Wall Street is bad enough. This is insanity.
Within just a few years there were large-scale "gold mining" operations set up in China, wholesalers, retailers, "forex" markets, etc... Nearly the entire modern economic ecosystem was set up around a game.
At some point, if WoW was treated as a country, its "currency" would have ranked above quite a few real countries in terms of forex trading. If I remember correctly, it was bigger than 70 real nations.
Crypto is the same, except times a thousand.
https://www.polygon.com/features/2020/5/27/21265613/runescap...
> it seemed like its ended entirely
not quite: relative volume actually increased as a function of growing game popularity around the time of the introduction of bonds (http://crystalmathlabs.com/tracker/players.php - amusingly enough, this is currently serving me a first-party ad for goldbuying) but that obviously represented a slice of a previously-undivided pie.
It's like legal weed: black markets still exist for those willing to forgo security and convenience for a deal. IIRC, black-market gold was 40-60% of the face price of a bond for the period I was active as a reasonably high volume swapper/seller. That kind of discount isn't worth it if you're buying 10m or a single prerolled joint or whatever, but generally makes sense in any kind of volume / if you've got the connections to mitigate the risk.
But the analogy continues: if the black market is relegated to a fairly small proportion of the total pool of individuals who buy (weed|gp), even if a lot of the volume transactions aren't captured, many of its harms are mitigated as you don't have unsophisticated consumers smoking rat poison / getting their mom's credit card stolen / etc.
Most of the regulations have come from centuries of banking history, which the crypto world seems to be speed-running through right now, learning the hard way.
There is plenty to criticize about the banking world, but crypto is indefensible at this point.
The next generation will have fond memories at that stadium and won’t think about the name either
We need look no further than the 2008 financial crash for evidence of that; The Economist was reporting for years that there was clearly a lot of risk being shuffled around such that nobody was quite sure where it was. We all found out, but not until after a lot of the shufflers made their money and got out.
But in crypto land, it's a pure cargo cult - a facade of finance and analysis, with nothing behind it.
Can anyone recommend a paper or post that explains how it is linked?
Ironic how similar the crypto and traditional world is.
This is an exciting time for that field.