[eszed]

Sell your mainline crypto for money-money, and declare it on your taxes? Isn't that straightforward to do, nowadays? Not trying to be snarky: I've never been involved in crypto, but I thought I understood it in principle.

Sidenote: The GP's point was an Aha! moment for me about memecoins. I never got why anyone ever bought into these at all, but money laundering makes perfect sense.

[yieldcrv]

you understand it

but one thing you’re missing is that people dont know which ones will be money laundered - or attract gobs of capital for unknown reasons - and go up in price wildly. so people play at all levels depending on their risk appetite since the profits from a coin being pumped are so wild.

these things launch with a marketcap in the low thousands, and run to marketcaps in the millions and billions for tens of thousands of % gains. its what retail has always wanted from the IPO market, but instead of waiting decades for every rule to slowly change with no sign of the private sector using those rules, they have the crypto ecosystem now and its been a hit.

as far as financial market innovation goes, the liquidity pool code is pretty novel and an active area of research and competition, a candidate of something to graduate to - or intertwine with - the traditional markets

[eszed]

Ah! It's penny stocks, then. My grandfather lost a ton of money "investing" in those, over the years - but his occasional hits, generally when he happened to piggyback a pump scheme (a gold mine scam in Papua New Guinea particularly sticks out), more than made up for it, at least to him.

[yieldcrv]

Yep

In fact its more like every unincorporated idea and general partnership and incorporated business all thrusted into visibility and publicly traded status all at once, right along side private equity backed corporations and ones that have actual institutional underwriters and IPO’d, issued and trading 24/7/365 with no circuit breakers or halts of any kind!

If the respected traditional market didnt have its layers of filtering via syndicates and the exchanges, it would look just as scammy

you can filter for stronger crypto projects, more consumers and investors simply need to, and crypto skeptics need to become more discerning to levy a more equivalent standard

[aspenmayer]

I mean, I kind of get it, I made a small amount from the Uniswap airdrop, and that was before pump.fun existed or whatever the hip thing is this cycle. I don’t think folks can usually count on airdrops but if you are making the crypto then you can do the math and price in an upside. I don’t see anything shady there per se as long as the tokenomics are solid. It’s the same as any crypto offer, buyer (and seller) beware.

I appreciate your explanation for me and for everyone else. I’m glad that crypto is being legitimized. It’s a cool technology and I think it should be profitable because it’s a technology whose time has come. I think its usage for money laundering is unfortunate, but ledgers offer introspection that is an opportunity for enforcement. I think it’s just another cat and mouse game, same as it always was. Most folks aren’t doing anything underhanded and just want to use the technology to do cool things. The law is catching up, but it had to be dragged to the table. This should have happened years ago in my opinion.

[yieldcrv]

No rebuttals there

I think the previously hostile regulatory environment has caused a lot of innovation, that is more resilient and useful for capital formation, new sectors, industries. the cryptosecurities market in 2012 was really ghetto, the ICO market in 2017 was baaaad but working around securities regulations since registration+liquidity was impossible. 2024’s pump.fun should be for entertainment only, but it does standardize the token issuances in ways that werent there before

the bad stuff should be ignored by consumers or cleaned up

but at the end of the day it will always be up to consumers and investors to be more discerning, for critics to criticize bad organizations individually instead of indict all of crypto when something goes wrong. the lack of discernment allows for most bad actors to act with impunity, and encourages the ones that do eventually face consequence

[aspenmayer]

I didn’t mean to conflate what Uniswap does with what pump.fun does, but I understand that Uniswap is a decentralized exchange whereas pump.fun is a launchpad, which is a basically crypto contract templating? I don’t know how to explain it abstractly but I think the liquidity pools that Uniswap and others pioneered has created a really neat community.

Like the thnickles guy, for example. Good old weird internet salt of the earth folks. I don’t even know if he’s associated with crypto, but the more people doing neat things as investments, the weirder the internet gets, and I’m more or less okay with that within the bounds of reason and complying with applicable laws and regulations.

[yieldcrv]

All good, I wouldnt say conflating, they both use bonding curves that Uniswap pioneered

For the uninitiated:

Uniswap’s liquidity pool concept changed crypto forever and there are infinite code branches from that at this point. Pump.fun is a homegrown version of the same blueprint, with scripted automation and gamification built on top of it.

What used to be separate processes and cost teams tens of thousands of dollars to code and review (creating a token, getting it audited), is now rolled into a click of a button for pennies free.

Pump fun creates your token, fills it in a liquidity pool, initiates the initial purchases for price discovery, and locks the dev into a game where the it stays in the pump fun smart contract until the token hits a certain marketcap, then it transfers the liquidity pool (which is a bearer asset itself) into a more open trading smart contract called Raydium. This is an important goal because people provide liquidity with their own capital to raydium liquidity pools, increasing the collective respect and liquidity depth. These marker makers earn basis points from trades through the liquidity pool. (I so wish this was available on the stock market, coming soon I hope). Pumpfun keeps all their trade volume earnings to themselves.

Look at how much pump fun has earned over the past year. Launchpads are lucrative.

[aspenmayer]

Have you followed what Robinhood is doing? They were tokenizing private shares of OpenAI and others, way before most private investors would have access to these shares. That allowed Robinhood to also fractionalize them.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/02/openai-robinhood-tokens.html

They also are doing a lot of stuff with prediction markets, which is pretty interesting even if I think the issue there is one of deferring trust to an oracle, but that’s kind of the gambit with most gambles, so it sort of comes with the territory. I think there have been some bad calls by oracles there, and I think there’s a brand risk to Robinhood if RH users identify strongly with the RH brand when placing prediction wagers even when they are outsourced to a third party.

https://www.theblock.co/post/367417/robinhood-launching-spor...