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It's more than just crypto-bros trying to take over the web. It's an italian serial conman in a dark room somewhere, pressing "print" on software that generate
by WalterSear 4y ago
It's more than just crypto-bros trying to take over the web.
It's an italian serial conman in a dark room somewhere, pressing "print" on software that generates ostensibly a dollar-equivalent crypto currency out of thin air, wrapped in a network of criminal enterprises that is currently using special 'insider only' versions of those tokens (tether-trons, vs tether-eths) to facilitate the theft of the life savings of a generation of middle class chinese, wrapped in a nesting doll of scams and pyramid schemes, wrapped in the greed, hubris, and legitimate desperation of a generation of 1st world hustlers, all wrapped in crypto-bros trying to take over the world.
If it was just crypto-bros, there wouldn't be anywhere near so much smoke to confuse/conflate with fire: the market manipulation being facilitated by the dirty (and clean, albeit grifted) money entering the system makes the whole thing seem financially bigger than it really is. But despite all the smoke making, it is still just a fart in a colander: the entire crypto market cap, as fanciful and hyperbolic as it is, is still less than the market cap of Apple.
The really astounding part is that so much of this activity is being recorded on publicly accessible server ledgers, in real-time.
- muxator 4y ago> It's an ITALIAN serial conman... Wow. I have been guilty of this very same blunder many times and I understand it's just a joke, but please realize that it is not pleasant to be on the wrong side of a joke for no reason. I'll be more careful with my generalizations in the future. I am confident you will be, too. Thanks.
- cbozeman 4y ago
- jjulius 4y agoYikes.
- hervature 4y agoFollowing HN guidelines, I assumed they meant that Italy is aiding and abetting the effort. My low effort search yielded [1] immediately. [1] - https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/10/05/italy-has-a-registry-of-73-unvetted-crypto-firms/ https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/10/05/italy-has-a-regis...
- WalterSear 4y agoI don't - I'm referring to Giancarlo Devasini.
- WalterSear 4y agoIt's not a joke. I'm referring to a specific italian serial conman.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoSatoshi is Italian? :)
- BlueTemplar 4y agoHow do you know he isn't ? :p (If he was a conman, this kind of misdirection would be really in style !)
- m4jor 4y agoThe biggest ones are American and Australian. Craig Wright (Claims to have invented Bitcoin but cant prove it lol) Richard Heart (Behind the Hex fraud crypto)
- WalterSear 4y agoNeither of them are arbitrarily minting the currency that is involved in 70%+ of all crypto trades. (70% may be off. It was correct as of 6 months ago.)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nwah1 4y agoIt is worse than that because the "market cap" in the context of crypto scams is meaningless. Spot price times the number of tokens means nothing if the tokens have no intrinsic value. Apple may be overvalued, but they have enormous assets and revenue backing their price. Their P/E ratio is a rational number. Crypto could fall to zero at any time and all the hodlers are left holding nothing but the bag. And of course a lot of the tokens are just locked away, keys are lost, etc.
- blueprint 4y agoCan't you just say the same thing about the fiat currency that you say Apple's holding? It could also "go to zero". And certain "tokens".. specifically, let's say something like Bitcoin or Monero, actually do have what you would call "intrinsic" value since they require the expenditure of actual, physical energy to obtain, unless you know of a viable attack on those proof of work systems that you're not telling us about.
- spamizbad 4y agoI don’t think you can. Apple owns real estate, intellectual property, and tons of tangible physical assets. The market is not going to decide Apple’s patents are worthless, California Real Estate is worthless, their factories and manufacturing equipment is worthless until there’s some world-ending cataclysm.
- actionablefiber 4y ago> The market is not going to decide Apple’s patents are worthless, California Real Estate is worthless, their factories and manufacturing equipment is worthless until there’s some world-ending cataclysm. I'm not sure why you think there has to be a world-ending cataclysm for this to happen? If there were any major change in the way societies or economies were organized, Apple the entity could cease to exist entirely, or some/all of its assets could cease to belong to them. Like for patents, it certainly seems like the world is very far from deciding to abolish IP, but if society wills it, it is very simple to do.
- ethbr0 4y ago
- WalterSear 4y agoIt's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary, or his hacker news handle, depends on not understanding it.
- ETH_start 4y ago>>It's an italian serial conman in a dark room somewhere, pressing "print" on software that generates ostensibly a dollar-equivalent crypto currency out of thin air, There is zero evidence for the Tether conspiracy theories.. But I gotta give you marks for creative writing.
- WalterSear 4y agoThere's mountains of evidence. They haven't been theories for a long time.
- jcranmer 4y ago> There is zero evidence for the Tether conspiracy theories. Tether has literally admitted to lying, which means at least one of the conspiracy theories is true by the admission of the major player. There is plenty of evidence that they are still lying, but the biggest evidence is that (unlike the rest of the financial system!) they claim to have $10s of billions of financial assets and refuse to identify which assets those are.
- ETH_start 4y agoThe conspiracy theory is an extreme exaggeration on what has been admitted, which I believe is - at one point - reserves of 77 percent of liabilities, and even that admission I'm not certain about given how much any news about Tether is misconstrued by the regulatory crowd.
- m4jor 4y agoYet Tether cannot prove its holdings in a transparent and easy manner. USDC can. BUSD can. oh but not USDT hrm.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoSo they're conmen using smoke and mirrors, deception and... this sounds like a lot of fancy words that mean the same thing as "crypto bros". Crypto bros are all of the things you say, so what's the distinction?
- manquer 4y agoHe means to say there are not just fanatic believers who are winning minions in pyramid schemes, but there is also professional large scale systematic extraction of wealth
- trophycase 4y agoIt's an italian serial conman in a dark room somewhere, pressing "print" on software that generates ostensibly a dollar-equivalent crypto currency out of thin air, wrapped in a network of criminal enterprises that is currently using special 'insider only' versions of those tokens (tether-trons, vs tether-eths) to facilitate the theft of the life savings of a generation of middle class chinese, wrapped in a nesting doll of scams and pyramid schemes, wrapped in the greed, hubris, and legitimate desperation of a generation of 1st world hustlers, all wrapped in crypto-bros trying to take over the world. Replace italian with <insert racial boogeyman here> and you would literally be describing the current financial system.
- WalterSear 4y agoI'm referring specifically to Giancarlo Devasini. I used broad strokes, but I wasn't making a fanciful description of what drives the crypto market as much as a literal one.
- spiralx 4y agoThis is perhaps the most wonderful description of crypto ever, thank you :)