illegal stuff (like drugs or credit cards numbers) - Ransomware and other scams
  - everfree 5y ago
    Letting people hold interest-bearing dollar equivalents (USDC, DAI) in countries with weak finance infrastructure.
  - CryptoPunk 5y ago
    * Buying products/services anonymously, if you don't want to have your personally identifying information, like your credit card details, leaked one day when the website you purchased from is hacked. * Making payments to parties underserved by banks, whether it's legal cannabis dispensaries, or Wikileaks when the credit card companies blockaded them. * Triggering financial exchanges, without the friction (and risk of PII theft associated with the identity-based accounts that centralized custodians use) of signing up to a traditional online brokerage or exchange, via crypto transfers to self-executing smart contracts like decentralized exchanges.
  - gopher_space 5y ago
    I can think of several uses for blockchain, I can't think of any reason to use an established coin for those uses.
  - nikanj 5y ago
    Avoiding capital controls and hiding assets too!
  - 5y ago
rsynnott 5y ago
Was recently watching "Becoming a god in central Florida", a Netflix sitcom about a fraudulent MLM scheme in the 90s. I was struck by how similar the vibe was to today's crypto community; anyone who wasn't making money or who questioned the value proposition of the overpriced cleaning products simply didn't understand, didn't believe hard enough, and those who refused to get involved were the enemy, their lack of belief viewed as an attack on the scheme ('no-coiners', anyone?)
- TrackerFF 5y ago
  I've said it before, but over here in Europe, a lot of the good ol' boys from the 80s/90s/00s MLM scene pivoted to crypto the second it hit the mainstream - if not before that. If I were to invest in anything related to crypto today, I'd conduct the due-diligence of a lifetime before sinking a cent into the investment, even going as far as hiring private investigators to fine-comb through the people involved. I don't think any tech sector has more veteran con-men than crypto - these folks have been scamming people for a lifetime. Behind MLM (https://behindmlm.com/ https://behindmlm.com/) makes a decent job at following the worst offenders
  - derangedHorse 5y ago
    Same, I wouldn't put any money into crypto if I hadn't at least glanced at the code for it and understood the high-level value added. The amount of (non-technical) people I know who invested in dogecoin and shiba inu (and not in a memey way) is astounding
- ijustwanttovote 5y ago
  > Becoming a god in central Florida Thanks for the show recommendation.
- graeme 5y ago
  Have a look at these ads for the MMM ponzi from 90s russia. Same vibes https://youtu.be/a9FA0b61zSE https://youtu.be/a9FA0b61zSE
deregulateMed 5y ago
I'm not sure this Applies to finite coins like BTC. But alt coins is gambling.
- analognoise 5y ago
  He directly called out artificial scarcity, it obviously applies to Bitcoin.
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by nikanj 5y ago

adventured 5y ago

> and are sold to poor people the same way lottery tickets are. Crypto has never been heavily marketed to poor people. They don't have the capital to buy in at any meaningful scale. The lottery ticket appeal is that you might win $10k or $1m off of a $1 or $2 ticket. There is no mass scale marketing effort pushing $1/$2 of Bitcoin or Dogecoin to poor people with that con-pitch. To this day poor people have barely any stake in the crypto world. For crypto, the lottery players are the small contingent of middle class persons that bother with it (which still isn't very many). Actual lottery tickets on the other hand, are prominently marketed to poor people all over the place, front and center in many common stores. Walk into an average convenience store or liquor store, you're telling me they have a large display of dozens of cryptos with updating price quotes appealing to poor people about how big the prizes are and how they can win a million dollars with a $2 ticket? Nope.

alex504 5y ago
They are marketed to people in my experience who are relatively poor. I know a guy who has a problem making rent who has all of his savings (about 1k) in dogecoin or other gambles like individual stocks. I have also met a ton of service people like bartenders and waiters who are involved in crypto. I have also met quite a few software engineers who are not poor but don' have nearly the level of wealth of the people manipulating these markets who have gotten involved with this stuff. These people aren't poor but relative to the scammers they are, and when they lose money in hurts. I know one engineer for example who lost his life savings on some alt coins in this mid thirties.
joshuahaglund 5y ago
I know liquor stores with crypto ATMs with displays. If you log into paypal, you can buy crypto. They're absolutely marketing to people with not much money.

