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My biggest fear is a 1997 Albania situation but on a global scale. MLMs locked up 50% of their GDP, and it led to a civil war killing thousands. [1] It was all

My biggest fear is a 1997 Albania situation but on a global scale. MLMs locked up 50% of their GDP, and it led to a civil war killing thousands. [1] It was all fun and games until war were declared. Then, well, war were declared. When the schemes collapsed, there was uncontained rioting, the government fell, and the country descended into anarchy and a near civil war in which some 2,000 people were killed. [1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarvis.htm https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2000/03/jarvis.ht...

RC_ITR 5y ago
The saving grace of crypto ofc is that it is EXTREMELY top heavy, so even if there is $1tn tied up in crypto, probably under 100k people control 95%+ of it. And good luck leading the revolution, Winklevos twins…
- astoor 5y ago
  It won't be the people at the top leading the revolt. It never is. They'll have creamed enough off to be safe whatever happens. It'll be the people at the bottom. They might not have large individual "investments", but it is large to them, and when one day all of that disappears, they won't be happy. And there will be a lot of them, the 99.999% who own a tiny percentage of the total wealth. Remember - strength in numbers...
  - RC_ITR 5y ago
    LMFAO, what is this a crypto.com commercial? The average Coinbase account has $1k in it (the median is even less). Not exactly riot-worthy.
FredPret 5y ago
...and I thought Amway was bad!
dvt 5y ago
I see you posting this kind of stuff on crypto threads regularly, and I'm no crypto bro, but I definitely think you're being hyperbolic. For context, the entire market cap of crypto is a third less than $AAPL. The idea that a crypto crash (hell, even if it goes to zero) is going to lead to riots is bonkers. In the next ~10 years, it's probably just going to get mildly regulated and stabilize as a (riskier) investment instrument.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  If it dropped off the face of the earth today, nobody at all would notice. Well, my Twitter timeline would clean up. But otherwise, nothing would happen. It's an issue of scale. If it continue to grow unabated, it's a real risk. This is sort of frog boiling. It's legal tender in one of the world's poorest countries, where there were already Bitcoin riots. The space has seen investments from the Quebec pension plan, and the Ontario teachers pension plan. If at each milestone we step back and say, well, it's not a systemic risk today so let's just ignore it - one day we turn around, and it's a systemic risk to the global financial system. Mortgage backed securities weren't a risk until one day they were. Albanian MLMs weren't a risk until one day they were. Just like Bitcoin's electricity usage. Hal Finney mentioned CO2 risk a decade ago. Now it consumes an entire country of power to do the work of a single Raspberry Pi. Each time the price goes up, so does its waste budget. However at every step along the way, folks continued to downplay. The longer we ignore it the more the cancer metastasizes. Until one day, pop. Forget where it's at now, assess it based on its incentives and its trajectory. It won't get regulated unless people speak out. The sooner, the better.
  - vmception 5y ago
    On the financial observations, all of those systemic risks were due to leverage. If there was real leverage intertwined with the parallel financial system, bitcoin and crypto would have to be 50 times larger, 100 trillion market cap full of commercial paper, longer dated bonds, rebundled and collateralized, and then those further traded on leverage.
    - 5y ago
secretsatan 5y ago
I often wonder how much all this hype is just amplified in the tech sphere but just doesn’t have any realworld significance. Are just a few thousand crypto bros gonna lose billions of made up money or will it really have any impact on realworld finances?
- nieve 5y ago
  Cryptocurrencies have made greater inroads among the poor in America than the middle class, so it'll definitely hit them hard. I'm not sure if that's what you mean by realworld finances, but it's a worry.
  - cuteboy19 5y ago
    Of course, MLMs routinely target poorer populations with promises of getting rich quick.
  - elkos 5y ago
    So lower income people tend to set money aside for crypto? Do they use cryptocurrencies to buy stuff?

RC_ITR 5y ago

The saving grace of crypto ofc is that it is EXTREMELY top heavy, so even if there is $1tn tied up in crypto, probably under 100k people control 95%+ of it. And good luck leading the revolution, Winklevos twins…

astoor 5y ago
It won't be the people at the top leading the revolt. It never is. They'll have creamed enough off to be safe whatever happens. It'll be the people at the bottom. They might not have large individual "investments", but it is large to them, and when one day all of that disappears, they won't be happy. And there will be a lot of them, the 99.999% who own a tiny percentage of the total wealth. Remember - strength in numbers...
- RC_ITR 5y ago
  LMFAO, what is this a crypto.com commercial? The average Coinbase account has $1k in it (the median is even less). Not exactly riot-worthy.

FredPret 5y ago

...and I thought Amway was bad!

dvt 5y ago

I see you posting this kind of stuff on crypto threads regularly, and I'm no crypto bro, but I definitely think you're being hyperbolic. For context, the entire market cap of crypto is a third less than $AAPL. The idea that a crypto crash (hell, even if it goes to zero) is going to lead to riots is bonkers. In the next ~10 years, it's probably just going to get mildly regulated and stabilize as a (riskier) investment instrument.

arcticbull 5y ago
If it dropped off the face of the earth today, nobody at all would notice. Well, my Twitter timeline would clean up. But otherwise, nothing would happen. It's an issue of scale. If it continue to grow unabated, it's a real risk. This is sort of frog boiling. It's legal tender in one of the world's poorest countries, where there were already Bitcoin riots. The space has seen investments from the Quebec pension plan, and the Ontario teachers pension plan. If at each milestone we step back and say, well, it's not a systemic risk today so let's just ignore it - one day we turn around, and it's a systemic risk to the global financial system. Mortgage backed securities weren't a risk until one day they were. Albanian MLMs weren't a risk until one day they were. Just like Bitcoin's electricity usage. Hal Finney mentioned CO2 risk a decade ago. Now it consumes an entire country of power to do the work of a single Raspberry Pi. Each time the price goes up, so does its waste budget. However at every step along the way, folks continued to downplay. The longer we ignore it the more the cancer metastasizes. Until one day, pop. Forget where it's at now, assess it based on its incentives and its trajectory. It won't get regulated unless people speak out. The sooner, the better.
- vmception 5y ago
  On the financial observations, all of those systemic risks were due to leverage. If there was real leverage intertwined with the parallel financial system, bitcoin and crypto would have to be 50 times larger, 100 trillion market cap full of commercial paper, longer dated bonds, rebundled and collateralized, and then those further traded on leverage.
  - 5y ago

secretsatan 5y ago

I often wonder how much all this hype is just amplified in the tech sphere but just doesn’t have any realworld significance. Are just a few thousand crypto bros gonna lose billions of made up money or will it really have any impact on realworld finances?

nieve 5y ago
Cryptocurrencies have made greater inroads among the poor in America than the middle class, so it'll definitely hit them hard. I'm not sure if that's what you mean by realworld finances, but it's a worry.
- cuteboy19 5y ago
  Of course, MLMs routinely target poorer populations with promises of getting rich quick.
- elkos 5y ago
  So lower income people tend to set money aside for crypto? Do they use cryptocurrencies to buy stuff?