Google bans cryptocurrency ads
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This genuinely frightened me.
The cases they told about were pure scams where the fraudsters stole the cryptocurrencies directly.
https://twitter.com/sarahjeong/status/953464303960469504
> All of this has gone too far!!!!! It was fine when you paranoid dorks were out there scamming each other, please leave the normies alone!!!!!!!!!!!
Love it, thanks for sharing.
It does seem like she is making the mistake of conflating Bitcoin with general crypto however, which can be misleading to her audience.
Bitcoin indeed suffers from slow transaction speeds and extreme volatility.
Other coins, truer to the original vision, fair much better in those respects, and with wide adoption and usage, the volatility would subside.
I think when she refers to Bitcoin, she also means every other piece of madness that has come after it including altcoins/cryptocurrencies on the whole; and does not play favourites.
Edit: Here's some evidence - https://twitter.com/search?q=%40sarahjeong%20cryptocurrency
I'm sure similar searches on related terms will reveal a similar sentiment very opposite to yours.
The ICO / ponzi scheme / overnight stock expert craze is ridiculous and I do not take part.
But Bitcoin Cash (closer to the vision of the original bitcoin whitepaper that she herself mentions, which she should know Bitcoin has now deviated significantly from) has been a transparent, expansive, and welcome addition to my other payment channels, much like Bitcoin used to be in the heyday.
I enjoy using it when and where I can, I enjoy the decentralization, the lack of reliance on the banking system, etc.
I am precisely that narrow part of the population she is highlighting.
Most of her points are entirely correct, but besides her conflation of some of Bitcoin's problems with other cryptocurrency, she ultimately discredits me and others who understand exactly what the point of cryptocurrency is, and its benefits to our lifestyles, with the dismissive phrase, "See you at Burning Man."
She must associate cryptocurrency with a specific kind of character and then attack that character instead, in order to drive her argument. That's fallacious and misleading.
That's not fair. Shady folks are just getting more publicity. Noone talks about people who created stuff that works and doesn't scam people. And there's a lot of such stuff. This space is growing because of such people, despite the shady folks.
No, there isn't. It's always been nebulous talk of "potential" without any concrete uses beyond scams and criminal activity. There have just been iterations of tools for those areas. Then you have the near-religious libertarian True Believers who promote as a matter of faith, regardless of what the reality is.
This article remains ever-so-relevant:
>Ten years in, nobody has come up with a use for blockchain
https://hackernoon.com/ten-years-in-nobody-has-come-up-with-...
I suppose it might count as criminal activity, but as far as I know, it's the only way to donate to Sci Hub.
The problem for bitcoin arrived when people begun to see it as something that could be more then an underground activity and started treating it like an investment object and essentially reinvented the old failed concept of "wildcat currencies" with an intentional scarce currency, something made viable by the libertarian refusal to even look at the real world history of economics.
What we now have is a bitcoin economy thats hit a hard(intentional) limit of growth forcing people to branch away from bitcoin as the revolutionary application of blockchain in a world where some minor advances are made in actually using the underlying theory for something other then scams, creating a market ripe for new wildcat currencies pretenting to be be "what bitcoin failed to become".
The fact it's hard to not only implement correctly, but to promote to society does not mean it's not relevant.
Good things take time.
Remember that people thought for some time that general relativity and the Law of large Numbers would never have practical applications.
Full public transparency isn't that great a property of a voting system.
And it's hard to call it a "legitimate use case" before it's successful.
And come on, it's a highly experimental technology whise use cases impact the most controversial aspects of our society : money, vote, accountability, transparency, power to the masse.
Of course it's going to take time and fail in many spectacular ways.
As always with these claims (that, as noted below, have not actually been implemented and so can only be speculated on), the question isn't whether this could be done with the blockchain, but rather whether this requires the blockchain to be done.
All too often the claimed magical things the blockchain will allow can be implemented far more easily with other, existing technology. So far it's a solution in search of a problem.
Nothing wrong with that.
The fact crypto is riddle with quick money making claims and project using the blockchain for sheer buzziness tends to make skeptics extra pessimistics in their views.
It's unfair to the technology.
We have a transaction oriented temper proof distributed transparent database.
Those are objective features, and they deserve we give them a try.
"UN’s World Food Programme Builds on Ethereum Blockchain Money Transfers"
https://www.ccn.com/banks-begone-uns-world-food-programme-bu...