w4llstr33t 5y ago

A poor person could've invested $50 in Bitcoin when it was priced at $1. That poor person would now be a millionaire if they would've held on to that since. It is not all rich people marketing to poor people, or at least it didn't start that way. I don't disagree in terms of rich people controlling the crypto ecosystem now. That is one aspect I'm not liking about crypto right now. Too much manipulation, although I think that's at least partly coming from the traditional institutions jumping in and playing the games they do with traditional markets. Plenty goes on behind the scenes in traditional markets, even though they are regulated, and yes, crypto has less regulation, so they probably can get away with more. I love crypto technology but I think there's stuff going on behind the scenes that regular folk have no idea, and I'm starting to wonder if the grand ideas crypto people have are incorrect. I think the way it will succeed is when big institutions accumulate enough and then it's in their interest to manipulate the crypto market up. I.e. see banks in the Big Short accumulating enough of what Michael Burry was betting on all along, and at that point they revised the indices that track the housing markets, since it was in their interest to at that point. In the end I don't think crypto is much different than what goes on in equity markets now. Rich people and big institutions control that market too. Meme stocks are essentially also lottery tickets. Way out of balance P/E ratios mean traditional fundamentals are out the window. It's all about momentum and trends now. The one difference, and a benefit I see for traditional markets, is the government will bail them out. The government would be fine if crypto crashes. I think that's the scary part about investing in crypto, but there is also higher potential for upside in crypto markets.

throwawayswede 5y ago

What are you trying to say? - Business and work in general makes rich people richer. Remember that rich is very relative. You are a very wealthy person compared to a random person in some countryside in China. - Considering the previous point, are you saying that people who have some money should not do anything to make more money? Should they stay the same, or should they become poorer? What do you advocate to do this? Prevent them from working? Take money from them forcefully? All I hear from people in the crypto world is that you SHOULDN'T invest if you don't have money you're willing to lose. Crypto investment is a dream only for delusional people who want to get rich quick. If you do that then lose your money, you don't get to complain. You're free to choose, if you choose wrong, lose, and then not take responsibility for your choice and blame others, then you're truly a loser.

qeternity 5y ago
I’ll take issue with your last point. Many in crypto are evangelical about it, but follow up everything with a “DYOR” as if that absolves whatever their statement was. Michael Saylor, the most visible corporate Bitcoin warrior, advised people to mortgage their homes and borrow as much as they could to buy Bitcoin at the literal top of the market (to the day). The number of people in crypto who believe in a libertarian, anarcho-capitalist world are on the order of 0.01% - the millions of retail traders punting Dogecoin around are just trying to get rich and don’t give a damn about the tech or some greater cause. And that’s because that is how crypto is actually marketed to the masses.
- w4llstr33t 5y ago
  Michael Saylor did say that, it's true. I am posting this, which is the original video, since I see the other comments link to a reddit post which has a modified, sensationalized version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgqC5_eugJI&t=4470s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgqC5_eugJI&t=4470s I take issue with him telling individuals to accrue debt to acquire Bitcoin (companies I have less of an issue taking debt on). That's also the least reasonable part of the interview though. I think overall he makes a lot of good points as to why Bitcoin makes sense in the majority of the interview. However, I'm not one of those crypto people that only looks at one side of this. Yes, sometimes ridiculous things are suggested, but there is some good to this technology, too.

Tenoke 5y ago

Some crypto like Dogecoin sure. However, some crypto is bets on tech - e.g. those that try to achieve something like DEXs or synthetic assets - not that different than investing in stock or startups.

leppr 5y ago

You're talking about fixed or restricted-supply cryptocurrencies, which do indeed almost always have some Ponzi aspect. These might represent a majority of the current cryptocurrency landscape, but isn't close to being a fundamental truth. Algorithmic stablecoins like RAI[1] don't have a Ponzi component to them, for instance. You use the dApp and that's it. [1] https://reflexer.finance https://reflexer.finance

arcticbull 5y ago
It's Russian Nesting Ponzis. Reflexer is collateralized by ETH which is traded 65% of the time against USDT which is backed by chewing gum and hope. This USDT trading determines the price of ETH which in turn determines the collateralization rate of RAI.
- Y_Y 5y ago
  a.k.a Matryoshka Pyramid, Financial Sierpiński
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    Those are both brilliant, btw.
- leppr 5y ago
  > Reflexer is collateralized by ETH which is traded 65% of the time against USDT which is backed by chewing gum and hope. This USDT trading determines the price. What kind of logical fallacy are you trying to make here? If someone sets up an exchange for bananas/pokemon cards and it ends up grossing a majority of the global banana trading volume, that doesn't mean the price of bananas is suddenly backed by pokemon cards. Furthermore, the mechanism through which Reflexer maintains the stablecoin's price is independent from the collateral asset. It works just as well whether the collateral asset is traded against USDT or fiat.
  - solveit 5y ago
    No, but if you had a banana farm you would be very very wary of pokemon cards turning out to be a ponzi. Bananas are nice and would be worth something regardless, but would they be worth quite as much if people weren't fraudulently printing pokemon cards to buy bananas? How much of the perceived value of bananas is a mirage caused by fradulent pokemon cards? We may never know before the house of pokemon cards collapse and the rubble clears.

