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> People who haven't worked in financial markets have a hard time appreciating how deep the muck can get. That's the main reason why I find the battle cry of "

• benreesman 5y ago
  You have a lot more faith in the IPO underwriting process than I do. They don’t call it a “pop” for nothing.
  • ckastner 5y ago
    Not at all. I'm just saying that the other process is much, much worse than that.
    • ravar 5y ago
      thats like, your opinion bro. In all seriousness I am ok with crypto punishing gamblers, eventually people will learn to stay away from it, or be forced to stay away from it because they have nothing left to gamble. I don't see how this is more morally repugnant than casinos which are legally accessible in most of the US.
      • wpietri 5y ago
        It's more morally repugnant because it's much less transparent. Casinos are exploitative misery factories and I'd be happy to see them vanish forever. But they're at least carefully regulated to exploit people at an agreed-upon level and with all the rules known beforehand.
        • ravar 5y ago
          Personally I am ok with both crypto and Casinos existing, just because some people are stupid doesn't mean i should have my freedoms restricted. Stupid Should Hurt. As an aside crypto has the potential to change the world for the better if it ever becomes used as a real currency. I think the people that stand to lose in that situation love spreading FUD about crypto. However it is probably not bitcoin that is going to become that imho, but rather some POS coin.
          • wpietri 5y ago
            Perhaps consider that this isn't about just you? It's bad for society to let scam artists operate unfettered. It doesn't just harm the scammed. For one, you've given terrible people more money to run bigger scams. Two, it misdirects resources to negative-sum activity. Third and most broadly, it reduces trust in anything that looks vaguely similar, which increases transactional friction and reduces available investment capital, making society poorer as a whole. And that's before we even get to your illusion that you are safe from being scammed because only stupid people get suckered and you're one of the smart ones. There are scams for everybody. The whole "crypto" space is proof of that.
        • Ekaros 5y ago
          If I play slot machines I know I lose money. But at least I know the return isn't absolutely horrible. Usually around 90%... Same applies to many casino games if played sensibly. The lotteries and scratch tickets are the truly horrible crap. Return is absolutely abysmal with them...
      • skrebbel 5y ago
        Yeah and after all, the world's poker chip factories consume the same amount of energy as Argentina so it's an apt comparison.
        • Tenoke 5y ago
          This seems sarcastic but the amount of resources that has went into building all casinos, casino sites, and everything related to the industry dwarfs the amount of resources that have went into bitcoin by a lot. If it seems otherwise it might be because you see articles on Bitcoin's energy consumption all the time, and not as much about casinos.
          • wpietri 5y ago
            I look forward to seeing your math on that. But for a fair comparison you can't just look at "casinos to date" and "Bitcoin to date". After all, as Bitcoin proponents never tire of telling us, this is supposedly the early days.
            • Tenoke 5y ago
              Some of the most expensive casinos (just the building) to build are: Venetian Macau – $2.4 billion, Wynn Las Vegas – $2.7 billion, Resorts World Sentosa – $4.53 billion, Marina Bay Sands – $5.36 billion, CityCenter Las Vegas – $9 billion. That already likely costs more than the combined electricity used by Bitcoin so far, if it doesn't you can easily reach trillions by combining the costs of just Casino buildings. Money roughly translates into resources, so I can't see a way in which the gambling industry hasn't consumed much more than Bitcoin as of right now. Maybe in a century if Bitcoin keeps going really strong it can start to catch up. 0. https://casino.partycasino.com/en/blog/the-most-expensive-casino-buildings/ https://casino.partycasino.com/en/blog/the-most-expensive-ca...
              • wpietri 5y ago
                Comparing the cost to build a casino with the raw electricity cost of Bitcoin is not so much an apple-to-oranges comparison as apples-to-tire-rims. But if your point is that Bitcoin is basically a big casino, I agree. And I think we should regulate it like one.
      • jayd16 5y ago
        >punishing gamblers, eventually people will learn to stay away from it Just like casinos?
        • kergonath 5y ago
          Casinos are deemed acceptable and gamblers are (somewhat) protected instead. Instead of avoiding the bad situation, it makes it less bad. It’s just a different risk management strategy; prohibition would not be ideal either.
          • wpietri 5y ago
            I think jayd16's point is that everybody knows that casinos are negative sum and have for a long time. But still, they continue to exist. So we can't assume, as ravar does, that in the long run the market will eliminate negative-sum things.
            • kergonath 5y ago
              Right. My point was that we don't punish gamblers. instead we regulate the environment in which they gamble to limit the extent of the damage. Otherwise, yeah. Negative things don't disappear just because they are negative.
      • heavyset_go 5y ago
        > I don't see how this is more morally repugnant than casinos which are legally accessible in most of the US. Gambling is heavily regulated in most of the US. It can be morally repugnant because retail investors are being swindled into making terrible "investments". Retail investors really shouldn't be exposed to that kind of manipulation and risk. You can argue that they're stupid and deserve it, but some of these people have kids to feed and house, and when their house of cards comes falling down, innocent people will suffer.
    • kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
      It's a fundamental question wether people should be allowed to take on risks or not. If you are leaning towards the "no they should not" side, then consider that doing a startup is also very risky. So maybe that should be illegal, too? Or at least, there should be government startup specialists that evaluate ideas and decide wether people should be allowed to create such startups? Or should there be an elite of people who would be allowed to create startups, and the poor people (can't afford the risk) should be restricted to union jobs?
