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Comment by blunte | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately for the author of this amazing (and cringeworthy) exercise, skeptics often put in a lot of effort, but receive practically no reward compared to the con artist.

Even the people who agree with and appreciate the effort of the skeptics are few compared to the number of irrational people who gladly follow the cons.

This is a bit radical (and probably outside the interest of HN), but if we somehow could remove personal financial need from society, imagine where our technologies might be driven?... instead of where they typically get hijacked and driven.

Television was once lauded as the future best thing to ever happen to education, but we know how that turned out. Same with the internet and web. And so on. Blockchain technologies are now the hottest and most ideal way to build a scam, because the audience is greedy and the technology is well beyond the comprehension of the average person.

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I don't think true personal financial need drives much of this. Anybody smart enough to pull off a con like this could get an adequate job and make enough to live comfortably on.

I think the problem comes from people who won't stop there. Some are just sucking voids of desire; they always want more. Others want to be on top, to be number one. In my view, these people are broken.

So personally, I wonder about how we keep broken people in check, and how we rework society to produce fewer broken people.

There's a great bit in Iain Banks's Player of Games where the main character, who is from a post-scarcity utopia, visits a classic stellar empire, one clearly a stand-in for the worst parts of our current culture. The rich, imperial upper class types he's talking with have a hard time understanding the main character's lack of interest in owning. They ask, "Could you have a planet?" His take was roughly, "Well, I'm sure you could find an empty planet and land on it, but what would you do with it?"

It's something I think of often when I'm dealing with people trapped in a scarcity mentality.

Not radical at all, greed ruins everything.

The more we can decrease it in society – the more freedom we'll all get.

How do you suggest we do that?

Build great stuff and don't be greedy - set an example. Make those greedy over mediocrity look bad. Build for the sake of building, because that's reward enough.

This naive approach likely leads to the head-down artist or creator being exploited by the greedy manager/agent/parasite/whatever, not some sort of life changing event for those who see this person's work and suffering with profit left on the table.

If you're naive, but not being greedy doesn't require naivety. In fact it probably requires some awareness to understand that money can be an anchor.

You're making $140k a year. Nice. How much of your time and attention and energy are you trading for that? Is it worth it?

Maybe that's enough of a reward for you, but personally I work because I like to get paid. The fact that I enjoy my work immensely is just a happy accident. There are things I enjoy doing even more than my work - much more so! - and if I did not need to get paid, I'd be doing those things instead.

Just wondering: If you got so rich from crypto currency that you could retire, would you retire? Start your own company? Just do fun stuff? Or keep working?

I myself work, to occupy myself with interesting problems, so I would keep doing this, regardless of my wealth.

Wealthy enough to really never work again? Yes, I'd absolutely "retire." I'd still "work", in the sense that, say, angel investors work, or people own real estate; I'd also still write software in my free time.

But for the most part, no I wouldn't continue doing what I do now because I'd stop consulting and I would never again be an individual contributor. I'd probably devote "professional focus" to investing and academic research in math and cryptography while traveling all over the world like Tom from Myspace.

I think in conversations like this the dimension people like myself are talking about is freedom. I'd still work on what I'm passionate about even if I was wealthy, I would just cease doing it in a way that I don't have total control and direction over my work. That circles back to my original point - my passion for my work is not nearly enough of an incentive for me to do it if I'm not doing it with total autonomy.

But, but what about love, friendship and the feeling of connectedness? Is freedom what people should desire?

> Build for the sake of building, because that's reward enough.

My daughter can't eat the sake of building.

I didn't literally mean do it for free. There's a tradeoff between comfort and freedom that's different for different people.

Only give power to people who don't want it.

There's an SF writer I really like for his books in the vein of this. His name is L. E. Modesitt, and some of his books that discuss this are the "Parafaith War" and probably the best "Adiamante."

It's a pretty old idea. The Bene Gesserit surely got it from Other Memory. They just figured out how to make it practical.

In Douglas Adams's books the president of the universe is completely powerless because anyone who wants to be president should absolutely not be given any real authority.

The real ruler is a man living in a shack in the middle of nowhere who only cares about his cat and an occasional glass of whiskey.

That's where some of us are destined to end up, I'm afraid. :)

By observing our behaviors and eliminating harmful ones, i.e. through mindfulness of one's actions and motivations.

This solves the problem for you, the individual who values your goal, but that's the easy part. How do you suggest we get other people to do it?

Education of the younger generations because adults are quite inflexible when it comes to habit changing.

Greed appears to me to be fundamentally intrinsic to human behavior and culture. I don't think it's realistic to try to get rid of it. Rather I think it would be more effective to use it as an incentive and actively limit its negative externalities.

There are lots of "fundamentally intrinsic" harmful elements of human behavior and culture but civilization is slowly getting them under control.

But there is a vast difference between getting something under control and getting rid of it.

Greed as we see it today is a symptom of our economics system. The system encourages greedy behavior, you win if you act greedy. I'm currently working on simulations attacking this problem, focusing on systems that discourage competitive actions and encourage cooperation and equality. A resulting society based on a more egalitarian economic system wouldn't be a utopia, but I hypothesize that we can create a much better world by attacking the root of all out systems and what types of behaviors it rewards.

I believe it's an educational/cultural problem and not a systematic one.

Bad actors will corrupt any system out of greed for wealth and power.

A "scam" implies intent, it's very possible/likely that a lot of icos have good intentions, but are inherently complicated and hard to implement.

True. I also think that it becomes a scam when you give up, and keep the money that's left. Say what you will about Secret (anyone remember that app?), but they returned money when they stopped. ICO funded projects? Who knows? Maybe just buy lambos as the author said.

> ... but they returned money when they stopped.

After they took a couple mil for themselves :) [0]

[0]: http://www.businessinsider.com/secret-founders-pocket-6-mill...

I think the upsides of "greed" outweigh the downsides. Getting rid of greed to thwart con artists would be throwing out the baby with the bath water.

If we removed financial (that is, material) need from society, we'd be in an utopia of endless plenty. This has been dreamed about for millennia. While not theoretically impossible, some children a society has a number of practical problems, like the human psychology. (Reworking humans is in the same ballpark. Being replaced by by other species, or machines, might be good — for them.)

New review is up! https://shitcoin.com/openbazaar-what-happened-to-bitcoins-eb...

I don't think this would work out. Think of it, most of what we do (fighting each other) makes sense on a nihilistic basis.

If we are peaceful, suddenly existence doesn't make any sense. And we are just better off killing our existence.

Fighting for existence is what pushed humans (or living creatures) to exist up to this day.

How about we say no to Communism?

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