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When people invest in a scam, they 100% deserve to lose all the money they invested. People should suck it up. They have no one to blame but themselves. I join

When people invest in a scam, they 100% deserve to lose all the money they invested. People should suck it up. They have no one to blame but themselves. I joined a project which was legitimate at first and founders essentially gave up (bribed?) and the project turned into a scam. OK I blame them, I think about taking it to court sometimes but I definitely blame myself too for having trusted them. I wasted 3 years of work on this. I should have seen the warning signs. I wasn't cynical enough. Later I launched my own project. I barely raised any money at all. But I'm still running it 4 years later. Nobody gives a crap. Nobody thinks this track record matters. I also have a solid 10+ years track record in open source. So f*** them. I love it when people lose their money in scams because they need to be schooled about LIFE and the value of TRUST. We're talking about BARE BASICS for being a functioning adult here. Just look at the people's track records you morons. Verify that the identities match up. Any serious person who values $10K+ WILL MAKE TIME to talk to you one-on-one to earn your investment. You can see their track record at various companies, you can contact colleagues, you can see open source contributions in the public domain. It's your fault and nothing but your fault that you didn't do the due diligence. You were lazy. If you valued your money, you would have done the research and set the trust bar higher. If you lost money in a cheap scam like this, you didn't deserve to keep that money in the first place. Don't go crying to big daddy SEC about the big bad wolf who fleeced you clean. Be thankful it didn't eat you alive because that's what should happen to any sheep which ventures into a wolf's lair. Not saying that the wolf shouldn't be punished... Just saying; we shouldn't protect irrational agents at the expense of rational ones.

netsharc 2y ago
Somehow it feels like even if I did something where I openly say "This is 100% going to be a rugpull", people are still going to put money in it... I need to get on this con... It seems like the crypto boom times gave a lot of people a lot of stupid money, e.g. that crypto guy who bought that "art" banana for millions (well, single digit millions) and then ate it. There must be a term for this similar to "fuck you money"... maybe "dance, monkeys, dance money"? Edit to add: which is why I feel like most of the people joining on the memecoin/rugpull bandwagons are either playing with their -- let's call it "monopoly money" that they gained by "playing crypto", or rubes that are actually putting their savings in. The first group will just laugh off a loss, while the second group saw the fist group, got FOMO and will get ruined when the rug gets pulled. Somehow it's very similar to card-sharking, where the other "victims" help the shark lure the actual victim..
- jongjong 2y ago
  Yeah but don't assume that because a lot of obvious scams got funding means that every legitimate project also got funding... It's not like the market 'ran out' of legit projects and people had no choice but to buy scams to meet their insatiable demand for crypto. There were a few high-exposure 'obvious scams' which became viral but they are not the norm. A huge amount of legit projects (mine included) got barely any attention and struggled to raise $30K in spite of having top-of-the-range tech (at least by several measures). The tech, and even business aspects are often a tiny component compared to the pure hype aspect. This is true for essentially any project that raised any significant sum. All the business or tech-focused projects are dealing in tiny numbers and virtually unknown. It's hard to find them even if you look for them. Total media blackhole.
hiq 2y ago
I can sympathize with this position when the scam is obvious, but what about fraud? It sounds like you were deceived into investing in a scam that was not obvious, at least at first. Ideally regulations and entities like the SEC should prevent that from happening, or at least shut them down before they cause too much damage (better if you get half your money back than none at all). And even in cases where the scam is obvious (at least to you), I do think there's room to protect less knowledgeable people from themselves, just like there's room to protect addicted gamblers from harming themselves and their families too much. And overall, for the greater good, maybe it shouldn't be possible to commoditize the creation of new scams, if only so that people would look for better investments (e.g. some that are not negative-sum).

netsharc 2y ago

Somehow it feels like even if I did something where I openly say "This is 100% going to be a rugpull", people are still going to put money in it... I need to get on this con... It seems like the crypto boom times gave a lot of people a lot of stupid money, e.g. that crypto guy who bought that "art" banana for millions (well, single digit millions) and then ate it. There must be a term for this similar to "fuck you money"... maybe "dance, monkeys, dance money"? Edit to add: which is why I feel like most of the people joining on the memecoin/rugpull bandwagons are either playing with their -- let's call it "monopoly money" that they gained by "playing crypto", or rubes that are actually putting their savings in. The first group will just laugh off a loss, while the second group saw the fist group, got FOMO and will get ruined when the rug gets pulled. Somehow it's very similar to card-sharking, where the other "victims" help the shark lure the actual victim..

jongjong 2y ago
Yeah but don't assume that because a lot of obvious scams got funding means that every legitimate project also got funding... It's not like the market 'ran out' of legit projects and people had no choice but to buy scams to meet their insatiable demand for crypto. There were a few high-exposure 'obvious scams' which became viral but they are not the norm. A huge amount of legit projects (mine included) got barely any attention and struggled to raise $30K in spite of having top-of-the-range tech (at least by several measures). The tech, and even business aspects are often a tiny component compared to the pure hype aspect. This is true for essentially any project that raised any significant sum. All the business or tech-focused projects are dealing in tiny numbers and virtually unknown. It's hard to find them even if you look for them. Total media blackhole.

hiq 2y ago

I can sympathize with this position when the scam is obvious, but what about fraud? It sounds like you were deceived into investing in a scam that was not obvious, at least at first. Ideally regulations and entities like the SEC should prevent that from happening, or at least shut them down before they cause too much damage (better if you get half your money back than none at all). And even in cases where the scam is obvious (at least to you), I do think there's room to protect less knowledgeable people from themselves, just like there's room to protect addicted gamblers from harming themselves and their families too much. And overall, for the greater good, maybe it shouldn't be possible to commoditize the creation of new scams, if only so that people would look for better investments (e.g. some that are not negative-sum).