[thrownawaysz]

>Meet Mike. Mike is a college freshman who is exposed to crypto through social media. He downloads Coinbase, buys ten dollars of CumRocket because his friend group is in on it, watches the price move, and feels for the first time the dopamine rush of gambling on non-economic random walks. By his sophomore year he is onto harder drugs: 0DTE options on triple-leveraged single-stock ETFs he does not understand, traded on a gamified brokerage built to look like a video game. By twenty-two he has a Kalshi account, because betting on the outcome of a presidential primary or a reality television show winner has been reframed as participation in financial markets. By twenty-four he has hit rock bottom in the sportsbook, firing off ten-leg parlays on Tibetan ping-pong and third-division water polo at two in the morning because the games he has actually heard of no longer move fast enough to feel like anything. Mike believes he is investing. Mike is gambling. Mike is on the express train to a gambling addiction, and he is meaningfully poorer at every stop along the way.

tbh that reads a bit like the war on drugs propaganda we got in school back then. You don't want to try the devil's lettuce cause in 2 years you will be a homeless heroin addict in San Francisco, or worse!

[pjc50]

This is a "vice" thing. Vices are things which match this pattern like alcohol or drugs:

    - many people don't indulge at all
    - many people indulge occasionally to no real harm
    - some people indulge in a way that makes a short term recoverable mess
    - a few people get addicted and are unable to stop. May or may not also be harmed at this point, but this tends to lead to cumulative harm
    - a few people really mess up tragically

The people in the first few groups can argue "why should this be banned, it's not harming me" with some validity. But there's also people for whom the vice overrides their self-preservation and they get into a bad financial and/or health position, and can only be saved by abstention. They may require help to abstain, such as the UK "legitimate" gambling industry's "self-ban" mechanism.

[tialaramex]

One thing that does vary is whether "it's not harming me" works out. Booze in particular has massive social consequences, drunk people harm non-drinkers not just themselves. I've never worried that degenerate gamblers leaving a slot machine parlour at 2am will attack me - but outside the bars that's definitely possible which is why they're required to hire security and have police contact

[lmz]

Some gamblers will inevitably run out of money and resort to crime.

[StilesCrisis]

I think this description is deceptive because it assumes bucket sizes ("many," "some," "a few"). Those bucket sizes work for alcohol and some recreational drugs. But they're tragically wrong for others--very very few people partake of heroin "occasionally with no real harm." You're almost certainly heading towards the last two buckets.

[pjc50]

True, but if you start counting codeine as an opiate the bucket gets a lot larger. And includes the Purdue Pharma scandal. Lots of people use opiates under medical supervision, with varying degrees of help and harm.

> assumes bucket sizes ("many," "some," "a few")

I was trying to be as vague as possible here!

[ligne]

...which is definitely an improvement over their previous slogan, "when the fun stops, stop"¹.

__ ¹ coincidentally what my Dad always used to say about black tar heroin.

[RobotToaster]

Propaganda always works best when it's true, but selective. People that ended up homeless heroin addicts 2 years after smoking cannabis exist, the propaganda just neglected to mention that they are a minority.

Just like the failure of the war on drugs, trying to ban crypto and arresting anyone that owns it would almost certainly be a dismal failure.

[Nursie]

That's why the on and off ramps should be regulated, heavily, instead.

Presuming you want to 'kill' cryptocurrency, starving it of interactions with the real economy seems a much easier way to do it.

[coldtea]

>tbh that reads a bit like the war on drugs propaganda we got in school back then.

Well, propaganda or not, hard drugs are bad for you.

[lionkor]

Well it's not wrong, the solution isn't abstinence though, it's proper education, help for those who struggle with it, and making it legal and regulating it.

[keiferski]

Just because the methods used by the war on drugs failed doesn’t mean that drugs are somehow good for you. It just means that the methods were ineffective.

[onionisafruit]

Not just ineffective, but counterproductive. Kids saw through the propaganda and that made many of them discount all warnings about drugs. That’s why we shouldn’t abide well intentioned propaganda.

[altmanaltman]

Yeah like why is Mike thinking he is investing if he is betting on a literal sportsbook? That is delusion and has nothing to do with crypto. I am not pro crypto but the logic here doesn't make a lot of sense.

You can say buying crypto is like gambling sure but it literally is not. It's investing in an extremely risky asset that can go to 0. But it is very different than placing a bit on Kalshi or a sportsbook.

I actually have bought CumRocket before but I also bought a lot of crypto and sold it at a profit. I did not use Kalshi later or sportbooks to gamble. I moved to invest in stocks later in life but bought boring etfs and index funds. Trading bitcoin actually taught me risk management and stocks seem much easier to handle in terms of strategy.

Sure I could've turned into a degenrate gambler but that's literally not crypto's fault

[speed_spread]

I read it as another verse of Eminem's "Guilty Conscience".