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> If you've been honestly working on the assumption that it is, then you deserve to lose your (real) money to some crypto VCs on an island somewhere This is vi

> If you've been honestly working on the assumption that it is, then you deserve to lose your (real) money to some crypto VCs on an island somewhere This is victim blaming. Nobody deserves to be exploited, robbed or otherwise for any reason.

JCharante 4y ago
If you knowingly put money in a scam where you send the previous person 2x the amount they sent and the music stops on you, you deserve it because you know the risk and choose it. So there is a line where it's acceptable to victim blame.
corndoge 4y ago
"Deserves" is a word with variable meanings. You learn early on not to touch hot stoves. Do you morally deserve to get burned if you touch the stove anyway? Arguably no, but in the other meaning of "you should've known better", you kinda do deserve it.
- cto_of_antifa 4y ago
- rtkwe 4y ago
  The big problem is Tether's minting has driven the market for crypto crazy so even if you've been avoiding holding Tether for longer than it takes to transfer your assets or to buy new assets your holdings are going to be inflated by the fake money injected by Tether's money printer.
- digianarchist 4y ago
  There's a very natural feedback mechanism to a hot stove. When former world leaders are turning up and crypto conferences and the industry remains largely unregulated, then can you really blame people for investing?
  - sgjohnson 4y ago
    > can you really blame people for investing? Not if it was investing. But they are not investing. Investing requires restraint, calculated risk-taking, and understanding of what it is exactly that you're buying. "yolo all in on Terra" is not investing. It's gambling. Would you feel sorry for someone who put his entire monthly salary on a single spin of a slot machine? I certainly wouldn't.
  - ambrozk 4y ago
    > can you really blame people for investing Yes, you can. You don't have to dig very deep into the crypto world to realize that a lot if not most of the participants have are not plain ol' honest folks making a big ol' mistake giving their hard-earned savings to a slick-talking salesman. They are conscious participants in what they know to be a get-rich quick scheme. They know it is shady, and they don't care, because they think they're going to get out before it crashes. They're motivated by greed, not innocence. You can recognize this and still support regulation of the industry. One of the big reasons you need regulation is to protect people from their own stupid greed.
    - Spivak 4y ago
      > They are conscious participants in what they know to be a get-rich quick scheme. What do you think the slick-talking salesman was peddling back in the day?
      - ambrozk 4y ago
        What makes you think that peolpe who lost their money to slick-talking salesmen in the past were not also blameworthy?
namdnay 4y ago
it's much easier to con a greedy person. And you had to be very greedy indeed to convince yourself that 20% interest is a safe investment
- closewith 4y ago
  > it's much easier to con a greedy person. Or a desperate person.
- hnbad 4y ago
  > convince yourself that 20% interest is a safe investment So what you're saying is people shouldn't expect to be able to massively multiply their wealth, but that directly contradicts the narrative that "anyone can make it" instead of the wealth and opportunities you're born into determining the likely upper limit of what you can hope for. I'm not disagreeing, but it's absurd to condemn people for falling for "get rich quick" schemes (and as far as those go 20% is unusually low) when the entire society is built around maintaining the lie that getting rich quick is possible as long as you "work smart" (i.e. don't rely on your own physical labor to make money).
  - Mordisquitos 4y ago
    > that directly contradicts the narrative that "anyone can make it" instead of the wealth and opportunities you're born into determining the likely upper limit of what you can hope for. It depends on what we understand by "anyone can make it". I would argue that, if understood in terms of "anyone can [become orders of magnitude richer just by picking the right investments]" then that indeed is a narrative that is harmful and should be contradicted. Yes, of course outliers happen, and anyone may become stupidly rich from a low income if they're lucky. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to try, and people on an individual level should be discouraged from taking such huge risks unless they are very consciously aware of the consequences of their likely failure. The other side of the issue is a systemic one. If a society finds it traumatic to accept that there is a likely upper limit as to what people can hope for based on their wealth and opportunities at birth, there is deeper problem. The problem may be cultural in that a society's members are too instilled with self-centred and unrealistic expectations (i.e. a culture of temporarily embarrassed millionaires), or it may be a deeper economic issue regarding inequality of incomes that makes surviving at certain levels of income without any hope of the smallest improvement leads to greater desperation and dreams of "breaking big". It may be a mix of both. Coming back to "anyone can make it", it should be defended, but in the sense of "anyone can [reach a level of economic security to live a fulfilling life]". That however is not a principle to encourage the individual through dire straits. Rather, it is a principle that should guide public policy and cultural attitudes as a whole, so as not to have a society like I described earlier. In such a society the population won't feel the need take unrealistic risks only for a chance to get out of a rut or satisfy cultural fantasies. That's not to say it won't happen, anyone can be an outlier.
