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And yet crickets out of anyone from the DOJ regarding the massive fraud that is happening everyday in crypto. I have no faith whatsoever in law enforcement anym

And yet crickets out of anyone from the DOJ regarding the massive fraud that is happening everyday in crypto. I have no faith whatsoever in law enforcement anymore. Its all politics and thumbs on scales.

farseer 4y ago
Rent is unavoidable and essential to a dignified life. Crypto is for people with some spare cash who want to buy a thousand lottery tickets. The priorities of DOJ are correct. They are there to save you from the greed of others, not from your own.
mjburgess 4y ago
Part of the problem with crypto is "elite capture", ie., the political class seem to have jumped behind it as with, eg., AI, quantum computing, self-driving cars etc. --- without realising that it's a pyramid-style hype phenomenon rather than a "innovation-style" one. To defend them, it's really really hard to tell -- many technical people are economically incompetent and have been "captured"; and political people are far from either economically or technically competent. However, of course, there's also a significant amount of money funnelled from this scam into political pockets. I'd say it's 80% the former, 20% the latter. In any case, if the gov were to come down against crypto, they'd wipe the entire industry out. That would be a high-risk move from the political elite class on any ordinary technology, let alone one they've been captured to support.
- est31 4y ago
  SBF was the second biggest individual donor to Biden's election campaign, and he donated 8 times as much in the 2022 midterms to democrats. Newspapers close to democrats have made very positive pieces about him and his scam. Now after the collapse, the government is still after him. He will probably meet the fate of most upper class blue collar criminals, with low security prison for a low single digit number of years. The political class protects you if you bribe them, and you can get really rich thanks to such cooperations. They will defend your shady real estate deal, your NIMBY-ism, your neo feudal constitutional amendments from 1978, or pro-corporate legislation. But this has limits, e.g. when you appear in newspapers as someone who has scammed tens of thousands. I do think however that a thing such as "good" (in the sense of quality, not in the sense of impact on the world) elite capture exists, even for crypto currencies. Ultimately we might end up with one or two private crypto currencies that have managed to bribe the elites of the gun owning apparatus well, and then that apparatus will use the guns to eliminate the crypto currencies that didn't manage to do such elite capture. We might end up with privatized, state sanctioned currencies, just as large parts of the banking system are private, or how certain parts of the elite got first row access to massive Fed loans while the masses had nothing. In the end, elite captured crypto currencies will just be the people with guns deciding to use a different mechanism to distribute the goods the guns are protecting, instead of being the innovation the pro-crypto people have been dreaming about that deprecates the need for people with guns.
  - mjburgess 4y ago
    Sure, but there's also a single-dotted-line from the crypto libertarian "brogrammer" class to the republican party elite. I have the sense that a democratic legislature (Warren, et al.) are a lot more hostile to scams perpetrated against the naïve. It is why, eg., sports betting failed to pass in California. One thing which often goes missing, somehow, in the discussion of Trump is he's a scam artist and perpetrator of old-fashioned pyramids. Not in some political muckraking kinda way, but in a has-gone-to-court-and-been-found-out kinda way. My point being that SBT's donations should not be equivocated with endemic scam-artistry in certain segements of the elite -- which is a far more serious matter .
    - est31 4y ago
      You do have a point. SBF might be an interesting case because he tried to get protection from democrats even though republicans might have been more receptive to him.
michael1999 4y ago
TBH - I consider that people in crypto opted out of the normal system of rules, and expecting the taxpayer to spend zillions of dollars investigating offshore entities conducting obvious ponzis is a waste of money. Crypto == lawless, and demanding help from the fiat system after the fact is embarassing.
- michael1999 4y ago
  This would be better if we formalized this with Matt Levine's Certificate of Dumb Investment. As he said: > I am open to compromise on the details. The point is that the right general approach to the problem of people buying dumb investments is to give them much, much, much clearer and starker and scarier warnings before they invest, and then much, much, much less sympathy if they do it anyway. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/09/get-money-nothin-get-chicks-free.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/09/ge...

farseer 4y ago

Rent is unavoidable and essential to a dignified life. Crypto is for people with some spare cash who want to buy a thousand lottery tickets. The priorities of DOJ are correct. They are there to save you from the greed of others, not from your own.

mjburgess 4y ago

Part of the problem with crypto is "elite capture", ie., the political class seem to have jumped behind it as with, eg., AI, quantum computing, self-driving cars etc. --- without realising that it's a pyramid-style hype phenomenon rather than a "innovation-style" one. To defend them, it's really really hard to tell -- many technical people are economically incompetent and have been "captured"; and political people are far from either economically or technically competent. However, of course, there's also a significant amount of money funnelled from this scam into political pockets. I'd say it's 80% the former, 20% the latter. In any case, if the gov were to come down against crypto, they'd wipe the entire industry out. That would be a high-risk move from the political elite class on any ordinary technology, let alone one they've been captured to support.

est31 4y ago
SBF was the second biggest individual donor to Biden's election campaign, and he donated 8 times as much in the 2022 midterms to democrats. Newspapers close to democrats have made very positive pieces about him and his scam. Now after the collapse, the government is still after him. He will probably meet the fate of most upper class blue collar criminals, with low security prison for a low single digit number of years. The political class protects you if you bribe them, and you can get really rich thanks to such cooperations. They will defend your shady real estate deal, your NIMBY-ism, your neo feudal constitutional amendments from 1978, or pro-corporate legislation. But this has limits, e.g. when you appear in newspapers as someone who has scammed tens of thousands. I do think however that a thing such as "good" (in the sense of quality, not in the sense of impact on the world) elite capture exists, even for crypto currencies. Ultimately we might end up with one or two private crypto currencies that have managed to bribe the elites of the gun owning apparatus well, and then that apparatus will use the guns to eliminate the crypto currencies that didn't manage to do such elite capture. We might end up with privatized, state sanctioned currencies, just as large parts of the banking system are private, or how certain parts of the elite got first row access to massive Fed loans while the masses had nothing. In the end, elite captured crypto currencies will just be the people with guns deciding to use a different mechanism to distribute the goods the guns are protecting, instead of being the innovation the pro-crypto people have been dreaming about that deprecates the need for people with guns.
- mjburgess 4y ago
  Sure, but there's also a single-dotted-line from the crypto libertarian "brogrammer" class to the republican party elite. I have the sense that a democratic legislature (Warren, et al.) are a lot more hostile to scams perpetrated against the naïve. It is why, eg., sports betting failed to pass in California. One thing which often goes missing, somehow, in the discussion of Trump is he's a scam artist and perpetrator of old-fashioned pyramids. Not in some political muckraking kinda way, but in a has-gone-to-court-and-been-found-out kinda way. My point being that SBT's donations should not be equivocated with endemic scam-artistry in certain segements of the elite -- which is a far more serious matter .
  - est31 4y ago
    You do have a point. SBF might be an interesting case because he tried to get protection from democrats even though republicans might have been more receptive to him.

michael1999 4y ago

TBH - I consider that people in crypto opted out of the normal system of rules, and expecting the taxpayer to spend zillions of dollars investigating offshore entities conducting obvious ponzis is a waste of money. Crypto == lawless, and demanding help from the fiat system after the fact is embarassing.

michael1999 4y ago
This would be better if we formalized this with Matt Levine's Certificate of Dumb Investment. As he said: > I am open to compromise on the details. The point is that the right general approach to the problem of people buying dumb investments is to give them much, much, much clearer and starker and scarier warnings before they invest, and then much, much, much less sympathy if they do it anyway. https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/09/get-money-nothin-get-chicks-free.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/09/ge...