Insider Trading in Cryptocurrency Markets
papers.ssrn.com
papers.ssrn.com
Of course, if you don't want to give those people your money, there is a simple solution: Don't buy shitcoins.
Don't buy any cryptocurrency.
Now the SEC and other regulators continues to use the chain to trace up many insider trades and charge other projects for violating regulations. [0]
Like it or not as long as there is no complete and 100% blanket ban on the entire cryptocurrency industry, they will always be buyers / sellers in this market with the certainty of tough regulations to come.
[0] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...
- premined (the creator reserves coins for themselves or for "development purposes" before releasing to the public)
- the coin is named after a dog
- centralized governance (one person/group/company controls development or makes frequent hard forks)
- been around less than 5-10 years (these aren't necessarily scams, but at best you're gambling on something unproven)
- small market cap (again, not necessarily a scam, but a big red flag. let other people be the ones to dig through the trash and hunt unicorns)
Take out the trash and you're left with between 1 and 5 projects, depending on how you feel about the details.
That's not a red flag if the emission is very slow, e.g. a pure linear emission that takes a century to reach the soft total [1].
[1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...
In other words, a coin's price is determined more by its total supply than by its current supply, to reflect future dilution.
I'm not convinced there's 1-5 projects left after you "take out the trash". There's nothing. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero... all of these legacy projects have no use besides P2P transactions. It's cool, and can scale well, but that's not going to drive prices in the long-term. Crypto's hands are tied, and it can do nothing except trade sideways until it dies forever, like SoulSeek or LimeWire. Betting on Bitcoin going back up is like betting on Tastetations showing up again at your local CVS; abysmal odds, all hours of the day.
25% is still too low for how huge of a scam this thing is. I assume this only addresses insider trading, while the more common scheme is pump and dump?
But when you introduce a delivery system that short circuits your brain's reward circuitry, it's incredibly dangerous and destructive.
Ponzi tokenomics are the crack rocks of blockchain technology, which is itself really nifty. The only thing that can and will stop the tokenomics craze is a popular backslash, which is building.
And as with cocaine, blockchain will be forever slimed by association with this ponzi scheme fad and its devastating impact on millions and millions of families and fortunes.
Only privacy coins which deliver on the original cypherpunk goals of blockchain will survive. And smart contracts won't find any general utility unless and until one arrives that offers reliable homomorphically encrypted private smart contract resolution.
They don't deliver on one aspect, which is full auditability. I think all existing privacy chains are completely broken by knowledge of the discrete log of one particular curve point.
Whelp, I'm gonna be bullish on some kind of move from cryptocurrency to a cypherpunk / plan9-esque Renaissance of distributed social computing, maybe taking ideas from e lang, and sprinkling in some web of trust auditable ledger if its appropriate and get the heck out of (web3) Dodge.
> And as with cocaine, blockchain will be forever slimed by association with this ponzi scheme fad and its devastating impact on millions and millions of families and fortunes.
Maybe you missed the irony of using a term that was coined and invented in traditional markets, but they seem to be fine and not very "slimed".
Crypto is certainly going through pre/early regulation gesticulation but ... most of the crypto scams were already done in traditional financial markets in their early days.
The question is: what would the market cap of crypto be if a bunch of novice investors weren't lured in by scams and promises of 20% APY? I suspect it would be a lot lower than what we see today. Indeed, how many crypto ecosystem participants would care about BTC if they weren't expecting to get outsized returns on their investments?
Without the scams to pump up the value, I don't think cryptocurrency would have legs. Not many people care about Bitcoin's ideological goals (breaking free from fiat, etc.), and the genuine use cases that work today (mostly remittances and cheap wire transfers) have a limited audience.
Umm ... what? Why is that the question? Because you have an agenda? Sure ok, but you haven't provided any information to the context of the topic of conversation -- that crypto scams are more-or-less rehashes of scams in traditional finance.
That will help many of us escape, but for normal people, it will just be part of the path.
No.
That ship has already sailed and it is not early days anymore; just like the failure of the free software movement or the privacy movement who have both failed to stop spyware and privacy invasive technology from proliferating and proxied / developed by the majority of big tech.