austhrow743 4y ago
Financial speculation is a zero sum game. These "victims" were hoping to gain from the loss of others just like the supposed crypto VCs that have made out well. They're not victims just the losers.
- kqr 4y ago
  I think the people who we would describe as victims here don't have a sophisticated mental model enough to understand that financial speculation is a zero sum game. (Or indeed that in a liquid enough market, the risk-adjusted expectation of any deal is zero.)
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    This is why I think we'll see some extensive crypto regulation soon enough, forcing companies that turn real money into crypto to filter out people who don't understand that crypto is a speculative market first and a payment platform second. You can't realistically prevent people from mining or trading shitcoins but you can put regulatory pressure on the ways people access them. Thr only way to do this effectively is blanket regulation on all cryptocurrency, as otherwise you'd end up with an endless cat and mouse game chasing new coins people use to trick people into entering the market and exchanging entrycoins for the latest scamcoins. This is all pretty terrible in my opinion, because cryptocurrency could've been so much better. Sadly, the idealists who wanted an independent currency were drowned out by the ruthless speculators who are only in it for their personal profits.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  the eame is true for bernie madoffs scam but nonetheless his customerd were victims.
  - sgjohnson 4y ago
    Madoff was awfully honest when compared to crypto scammers. 75 cents on the dollar were recovered. When a crypto scam finally gets pulled off, the suckers get closer to 0 cents on the dollar.
outside1234 4y ago
People have been shouting to the rafters that crypto was all a grift for months, years.
bmacho 4y ago
> Nobody deserves to be exploited, robbed or otherwise for any reason. Well they tried to exploit, rob or otherwise me, that is, getting money from thin air without creating any value. How is that fair in any moral system? (That wasn't what GP said tho.)
- hnbad 4y ago
  By that logic they still "deserve" it less than any of the crypto grifters that were able to cash out with orders of magnitude ROIs.
  - ambrozk 4y ago
    Yeah, but they still deserve it.
mytailorisrich 4y ago
If you put your money in some risky 'investment' that you don't fully understand and lose you made a bad decision, you are not a victim. It's like if you burn your money in a Las Vegas casino.
- logifail 4y ago
  ...and if you run ads for your risky investment scheme in which you falsely claim it's not risky, you get into trouble. Aren't there some fairly good reasons for finance to be highly regulated?
- white_dragon88 4y ago
  Gambling is an addiction, and doesn’t just come down to poor judgement. There’s a short circuiting that occurs in the pleasure centre that we simply haven’t evolved to handle properly. It’s why even if you’re the most seasoned, calm, financially secure and stoic of people, if I told you that you suddenly won $100M with clear proof, you’d almost shit yourself in excitement, your heart would race. None of us are immune to the physiological effects of winning money, by chance or skill. I’m not saying people getting suckered aren’t ultimately responsible for their actions, but at the same time just like a drug addiction, an objective and problem solving perspective is more productive than just judging that person for simply being weak, stupid, gullible, greedy etc.
  - mytailorisrich 4y ago
    It's quite a jump to go from my comment to "gambling is an addiction". Gambling is not an addiction. Gambling might become an addiction for some people, like many other things might. The vast majority of people who 'invested' in crypto (or who go to Las Vegas for that matter) are not addicted. They think it's a way to get rich quick, and some did. They may also not have done their homework. Sometimes when people make bad decisions and lose there simply isn't anyone else to blame. That's life.
  - greyhair 4y ago
    > you’d almost shit yourself in excitement, your heart would race You need to watch "Being Ned Devine" if you have never seen it.
pjc50 4y ago
If you say "don't go there, you'll be robbed" to someone, they insult you in return, and then get robbed, you're entitled to a bit of schadenfreude.
- exactlythat 4y ago
  You’re entitled to quite a lot. It is those delightful moments, enjoyed quietly and within one’s own head out of common courtesy, that make all of life’s problems worth it. There are few feelings as remotely good as that one, and we’d all feel better admitting it to ourselves. Doesn’t speak to caring. They’ll listen to you next time, won’t they?
  - pjc50 4y ago
    > They’ll listen to you next time, won’t they? Obviously not. The weird thing about having been on the internet so long is how nobody listens any more - for any idea, no matter how bad, you can find a community built around it, defending it against outsiders. A million micro-cults. It wouldn't be so bad if there weren't serious negative externalities to the rest of us from this.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > They’ll listen to you next time, won’t they? No, but they won’t have the capital to spawn another drain on our economy either.

