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Comment by unkulunkulu | Hacker News Reader

My brother is currently working in the field. It brings him good money. Now, really good money. His work is 100% clean per se (infrastructure for mining).

I don't feel any moral grounds to say anything to him, he does it for engineering and fun and really actualizes himself. He is my older brother finally creating something meaningful for people and having rightful rewards. He is hidden in the moral waves, harvesting something he can, surfing in the sunshine. I don't know how to think about this.

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I have friends who have made millions from crypto. But every dollar they made is a dollar that someone else paid into the system, that that person is going to lose when the bubble bursts. Enabling that loss is not morally clean.

But the question is: what is morally clean?

Is housing not a bubble? Then, how could prices be that inflated in most places, even with a stable (or just slightly increasing) population?

Is stock trading not a bubble, because "real companies exist and have a value"? But, their price is probably 20x their "real worth"?

Is selling vegetables in grocery stores at 20x the price the farmer gets morally clean?

Is it morally clean to keep putting CO2 into the air that everybody breaths?

There are a freaking lot of "unclean" things in the world. I don't understand why a lot of people seem to focus on cryptocurrencies and blockchains.

Taking your logic to its conclusion, any stock or other kind of trading should be banned because it will enable some people to lose money at some point. To clarify, is that your position, and if not, why not?

It's absolutely morally clean. The people losing money made their choice.

Similarly I don't see anything wrong working for a betting company or even a company that produce dangerous or addictive drugs.

I consider it morally wrong to work for the government or for criminal organisations which steal money under the threat of violence or kill people for reasons other than self defence.

Personally I find it immoral to support things that I believe cause more harm than good, regardless of whether the participants were compelled to do so by violence.

are you okay with trading precious metals? stocks? real estate?

all of those have so-called market cycles, which is what you described here. the price continues to increase (bull market), as each trader sells higher to another sucker, who wants to sell higher to another sucker... until eventually it runs out of new suckers and the price collapses for some time (bear market). each dollar you gain is a dollar someone else loses. those suckers at the end of the bullrun transfered their money to earlier suckers and lost everything.

the "ponzi" nature of crypto isnt specific to crypto at all - this is how all markets operate.

By that logic, anything with downside risk is not morally clean. If you buy anything with the plan, secondary or not, to sell it later for some profit of some kind, you're taking from a sucker. Housing, the used car market, commodities, the stock market, everything is a greater fool scam.

But when you look at these things from the individual perspective, we all take a risk when buying things. The people that don't assess their risk when they buy lose, the ones that do don't lose.

Assuming the bubble does burst which it may not.

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