"The pilot alone is said to save the agency $150,000 a month while eliminating a staggering 98% of bank-related transfer fees, according to Munich WFP innovation lab chief Bernhard Kowatsch."
This is so clearly false that it overshadows the rest of your comment. You _cannot_ claim these things without proof and your point is so easily disproven that it's not worth the time to even do so.
>Internet rando 2: What about people who live under oppressed governments with unsound currency
>Me: Only if the problem with their currency is that it's not volatile enough and the transaction speeds are too fast
>"People are sick of the Federal Reserve, sick of bailouts, sick of inflation. You know what we need? Internet money with the usability of PGP and the stability of BART service"
Like hey, BART isn't that bad.
And since we're on the subject, Bitcoin allowed individuals to get around the financial blockade against Wikileaks a few years ago. It has also allowed Venezuelans, who have been driven to abject poverty by their government, to get their capital out of the country and the reach of their government.
As for privacy, there are other cryptocurrencies, like Monero (ring signatures) and Ethereum (potential to create ring signatures, and since the Byzantium hard fork, zk-SNARK proofs), that open the door to significant privacy.
Some other cryptocurrencies try to deliver anonymity but even if the technology eventually delivers they'll have the same problem that almost everyone needs to get real money out of the system and that's where the normal banking laws kick in. Outside of a few cases where someone can do entirely unregulated remote work most people are going to need to convert to or from local currency to pay their bills or receive income.
>>This shows up in both examples you cited: if the Venezuelan government wants to enforce capital controls, the people who used Bitcoin are going to wish they'd smuggled suitcases of cash out of the country instead because they've left a durable paper-trail of their transactions behind.
It does want to enforce capital controls but it is far more costly and difficult to do so against users of Bitcoin than users of against traditional trusted third party controlled intermediaries.
It's not a simple matter for the Venezuelan government to determine which pseudonymous transactions on a cryptocurrency blockchain belong to which Venezuelan resident. It is also much more costly to enforce a law against many thousands of end users versus a handful of large intermediaries operating in the country.
Do you really think it's equally easy for the Venezuelan government to enforce capital controls with the traditional financial system and with cryptocurrency?
>>even if the technology eventually delivers they'll have the same problem that almost everyone needs to get real money out of the system and that's where the normal banking laws kick in.
Yes it won't be perfect but it will increase the cost/difficulty of mass surveillance of financial transactions. Many of the measures that would be needed for a government to prevent private use of cryptocurrency would be politically unpalatable.
That's a closet NIMBY if I ever heard one. It was FINE when they were only stabbing each other in the bad neighbourhoods, but PLEASE leave the normal neighbourhoods alone!!!! NOW all of this has gone too far ...
More specifically, Google doesn't want the SEC to hold them liable when they go after some of these fraudsters.
* sites abandoning adsense because they don't want to be associated with cryptocurrency
* users installing adblockers because they don't want to be running monero miners
There is the "bubble" word again. So how about our economy, isn't that a bubble too?
What is a bubble? I still see too many places in the world where the sales price for a house is easily 10x the price it actually cost to build it. Banks? Quantitative easing? Startup's? Or at what point will Google look like a bubble itself?
Governments and Banks have learned that the crypto-currency revolution can replace a significant part of our current economy. Whether that's good or bad news, calling it a bubble is foolish and cheap IMHO.
So yeah there is some intrinsic value.
Yes, I spend a lot of time annoyed.
edit: the value of the share (in the old good days) is the discounted cash flow. you invest in a business, then business pays you the share of the profits (hence - share) in the form of dividends. AMZ share does NOT pay any dividends, nor does grant you any voting rights. nothing. zero. this is your intrinsic value.
If the total value of share prices drops below the value of the assets, you can buy all the shares, take the company private and sell off all the assets to make money.
Assets (vs liabilities) thus can put a floor on the value of a stock price.
it is amazing that no one seems to be able to answer simple question - what financial benefit do i get from ownership of an AMZ share? other that selling it to a bigger fool.
People hear ads about how you need to move over your 401k and discount the whole space as a scam. The scams are crowding out the innovation, drawing potentially disastrous regulatory scrutiny, and as a whole setting back a legitimate budding industry substantially.
I hope that when regulators finally do step in, they are able to take actions that stop the scams without destroying the underlying technology.