Why is it that regulators are chasing after privacy tools / coins, like Tornado.cash, Monero, etc and not attempting to ban the others? The regulators have made it totally clear that they don't want these certain coins / tools to be around or used as a side benefit by scammers, criminals, etc.
I would say only the compliant few coins, crypto projects, etc that comply with regulations will survive and it will allow companies to accept crypto and use it safely.
The privacy coins are going to get axed first. The rest are just tooling up to see what scumbags law enforcement can rake in with CI jobs.
Anyone who thought digital currency was going to do anything to help privacy has been smoking the highest quality cocaine.
Indeed they do. As long as they are able to see everyone's transactions and also identify and trace up illegal transactions easily, why would they ban it? Of course they won't hence they instead went after the privacy coins and will keep a compliant few that will survive regulations.
> Anyone who thought digital currency was going to do anything to help privacy has been smoking the highest quality cocaine.
Correct, and crypto is here to stay, just like spyware and closed-source software is. Anyone who thinks that crypto or closed-source software would go away entirely or having all of it get banned completely 100% is also already on the highest quality of cocaine or LSD to dedicate their whole life to try stopping all of it completely.
I don't think very highly of crypto but if the stocks can shrug that off, so it can too.
There´s a reason why in the 90s there was huge SPAM on pumping penny-stocks. Right now, there are a bunch of crypto-currencies that do hold some inherent value (ETH, Golem, FileCoin, STORJ, Augur, Polygon, Polkadot, are some of them), and I am sure with time, more will appear.
If it wasn't for the pesky reward-system hijacking, cocaine would probably be in everyone's emergency first aid kit.
The SEC seems to be still enforcing and investigating many projects this for some time [0], which tells us that crypto will most definitely be regulated rather than a total full scale and complete ban which opponents have been screaming about are have been dreaming for years.
Due to the transparency and traceability of the majority of blockchains, it makes it possible to trace up all of this activity easily. Thus, is it not a surprise to see regulators banning blockchain privacy tools / coins off of exchanges and allowing the others or a compliant few. This is why they won't be a. complete ban and I would expect stricter regulations for the exchanges to reduce these problems.
But as always, anything critical of cryptocurrencies or crypto projects in general here is quickly raced to the top of HN, despite regulators still actively investigating the mentioned projects and many others from time to time. [1]
[0] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...
[1] https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2022/comp-pr2022-1...
It has placeholder text in it like "[Insert Figure 1 Here]" and "[Insert Table 2 Here]".
Is this a draft?
I love seeing financial minded folks talk about how the price of cryptocurrencies will go up and that they're good investments. They're gambling entirely on the fraud working, and most of them don't know it's fraud all the way down.
A) how Coinbase got past YC vetting process
B) continue to engage in serious violation of US security and trading laws
C) a large portion of HN seems to downvote, flag, critical comments towards Brian Armstrong and coinbase
I couldn't stop laughing when he said older banking systems run on "cobalt".
while for the rest of us the bar is so much higher and trusted with far less.
our world is run not based on merit, ideas, gumption but a closed group of people brought together by common skin color, religion, class.
I don't think Brian Armstrong would've gone very far with YC if he was black or asian
This is an outrageous statement and demonstrably incorrect.
So, I think this is an underappreciated point. Coinbase, to the best of my knowledge, does not engage in crimes that would send people behind bars. (edit to clarify: Coinbase employees occasionally do, and I believe some are facing jail time, but this does not seem to be something Coinbase is doing).
They do engage in "crimes" that result in fines and other regulatory action. Why the scare quotes? Because the main way they commit these crimes is by taking laws/regulatory guidance that is vague, and pushing boundaries to see precisely where the boundaries are. This makes them like every other financial institution that wants to try something new, and the inevitable regulatory smackdowns they eventually get are just a cost of business.
My understanding is that this basic structure is normal in finance, to the point where "regulation by enforcement" (as opposed to regulation by regulation, where you write out in advance what is and isn't allowed) is a meme, and Coinbase only really stands out by being in crypto, where there are a lot more unclear boundaries and therefore more opportunity to push them.
tl;dr Violations of US security and trading laws are normal to some extent, and Coinbase generally stays within the "understood to be okay" standard, which is a lot looser than a "tries to never break laws" standard.
