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Comment by benreesman | Hacker News Reader

You have a lot more faith in the IPO underwriting process than I do. They don’t call it a “pop” for nothing.

Not at all. I'm just saying that the other process is much, much worse than that.

thats like, your opinion bro. In all seriousness I am ok with crypto punishing gamblers, eventually people will learn to stay away from it, or be forced to stay away from it because they have nothing left to gamble. I don't see how this is more morally repugnant than casinos which are legally accessible in most of the US.

It's more morally repugnant because it's much less transparent. Casinos are exploitative misery factories and I'd be happy to see them vanish forever. But they're at least carefully regulated to exploit people at an agreed-upon level and with all the rules known beforehand.

Personally I am ok with both crypto and Casinos existing, just because some people are stupid doesn't mean i should have my freedoms restricted. Stupid Should Hurt.

As an aside crypto has the potential to change the world for the better if it ever becomes used as a real currency. I think the people that stand to lose in that situation love spreading FUD about crypto. However it is probably not bitcoin that is going to become that imho, but rather some POS coin.

Perhaps consider that this isn't about just you?

It's bad for society to let scam artists operate unfettered. It doesn't just harm the scammed. For one, you've given terrible people more money to run bigger scams. Two, it misdirects resources to negative-sum activity. Third and most broadly, it reduces trust in anything that looks vaguely similar, which increases transactional friction and reduces available investment capital, making society poorer as a whole.

And that's before we even get to your illusion that you are safe from being scammed because only stupid people get suckered and you're one of the smart ones. There are scams for everybody. The whole "crypto" space is proof of that.

If I play slot machines I know I lose money. But at least I know the return isn't absolutely horrible. Usually around 90%... Same applies to many casino games if played sensibly.

The lotteries and scratch tickets are the truly horrible crap. Return is absolutely abysmal with them...

Yeah and after all, the world's poker chip factories consume the same amount of energy as Argentina so it's an apt comparison.

This seems sarcastic but the amount of resources that has went into building all casinos, casino sites, and everything related to the industry dwarfs the amount of resources that have went into bitcoin by a lot.

If it seems otherwise it might be because you see articles on Bitcoin's energy consumption all the time, and not as much about casinos.

I look forward to seeing your math on that. But for a fair comparison you can't just look at "casinos to date" and "Bitcoin to date". After all, as Bitcoin proponents never tire of telling us, this is supposedly the early days.

Some of the most expensive casinos (just the building) to build are:

Venetian Macau – $2.4 billion, Wynn Las Vegas – $2.7 billion, Resorts World Sentosa – $4.53 billion, Marina Bay Sands – $5.36 billion, CityCenter Las Vegas – $9 billion.

That already likely costs more than the combined electricity used by Bitcoin so far, if it doesn't you can easily reach trillions by combining the costs of just Casino buildings. Money roughly translates into resources, so I can't see a way in which the gambling industry hasn't consumed much more than Bitcoin as of right now. Maybe in a century if Bitcoin keeps going really strong it can start to catch up.

0. https://casino.partycasino.com/en/blog/the-most-expensive-ca...

Comparing the cost to build a casino with the raw electricity cost of Bitcoin is not so much an apple-to-oranges comparison as apples-to-tire-rims.

But if your point is that Bitcoin is basically a big casino, I agree. And I think we should regulate it like one.

> you can easily reach trillions by combining the costs of just Casino buildings.

I have my doubts about this.

BTC energy cost was in the realm of 10 billion/year this year, and increasing quickly year over year. That's from around 150 TW hours, or around 5x Nevada's consumption.

The hash rate this year averaged around 140 million THash/sec. It appears that efficient equipment costs about 10k per 100THash/sec. So you're looking at another 14 billion in currently running hardware, conservatively, not to mention the price of the buildings those Asics need to be put in.

There's another big flaw here, which is that cost isn't just reflective of consumption but of demand. The same hotel building on the Vegas strip is a lot more expensive than if you built it in rural Idaho, and BTC has the advantage of being able to use the cheapest land and electricity.

In the case of buildings, that money went largely to engineers, workers, and materials. It’s not the best way of stimulating local economies (it’s fairly inefficient because of bribes and margins), but still much better than Bitcoin.

>punishing gamblers, eventually people will learn to stay away from it

Just like casinos?

Casinos are deemed acceptable and gamblers are (somewhat) protected instead. Instead of avoiding the bad situation, it makes it less bad. It’s just a different risk management strategy; prohibition would not be ideal either.

I think jayd16's point is that everybody knows that casinos are negative sum and have for a long time. But still, they continue to exist. So we can't assume, as ravar does, that in the long run the market will eliminate negative-sum things.

Right. My point was that we don't punish gamblers. instead we regulate the environment in which they gamble to limit the extent of the damage.

Otherwise, yeah. Negative things don't disappear just because they are negative.

> I don't see how this is more morally repugnant than casinos which are legally accessible in most of the US.

Gambling is heavily regulated in most of the US. It can be morally repugnant because retail investors are being swindled into making terrible "investments". Retail investors really shouldn't be exposed to that kind of manipulation and risk.

You can argue that they're stupid and deserve it, but some of these people have kids to feed and house, and when their house of cards comes falling down, innocent people will suffer.

It's a fundamental question wether people should be allowed to take on risks or not.

If you are leaning towards the "no they should not" side, then consider that doing a startup is also very risky. So maybe that should be illegal, too? Or at least, there should be government startup specialists that evaluate ideas and decide wether people should be allowed to create such startups?

Or should there be an elite of people who would be allowed to create startups, and the poor people (can't afford the risk) should be restricted to union jobs?

That is not a fundamental question. Everybody agrees that people should be generally allowed to take risks. However, we also constrain those risks in all sorts of ways so that we can run a reasonably safe and effective society. The eternal questions are which risks lead to generally positive-sum activity and which tend to be dangerously opaque, negative-sum, or with strong negative externalities. You can see this is almost any serious activity. Not just investment. Think of food, or transport, or construction.

"Everybody agrees that people should be generally allowed to take risks."

Not really, the nanny state is a thing.

Companies are free to direct list without underwriters and even issue new shares in the process.

I'm not sure what a "pop" (the idea that prices often go up on listing) has to do with anything. It generally means that the company underpriced its equity but by no means does this always happen.

Are you referring to a greenshoe? There's some misinformation there too, but it serves a purpose, too. [1]

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/optioninvestor/08/gree...

I think they may be referring to the "pop" some tech companies have gotten lately where they may have been purposely undervalued so when they IPO they get a nice 5-10% "boost" and good publicity when they open.

IPO "pop" is a bit of pejorative usually referring to the deliberate underpricing of an IPO so that the investment bankers' big clients can get a quick profit, the difference between the IPO price and the first available exchange price. In the context of this thread, an example of Wall Street sleaze.

perfect is the enemy of the good. it's not an infallible process, but some checking is better than zero

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