> People hear ads about how you need to move over your 401k and discount the whole space as a scam. The scams are crowding out the innovation, drawing potentially disastrous regulatory scrutiny, and as a whole setting back a legitimate budding industry substantially.
I accept your reasoning. But cryptography was all the time about how one can "scam" another person or prevent being scammed (where "scammed" in this case means e.g. that the cipher is broken).
To give a concrete example: MITM attacks on, say, Diffie-Hellman key exchange (just the standard textbook MITM attack if DH is used without any certificate) is in this wording just scamming the user that he has a secure connection while in reality someone can eavesdrop it or even modify sent messages. Of course the standard solution for this exact problem is to use X.509 certificates. But the "scamming" does not stop here: Of course a malicious person immediately thinks about more sophisticated attacks such as replay attacks to scam the user and again of course the protocols use methods to prevent this.
In this sense my counterclaim is that this does not "paint a really sour picture of the space as a whole", but just presents the "ordinary man" with what cryptography has been about for decades in a completely realistic (though in this case perhaps somewhar painful) way.
A few, but the vast majority have latched onto it because they think it will make them rich. Almost no one buying into cryptocurrencies could explain a blockchain if their life depended on it.
Self-interested value creation has generated the vast majority of great achievements in the world. I don't see what wrong with that being a primary motivation to invest time and resources into something?
Why else should people do it? Only for fun or altruistic reasons?
If that was the case then cryptocurrencies would still be novelty on the internet only known to nerds. That may be safer and harmless and idealistic but it would be entirely insignificant.
Nearly all big developments requires risk, experimentation, and early failures until it matures into a stable and well understood technology.
Every time I hear about Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies on mainstream radio/media they always mention it's volatility and risk. Google results are full of stories about it. The association between risk and cryptocurrencies are essentially common-sense these days, as it rightfully should be. I'm not sure why everyone's acting like it's some big secret we need to protect people from.
If it's an explicit scam or ponzi scheme then yes that's a problem worth worrying about, and we already have plenty of laws, regulations, and agencies to deal with that already. But I don't quite agree with automatically lumping all paid mentions of cryptocurrencies and blockchains into that category.
Well the OP I was responding to suggested that people were doing it because "it's a powerful idea and because the underlying technology has a lot of legitimacy to it".
The hell it has. Polio vaccine? Symphonies? Cathedrals? The Sistine Chapel? Representative democracy? The works of the great philosophers? The moon landings? The Mars rovers?
I'd say, make a list of the top 100 "great achievements in the world" and strong odds are, they're either done by some poor but intensely driven person, or a government that represents a lot more than one self-interested value creating person.
This gets repeated ad nauseam. Maybe it might be time to consider that this tidal wave of scams IS the way the technology is changing the world?
It seems shoe shiners can come in many forms. But that was the particular one for me to unload all of my bitcoin and other crypto and get out while I was ahead.
I'll be surprised if the whole space doesn't completely crater sometime this year, a bunch of ordinary people get shafted, and the SEC steps in and knocks some heads. There's no way I'm getting near this until after the dust settles.
We are definitely in a very hype driven cryptocurrency bubble right now, and there are a lot of naive folks who are probably going to lose money to it.
And yet somehow, we haven't really managed to make any cryptocurrencies an actual, widely accepted, payment alternative, for anyone other than a few people with special circumstances (government restrictions on currency exchange, criminals demanding ransoms, funding organizations that governments are trying to shut down) or people who are fairly technically competent.
There's a chance the lightning network could be the last piece of the puzzle to make cryptocurrencies actually usable for payment, though even still, I have a hard time seeing most places wanting to accept payment in an asset as volatile as Bitcoin.
Or maybe we'll see a coin backed by fiat currency and real, regulated banks on Stellar, where you don't have nearly the same scalability issues nor gigawatts of power wasted just to try to solve Sybil attacks. If you have a coin backed by fiat currency, and low transaction costs, businesses are a lot more likely to accept it as payment as most of their expenses, taxes, debts, and so on are in the local fiat currency rather than than in any cryptocurrency.
I have an even harder time seeing any of those people who invest in bitoin using their coins for purchases.
I'm pretty sure whatever "newbie guides" exist out there purposely lead people to this awful state.