Coinbase is, however, tempting fate. The „regulation by enforcement“ you speak of may be what’s happening to the industry. The company, however, might end up as a token skull on a post by the side of the road, metaphorically speaking.
technicalities aside, what they are engaging as a company is highly unethical
Just one of the many cancers affecting our current society.
You can work in crypto as long as you have no morals.
I agree that most projects are cash grabs, but that's no excuse for insulting all developers without exception.
There's a lot of scammy stuff in the cryptocurrency world, but why do so many people feel the need to pompously proclaim the whole thing is a scam when they clearly only have a shallow familiarity with the space? Is it sour grapes or jealousy?
Edit because I'm getting the same replies: Nobody's questioning the blockchain as a solution to a game theory problem - that's great, long live the blockchain. We're talking about crypto here though.
Copied from another reply I made, here's some projects to check out:
- Lens Protocol [https://lens.xyz/ (one example implementation: https://lenster.xyz/)] is an early social network built on top of Polygon.
- Farcaster [https://farcaster.xyz/] is another one, that takes a more hybrid approach of using Ethereum for trustless identity, but stores social stuff in a "sufficiently decentralized" way.
- ENS [https://ens.domains/] is a universal username system.
- Unlock Protocol [https://unlock-protocol.com/] uses NFTs for tradeable subscriptions, event tickets, etc.
- Radicle [https://radicle.xyz/] is a decentralized Github basically, that (optionally) uses Ethereum to store the Git HEAD of a "project" essentially.
- Arweave [https://www.arweave.org/] stores files permanently using a cool "endowment" mechanism. Currently, the network has secured its storage for like 1000 years in theory.
Claims like this are ridiculous on their face. In 1000 years the cryptographic primitives used for this project will be obsolete and broken. That's if we're not all using quantum computers of some kind and "traditional" computing is a relic of the long past.
As a result, why should I trust any other claims made about Arweave? Clearly the project has no sense of its own limitations.
But I still trust nVidia to render my video games.
Sometimes marketing department and copy-writers get ahead of themselves. It shouldn't discredit the entire project unless there are other signals as well. Which there might be with Arweave! I have no idea. But discrediting the technical part of a project because of the marketing part of the project can be short-sighted.
Fundamentally, I disagree. "Too good to be true" marketing is a great sign you're being scammed. I wouldn't trust a used car salesman who's throwing in free "undercarriage protection" and other junk after "talking to his manager". Why should I trust a website that's doing the same?
What's more, because Arweave like all crypto projects probably depends on users continuing to buy and mine tokens to function, unrealistic marketing contributes to boom-and-bust dynamics that might put my data at risk if enough people give up on the project/token. Whatever the underlying technology, this is enough of a reason to stay away. When Luna collapsed, a lot of people lost all their money. If the Arweave token collapses, users might also lose their "permanent" data.
Incidentally, this prompted me to look at the Arweave "yellow paper", and I found this gem:
> While the Arweave’s mechanism design is generally engineered to promote adaptivity to new circumstances, the core Arweave team does not expect that the network as it is currently formulated will continue to produce blocks in true perpetuity. This does not, however, mean that we expect that the information stored inside the weave will be lost after the final block is mined. It is our expectation that when eventually a permanent information storage system more suited to the challenges of the time emerges, the Arweave’s data will be ‘subsumed’ into this network. After the mining of the final block, the financial incentive mechanisms for data preservation will subside and give way to social incentives for data preservation. This effect will likely be compounded by the exceptionally low cost of storing the data from the network, due to its decreasing relative cost over time.
So data is stored "forever", assuming someone comes along and archives all the data at some point in the future for free.
Sure, there is definitely a scale where something becomes "too good to be true" and increasing your own skepticism in proportion with that scale is a sensible approach. My point was that it can be short-sighted to judge something off a single data-point when that data-point comes from the marketing departments copywrite rather than the technical aspects of the project.
I'll just go back to my example. If I swore off nVidia solely off the single data-point of the card being advertised as "military grade", that'd be rather unfortunate because the product itself is really quite good in my opinion. Even though "military grade" is a wildly stupid thing to advertise a graphic card as.
