[clucas]

Right, but if I'm sitting in the chair as a regulator whose goal is to reduce the harm that financial products can cause to an average member of the general public while still allowing the market to work on its own as much as possible... I'm going to look at Netflix and think "well, we did what we could." Do you honestly think I should look at Bitcoin and think the same?

[aetherson]

I mean? Maybe? Bitcoin has generated more wealth for more people than Netflix and lost less value from its peak? Seems like things are going okay?

You seem to be hinting that there's a natural limit to what we "can" do for any given security. I don't think that's true: it's just all tradeoffs. Could a regulator have tried to stem the losses people experienced from Netflix? I mean, sure. They could've halted trading on Netflix. They could've artificially bought up Netflix's stock.

I don't think they should have done all that. The costs would have been extreme. But if you're all in on, "we did what we could," then I think the ball's in your court to describe exactly where the limits of that doctrine lie.

[arcticbull]

40% of bitcoin holders are underwater, and the vast majority of that so-called wealth is held by like 5 people. And for what? being in the right anarcocapitalist forum in 2009? Nice.

[aetherson]

What percentage of Netflix holders are underwater?

That's the point of this whole thread: whenever you get crypto haters on these fora, they act like crypto is the only volatile asset that has no effective price floor. But in fact, there are loooooooooooots of assets that are volatile and have no effective price floor.

Are those assets dangerous to invest in? They sure are. I don't invest in crypto and I don't invest in Netflix, either.

But do those many other assets that are volatile and have no effective price floor draw all this apocalyptic talk and complaints? No, they don't. They may draw entirely reasonable discussions of the value of not investing all your eggs in one basket. Which suggests to me that all the hate that crypto draws is not in fact because they're volatile and have no price floor -- that's a smokescreen for people who, generally, are in some combination of: a. don't like the politics of some people involved in crypto, or b. are pissed off that they spent a decade saying that crypt was going to crash any day now and have been consistently wrong.