Using "crypto" to abbreviate "cryptocurrency" causes a lot of confusion, as the "crypto" in "cryptocurrency" was already an abbreviation; "cryptocurrency" is short for "cryptographic currency."
People who know nothing about cryptography or even that cryptocurrency uses cryptography get confused if they are looking for information about cryptocurrencies and instead find more general purpose resources on cryptography (like https://crypto.stackexchange.com/ or https://www.reddit.com/r/crypto/).
I know that this is a losing battle, like getting people to stop using "wiki" as an abbreviation for Wikipedia (which is just one out of many wikis), but I figure that as long as we're talking about people not knowing much but investing in it anyhow, I really encourage everyone to stop using "crypto" as an abbreviation for "cryptocurrency."
Now a similar population at large has decided the new usage rules. It's normal, it's just evolution of the English language. By this point, "crypto" is indeed widely used as a short term for Cryptocurrencies also.
People who know nothing about things are going to get confused either way. The society can't form every single rule just so every person who doesn't know anything will have a clear mind. If they want to learn something, they will. And learning that "crypto" can mean two things, in a language where it's already commonplace for terms to mean different things in different areas - is not a huge thing.
Yes, this is why I say that I know this is a losing battle.
I mostly care about it in the context of technical forums like Hacker News. While the word may have a different meaning for the population at large, when you're having a discussion on a technical forum you should generally try to learn how words are used in that context.
This is somewhat like the different meanings for the word "theory" in a scientific context and in general use. In general use, "theory" means an idea that may not yet have been tested or proven, somewhere around the meaning of "idea", "hunch", or "hypothesis", while in a scientific context "theory" indicates something that has been tested successfully and is well accepted.
While the use of "theory" in the broader sense is well accepted in general use, using it in that sense in a discussion about scientific theories is confusing; so if someone does that in such a discussion, I am likely to point out the stronger meaning of the word in scientific usage.
So likewise, while "crypto" as an abbreviation of "cryptocurrency" is already fairly widespread (though I think still niche enough that there's a tiny chance a concerted effort could change usage patterns), I at least want to make sure that folks getting involved in technical discussions are made aware of the earlier definition of "crypto" and are made aware of the confusion that can be caused.
He is the spokesman/brand ambassador for "Bitcoiin".
Yes that is two "I"s.
I've worked in ad-tech. Part of the problem is the scale is too large for advertising networks to check all the adverts. If you run a newspaper, you get to see and approve the ads before running with them.
Online, at best, an advertising network might see the initial ad & landing page, but then it is rapidly changed once live.
Facebook detects text in ads and will alert you when there is too much. I imagine it also reads that text and therefore would be quite easy to auto flag ads with "ICO" "Crypto" "Coin" in them.
It's a slippery slope and with the decentralization revolution that is happening, this will only keep on getting more blurry.
If you buy them to HODL because you think potato options are going to bring you a return, it's an investment.
If you've invested in a global, decentralized game of hot potato, well, that's crypto ;)
Somewhat related: A few years ago, in Argentina it was usual that the farmers keep most of their production of soy in big long bags in the field, because if they sold them they only could get pesos and with a 30% annual inflation it was better to keep the grains and sell them when they need to buy something. (In Spanish) https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silo_bolsa autotranslation https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=es&tl=en&js=y&prev...
That definition of "investment" includes almost everything anyone can possibly do.
“Food” doesn’t generally appreciate or generate cash flow. (Outside of obvious restaurant contexts.)
You can call food an “investment” but you could also call a dog a cat — that doesn’t make it so.
But you can still expect returns on shoes. Construction boots for construction workers, for example, are as much an investment as construction tools. An investment is more than just something that accrues value over time.
[0] http://www.businessinsider.com/18-year-old-entrepreneur-make...
A durable good which you own in order to make yourself more productive is known as a capital good. Shoes, clothes, and shelter qualify, to the extent that having these things increases productivity. Food would not qualify, since it a consumable and not a durable good. The purchase of capital goods, for the purpose of increasing productivity, is investment.
If you only way to sell a drug is to convince people they need it in the first place then I think it ought to be illegal, yes. Look at the massive opioid crisis in the USA which stems in great part from pharma pushing drugs people didn't really need and getting them addicted. If that's the only way you can figure out to fund cancer research we have a big problem indeed.