agumonkey 5y ago

A large chunk of society works this way. How many products are only trying to make crowds spend money uselessly so a group of educated wealthy people make another profit (until the next trend). Crypto is yet-another-trading-market nothing new expect maybe marketing)

imtringued 5y ago
Crypto is money but this time I'm the one in power instead of the government! There are entrenched powers in the government system? No problem, we can become the entrenched power in the new cryptocurrency! Literally nobody in the cryptocurrency space is thinking about how to make fiat fair and sustainable because they actually like the flaws of fiat and just want to amplify them for their own benefit.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  I find that native. People with billions have more power than me on bitcoin, they can play me like a toy. cryptocurrencies aren't perfect, maybe better than fiat .. and that remains to be seen IMO, it's only 10yo.
- mikeblackson 5y ago
  What would make fiat "fair" in your opinion? The only thing I can think of is stopping the constant debasement that the poorer holders are unaware of.
  - jokethrowaway 5y ago
    Backing fiat with real assets stored somewhere (not necessarily gold) I don't think cryptocurrencies solve anything though, they're equally not backed and they don't even have weapons or an economy behind
    - mikeblackson 5y ago
      How do you make sure fiat is backed by the necessary amount of real assets? Without a concrete safeguard, we would eventually fall back into the debasement scenario again. I believe this is the problem bitcoin is attempting to solve. The asset/value is inseparable from the monetary network which makes it easily auditable.

hellbannedguy 5y ago

Every retail instition I know of, and appears on CNBC (a place that bankers, hedge fund guys, Jimmy Prop guy Cramer (I actually feel for Cramer. I had no idea he was having migraines over half the days in a month.), etc.) are creating their own crypto. They are all believers now. It does seem like they are just in it to take money from the Retail Investors investors though like they always do. Meaning I have seen to many Bull to Bear Markets, and when the switch happens--it's the Retail investor that looses everything. (I guess we will know how it all turns out in a few years. If I had Bitcoins, I would sell. The competition is almost exponential. New crypto are coming on daily. Every money licker wants their own crypto.)

spookthesunset 5y ago
I’ve been watching Bitcoin for like a decade. Bitcoin is the scam that will just keep on going. I have no clue when it will crash for good.
w4llstr33t 5y ago
I don't think Jim Cramer is creating his own crypto. Where did you hear that? I don't watch his show but a quick google search produced no results. He has said he has invested in Bitcoin and Ethereum, but also seemed to have gotten out as soon as they started to go down. However, I don't disagree that retail investors may end up with issues with crypto, but I don't think traditional markets are necessarily safe for retail investors either. Big money controls both crypto and traditional markets. Governments can bail out traditional markets, but in the end big money gets most of the bailout, too. Traditional markets, at least right now, are less volatile than crypto, but things like March 2020 show that they aren't for certain, either. It sounds like we don't really disagree though since you referred to watching various bull and bear cycles.

machinehermiter 5y ago

For sure. It really has become a more distributed lottery. The people I know who are obsessed with slot machines and buying lottery tickets are the people I know that own dogecoin. This whole thing gets more absurd as USD Coin and Binance USD climb to the top with Tether. The whole space to me feels like such a massive waste of resources and brain power.

