Benefit of the hindsight
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Explain to me one such benefit please
Software licenses
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You are absolutely right, just look at the popular investment subreddits, they don't talk about long-term goals and successful investment strategies for retirement, etc. They talk about what the latest fast-buck is going to be, what the newest short or pump-and-dump is doing, they report on when a rug gets pulled or a bubble bursts so that their buddies can stop working in inflating it.
It's an entire industry of scams and cons, from crypto to the stock-market broadly, it's all about short-term rewards at any cost.
I used to work in Tech back in the late 90s, during the first bubble and up to the Tech Crash. I also worked in both Investment Finance and Tech Startups much more recently.
I can't even begin to describe just how angry, disgusted and dissapointed this unholly intersection between Tech and Hyperspeculative-Finance of the XXI century makes me.
The whole spirit in pretty much the entire domain of Tech back in the 90s was completely different from this neverending bottomless swamp of crap we have in the supposedly innovative parts of Tech.
Ever since the sleazy slimeballs who saw from the first Tech bubble that there were massive opportunities to use Tech-mumbu-jumbo to extract money from suckers started (immediatly after the Crash) trying to pump the Net bubble back up (they even called it Web 2.0) that the old spirit of innovation for the sake of improving things of the old days in Tech was crushed and replaced by the most scammy, fraudulent, naked greed imaginable.
After my time in Finance (which, curiously, also involved a Crash in the Industry I was working in) I started describing Tech Startups as "The Even Wilder Wild West of Speculative Finance".
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You know, I feel bad for the people who were conned by the Super Bowl commercials. Celebs added legitimacy to the con. Everyone else who actually got into it because of whatever other reason, I don't give a fuck about. And SBF? Fuck that guy. I'm glad he's in prison. (I know he was selling a crypto-currency, not NFTs. Don't correct me.)
Oh, and the late night guy and the celeb blond lady who had an awkward conversation about it (was it the hotel sex tape lady?) can also fuck right off. Someone paid them to shill and they went for it. Assholes.
But, all that being said, I'll sell you a jpeg for $1000. Or two for $1999.
Edit: Paris Hilton, don't @ me.
Edit: missing "the"wrote on last edited by [email protected]I feel bad for people who are duped by the scam artists. But on the other hand, scam is such an integral part of the US life, recognising it is an essential skill by now. So if you have enough money to be scammed, but didn't learn how not to get scammed, it's at least a little bit on you at this point.
That being said, nobody is safe, unfortunately, you can be as smart and as informed as possible, they still can invent a scam that will work on you specifically. -
NFTs are just beanie babies for millenials and gen z
I could buy a beanie baby at an auction and then drive across town and sell the beanie baby at a different auction. I'd get around the same estimated price on the toy buying and selling, unless I found a particularly friendly/disappointing market.
By contrast, the NFT auction houses are all owned and operated by the same assholes trying to sell the digital merch. The prices are set arbitrarily, many of the sales are wash sales or straw purchases, with the same individual/cartel running multiple accounts to create the illusion of a market. Once you've bought your NFT, there's no real way to off-load it onto anyone else. It's purely a scam.
Tack on to the tail end, at the absolute worst you get a cute little stuffed animal out of Beanie Babies. With NFTs, you're not even buying the artwork itself. You're buying a link to artwork with no guarantee of continued costing. Quite a few NFTs are the victims of Link Rot, leading to the owner having gone out of pocket for some absurd fee in exchange for what amounts to a stall bit.ly URL.
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Tbh I get it from a certain point of view. We all made fun of bitcoin at first but now it's pretty common for people to wish they could tell their younger self to get as much as they can afford.
I get the idea of not wanting to miss out on the next thing that did that.
Did we make fun of bitcoin? It was a cool currency for buying drugs on the black market at first.
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How do you know a crypto scheme is a scam?
You already know, the answer is "yes". It's always "yes".
The only question is, can you hold the tiger's tail just long enough to make a mint and still let go in time that you aren't the last one holding it.Unfortunately for them that ship has sailed. It's not hard to get in on a scam like this of you do it early enough, i probably would have done it if i had enough money when this started (don't judge, much, money is important when you don't have it) and i probably would have gotten out like a bandit. Now though, it's mostly targeting them.
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The amount of ignorance regarding crypto is too damn high. I agree that NFT's are stupid, always felt that way, but when people just say a "all crypto is a scam" really don't understand what they are saying. There's a plenty of legit crypto products out there, but yes, the vast majority are just garbage. Invest in the blue chips, the REAL industry of crypto, not memes or things no ones ever heard of before. (Bitcoin, Solana, Ethereum, etc..)
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How do you know a crypto scheme is a scam?