When economic historians of the future consider the current era's pharma industry, they will marvel at how much money was spent for how little benefit. The cure to cancer will not come from pharma. (Quite possibly from biotech, but that's a different thing.) The incentives are wrong: cures are less valuable than indefinite treatments. Look how much they have to charge for the hep C cure. If that were a mere treatment, they could amortize their "research costs" over a lifetime. Even better than treatments that work are treatments that might work. One poor suffering patient might be prescribed 15 such, multiple times a day for the rest of her life.
Still, for many hep C sufferers even an expensive cure is a good thing. Many other conditions respond in agreeable ways to some medicines for some patients some of the time. Maybe the research costs too much for some of them. One suspects that a more rational FDA process could cut costs for most drugs, but no one who would benefit from that has any control over the process itself. The whole edifice is a bit monstrous. Just the same, if the golden goose requires drug marketing, do we really want to do away with drug marketing?
On the other hand, there are tons of people who have stories about knowing something was wrong, being told by 3 physicians that it was nothing, then finding a 4th who diagnosed them with something the others missed because a patient is usually their own strongest advocate.
A boss of mine a few years ago mentioned that he thought the best solution was for a disease to have ads. All of the companies that have drugs in market for that disease will want to buy in and say "Feeling X symptoms? Talk to your doctor; you might have Y". Of course there are still a ton of problems (there was no market for impotence until Pfizer re-branded it as ED, there are lots of diseases where there are low single digit options, etc), but it's a good start, in my opinion.
To tie this back to the topic at hand, there really isn't a trusted authority in the role of crypto purchases, aside from maybe a very forward-thinking/risky financial manager? Part of the problem is the very benefit: marketing to unqualified people gives access for anyone to grow their wealth, but also gives anyone the ability to lose a ton of money. It's sort of the central problem with Libertarianism overall.
Your colleagues in marketing agree with you, though they probably have a different definition for "useful". This 2012 article[0] says pharma spent $24B in marketing to professionals vs $4B to consumers. I assume relatively more is spent on consumers now but didn't find any more recent numbers.
It is also worth mentioning that pharma now spends more on marketing than research.
> On the other hand, there are tons of people who have stories about knowing something was wrong, being told by 3 physicians that it was nothing, then finding a 4th who diagnosed them with something the others missed because a patient is usually their own strongest advocate.
Are there any peer reviewed studies to back this up? As a researcher in the field I'm sure this is the threshold you would want to meet before making such an assertion.
Also, are there any studies that can tell us the ratio of marketing spent on informing consumers of legit ailments vs what is spent on kickbacks, hiring former cheerleaders as marketers, junkets for doctors, coupons for the on patent drug when the off patent drug works just fine, paying the generic company to not sell its drug to compete, etc or any of the other shady practices that pharma engages in?
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/11/big-p...
Really, though, it's absurd to demand that the rest of world be grateful. Try changing the system in the US and you will find it exceedingly difficult due to the deep pockets of big pharma and the massive role money plays in the US democratic system. So no, the rest of the world should not be grateful that a capitalist system is doing what it does.
The drug industry likes to say that, but could someone back it up?
However, many countries allow for Rx drug advertising / marketing targeted towards consumers.
Unless you mean to say that drug companies can advertise to prescription drug users for the specific window when they happen to be actively taking a prescription drug. Which seems rather difficult to manage and would require a massive privacy violation to achieve. Plus I'm not clear what the delivery mechanism would be unless you're just talking about inserts delivered with the drugs themselves.
What that means is that the particular Rx drug being advertised can only be advertised to consumers of that Rx drug in question. So insulin can only be advertised to people with diabetes.
The interesting thing about this is that it leaves most of the power with the HCP.
As for the delivery mechanism, there weren't too many options in the recent past, however, these days there are POC marketing companies like Outcome Health (and others) and a growing number of software applications are aware of their user's health condition / needs (with permission of course either explicitly or by virtue of the intended use, like apps for diabetes patients, etc.).
Let’s think of another industry — tires. Is a consumer typically an automotive engineer or a mechanic? Then why should it be legal to advertise tires to consumers? Ultimately a mechanic will have to install the tires. However, that certainly shouldn’t preclude a consumer making their preferences known. With meds, a doctor can always say no — and they should and do if it isn’t indicated for the particular affliction.
The idea that consumers need to be shielded from information is a bit weird to me.