All I'm saying is that technical projects should not solely be judged based on a single marketing claim. In the large projects I've been a member of, I have absolutely zero say in how it is advertised. And the marketing department making the advertising could not possibly care less about the technical merits of the project.
The rest of what you said is applicable specifically to Arweave, which I don't care one bit about, so I don't have any specific comments on that.
did it cost 10x RRP?
Thankfully it did not appear like I paid the 'military-grade' tax.
I think they've set up a system that incentivizes long term storage (and possibly a better setup than IPFS) but theres no way in hell they can make a guarantee for more than a few years at best.
All of these are absolutely fine, they are dumb to have on a blockchain.
Yea but it hasn't though, so maybe the incentive models a blockchain-based approach provides is what actually makes this practical, consider that.
> without the massive environmental damage
That's a silly argument, but regardless the chain all these projects are built on (Ethereum) is about to move to Proof of Stake in a month, which makes it's carbon footprint nothing.
Edit: your edit is nonsensical - there is no blockchain without crypto - blockchains do not function with the financial incentive because that's what makes potentially-adversarial actors cooperate.
On a related note - I don't think proof-of-stake would have worked for bitcoin. First of all, equitable distribution is a big deal and mining can do that but PoS by itself can't. But if you solved that problem I still think you would have a harder time convincing people that there was any value in a staker's signature, and whether it makes sense to trust transactions secured "only" by stake.
A fixed block reward (i.e. no halvings) would also have rewarded early adopters to the extent that were fewer miners competing with each other, but would have avoided the large wealth concentration and deter most of the speculation. You're correct to note that PoS is not a coin distribution method and thus made no sense for bitcoin.
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1geg5HHgDO-ht0u6CSTHp...
Are all non-crypto startup businesses 'cash grabs' in your opinion? Does that make them scams?
Edit: Actually we don't have to imagine this scenario. The diamond cartel[1] does something very similar already and yes, it's a scam.
Everything in the crypto world is built off of the core decentralized consensus idea described by the whitepaper, so I think it's really the foundation of understanding everything else.
My personal appraisals of other parts of the crypto space that aren't scams: Ethereum, Lightning Network, hardware wallets, Coinbase, Proof of Stake (may not like the incentives, but it can work as designed), DAOs (inherently risky because they have an implicit bug bounty for their total value, too risky for my taste, but glad they exist and people are learning how to make them more robust)
Is the cost of settling a transaction on a blockchain still greater than the value of the transactions, in electrical bills?
This is smugness. It's being aware of a cancerous growth and doing what we can to avoid and excise it.
No, I'm not smug. I'm upset. Crypto has displaced a lot of good investment and effort.
Ah, because scamming doesn't happen inside the other classes of investments you're talking about
Parent is painting with broad negative strokes, but they aren't far from reality.
Money attracts sociopaths, who seek positions of power. I don't think crypto is special or unusual in this sense.
Personally I think real estate a an "investment market" is doing much more harm to society than anything else right now
/s
Assuming you work in tech, do you feel a personal responsibility for all of those cancers?
I bought Ethereum in 2015.
Raised a 7-figure fund in 2017.
Closed everything down in 2019.
My take of the space is that all of the projects are on a spectrum.
Total scams <--------------> Completely superfluous
When I walk into a restaurant, same deal. I don't have to really worry.
The amount of legwork I have to do separate the bad parts from the good parts is incredibly low.
The crypto space is the complete opposite of that. I have to do a shitton of legwork to find out if it's a scam or not. And to top it all off, most of them are, in fact, some form of scam. At some point, it's not laziness, it's efficiency.
Especially when you consider I have to do all the work no matter who is promoting it. There are absolutely no trustworthy voices. Because either the voices are the scammers themselves or have been taken in by scammers.
As an example, I believe ALGO is a legitimate blockchain coin but when your marketing copy reads like this, it doesn't take laziness/disinterested to pass sniff tests.