eli 5y ago
It's all like that. Dogecoin isn't different from any other crypto in any meaningful way
- everfree 5y ago
  It's different in terms of inflation schedule, contract support and of course that it's not trying to be anything but a meme. Would you mind elaborating on your thoughts?
  - eli 5y ago
    I guess I just don't think inflation schedule or contract support are particularly meaningful. And Doge is explicitly a meme, but all of them are implicitly a meme. People want crypto because they are bought into the viral idea of owning crypto. Unless you have a ransom to pay, nobody is buying it for its inherent utility.
    - everfree 5y ago
      I've seen people increasingly buy stablecoins to earn interest from lending them (higher rates than a bank or bond gives you), which I would argue is inherent utility. Plus, the idea of holding USD stablecoins in countries with poor banking infrastructure is gaining steam, which is inherent utility.
      - MathYouF 5y ago
        My best friend is Venezuelan and I assure you there are real humans in the world who get real value from a stable digital form of currency that doesn't require a central bank account. The only ones they can legally have are ones in their country, and the exchange rate for foreign currencies is a rigged price that doesn't reflect real inflation. They're almost literally financially enslaved to their countries central bank, which devalues their only legal form of life savings by 25% every month by printing more and more (for government members) and no other country will give them banking access but their own, which has regulated against them using any alternative currencies than the one the central bank controls. Just imagine if the US made it illegal to own any currency besides USD, and then started printing so much that you lost 90% of the value of your savings every 3-6 months. They've experienced 10,000,000% inflation since 2014. That would turn someone's retirement account of $5,000,000 into $49.95. The only option there is a digital store of wealth that doesn't discriminate against them based on their citizenship, unlike every central bank in the world. Otherwise, the rug is just constantly being pulled out from under you, and your only legal store of value is the things you can buy in the store and keep in your closet to sell later. Back to a financial system more primitive than in ancient Athens (400BC). Americans benefit from a global banking structure that is rigged in their favor. Their government prints the global reserve currency, most countries in the world welcome them with open arms and offer banking solutions, and their hegemony is backed by hundreds of military bases armed with tanks, airplanes, and soldiers across the world, and miltiary ships across the seas. It's very easy for all the rich tech people in this thread living in stable countries to denounce crypto as useless, because to them, right now, it is. But it is careless to denounce it as a concept. The tweeter mentioned that it is a right wing tool. In the US that has a dirty connotation, and I agree that coming from the US, we can see first hand the dangers of unfettered right wing policy. But people coming from countries that have experienced extreme left wing governments that describe daily common horrors far worse than people peeing in bottles on Amazon's factory floors. A little bit of sympathy for them and the real life saving use case the "right wing" tool of decentralised finance against the troubles they experience could go a long way. All that said, I was very skeptical of the crypto community for a long time as well, because it is most of the same people who do MLM schemes. But real life experience has now made it impossible for me to ignore that the underlying tech has real humanitarian use cases as well, and those should be nurtured.

herbst 5y ago

Jobs, especially it jobs, are Portrait like that too. Yet I know more people who got wealth and crypto than I their jobs.

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matheusmoreira 5y ago

It's true that shitcoins are basically a casino but I don't think it's fair to generalize that to the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem. We have real projects that provide real innovations and uses such as Ethereum and Monero.

eloisant 5y ago
I still have to see one application of cryptocurrency that wouldn't be better without it. Except for: - Selling/buying illegal stuff (like drugs or credit cards numbers) - Ransomware and other scams
- everfree 5y ago
  Letting people hold interest-bearing dollar equivalents (USDC, DAI) in countries with weak finance infrastructure.
- CryptoPunk 5y ago
  * Buying products/services anonymously, if you don't want to have your personally identifying information, like your credit card details, leaked one day when the website you purchased from is hacked. * Making payments to parties underserved by banks, whether it's legal cannabis dispensaries, or Wikileaks when the credit card companies blockaded them. * Triggering financial exchanges, without the friction (and risk of PII theft associated with the identity-based accounts that centralized custodians use) of signing up to a traditional online brokerage or exchange, via crypto transfers to self-executing smart contracts like decentralized exchanges.
- gopher_space 5y ago
  I can think of several uses for blockchain, I can't think of any reason to use an established coin for those uses.
- nikanj 5y ago
  Avoiding capital controls and hiding assets too!
- 5y ago

rsynnott 5y ago

Was recently watching "Becoming a god in central Florida", a Netflix sitcom about a fraudulent MLM scheme in the 90s. I was struck by how similar the vibe was to today's crypto community; anyone who wasn't making money or who questioned the value proposition of the overpriced cleaning products simply didn't understand, didn't believe hard enough, and those who refused to get involved were the enemy, their lack of belief viewed as an attack on the scheme ('no-coiners', anyone?)

TrackerFF 5y ago
I've said it before, but over here in Europe, a lot of the good ol' boys from the 80s/90s/00s MLM scene pivoted to crypto the second it hit the mainstream - if not before that. If I were to invest in anything related to crypto today, I'd conduct the due-diligence of a lifetime before sinking a cent into the investment, even going as far as hiring private investigators to fine-comb through the people involved. I don't think any tech sector has more veteran con-men than crypto - these folks have been scamming people for a lifetime. Behind MLM (https://behindmlm.com/ https://behindmlm.com/) makes a decent job at following the worst offenders
- derangedHorse 5y ago
  Same, I wouldn't put any money into crypto if I hadn't at least glanced at the code for it and understood the high-level value added. The amount of (non-technical) people I know who invested in dogecoin and shiba inu (and not in a memey way) is astounding
ijustwanttovote 5y ago
> Becoming a god in central Florida Thanks for the show recommendation.
graeme 5y ago
Have a look at these ads for the MMM ponzi from 90s russia. Same vibes https://youtu.be/a9FA0b61zSE https://youtu.be/a9FA0b61zSE

deregulateMed 5y ago

I'm not sure this Applies to finite coins like BTC. But alt coins is gambling.

analognoise 5y ago
He directly called out artificial scarcity, it obviously applies to Bitcoin.

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