JCharante 4y ago

If you knowingly put money in a scam where you send the previous person 2x the amount they sent and the music stops on you, you deserve it because you know the risk and choose it. So there is a line where it's acceptable to victim blame.

corndoge 4y ago

"Deserves" is a word with variable meanings. You learn early on not to touch hot stoves. Do you morally deserve to get burned if you touch the stove anyway? Arguably no, but in the other meaning of "you should've known better", you kinda do deserve it.

cto_of_antifa 4y ago
rtkwe 4y ago
The big problem is Tether's minting has driven the market for crypto crazy so even if you've been avoiding holding Tether for longer than it takes to transfer your assets or to buy new assets your holdings are going to be inflated by the fake money injected by Tether's money printer.
digianarchist 4y ago
There's a very natural feedback mechanism to a hot stove. When former world leaders are turning up and crypto conferences and the industry remains largely unregulated, then can you really blame people for investing?
- sgjohnson 4y ago
  > can you really blame people for investing? Not if it was investing. But they are not investing. Investing requires restraint, calculated risk-taking, and understanding of what it is exactly that you're buying. "yolo all in on Terra" is not investing. It's gambling. Would you feel sorry for someone who put his entire monthly salary on a single spin of a slot machine? I certainly wouldn't.
- ambrozk 4y ago
  > can you really blame people for investing Yes, you can. You don't have to dig very deep into the crypto world to realize that a lot if not most of the participants have are not plain ol' honest folks making a big ol' mistake giving their hard-earned savings to a slick-talking salesman. They are conscious participants in what they know to be a get-rich quick scheme. They know it is shady, and they don't care, because they think they're going to get out before it crashes. They're motivated by greed, not innocence. You can recognize this and still support regulation of the industry. One of the big reasons you need regulation is to protect people from their own stupid greed.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    > They are conscious participants in what they know to be a get-rich quick scheme. What do you think the slick-talking salesman was peddling back in the day?
    - ambrozk 4y ago
      What makes you think that peolpe who lost their money to slick-talking salesmen in the past were not also blameworthy?

namdnay 4y ago

it's much easier to con a greedy person. And you had to be very greedy indeed to convince yourself that 20% interest is a safe investment

closewith 4y ago
> it's much easier to con a greedy person. Or a desperate person.
hnbad 4y ago
> convince yourself that 20% interest is a safe investment So what you're saying is people shouldn't expect to be able to massively multiply their wealth, but that directly contradicts the narrative that "anyone can make it" instead of the wealth and opportunities you're born into determining the likely upper limit of what you can hope for. I'm not disagreeing, but it's absurd to condemn people for falling for "get rich quick" schemes (and as far as those go 20% is unusually low) when the entire society is built around maintaining the lie that getting rich quick is possible as long as you "work smart" (i.e. don't rely on your own physical labor to make money).
- Mordisquitos 4y ago
  > that directly contradicts the narrative that "anyone can make it" instead of the wealth and opportunities you're born into determining the likely upper limit of what you can hope for. It depends on what we understand by "anyone can make it". I would argue that, if understood in terms of "anyone can [become orders of magnitude richer just by picking the right investments]" then that indeed is a narrative that is harmful and should be contradicted. Yes, of course outliers happen, and anyone may become stupidly rich from a low income if they're lucky. That doesn't mean it's a good idea to try, and people on an individual level should be discouraged from taking such huge risks unless they are very consciously aware of the consequences of their likely failure. The other side of the issue is a systemic one. If a society finds it traumatic to accept that there is a likely upper limit as to what people can hope for based on their wealth and opportunities at birth, there is deeper problem. The problem may be cultural in that a society's members are too instilled with self-centred and unrealistic expectations (i.e. a culture of temporarily embarrassed millionaires), or it may be a deeper economic issue regarding inequality of incomes that makes surviving at certain levels of income without any hope of the smallest improvement leads to greater desperation and dreams of "breaking big". It may be a mix of both. Coming back to "anyone can make it", it should be defended, but in the sense of "anyone can [reach a level of economic security to live a fulfilling life]". That however is not a principle to encourage the individual through dire straits. Rather, it is a principle that should guide public policy and cultural attitudes as a whole, so as not to have a society like I described earlier. In such a society the population won't feel the need take unrealistic risks only for a chance to get out of a rut or satisfy cultural fantasies. That's not to say it won't happen, anyone can be an outlier.

