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First I was thinking, "hey maybe the recent downturn in crypto will weed out the most obvious nonsense" But now I see #1 story on Coindesk "Shiba Inu-Themed BO
by shp0ngle 4y ago
First I was thinking, "hey maybe the recent downturn in crypto will weed out the most obvious nonsense"
But now I see #1 story on Coindesk "Shiba Inu-Themed BONK Tokens Are Yielding Nearly 1,000%"
So I guess we are not there yet
- senttoschool 4y agoIt's a pump and dump with most of the tokens centralized in top 20 wallets. Crypto needs to die.
- Buttons840 4y agoI agree, but 1% of society holds more wealth than the bottom 50%. To a passing observer of crypto, they see that a few have extreme amounts of wealth, just like every other currency, and think everything seems normal.
- robertlagrant 4y agoThey don't see the difference in mechanisms. Getting rich through pump and dump vs getting rich through making or doing something people find valuable.
- Lalabadie 4y agoI think we're past believing that our top .1% is bringing value that's worth billions of times more than the rest of the population. They're all hoarding wealth and offloading risk on others, it's just that in comparison, the crypto-rich are not (yet?) a social class with an army of lobbyists on its payroll.
- 988747 4y ago> I think we're past believing that our top .1% is bringing value that's worth billions of times more than the rest of the population. Fortunately, we do not have to rely on our beliefs here, we have an objective measure, which we call "money". If someone starts a company in their garage, and a decade later that company is worth few billions of dollars then that's the value this person brought to society - because people willingly paid them those billions of dollars for their product/service. Of course the whole logic breaks down with purely speculative financial assets such as crypto.
- guelo 4y agoParasitic rents and many other market distortions/extortions exist.
- robertlagrant 4y agoSaying that something exists isn't a complete thought.
- guelo 4y agoStatements in a conversations do not stand alone. Thoughts flow from one to another.
- robertlagrant 4y agoThoughts can't flow if they aren't expressed completely. Insinuation can flow, but not open thoughts.
- mickael-kerjean 4y agoBy that only measure Nobels are thousand of time less valuable than Sam Bankman Fried
- nxmnxm99 4y agoHe didn't say it's the only measure.
- 988747 4y agoNobel prize winners are bad example, because their work is usually theoretical, hard to put to use. If someone writes a paper tomorrow proving that faster-than-light travel is possible then the only immediate value it brings is that you now have a nice lecture to read in bed. There are still thousands man-years of work required before an actual spaceship will be available for sale in your local dealership.
- 4y ago
- jl6 4y agoAverage wealth of the top 0.1% in the US is ~$50m. Average wealth overall is ~$100k. So it’s not billions of times more, it’s ~thousands of times more. Most high net worth individuals keep their wealth in stocks and shares. This is not what hoarding means. The comparison to crypto scams is absurd.
- robertlagrant 4y agoYou're missing the difference between ownership and money. People who make extremely useful companies own parts of them. They don't have that money in cash. The only thing they can do with that ownership is to sell it, which the market also seems a valuable thing. They have to constantly do valuable things to have money. They aren't like a government, which can lock you in a box for not paying them. Companies have to earn it.
- danielheath 4y agoTo be fair, it's a little bit harder to see the difference between pump & dump vs getting born rich.
- robertlagrant 4y agoThat's neither fair nor obvious. Inheritance makes providing value worth doing past the point of one's own comfort. Many people's work becomes most valuable in their latter years, and so we would want them to keep working and pass on wealth, as opposed to either stopping working or just splashing their money out on nonsense. The principle of being able to own things and work to one's own good, and the good of those whom one choosing to transfer it to, is the fundamental basis on which we now exist in the most advanced societies the world has ever seen, and the most rapidly advancing societies. It's not perfect, but every authoritarian attempt to make things better by centralising power in the name of fairness has gone terribly. Pump and dump schemes are just nothing like that.
- danielheath 4y agoFrom the perspective of those born poor with little prospect of improving their station, I don’t see how it’s obvious that the people who inherited wealth are more deserving of the money than the people who got it by scamming. The legitimacy of the social contract that respects private ownership depends on the prospect of a good life for those who work for it. When people lose belief in that prospect, they have no reason to respect the rules of that social contract.
