He's still behaving as if having billions of liabilities in real money backed by funny money "assets" is somehow acceptable and everything would have been fine if it wasn't for the "last week".
I’m a complete crypto skeptic who would never touch anything like FTT, but it’s not an obvious Ponzi scheme. I think one of the troubles with crypto is that it’s very easy to operate what is effective a Ponzi scheme, without fully realizing it yourself.
A lot of people will explain to others that it’s a Ponzi scheme, but those people are making so much money that hey don’t want to hear it.
Crypto is a Ponzi scheme, and it always was. I’m not just talking about these companies, being Ponzi schemes, I’m talking about the whole ecosystem being a Ponzi scheme.
You can either listen to those of us telling you cook those a Ponzi scheme or you can focus on your greed. Your choice.
Is that they are totally obvious once they fall apart. No contradiction.
I offer a 10% return on stock market, every years, in bull as well as bear markets.
Does it sound legit ?
1. you should actually listen to the podcast, or at least skim the transcript[1], rather than trusting some second hand account by some youtuber. In the podcast, he's describing an abstract token that offers no utility, not FTT and certainly not the exchange itself.
2. At least from skimming the whitepaper for FTT, there's at least a plausible business model (eg. through exchange fees). That's not to say it's not a ponzi scheme, because many ponzi schemes claim they have a plausible business model, but that's different than literally describing yourself as a ponzi scheme. That would require you to put out a whitepaper that's like "we fully expect this token/company to make zero money and all profits to earlier investors come from later investors".
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/odd-lots-...
I'm pretty certain most of us, at least in the BTC community, were mocking this yield farming as the new ICO since it's inception. The Effective Alturism, and his parent connection to Silicon Valley via Stanford make it clearer this was the typical disruptor cosplaying grifting that happens all the time: see Theranos.
Being connected and well off, should now be a sign of lack of inventive mind than having one. VCs think they are risk takers but rather go for well connected SV folks unconsciously or consciously to avoid risks. I hope these two three episodes like Theranos put some sense in them.
I don't know enough/anything about biochemistry so I don't know if the vision Theranos sold was even possible but how do I know that the all public all the time but only to someone physically nearby you photo sharing idea (of color) would work either?
How do you decide who to back?
[Techcrunch] https://techcrunch.com/2011/03/23/color-looks-to-reinvent-so...
Edit: another post on HN: what is "growth hacking"? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33582002
One particular item of fraud was the claim that their machines were on helicopters in US-led war zones. Okay, show me the contract details for this, or some kind of evidence this is actually true, and then I will verify with the counter party to ensure it's not completely bologna.
Not to mention the entire concept of 'nano-tainers' and doing blood work with a single drop of blood seemed physically improbable, and literal Nobel level scientists would need to be involved, people with decades of experience in the field, not a random college dropout.
> all public all the time but only to someone physically nearby you photo sharing idea (of color) would work either?
I can't see the appeal of that whatsoever. At least with instagram or whatever you can have followers, and then monetize those followers one way or another. On the flip side, it might be an interesting avenue for prostitutes and drug dealers to advertise their services discretely in public places.
Yes. At the time it was not hard to find people who did have expertise in the relevant fields expressing skepticism. It definitely wouldn’t have been hard to kick $50k in consulting work to some postdoc to act as your advisor when the investment is orders of magnitude greater.
Proof that lots of money does not necessarily make one a "sophisticated" investor. But maybe the $50m-$100m that each of those investors put in wasn't enough to be worth their time to do any due diligence.
Or how about it is neutral?
That is never the case in the VC model; who knows you will always be more important than what you know or who you know. It's often tolerated because the king makers like Altman at YV spread the funds far enough for it to be seen as 'fair' but it's always been an insiders game if you wanted anything but a total take over for funding since capital got so concentrated in those systems.
Maybe for a while, but ultimately no - reality will assert itself even if you have stopped believing in it. Made-up valuations of faith-based assets are insubstantial, and anything that is entirely that is completely without substance.
There's no financial principle which says it is not a Ponzi scheme until you notice that it is.
That said, I think the real problem here was undercapitalization. It seems akin to throwing a party at your home that has a structural addition not up to code, and then when it collapses under the weight, saying it was just bad luck.
"Everything is a Ponzi" is a lazy analysis only made possible by having a lazy definition of what a Ponzi scheme is
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/ponzischeme.asp
I think the point is that there are more structures out there like this than we think. Social Security for example. Just do a web search and you'll see it's a rather mainstream question. Also there are so many unfunded public pensions that could meet the definition.
Perhaps the difference is transparency. We know these public programs are currently in bad shape, but private schemes are completely opaque until they collapse.
Pay as you go isn't a Ponzi scheme.
It doesn't hide anything, it's far more transparent than Social Security, it doesn't mislead anyone.
It's more of a pump and dump scheme where people extol made up virtues to get suckers to put money in, and as demonstrated for well over a decade now, it's a complete financial crapstorm filled with theft, criminal activity, and people stealing incredible sums of money from the unsuspecting.
But sure, it's not a Ponzi scheme. It just makes them easier to do to people.
Many things from MLM to social security to VC markets can be viewed as a Ponzi scheme.
Yes, you can use these currencies as a store of value, and therefore get utility from exchanging them with somebody in the future, but that's not where the value of the currency itself derives from (which is 1. the utility of the currency itself (people want to transact in it in personal affairs, because it's more efficient and reliable than the alternative), and 2. the authority of the state (people must transact in it in state affairs)). Call it what you will, but it's not a ponzi scheme. If you're looking for things in traditional fintech that resemble a ponzi scheme, look at something like a non-voting stock without a dividend.
We mostly don't know why money/currency came into existence, it happened so long ago.
There is some evidence that at least in some places it was to fund armies or generally provide more state (or pre-state ruler) control of the economy.
I don't really know what impact that has on whatever argument you're having, but anyway.
I mean, we don't need any kind of science or history if we could just be like "this story makes sense to me, so it must be true." I guess it's appropriate for our post-fact world.
We don't have any historical record of people explicitly writing that they started using bronze tools to deal with the undesirable aspects of stone tools afaik. We just happen to know from scientific first principles that bronze tools are much more efficient than stone and we also know that societies switched from using stone to bronze. So we assume that they switched due to bronze being better. That's how the study of history has always worked.
> I guess it's appropriate for our post-fact world.
If you want to imply a conspiracy of control through currency I would say that would require more facts to back it up than the simpler alternative. Historically, we know that those in power in the past had no trouble controlling / levying tribute with simple violence.
That might be true, but your prior comment says
> State-backed central currencies emerged because people in informal economies were bartering to exchange goods and services, which is less efficient than having a standardized medium of exchange, so central authorities issued currency in order to increase the efficiency of the economy.
Which is a much stronger claim and doesn't necessarily follow from the fact that "people prefer cash to trading pelts for groceries".
If you check the wikipedia article on the history of money[1], the first forms of currency wasn't issued by the state. They were informal credit systems, or standardized unit of account (eg. grain, or receipt for grain stored at a granary and later precious metals). State backed versions of the latter came later. Even in the US, prior to the federal reserve, "currency" was IOUs for gold issued by various private banks.