You already know, the answer is "yes". It's always "yes".
The only question is, can you hold the tiger's tail just long enough to make a mint and still let go in time that you aren't the last one holding it.That’s the big question: do you recognize the scam in time to take advantage of it, and have the awareness to get out in time when there are still suckers?
I know a few people who made money on crypto in the early stages this way: recognize the scam but take advantage.
It was probably possible to take similar advantage of the Trump bribe laundering crypto scam, even without the benefit of the insider trading and market manipulation
I very briefly considered it but don’t trust my awareness to get out in time, plus participating in the scam would eat me up.
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I get the impression that most of the people who are swindled by crypto nowadays are aware of the scam and jump into it thinking they're going to make money by finding a greater fool to dump their participation the scheme on for a profit.
Such people are really trying to be scammers in the scam.
That explains them invariably rushing to defend whatever scam token they're holding whenever it gets criticized in social media: if outsider are generally made to suspect the true nature of the scam and hence become unwilling to jump in, these wannabe scammers aren't going to find a greater fool to take those tokens out of their hands and give them a nice profit.
Of course as @[email protected] pointed out, these scams are done from the very start for maximum profitability of those starting the scam, not for the profit of the first ones to buy into it, so often those wannabe scammers end up being the greater fools of that scam themselves.
That’s a big part of knowing when to get out. They don’t. ….. or maybe they do: I don’t know if that scam is still finding enough suckers.
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The amount of ignorance regarding crypto is too damn high. I agree that NFT's are stupid, always felt that way, but when people just say a "all crypto is a scam" really don't understand what they are saying. There's a plenty of legit crypto products out there, but yes, the vast majority are just garbage. Invest in the blue chips, the REAL industry of crypto, not memes or things no ones ever heard of before. (Bitcoin, Solana, Ethereum, etc..)
It's a solution in search of a problem. Currencies are government backed because the vast majority of people have faith in their governments' enforcement of legislation regarding use of that currency. It's good to be able to make class action lawsuits against scammers and most in the population will choose anything government backed if they have the option.
So if the goal is to get away from government backing, who do you give control to? In the case of a blockchain, it's the parties with the majority of the "proof of XYZ" creation hardware. Which are not normal people. Then there's the possibility of developers of a blockchain choosing to rewrite the ledger, causing splits. So you didn't invent some unmodifiable currency either, the control lies with people who you probably should trust even less than the parties managing EUR/USD.
Then, it's incredibly energy inefficient. Especially proof of work is a ridiculous waste of computational resources, at least tie the problem to something NP-hard with actual value instead of whatever reverse hashing search is usually done. But wasting resources is the design of the system anyways.
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I used to work in Tech back in the late 90s, during the first bubble and up to the Tech Crash. I also worked in both Investment Finance and Tech Startups much more recently.
I can't even begin to describe just how angry, disgusted and dissapointed this unholly intersection between Tech and Hyperspeculative-Finance of the XXI century makes me.
The whole spirit in pretty much the entire domain of Tech back in the 90s was completely different from this neverending bottomless swamp of crap we have in the supposedly innovative parts of Tech.
Ever since the sleazy slimeballs who saw from the first Tech bubble that there were massive opportunities to use Tech-mumbu-jumbo to extract money from suckers started (immediatly after the Crash) trying to pump the Net bubble back up (they even called it Web 2.0) that the old spirit of innovation for the sake of improving things of the old days in Tech was crushed and replaced by the most scammy, fraudulent, naked greed imaginable.
After my time in Finance (which, curiously, also involved a Crash in the Industry I was working in) I started describing Tech Startups as "The Even Wilder Wild West of Speculative Finance".
Yeah it’s such a degeneracy…..
When I worked in investments, it was all about finding the best statistical model to balance returns against risk. It was fascinating how complex the models could be, and even included currency hedging to reduce the risk of exchange rates. And most importantly to also minimize trades to control costs and tax impact. This was before lightning trading: plenty of the funds were monthly trading. Those were the good old days when a better algorithm could shave points enough to stand out but everyone was on similar footing
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It's a solution in search of a problem. Currencies are government backed because the vast majority of people have faith in their governments' enforcement of legislation regarding use of that currency. It's good to be able to make class action lawsuits against scammers and most in the population will choose anything government backed if they have the option.
So if the goal is to get away from government backing, who do you give control to? In the case of a blockchain, it's the parties with the majority of the "proof of XYZ" creation hardware. Which are not normal people. Then there's the possibility of developers of a blockchain choosing to rewrite the ledger, causing splits. So you didn't invent some unmodifiable currency either, the control lies with people who you probably should trust even less than the parties managing EUR/USD.
