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It's incredible to me, but I have a friend who's still suggesting buying stablecoins that "pay" 9-12% interest after this. It's like some people are congenitall

It's incredible to me, but I have a friend who's still suggesting buying stablecoins that "pay" 9-12% interest after this. It's like some people are congenitally incapable of recognizing a ponzi scheme. When I pointed out that it was a lot of risk to trust a ponzi just to keep up with inflation, his response was "haters gonna hate". Look, Zhou Tong ran off with some of my money (Bitcoinica). GOX ran off with some of it. The obfuscation around the scam has evolved, the language and instruments have become more complicated (mostly for the purpose of suckering people who think they're not suckers, I suppose), but the basic scam is exactly the same. It's almost like crypto has become a living thought experiment in how many times people can be scammed and keep on believing.

xwdv 4y ago
We really are in the golden age of scamming. People want money more than ever. But financial education and common sense is at all time lows. But also people have access to applications that allow for rapid investing at the speed of thought. And Crypto provides a vehicle for obfuscating transfers of wealth, from fools to scammers. Barriers to entry in creating a scam are very low. Social media allows for rapid propagation to unwary victims. Governments don’t do anything to protect people.
- noduerme 4y ago
  I'll go one further and say that with the exception of a few honorable pizza delivery services and casinos that were bound by their reputation, almost every enterprise involving crypto has been one kind of pump-and-dump scheme or another since day one. And I've got a metric fuckton of chat transcripts from early bitcoin founders in 2011 to prove it (some of whom are household names now, most of whom are wildly rich). I only got into taking Bitcoin because UIGEA cut my real-money gaming startup off at the knees right when I'd finished 3 years of coding and beta testing. I spent a lot of time in the gambling world with sharks, but Bitcoin was a whoooole other pit of snakes. And those [early Bitcoin] guys at least understood the technology and believed in the libertarian ethos of it, even if they were also the first to understand how to manipulate the market. What's gross is watching a whole generation of scammers and marks who don't even fundamentally understand what's going on. IMHO financial education is pretty simple: Don't take on debt. Don't invest in people who take on debt. Don't invest in something that's too good to be true. Save as much as you can. Save something from every paycheck. Buy stocks that pay dividends, reinvest and don't touch them until you're dead. Don't dip into capital. Don't ever sell real estate. It's not hard, it's not complicated, it's just not fast. If it's fast, it's too good to be true; see step 3.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Yeah, the real advance with crypto has turned out to be decentralized scams, where it can be difficult to prove even afterwards that it was an intentionally executed scam. But when the pattern repeats time and time again, you gotta start to realize what it is, even if you can't define or prove it.
  - literallycancer 4y ago
    >Don't take on debt In an system centered on printing money and distributing it via the banking industry to whichever group is preferred by the current government? Might be the worst advice I have seen. Mortgages are free money and if you aren't using that you are going to become poor within a generation.
- creakingstairs 4y ago
  Scams are much easier to pull off if the victims are desperate and I think it’s the golden age of scamming because people have gotten much more desperate as the value of labour has been rapidly dropping compared to capital. Every day they see value of housing, stocks and cryptos skyrocketing while their wage remains stagnant. They don’t believe they could ever catch up and they feel obliged take riskier and stupid bets like stable coins. It also doesn’t help that they don’t trust sensible financial advice because those advocate investing in the old system that had failed them. Hence the “haters gonna hate” attitudes from some crypto dudes.
- MacroChip 4y ago
  Financial education and common sense are at all time highs at a global, hundred years zoom level. If you are trying to make a claim about your region on a shorter time scale, I could believe it. Same for "people want money more than ever". Could be true for your bubble, country, etc but is not globally/100 year window. But of course this claim is hard to measure.
- turzmo 4y ago
  I think you’re right. Smartphones and the internet make it easier to scam before, but why do people want money more than ever? I’ve noticed it. It was a lot different 20 years ago. What happened?
  - xwdv 4y ago
    People finally see all the things money can buy thanks to social media, and social media gives a larger platform than ever to flex your wealth. Therefore, people now have insatiable urges to acquire money by all means necessary, even prostituting themselves casually through OnlyFans.
kibwen 4y ago
> It's almost like crypto has become a living thought experiment in how many times people can be scammed and keep on believing. When cultists put their all-consuming faith in a prophecy, experience shows that the failure of that prophecy tends to make their faith more ardent.
- LarryDarrell 4y ago
  I'm reminded of the 7th Day Adventists.
jrmg 4y ago
Is it possible that they know it’s a Ponzi scheme, but think they will get out before the crash?
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> It's almost like crypto has become a living thought experiment in how many times people can be scammed and keep on believing. So it's just like the perpetually insolvent fractional reserve banking system that creates not only massive inflation and inequality but also global recessions and yet continues on with complete impunity. Cryptocurrency is only slightly more unhinged by comparison.
BenoitEssiambre 4y ago
I mean casinos don't try to hide it and people still plow money into them. I think that's a lot of crypto investor's (psychopathic) play, even if they don't really believe in the technology, they think (and they may be right) that they can fallback to running unregulated online casinos.
moistly 4y ago
Ever met someone who keeps falling for MLMs? Cut from the same cloth. Likewise those who follow prosperity preachers. Naïve, greedy, and a sucker for a smooth talker.

