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Comment by red_Seashell_32 | Hacker News Reader

That’s worse, than few days ago among crypto-whales it was already common knowledge, and they were pulling out. It’s common people who ended up losing on this.

So much about decentralization and unregulated market

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There are no "common people" in this scenario. Just different groups of gamblers with different levels of knowledge and foresight. Hard to feel sympathy for anyone who loses money in crypto at this point.

Polls have shown >20% of people have traded or used cryptocurrencies [1]. Clearly there are common people in the space.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/31/cryptocurrency-news-21percen...

I'd love to see that number broken down. I expect it to be mostly "used cryptocurrencies", not traded them, and those cryptocurrencies to be mostly BTC and ETH, possibly XMR, but not some utility token of an exchange.

Yeah i know quite a few people who have bought drugs online with crypto but don't trade/invest in it. For the majority of people it's just not on their radar.

Oh interesting, I kind of assumed it was investing just because it's easy to open a Coinbase account and buy $20 of Bitcoin. It's pretty involved to set up a wallet, send crypto, and then do something with it. Web3 is not particularly user friendly.

Darknet markets did make it pretty easy, and often had instructions to use e.g. anycoin direct to send cash straight to your market balance to then order drugs or alien artefacts or whatever with, so you "use" BTC or XMR (and the electrum-style slim wallets made things somewhat easy). Plus there was the whole hype of cryptokitties and NFTs etc which would bring you into contact with ETH.

The number of Americans having any money invested in the stock market in any form (i.e. including 401k, mutual funds etc) peaked at 60%. I'd be surprised to see people trading/investing in crypto to be > 3%, but who knows. Annoying that they just have these broad questions. "Have you, at any time in your life, ever eaten solid food or murdered a president?"

But some gamblers have a larger share of the total market(lets call them whales), and are therefor incentivized to coordinate their actions with other whales. They also have more resources to acquire information on the market that may give a competitive advantage. Whereas commoners tend to discuss in common areas, and they don't have enough of a share of the market to move the price through coordinated action.

Common people gamble all the time.

FTX is centralized, regulated, and audited.

This is the problem - people think more regulation would solve this problem and it fails time and time again.

Decentralization is the solution. A decentralized exchange like Uniswap, Balancer or GMX will never suddenly go bankrupt and lock up your money because everything is public and transparent.

Eventually with ZK Proofs we'll be able to have privacy and open source transparent protocols. Which will be a massive upgrade for finance.

It’s due to astroturfers like this guy [1] here on HN manipulating the narrative with intentional misinformation and HN taking the bait and upvoting like crazy because it sounds intelligent and authoritative.

Don’t trust anyone, they’re all scum.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33467429

Also cryptoanon was spreading disinformation as well:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33466306

They may be insolvent now due to FTT dip, but at the time this comment was written, he was right. They were almost certainly not insolvent. I think this all started with a tiny bit of FUD about Alameda and FTX being naughty with user deposits. CZ saw that and did a supreme job of taking advantage, but probably this would have all blown over otherwise.

Easy to look at someone's post in hindsight and see that they were mistaken. Probably

> They may be insolvent now due to FTT dip

Are you intentionally trying to mislead people? The whole point at that time was that their claims to solvency were entirely predicated on an indefensible valuation of their FTT holdings. We've now seen, as expected, that that FTT valuation was totally bogus.

Does FTT pay dividends? If not, it's not a stock. Its valuation is what people are paying for it on the market. If it's trading for $25 on every exchange, it's $25. Their valuation was accurate.

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