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Comment by elliekelly | Hacker News Reader

I feel like cryptocurrency markets and investors are painfully “re-learning” the lessons of a hundred years ago.

It seems that reinventing finance works out about the same a rewriting a big software project. You think you'll get rid of a lot of nasty code, but then you realize all that ugliness was there for a reason and you're just rediscovering all the edge cases again the hard way.

But in doing so, you bring that latent knowledge back into the minds of living people who can rethink the solutions in the face of the modern ecosystem and clean out the cruft that truly has no modern purpose.

Do you think no one in finance has thought about financial regulations until crypto came around? I can assure you there were (and are!) many people paid quite a lot of money to “rethink the solutions in the face of the modern regulatory ecosystem and clean out the cruft that truly has no modern purpose”. One of the reasons securities regulations are “expensive” to comply with is because they’re constantly changing. Why are they constantly changing? Because we’re rethinking how, when, and whether the various regulations ought to be implemented.

The regulations implementing Federal securities laws are perhaps the most nimble, iterative, and “listen to your users” driven regulations in the US.

Certainly no one in finance ever thought about programmatic regulation of a currency. But your comment is of the type that has the premise "everything that could ever be thought of has been thought of before". Well obviously that isn't true. And it also isn't true that everything that has been thought of and not done is not doable.

Certainly? How certain are you of this?

I am not so certain.

I don't think that, no. Still, different people with different toolboxes will come up with different solutions.

Except that now its even worse, because we are throwing a whole lot of electricity and advanced manufactured goods (computer chips) into it, which currently has large negative impacts on the rest of civilization.

This is an interesting point, what does it mean when it is gray?

Comments get grayer as they are further downvoted.

I think the problem is that people think they are reinventing finance when the only thing that changed is the currency.

There exist algo stablecoins too though.

Highly underrated comment

"Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" (1841) is still worth reading. You get to see the first versions of the classic large-scale scams. John Law's bank, the South Sea bubble, tulipomania. Scams go much further back, but mass-market scams had to wait for mass communications. Newspapers powered the first round of large-scale scams.

Most scams today are very similar to some classic scam mentioned in that book. There's not that much innovation.

Kids should be taught the classics in school - the short con, the long con, the big store, the pigeon drop, the badger game, the protection racket, the bait and switch, the Ponzi scheme... The list is not that long.

Personal finance should be a subject in schools, and scam awareness should be one of the topics covered. The long-term economic benefits would be huge.

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