| > As an inevitable crash occurs, many of the swindles and alleged swindles are coming to light. Yeah, bubbles make overvalued prices. Crashes occur. Losers fail. Winners gain bigger marketshare and mindshare. Spectacular failures are actually a sign of a functioning market. The worst possible thing that could have happened last week would be the federal reserve offering Do Kwon a very cheap bridge loan to stabilize his section of the crypto economy, lest we risk broader market contagion. Crypto failures are fast and painful as opposed to long and corrupt. This is a feature, not a bug. Also, ironically, this author has spilled a fair amount of ink over all the market crises of the years. He wrote a whole book on the dot-com bust. The Luna saga was over in about 3 days. > The list includes some traditional tactics for illicitly relieving rubes of their money, such as pump-and-dump schemes and phishing for passwords. It also describes new, more novel schemes, including the “pig butchering” crypto scam, which often involves an attractive person approaching you online and offering you spectacularly lucrative crypto investments. Sure, I get these DMs on discord too. Don't fall for scammers. They were doing the same nonsense with "Double your Square Cash!" scams shortly before the crypto boom. Or offering great deals on "GPUs" during the shortage. This is not a crypto problem in the slightest and crypto probably makes these lower end scammers easy to prosecute. > The over-all aim was to make crypto investing seem mainstream and draw in gullible investors who feared they were being left on the sidelines. Does anyone seriously believe that etrade or robinhood advertising options trading to me is somehow different? There are constant commercials for precious metals and ETFs and all kinds of things. I know a fair amount of bitcoin millionaires, all of whom were called "gullible investors" at the time. What really bothers me is the incredible amount of ignorance I see in the comments section about crypto, blockchain technologies, poor understandings of economics, etc. Wtf HN. Do better. I feel like I'm watching my peers get old and resistant to change and dismissive of new technologies and exciting possibilities. Also, if you appreciate my contrarian (for HN?) view and are looking to take on more risk, now is the time to build for web3. The people chasing easy money will give up and the people moving the tech forward will build while no one is watching. |
>Does anyone seriously believe that etrade or robinhood advertising options trading to me is somehow different? There are constant commercials for precious metals and ETFs and all kinds of things.
Well they're equally bad in terms of being a scam, unless you are a hedge fund that has enough liquidity to even need options trading in the first place. Not sure what other conclusion you could come up with there.
>What really bothers me is the incredible amount of ignorance I see in the comments section about crypto, blockchain technologies, poor understandings of economics, etc.
Being bothered by the flaws of crypto does not equate to being uninformed. That kind of logic is what I expect from a car salesman, not HN.
Yes, that wasn't nice of me, but being told I'm old and resistant to change because I disagree with someone doesn't engender friendly interpretations.
No asset is a pure force for good nor evil, but there are material issues with crypto and pretending they're ONLY a technicality is convincing no-one.