Then, it's incredibly energy inefficient. Especially proof of work is a ridiculous waste of computational resources, at least tie the problem to something NP-hard with actual value instead of whatever reverse hashing search is usually done. But wasting resources is the design of the system anyways.
Sounds to me like you never read the Bitcoin whitepaper.
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There use to always be a crowd of TSLA stock owners (fewer now) defending Tesla in posts criticising Musk and Tesla, and similarly lots of people who are clearly cryptocurrency owners coming out of the woodworks to defend cryptocurrencies in posts critical of them.
Under this post we seem to be getting a lot of NFT owners doing the same: "selling their book" as they say in Finance.
People will say any old bollocks and dissemble like pros to keep up interest in the "investment" assets they own until they find a greater fool to dump them on.
Makes me think of the difference in the discourse around Bitcoin back in the early days vs latter stages: NFTs were created from the very go as way of separating fools from their money so the talk around them has always been swindlers' talk - or if you want to describe it in a positive light, "the grifters grift" - but Bitcoin did not start as a vehicle for money making, and I remember back in the beginnings of Bitcoin how the talk was very different - mainly naive idealism - and how it changed over time as greedy types became a greater and greater part of those who had bought Bitcoin.
There use to always be a crowd of TSLA stock owners (fewer now) defending Tesla
Seems like a resurgence now, plus I’m seeing a lot more misleading videos.
This time it’s worse: all scam and manipulation.
Before there were a lot of true believers and the bubble went on too long to be just a scam
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Bitcoin is still fucking shit. That just amounts to "I wish I was there first in this this pyramid scheme". It doesn't change what it is.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]There were enough layers in that pyramid and enough years in construction to have room for more people to make a buck.
What’s the difference between a scam and a bubble, and is the bubble more legitimate or just a bigger, longer scam?
- NFTs were a misuse of blockchain giving no real value. Plus it was very short term and really only rewarded scammers and manipulators. A true scam.
- Crypto is better thought out and actually could serve as a currency. It has a bit more staying power and even enriched a few non-scammers. Does that make it a “bubble” ?
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NFTs are great, the stupid fucking pictures that everyone calls NFTs are not
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Don't forget Funko pops
I really hate these things and can’t believe I wasted money on some my kids wanted.
But you do buy something. It’s not imaginary
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Near the peak of the NFT craze I was gifted (as part of an initial mint) an NFT, which I turned around and immediately sold for $3k. Last I looked it was worth about $200. That's the extent of my experience with NFTs.
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This still fundamentally suffers from the oracle problem like all blockchains solutions. You can always attack these blockchain solutions at the point where they need to interact with the real world. In this case the camera is the "oracle" and nothing prevents someone from attacking the proposed camera and leveraging it to certify some modified footage. The blockchain doesn't add anything a public database and digitally signed footage wouldn't also achieve.
The blockchain is distributed.
For example, you might use it as a trademark registry or to certify a chain of legal evidence. You can validate a presented copy matches the original and what the chain of ownership was. And you can do this without the single point of failure of a nationwide database
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Or you could travel at any speed.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Well not 299,792,458 meters per second. The time travel effect becomes more effective the slower you are from that
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It's a solution in search of a problem. Currencies are government backed because the vast majority of people have faith in their governments' enforcement of legislation regarding use of that currency. It's good to be able to make class action lawsuits against scammers and most in the population will choose anything government backed if they have the option.
So if the goal is to get away from government backing, who do you give control to? In the case of a blockchain, it's the parties with the majority of the "proof of XYZ" creation hardware. Which are not normal people. Then there's the possibility of developers of a blockchain choosing to rewrite the ledger, causing splits. So you didn't invent some unmodifiable currency either, the control lies with people who you probably should trust even less than the parties managing EUR/USD.
Then, it's incredibly energy inefficient. Especially proof of work is a ridiculous waste of computational resources, at least tie the problem to something NP-hard with actual value instead of whatever reverse hashing search is usually done. But wasting resources is the design of the system anyways.
it’s the parties with the majority of the “proof of XYZ” creation hardware. Which are not normal people.
Originally the idea was that it WOULD be normal people using their own CPU cycle time to secure the chain and mint new blocks. Even then, as long as no one party holds the majority of hash power, the incentive is to support the security of the coin rather than subvert it. The moment that changes is the moment that Bitcoin dies, because no one will be able to trust it any more - which also means there is an incentive to make sure there are enough competing BTC farms.
there’s the possibility of developers of a blockchain choosing to rewrite the ledger, causing splits.
The blockchain is upheld by the combination of the developers and the miners. If the developers aren't acting in good faith and the miners don't like it, they don't move to the new chain. Sure, you get a split, but odds are one of them is going to die.
