I've been waiting for this for years.
Which is something that will be true until it's not. Bitcoin dropped around 25% in the last week (though is rebounding a bit this morning). It only needs to drop around 33% from the current price to break your 2 year thing. Anything is possible here (in any direction), because it's an insane market propped up by all sorts of shady bull****
I do not think crypto itself is a ponzi - I think long term it has uses, but not this stupid "get rich quick" bs.
But I was laughed at for saying "don't buy crypto to make money". NFTs can genuinely be useful - but if you're using them with the goal of making money then you're using them wrong. This stupid art stuff and other general stupid "get rich schemes" have obfuscated it's actual usefulness, leaving it overvalued as all heck, and everyone scammed.
The very volatile price caused by this stupid "get rich quick" hype makes it even more difficult to actually use it.
The bad outcome I was warning about was the 80%+ drop. Even advising people to keep coins in their own wallet is commonly dismissed with "yeah but [exchange] does x differently and is too big to fail".
Just wanted to come back and say - today the price (Currently ~$15950) has dipped below the price two years ago (~$16100)
So that didn't age so well!
And yes, I believe a little schadenfreude is appropriate, given the circumstances and all the "Have fun staying poor" crap.
The FTX story is interesting though - mostly reads like an execution by CZ: https://twitter.com/jonwu_/status/1590099676744646656?s=46&t...
The main technical innovation of cryptocurrency is the capability to self-custody funds. People ignore this at their own peril. That said, bad UX will lead people to do the wrong thing even when their life depends on it, so it’s not a surprise it continues to be a problem.
My main takeaway from this is that Coinbase continues to be underrated in the crypto community and Brian Armstrong is a good CEO: https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/15900886737267179...
I'm a little surprised SBF was engaged in this kind of scheme, there's a pretty interesting interview with him and Sam Harris here: https://www.samharris.org/podcasts/making-sense-episodes/271...
Though I suppose Jane Street does select for people willing to take massive risk on bets they think they can control. It might have continued to work out too, but CZ saw an opportunity to destroy a competitor and had the capital to carry it out.
This is coming from someone who genuinely hopes there will be real benefits coming from crypto.
Many of us have seen many "too big to fail" exchanges fall, have seen 2+ other "crypto bubbles" drop the price by 80%+.
When we told everyone "don't keep your money on an exchange" and "we've seen seen these 'too the moon' skyrocketing prices before - be prepared for the eventual crash" - they laughed and confidently said it was different this time, that we were just jealous, didn't understand defi/web3 etc.
I seriously do not enjoy seeing people suffer, I tried to warn people to prevent them from losing huge amounts of money. But when your warnings were laughed off - it's hard and there's some mixed emotions, and many of us are a bit jaded.
I do think crypto has a legitimate use, but this "buy crypto because you'll get rich" mentality just creates these detrimental hype cycles.
The FTT token itself was only used on the exchange to get some benefits like lower fees or free withdrawals and didn’t give any yield at all when staked.
From a risk averse user perspective and someone working in tech, there really wasn’t anything shady going on to suck people in. So them collapsing hurts and is very sad news for the entire ecosystem
Without regulations there's absolutely no incentive for them to be transparent, there are tons of perverse incentives to hide and cook the books though.
It's frustrating that centralized opaque companies keep failing and yet people keep trusting them or lumping DeFi into the same bucket when they are night and day different. Decentralized Finance is the point of Crypto.
No, thanks...