That investing carries large amounts of risk isn't new or unknown to most. If you cash out your 401K and put it in AAPL, even a modest decline could eliminate your retirement. And those are the super-regulated "safe" investments as opposed to those super dodgy "not-safe" investments that are so awful you're not allowed to advertise for them anymore.
This does not mean that Doug the village doctor isn't in Novartis' pocket and trying to shill their pills, just that your area of expertise is not nearly as high enough to make an accurate diagnosis of the best way to treat an ailment through medication.
Funny you mention this case. Do you think the state should choose the doctor and facility you go to? For example, below a certain income, you only have access to a certain type of facilites.
And what if the state said that you could only receive care from americans? because doctors outside of the US, even if they have international reputation and acclaim, or experience, or a great track record, you shouldn't be able to see them?
What if the us forbid you to leave the country to buy meds somewhere else as well, or to get care outside.
Beware: some of this are actually happening right now!
"This is a good tire, it will last longer than most and will serve you well. It is highly unlikely to interfere with any other parts of your car"
VS.
"This is a enzyme inhibitor that will degrade the signalling molecule cyclic guanosine monophosphate which will prevent smooth muscle relaxation. It could have unforeseen interactions with any number of different commonly imbibed chemicals."
"We don't even know about all the things this molecule could do inside your body, but one of the things we do know about turns out to be pretty useful, and so we have made an arrangement with the physicians cartel. You have to pay one of them to monitor your individual situation to make it less likely you die or suffer some horribly grievous injury. In exchange, they will absorb some of our product liability for the most frequent and least severe side effects. This is usually a win-win-win, but sometimes it's just win-win for us and the physicians and a loss for you."
When you want to pump people full of newly developed and recently tested chemicals, you do need someone capable of reading and understanding the publications of medical studies, and keeping track of all the recommendations published by the professional association. Auto mechanics do have a similar, less extensive sort of training in that they need to do the same kind of thing with service bulletins, but tire maintenance is one of those things that anyone with the right tool can do, like changing oil and filters or replacing brake pads.
Knowing what cryptocurrency is right for you is even simpler than that. None of them are. Even the very first cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, is still essentially in beta release, and not suitable for consumption by the general public. Anyone who can't or won't admit that the technology is not yet ready for wide-scale adoption is selling you vapor, and will probably run off with your money, leaving you with a bag of wooden nickels. That's why the ads are coming down. Every last one of them is a fraud, like the snake-oil panaceas of unregulated frontier pharmacologists that were pretty much just booze and opioids.
Sounds interesting; could you recommend something?
Those are clearly not fraudulent.
That said, the crypto ads are less like that & more like the auction prize site ads, so good riddance.
That's just not how advertising works. Investments are products like anything else and advertising is literally designed to expand the number of people who might purchase a product. You can say this about any product with differing utility among possible users.
> Truck buying should not be driven by advertisement but by facts. In my experience, any truck advertisement tying to appeal to mass audiences is fraud.
I don't need a truck to live in the city, but that doesn't mean Chevy should be banned from running advertisements in a city.
If you step into a large bank, they'll tend to get a cut on each fund they sell you -- whether that is a good fund or a bad. Often these funds are also run by the bank, and they charge excessive fees for managing.
Yep, it's deliberate. They're the backalley version of a regular stock offering.
They're marketing themselves as "opening investments up to the people" but they're simply a way to get money from investors without any of the very reasonable legal securities and obligations that come with a company going public.
[2] https://basicattentiontoken.org/faq/#meaning
edit: typo
I would put this squarely in the same vein as ads that might encourage you to 'buy our gemstone, it's going to be the new diamond'. Or 'our baseball cards are first edition and guaranteed to go up in value', etc.
That's not an endorsement of any asset in the crypto space, and I would never remotely suggest that any token today is guaranteed to go up in value.
This is not true for deflationary currency...like Bitcoin.
It's the basis of the financial industry: You can make X using your own money, but you can make X+n using other people's money too.
So would 99.9% of people who see that ad. Everyone knows that if it sounds too good to be true, then it likely is. Especially in a paid advertisement. Modern consumers are more than well atuned to not trust every ad they hear.
If they don't see the glaring risk in cryptocurrencies, as it is constantly mentioned as being in the media nearly every time it's mentioned, or if they didn't spend a minute Googling them to see the countless headlines about it's volatility before gambling on it then I really wonder whether their money would be going to a place of value elsewhere anyway.