      • wpietri 5y ago
        That is not a fundamental question. Everybody agrees that people should be generally allowed to take risks. However, we also constrain those risks in all sorts of ways so that we can run a reasonably safe and effective society. The eternal questions are which risks lead to generally positive-sum activity and which tend to be dangerously opaque, negative-sum, or with strong negative externalities. You can see this is almost any serious activity. Not just investment. Think of food, or transport, or construction.
        • kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
          "Everybody agrees that people should be generally allowed to take risks." Not really, the nanny state is a thing.
  • arcticbull 5y ago
    Companies are free to direct list without underwriters and even issue new shares in the process. I'm not sure what a "pop" (the idea that prices often go up on listing) has to do with anything. It generally means that the company underpriced its equity but by no means does this always happen. Are you referring to a greenshoe? There's some misinformation there too, but it serves a purpose, too. [1] [1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/optioninvestor/08/greenshoe-option-ipo.asp https://www.investopedia.com/articles/optioninvestor/08/gree...
    • azemetre 5y ago
      I think they may be referring to the "pop" some tech companies have gotten lately where they may have been purposely undervalued so when they IPO they get a nice 5-10% "boost" and good publicity when they open.
      • okhobb 5y ago
        IPO "pop" is a bit of pejorative usually referring to the deliberate underpricing of an IPO so that the investment bankers' big clients can get a quick profit, the difference between the IPO price and the first available exchange price. In the context of this thread, an example of Wall Street sleaze.
  • fragmede 5y ago
    perfect is the enemy of the good. it's not an infallible process, but some checking is better than zero
• eric_cc 5y ago
  > the truth is that the vast amount of control that we've seen develop in the past century (and especially in the past two decades) were just to protect people from said muck. Think of the children! Do you really believe the vast amount of centralized control is to protect the poor stupid people? I think this is an incredibly naive and gullible take. The vast amount of controls in place are to solidify power amongst the powerful.
  • wpietri 5y ago
    Two things can be true at the same time. Power systems do tend to work for the powerful. But that doesn't mean they can't also be valuable to everybody. Or even valuable to the average person much more than the powerful person. Look, for example, at food regulation. Anybody who has worked in a restaurant can tell you a) how important food safety is, and b) how much health department regulations contribute to keeping them effective. That's good for almost everybody, but it's most valuable to those who buy food from low-end restaurants, where the incentive to cheat is strongest and where the clientele is low on political power.
    • freedomben 5y ago
      It seems pretty hard to me to look at charts of inflation, income inequality, and quantitative easing and compare them to stock market values and not see how the system is allowing the rich and powerful to use inflation to suck money away from everyone not heavily in the market (especially the poor as inflation is a highly regressive tax) and into their own pockets through increases in valuation. And then look at the barriers that regulation throws against the average person to keep them from the most lucrative investments (like required accreditation) and protecting the people stops feeling like a primary (or even tertiary) goal. I don't doubt that initial push for regulation was at least in part to protect people from the sharks, but it sure doesn't seem like that's the driving motivation anymore.
      • wpietri 5y ago
        > look at the barriers that regulation throws against the average person to keep them from the most lucrative investments (like required accreditation) If anything, the accredited investor standard is proof that regulation doesn't favor the powerful. Taken as a whole, those aren't the most lucrative investments. They're the riskiest. The whole theory behind it is that if somebody is rich enough we won't try to protect them as much from scams; they're presumed to be sufficiently sophisticated and well resourced that it's their own problem. I agree inflation is a problem, but you can't use that to prove much about the regulatory system, because a) inflation was low and stable for a long time, only increasing due to pandemic-driven disruptions, b) the wealthy are the ones yelling the loudest about pinching off inflation pronto, and c) the classic way to stop an inflationary surge is performative "austerity", which is much more disruptive to the poor than to the rich.
• beloch 5y ago
  When half of the people responsible for regulating markets are, instead, using insider knowledge to make a killing at day-trading, it's hard to trust the system. So, the natural response is to build a new system that can be made to dance on strings by people you don't even know the identities of. It doesn't exactly seem like progress, does it?
  • mcguire 5y ago
    You are assuming the two systems are equivalent.
    • BlueTemplar 5y ago
      Ironically a lot of people that would have before criticized Wall Street now seem to be spending more effort criticizing cryptocurrencies ? (Even though they are the same kind of people that created and popularized cryptocurrencies to deal with Wall Street's issues in the first place ?)
      • wpietri 5y ago
        I have no problem criticizing both. Indeed, one good criticism of cryptocurrencies is that the are sucking up a lot of the attention and money that could go into actual reform. For example, contrast Bitcoin usage in emerging markets with something like M-Pesa. They both started at the same time, but M-Pesa has been a huge boon to the unbanked, whereas Bitcoin is a rounding error in those markets.
        • BlueTemplar 5y ago
          Any good source to learn what M-Pesa is ?
          • wpietri 5y ago
            Help me understand what you need beyond what you'd get from the top 10 Google hits. Because I see 4 or 5 sources there that seem good to me.
• anonymoushn 5y ago
  It's really great that people who don't have tens of millions of dollars to burn can't access L2 market data. It does a lot to promote fair and efficient markets.