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The most charismatic desert islander finds a stash of pretty sea shells. She persuades a bunch of the other marooned survivors to exchange their food rations f
by gorgoiler 4y ago
The most charismatic desert islander finds a stash of pretty sea shells. She persuades a bunch of the other marooned survivors to exchange their food rations for pretty shells.
A week later these chumps feel as stupid as they are hungry. Their only way out is to repeat the fraud. When they find some newcomers stupid enough to swap food for shells they as culpable as the original fraudster. Legally, does it matter if they knew that the shells were worthless junk? If they got triple their food ration back by exiting their shell position in a deal with someone even more stupid then they were, is it worse?
We push the original fraudster into the volcano because their very first action was to quit the shell economy. You can argue that anyone else who exited should be proportionally liable. In fact, you could take it as a given that everyone would have exited at some point. They’re all going to get hungry and eventually angry, especially when they see the fraudsters gorging themselves on all that food. You can therefore quantify peoples immorality, guilt, and liability not by how much they exited with — be that food rations or USD — but by how many shells they held over the lifetime of the scheme.
The original fraudster held all the shells at one point and gets the biggest sentence and pays the biggest damages. Everyone else is liable on a sliding scale based on how much they invested.
If Larry David took a cash fee for some acting then that’s fine. If he got any FTT out of this, he’s on the hook. If you’ve ever bought into a scam coin, so are you.
- brutusborn 4y agoDoesn't that analogy break down at the sale step? I.e. shitcoin owners might still beleive their coins are valuable when they sell them, thus are not guilty of anything morally.
- gorgoiler 4y agoThat’s a good point. If someone has to sell their coin to pay an unexpected vet bill, does that still count as a confession of immorality? In the end, their actions boil down to admitting that the only good thing you can do with a shitcoin is sell it. If you persuaded the vet to fix little Mittens in exchange for some shitcoin are you demonstrating you are a true and moral believer in the value of this asset, or are you just immorally passing the bag in a novel way? I’m going with the latter.
- notch656a 4y agoI'm going to go to Yap and tell them their ancestors were immoral shitbags. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Yap_license_plate_2000_series.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/29/Yap_lice...
- californical 4y agoI feel like this is revisionist history — the same could be said for the USD if it came crashing down eventually. Or maybe other currencies which are more likely to fail in the near future. Are you immoral for ever having used them? Most (all?) currencies are fiat anyways, so nearly equivalent in value.
- gorgoiler 4y agoCurrencies are usually backed by something useful, like goods or resources or labor. USD and oil are linked globally for example. The problem with these new currencies is that the people proposing them offer nothing of substance other than fear — the fear of missing out.
- notch656a 4y agoIn this story the charismatic islander took the food in promise she would keep it safe in case they want to trade more food for shells later. Instead she used the food to try and catch quarry, but all the quarry got away and it was wasted. IMO selling shitcoins is a much more difficult prosecution than ripping off customer deposits.