- robertlagrant 4y agoI don't think you can lump people unable to improve their lot into a homogenous group all unable to see what money is. Some will; some won't. And that doesn't make money something else than what it is. I agree that as individual liberty is eroded, and it's easier to just become yet another BS cog in a giant BS machine, with no incentives to make anything better, then you can descend into something authoritarian that promises a better way, such as our previous attempts at socialism, but the way out isn't to reinforce (or repeat) incorrect assumptions about money. It's to campaign for more liberty and fairness.
- Lionga 4y agoAnd the solution is something where 0,000001% society hold 50% of the coins/"wealth"? The reason bitcoin will never be the main currency is, that even in case case crypto will ever be technically/UX viable as a currency (is very, very, very far from it) nobody of the 99% that do not own bitcoin now will choose bitcoin as the main currency. They will choose some most likely government started crypto where they can exchange their current money 1:1 and not buy into some stupid old thing that gives them nothing. So if crypto ever succeeds it is the death of bitcoin as the new system that converts from the old will win by a million miles
- rsynnott 4y agoIf anything the downturn will create even more nonsense, as people try to keep the money flowing in. If you think of crypto writ large as a sort of accidental self-organising distributed Ponzi scheme (which isn't unreasonable), then this is exactly what you'd expect; traditionally towards the end they get weirder and weirder, as people need money coming in by whatever means.
- jacquesm 4y agoPrecisely, it will just get weirder and more extreme until it explodes. These are all spasms of a dying organism. The addiction is so massive though that there will be some kind of backlash or a shift to something else. It's like when the authorities cracked down on money laundering through banks, for every one they killed four new ones sprang up.
- college_physics 4y agoIt may be rational behavior though. If the insider view is that the equity is worthless it makes sense to explore every possible option, no matter how weird.
- danuker 4y agoBut Bitcoin has "exploded" in the past, crashing 70%+ several times, yet each time it had a higher and higher floor. How do you explain this?
- robertlagrant 4y agoIt could be that people are just holding on. The question is: why is it worth anything at all?
- VLM 4y agoThere's a fundamental floor of value where "in the bad old days" I once bought a specialty swiss army knife (a very custom gift; details utterly irrelevant) and I wanted the knife enough to pay middlemen about 20% overall to turn by USD into ... whatever the swiss were using at the time. It used to cost twice as much money to move money around the world than to move a small consumer good around the world. That's just how the world was. Weird to think it would have been half the cost to mail the swiss a gold coin than to transfer money all legally. Clearly, I didn't think the middlemen provided 20% of value, but I was willing to cough up the cash to perform the overall transaction. If a cheaper money transfer option existed I'd never have used the middlemen, whom provided nothing of value to me for their 20% charge. Cheaper options do exist now... There's a lot of hand waving, but if you trust paypal, which you probably should not, the cost of moving money internationally has dropped to about 5% and the cost of currency conversions has dropped to 4%. I would assume they double dip and converting USD in USA to swiss whatevers in Switzerland would cost about 9%. Then of course there are withdrawal fees and so forth stacked on top. Anyway, lets say you can turn and burn bitcoin in "somewhat less than an hour" so simply divide total international daily transaction volume by twenty five or so and that seems a reasonable starting point for a store of value. If the price gets too high making it cost more to use BTC than paypal, then the BTC transaction volume would seem to drop until prices drop and people start using BTC again. Obviously for various UI and enduser reasons I would not expect all international trade to flow over either BTC or paypal or the legacy banking system, but "enough" should be there to support the BTC price at some level.
- marban 4y agoBonk happened within a week so you might say that rug pulls have at least gotten more efficient...
- xmcqdpt2 4y agoSmart contracts could automate this.
- shp0ngle 4y agoI am not sure if BONK already rugpulled. There are too many tokens with Elon Musk and Shiba Inu, and they are all interchangeable.
- WrtCdEvrydy 4y agoI could swear the owner claimed he had gambled the cash but maybe I'm wrong.
- moffkalast 4y agoThey go to real life jail. bonk
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- spamizbad 4y agoTo put this politely: crypto’s growth model heavily depends on those “quirky” projects to attract new users, drive trade volume, and bring in cash.
- rubyist5eva 4y agoIt's all obvious nonsense, always has been.