"Examples include bond issuance, escrow account creation, loan payments & fee executions, limit orders, subscriptions, collateralized obligations, disbursements, programmatic fees, delegated high- security account management, interface with off-chain data providers, HELOC (Home Equity Line of Credit), decentralized exchanges, crowdfunding, voting and more."
These all sound great! Who's offering HELOC's using ALGO right now? Crickets - so how would you convince me this isn't a scam?
Well that's the thing though, shocking as it may be, there are other societies out there.
Living in a Third World country with a controlled currency, Bitcoin was the only way I could actually buy things online.
So yeah, to me, it does have an actual value. Disregarding something completely just because you don't think is useful is very shortsighted. It's akin to people thinking x programming language is complete trash.
Edit: lol to the people not realizing this is intentional satire meant to poke fun at the meme-like representation of the stereotypical crypto-hater
Edit: And I say this as someone who's pretty much, "fuck crypto". OP said they're from a third world country and were vague with what they purchased and, especially, why. Yet you've painted them as an absolutely disgusting individual. Geez.
It can be difficult to understand if something is sarcastic or satire when there is no tone of voice or facial cues to help. Especially when you don't exaggerate, and simply type out the same things as the group your satirizing. Maybe the only difference/give-away was the "crying" part of the polar bears. The rest is pretty much verbatim of some of the nastier comments I've seen in other threads.
See comment below:
>It can be difficult to understand if something is sarcastic or satire when there is no tone of voice or facial cues to help. Especially when you don't exaggerate, and simply type out the same things as the group your satirizing. Maybe the only difference/give-away was the "crying" part of the polar bears. The rest is pretty much verbatim of some of the nastier comments I've seen in other threads.
>Maybe the only difference/give-away was the "crying" part of the polar bears. The rest is pretty much verbatim of some of the nastier comments I've seen in other threads.
> pretty much verbatim
So yeah, your peers disagree with you. What I said is apparently "pretty much verbatim" of the stereotypical ilk, apparently. So which of the two of you are lying? Have that debate down in your counterpart's thread if you like.
>There's nothing specifically stereotypical about what you wrote when it comes to people who dislike crypto
The hilarious thing is I meant for my post to sound over the top and exaggerated vs the stereotypical meme. It was supposed to sound a bit ridiculous. Then I simultaneously get accused no one could possible understand it is satire because I didn't exaggerate enough while also being accused it's not satire because I exaggerated too much. The honest to god truth is I didn't realize people were actually saying shit quite this ridiculous until I was told this while being scolded in this thread, that people were saying such ridiculous things that my statement couldn't possibly be interpreted as satire because it was the verbatim argument of the people I was poking fun at. Maybe that hit too close to home for you, idk.
Who did this? I certainly didn't. I said the extremism of sounding like an unhinged loon* is what is coming out. Not satire of a stereotypical person against crypto.
I also didn't think what you wrote was satire or exaggeration either. I read your comment as a seriously written one. Yet I don't think it's indicative of your narrative.
--
Your entire logic appears to be literally one comment agreeing with your narrative. I’ll focus on one example.
> The honest to god truth is I didn't realize people were actually saying shit quite this ridiculous until I was told this while being scolded in this thread, that people were saying such ridiculous things that my statement couldn't possibly be interpreted as satire because it was the verbatim argument of the people I was poking fun at.
It isn't people. It is one person. The other two people just like i did, are taking your comment at face value. That doesn't mean they agree with your narrative .
One person's hearsay shouldn't convince you. I actually brought up a specific anti crypto piece, Line Goes Up. Tons of discussions on it online. There aren't enough examples of your narrative in the real world about this for example (outside the consistent but small amount of unpleasant Karen sort of people)
> Maybe that hit too close to home for you, idk.
This is sad. If personally insulting me helps you, go for it!
* why would you take offense to me calling your fake talking as unpleasant. The unpleasantness is your admitted satire. So it's not saying you're unpleasant, heh. That still doesn't stop you from talking about my unpleasantness.
It appears you write comments on here for others. It could be that’s what makes you speak in such bad faith? It sucks to live life for others. Even worse you don’t even like them.
does the posting war need to continue?
actually, what am i even doing here?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. For clarity: I'm not making an argument about cryptocurrency here. Just about HN threads.