[rsynnott]

> If you know the rules of the game and you willingly participate, then how is it different from any casino?

If _everyone_ playing the game knew the rules, no-one would play. Like all fraudulent schemes, these are fundamentally dependent on getting in new marks.

These memecoins are essentially partially open Ponzi schemes; there are the organisers (occupying essentially the Charles Ponzi role), the naive marks (occupying the same role as the marks in a conventional Ponzi scheme), but in the middle you have the gamblers, the people who are _aware_ that it's a fraud, but also aware that if they get in at the right time they can take some money off the marks and the gamblers who misjudge their time of entry.

(To _some_ extent this dynamic exists in some conventional Ponzi and pyramid schemes; "this is obviously a fraud, but if I get in early I might be one of the winners" is a game that has been played before. Meme coins have really turned it up to 11 tho)

[TZubiri]

Yet people play at casinos all the time.

There's always people that are ok with gambling and losing on the long run.

But there's people that recognize the zero sum, and bet that they are the ones having the advantage.

It's not like people bought the coin thinking they were helping the country, only conmen trying to outcon the conner bought it.

Although there definitely is an argument for tricking laypeople, I think it was just crypto traders and kids speculating on a coin.

It's very common in cons for the mark to think they are the conmen I hear.

[jerojero]

Cigarettes also exist and people smoke and get cancer from smoking all the time.

Does this mean cigarettes are a good thing? Why do they exist in society if they so clearly harm people?

There's a big industry around smoking that has managed to perpetuate itself in society despite the fact that it causes harm. This doesn't mean there's a good reason reason for it to exist; the reality of the situation is that you can entrench yourself in society and become very difficult to remove if you have enough power to do so. It might be that in 100 or 200 years the cigarette industry is finally gone.

Pretty much the same applies to Casinos. Yes, people play at them, and a lot of people that go to Casinos have a gambling addiction. For some, perhaps most, casinos provide a degree of entertainment that is not really a problem but ultimately Casinos are set up as a business that relies on people losing more money than they win. There's things like lotteries which seek to channel gambling addiction into social good.

And even in this scenario; Casinos are highly regulated. Which crypto ponzis are not. The existence of crypto gambling is simply a failure of regulation which is slow to adapt to new technologies. Yeah, crypto bros are in luck that there's an administration that goes as far as to encourage people to fall for these scams. It doesn't mean it's something that's going to last.

[TZubiri]

I concede that just because something is consensual doesn't mean that it is ethical or legal.

However there is and should be a legal difference between selling tobacco to unknowing customers, like in unlabeled soda or ice creams, against selling to cigarette buyers who are informed.

Similarly security laws are in place to protect legitimate investments, the courts do not want to be involved in inproductive speculative trades. You need to have some nuance between speculative casino games and genuine trading.

You can't treat both cases the same, if you do you do it at the expense of genuine commerce.

In this case, it crossed over to the criminal kind because it passed as an investment security, and was sold as such. So I do backtract in what I said in my original comment, I do see how THIS is a crime, but not other stuff like say, other typical pump.fun coins. Mostly because I learned a bit more about the case.