austhrow743 4y ago

Financial speculation is a zero sum game. These "victims" were hoping to gain from the loss of others just like the supposed crypto VCs that have made out well. They're not victims just the losers.

kqr 4y ago
I think the people who we would describe as victims here don't have a sophisticated mental model enough to understand that financial speculation is a zero sum game. (Or indeed that in a liquid enough market, the risk-adjusted expectation of any deal is zero.)
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  This is why I think we'll see some extensive crypto regulation soon enough, forcing companies that turn real money into crypto to filter out people who don't understand that crypto is a speculative market first and a payment platform second. You can't realistically prevent people from mining or trading shitcoins but you can put regulatory pressure on the ways people access them. Thr only way to do this effectively is blanket regulation on all cryptocurrency, as otherwise you'd end up with an endless cat and mouse game chasing new coins people use to trick people into entering the market and exchanging entrycoins for the latest scamcoins. This is all pretty terrible in my opinion, because cryptocurrency could've been so much better. Sadly, the idealists who wanted an independent currency were drowned out by the ruthless speculators who are only in it for their personal profits.
LegitShady 4y ago
the eame is true for bernie madoffs scam but nonetheless his customerd were victims.
- sgjohnson 4y ago
  Madoff was awfully honest when compared to crypto scammers. 75 cents on the dollar were recovered. When a crypto scam finally gets pulled off, the suckers get closer to 0 cents on the dollar.

outside1234 4y ago

People have been shouting to the rafters that crypto was all a grift for months, years.

bmacho 4y ago

> Nobody deserves to be exploited, robbed or otherwise for any reason. Well they tried to exploit, rob or otherwise me, that is, getting money from thin air without creating any value. How is that fair in any moral system? (That wasn't what GP said tho.)

hnbad 4y ago
By that logic they still "deserve" it less than any of the crypto grifters that were able to cash out with orders of magnitude ROIs.
- ambrozk 4y ago
  Yeah, but they still deserve it.

mytailorisrich 4y ago

If you put your money in some risky 'investment' that you don't fully understand and lose you made a bad decision, you are not a victim. It's like if you burn your money in a Las Vegas casino.

logifail 4y ago
...and if you run ads for your risky investment scheme in which you falsely claim it's not risky, you get into trouble. Aren't there some fairly good reasons for finance to be highly regulated?
white_dragon88 4y ago
Gambling is an addiction, and doesn’t just come down to poor judgement. There’s a short circuiting that occurs in the pleasure centre that we simply haven’t evolved to handle properly. It’s why even if you’re the most seasoned, calm, financially secure and stoic of people, if I told you that you suddenly won $100M with clear proof, you’d almost shit yourself in excitement, your heart would race. None of us are immune to the physiological effects of winning money, by chance or skill. I’m not saying people getting suckered aren’t ultimately responsible for their actions, but at the same time just like a drug addiction, an objective and problem solving perspective is more productive than just judging that person for simply being weak, stupid, gullible, greedy etc.
- mytailorisrich 4y ago
  It's quite a jump to go from my comment to "gambling is an addiction". Gambling is not an addiction. Gambling might become an addiction for some people, like many other things might. The vast majority of people who 'invested' in crypto (or who go to Las Vegas for that matter) are not addicted. They think it's a way to get rich quick, and some did. They may also not have done their homework. Sometimes when people make bad decisions and lose there simply isn't anyone else to blame. That's life.
- greyhair 4y ago
  > you’d almost shit yourself in excitement, your heart would race You need to watch "Being Ned Devine" if you have never seen it.

pjc50 4y ago

If you say "don't go there, you'll be robbed" to someone, they insult you in return, and then get robbed, you're entitled to a bit of schadenfreude.

exactlythat 4y ago
You’re entitled to quite a lot. It is those delightful moments, enjoyed quietly and within one’s own head out of common courtesy, that make all of life’s problems worth it. There are few feelings as remotely good as that one, and we’d all feel better admitting it to ourselves. Doesn’t speak to caring. They’ll listen to you next time, won’t they?
- pjc50 4y ago
  > They’ll listen to you next time, won’t they? Obviously not. The weird thing about having been on the internet so long is how nobody listens any more - for any idea, no matter how bad, you can find a community built around it, defending it against outsiders. A million micro-cults. It wouldn't be so bad if there weren't serious negative externalities to the rest of us from this.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > They’ll listen to you next time, won’t they? No, but they won’t have the capital to spawn another drain on our economy either.