QuadrigaCX CEO allegedly traded millions in fake funds to fund luxury lifestyle
decrypt.co
decrypt.co
It is no more akin to gambling than simple trading is akin to gambling. The only difference is that funds are also borrowed, which in this case means it was borrowed plus fraudulently obtained funds. And he was likely extra desperate, as most pyramid schemes usually are, taking extra risks because he really needed to make it whole again.
Gambling debt wasn't even enforcable in this country until recently because lending people money to gamble with is fundamentally wrong.
Everything is seamless for the user, they don't even need know how leverage works, it's no different from trading on any other exchange.
That said, it is a little different, because without margin you can ride out any position, but with margin you get margin called (liq'd) at increasingly smaller deviations.
Or in another view of it, it does the equivalent of turning low-return 1:1 odds into high return 100:1 odds which further attract problem gamblers.
Watch the rekt bot for a while and tell me that there aren't a lot of problem gamblers on mex.
Crypto is about decentralization and reliance on strong cryptography. There’s nothing in the definition that rejects regulation. It’s mostly people’s misconception that crypto is just a means to “fight the power”.
And it’s not even the currency itself that has to be regulated, it the entities that want to deal with it, like your shady exchange that has no transparency or accountability. They didn’t play with financial instruments after all.
As a corollary to that, you also have an army of people who are driven to madness because they didn't get to cash in, and seek to undermine crypto in the hopes of healing those gaping mental wounds. But it doesn't change the fact that the masses who drove the prices up wanted it to be a pyramid scheme in which they were the winners.
If the hoarders and traders disappeared, the volatility would be due to other more inexplicable market mechanics.
That’s a hard problem. Irreversible transactions look nice for the merchant, but as legal organizations can be taken to court that’s mostly valuable for scammers etc. Anonymity is a prized feature, but brings the legal hammer down as governments will actively fight such systems.
PS: Crypto investment is an obvious pyramid scheme mathematically as it does not generate profits internationally. Further it makes no difference to adoption if you buy or don’t buy a given coin. It can only move them from later investors to early investors.