Otherwise plenty of people know the risk and are still willing to bet on it because it is possible to gain quite a bit from the growth. I know many people who have successfully. And many who are in it for the long term because they fully believe in the technology. And there's nothing wrong with that.
It's a bit like how poorly written spam makes professional-looking phishing look more convincing to the average person.
The most effective scams are the ones that fool people who think they couldn't have been fooled. Heck, you see it all the time with car advertisements, etc.
Only if something has buyers does it have value, this is true with finance scams as well as real world over0valued items.
'The most bespoke electric hypercar! With blockchain!' http://www.arrinera.io/ - I mean really?! I heard someone talking about "LGBT on the blockchain" the other day - "We'll aim for a conservative $40million ICO." Ridiculous.
At a certain point I have to wonder if this is working along the lines of a lemon market. Coin investors don't know for certain whether they're being scammed, so they want an offer that will have positive expectation even after adjusting for scam risk. But founders do know, somewhat, the value of their ideas - and honest players are bounded by what they can actually return, while the deluded or dishonest can promise the moon. Eventually it only becomes possible to get investments by lying to people.
There are forces that should act as a brake here, of course; a sober idea asking for $200k ought to have lower risk than a stupid idea asking for $20M. But for some reason, that sort of risk discrimination isn't really happening at the moment. Maybe investors are over-eager, maybe the scam rate is so high at all price points to bury useful information, but it certainly looks like bad ideas are actually doing better.
Also, wallets? What did the crypto wallet makers do wrong?
This, my friends, is monopoly capitalism at its finest; when corporate interests are threatened they come down on information exchange, which means they can disappear products. And since it's privately owned and not state owned, everyone's okay with it morally. Because cryptocurrency is naughty.
Let's ban drug discussion, too, it's naughty. How about hate speech, let's disappear search results for that. Who needs Big Brother when a massive surveillance apparatus that, quite frankly, is a headache to avoid (although I use duckduckgo and Firefox for all non tech stuff) can also disappear ideas and products without a popular vote or accountability?
One plus of all this is I won't have to see the Crypto Genius Reveals Next Bitcoin ad with the pic of the guy staring off in the distance in crooked glasses. Always hated that one.
As an aside, I'm not sure what drug discussion or hate speech has to do with this at all.
But he warned that there were wider implications for financial services, saying: “Big American tech companies are increasingly influential in deciding how financial services products are marketed. This is fine if they get to the right answer . . . but a worrying precedent if they do not, since the normal checks and balances do not apply to their decisions.”
("Google to ban cryptocurrency adverts", Financial Times, March 15, 2018)
I'm actually glad Google are (at least for the time being). Whilst rogue ICOs and crypto-pumpers are still working their stuff, the market is much more akin to back-street gambling and since there are already regs on AdWords for unsavoury ads, this fits the bill.
Also lots of russian money scam ads posted from temporary accounts, this may be explanation why ICOs aren't banned too: they ban, but new ads are posted again and again.
Please. People have always been gullible, it's just that the scams have moved to more lucrative enterprises.
It is a problem of basic finance education which should be part of the school curriculum. People also buy a lot of stuff they don't need or include false claims because a banner told them to.
I don't know any government funded school... do you? Beyond this, people need financial knowledge to make better decisions since finance skills are required on a daily basis in the modern world.
The obvious answer to your first question is: It has severe detrimental effects to our society, and we'd all be better off if people were taught the basics.
Not sure SEC is a good example, since they are a corrupt organization focused on prohibiting class mobility. Their propaganda works better than ads on the same people.
This isn't rocket science:
"Hey, we shouldn't be supporting cryptocurrency advertisement any more, this could lead to trouble for us in the upcoming year and may be unethical"
"Why don't we take a look at all risky financial products that aren't easily understood but are marketed at layman investors"
"Great idea!"
"Definitely let's leave binary options out with cryptocurrencies, but we'll just leave in stricter controls for financial products which aren't complete scams"
Of course I suppose it's futile. Once this kind of mania takes off it takes on a life of its own.
We already have currencies that worldwide could be transferred to a blockchain crypto-asset structure via governments destroying money ('take out' of traditional circulation) to put onto an immutable digital blockchain ledger, as opposed to someone receiving currency of choice in exchange (E.g. I give you this digital thing you call a 'coin', and you give me $1 USD).