xwdv 4y ago

We really are in the golden age of scamming. People want money more than ever. But financial education and common sense is at all time lows. But also people have access to applications that allow for rapid investing at the speed of thought. And Crypto provides a vehicle for obfuscating transfers of wealth, from fools to scammers. Barriers to entry in creating a scam are very low. Social media allows for rapid propagation to unwary victims. Governments don’t do anything to protect people.

noduerme 4y ago
I'll go one further and say that with the exception of a few honorable pizza delivery services and casinos that were bound by their reputation, almost every enterprise involving crypto has been one kind of pump-and-dump scheme or another since day one. And I've got a metric fuckton of chat transcripts from early bitcoin founders in 2011 to prove it (some of whom are household names now, most of whom are wildly rich). I only got into taking Bitcoin because UIGEA cut my real-money gaming startup off at the knees right when I'd finished 3 years of coding and beta testing. I spent a lot of time in the gambling world with sharks, but Bitcoin was a whoooole other pit of snakes. And those [early Bitcoin] guys at least understood the technology and believed in the libertarian ethos of it, even if they were also the first to understand how to manipulate the market. What's gross is watching a whole generation of scammers and marks who don't even fundamentally understand what's going on. IMHO financial education is pretty simple: Don't take on debt. Don't invest in people who take on debt. Don't invest in something that's too good to be true. Save as much as you can. Save something from every paycheck. Buy stocks that pay dividends, reinvest and don't touch them until you're dead. Don't dip into capital. Don't ever sell real estate. It's not hard, it's not complicated, it's just not fast. If it's fast, it's too good to be true; see step 3.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Yeah, the real advance with crypto has turned out to be decentralized scams, where it can be difficult to prove even afterwards that it was an intentionally executed scam. But when the pattern repeats time and time again, you gotta start to realize what it is, even if you can't define or prove it.
- literallycancer 4y ago
  >Don't take on debt In an system centered on printing money and distributing it via the banking industry to whichever group is preferred by the current government? Might be the worst advice I have seen. Mortgages are free money and if you aren't using that you are going to become poor within a generation.
creakingstairs 4y ago
Scams are much easier to pull off if the victims are desperate and I think it’s the golden age of scamming because people have gotten much more desperate as the value of labour has been rapidly dropping compared to capital. Every day they see value of housing, stocks and cryptos skyrocketing while their wage remains stagnant. They don’t believe they could ever catch up and they feel obliged take riskier and stupid bets like stable coins. It also doesn’t help that they don’t trust sensible financial advice because those advocate investing in the old system that had failed them. Hence the “haters gonna hate” attitudes from some crypto dudes.
MacroChip 4y ago
Financial education and common sense are at all time highs at a global, hundred years zoom level. If you are trying to make a claim about your region on a shorter time scale, I could believe it. Same for "people want money more than ever". Could be true for your bubble, country, etc but is not globally/100 year window. But of course this claim is hard to measure.
turzmo 4y ago
I think you’re right. Smartphones and the internet make it easier to scam before, but why do people want money more than ever? I’ve noticed it. It was a lot different 20 years ago. What happened?
- xwdv 4y ago
  People finally see all the things money can buy thanks to social media, and social media gives a larger platform than ever to flex your wealth. Therefore, people now have insatiable urges to acquire money by all means necessary, even prostituting themselves casually through OnlyFans.

kibwen 4y ago

> It's almost like crypto has become a living thought experiment in how many times people can be scammed and keep on believing. When cultists put their all-consuming faith in a prophecy, experience shows that the failure of that prophecy tends to make their faith more ardent.

LarryDarrell 4y ago
I'm reminded of the 7th Day Adventists.

jrmg 4y ago

Is it possible that they know it’s a Ponzi scheme, but think they will get out before the crash?

matheusmoreira 4y ago

> It's almost like crypto has become a living thought experiment in how many times people can be scammed and keep on believing. So it's just like the perpetually insolvent fractional reserve banking system that creates not only massive inflation and inequality but also global recessions and yet continues on with complete impunity. Cryptocurrency is only slightly more unhinged by comparison.

BenoitEssiambre 4y ago

I mean casinos don't try to hide it and people still plow money into them. I think that's a lot of crypto investor's (psychopathic) play, even if they don't really believe in the technology, they think (and they may be right) that they can fallback to running unregulated online casinos.

moistly 4y ago

Ever met someone who keeps falling for MLMs? Cut from the same cloth. Likewise those who follow prosperity preachers. Naïve, greedy, and a sucker for a smooth talker.