If the main value is truly in the decentralized and immutable ledger aspects, then its use can eventually be State/government-mandated, instead of gaining collaboration through unreasonably incentivizing its adoption, no?
Another platform is LinkedIn, where I have been getting a ton of invites from "Blockchain Experts", "ICO Experts" whom I have never heard of. Some of my connections are connected to them but I think that's more of a blind "Accept".
If you connect, I've noticed they immediately start promoting coins or ICO. Massive scam going on here. Hope LinkedIn bans these fake promotions too.
The question here is where they draw the line. What about tools, software and services around the ecosystem but not promoting any particular cryptocurrency or related to trading?
I can see how it makes sense for them to block wallet ads for now seeing just how many forked scamwallets buy ads for e.g. MyEtherWallet to trick users into giving them their keys.
However, there are a growing number of companies offering services and products for the business sector that could get seriously affected by this.
As an example, it's clear that they won't ban HyperLedger consultants (HyperLedger is a blockchain platform without a cryptocurrency), but how about Ethereum consultants?
How about SDK vendors?
That said, I don't think the price dives have anything at all to do with advertising, and more to do with the fact that the bubble is slowly deflating.
(I’m not holding any position, I just want to understand the logic for either case)
Some of the coins are tokens that can be used in exchange for something (e.g. siacoin in exchange for decentralized storage).
Alternatives (even though it takes more keystrokes) could be along the lines of "pardon my ignorance", "I'm new to this" or even simply "can someone explain". I bet these would receive just as good (if not better) responses.
Anyone agree or disagree?
So the other alternative is to have more ELI5 prefixes for questions. It's something I never question on reddit since that's where it has orginated and flourished, but since this is hacker news I figured it'd be safer to overthink than underthink.
That’s what I always say...
But seriously - we need a method for which is accepted where individuals can ask elementary questions for topics they have less knowledge than an expert in the field.
Thus, I think that “ELI5” encapsulates this.
What I am opposed to is suppression of sharing knowledge. So don’t shut people who use a moniker/meme from gaining the info they seek. Educate them and expand.
So, if you have some better way of expressing “Hey I don’t know anything about this subject, please give me some simple pointers, thanks”+
Edit: I just realized we said the same thing
I don't think it has anything to do with quality of responses. If you compare r/AskReddit and r/ELI5, you'll find the latter tends to attract more comprehensive and structured comments.
Google: We're banning them too.
Big Pharma: But not us right?
Google: No, we appreciate your business...
Facebook: How much are you looking to spend??
However, it may be a small amount or they both factored this change into their forecasting before announcements.
This is probably a case where the short term financials is the exact wrong way to think about the problem.
I am actually glad they did it. This should make it harder for ponzi-like schemes to get traction, so hopefully, it will make price less volatile.
Which is both good and bad, of course.
"Hey, give us $50,000 and we'll give you a token that will hopefully be worth 10x once we dupe a bunch of other suckers like you! If you're really, really lucky we'll build something marginally useful and might even use that token you bought to power it! Now you can use your $50,000 in tokens to power a decentralized photo sharing app that you could have gotten for free by just using google drive! Woww!"
Source for statement: http://blog.talosintelligence.com/2018/02/coinhoarder.html
> Customer may not use the Services to engage in mining cryptocurrency;
2. Ban advertising on (one of?) the largest online advertising platform(s).
3. Wait for bitcoin to crash.
4. Buy bitcoins again.
5. Profit!
Don't need to do any manipulation at all for that to happen.
Google.com should be google.com — everyone that visits should see the same thing regardless of location.
If I visit a shop in downtown Mountain View, they don’t re-arrange the shop because I am resident of France do they?
Then why the hell do websites do that?
If I want the French location of the Google “shop,” I will visit the shop in France — google.fr.
Of course, Google France would need to follow French law, but why Google Mountain View would need to — it makes no sense.
The consumer is choosing to visit the website. The consumer should have the choice if they want to visit California or Lyon.
It's completely irrelevant to the problem at hand however, it's their service and if they decide they don't want to advertise strawberry yogurt or brands containing the letter 'w' anymore then they can.
Somehow I don't see an exodus of customer's from Google over their banning of cryptocurrencies from ads.