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Comment by richbell | Hacker News Reader

Logan Paul starts heavily promlting an NFT project. He claims that he's super passionate about it and has spent 1M of his own money into it, presumably to signal that it isn't a rug-pull scam like all his previous rug-pull scams. People put millions into it before it even launches, only for it to launch in a completely broken state and instantly lose value. It's clear that all the claims Logan was making to hype the project weren't true. Coffeezilla, attempting to figure out what happened, reaches out to the devs who claim they weren't paid, then reaches out to Logan's manager who refuses to comment and makes thinly veiled threats of legal action of Coffee reports on any of this.

Logan proceeds to never bring it up again and starts building hype for another project that totally won't be a scam. Rinse and repeat.

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Maybe there’s some Darwinian forces at play here.

Afaik, Logan is just some internet moron. He has no credentials or life accomplishments, he’s just a pretty face with an attractive personality.

So if that’s who you’re going to trust to invest your money, maybe it’s good you don’t have as much money. Maybe that’s something that will actually improve our species.

Add in that these people who threw away all this money are happy to come in and laugh about it on camera (how did society get to this point where submitting your humiliation is normal?)… like what are we really upset about here? That losers are losers and they’re being taken advantage of?

That’s life. Maybe if people weren’t so insulated from their consequences they’d be raised to actually see these things from a mile away.

If you want to see it that way, doesn’t that mean “maybe it’s better” if fraudsters accumulate wealth with impunity?

Perhaps we should incentivize crime and fraud, since the victims are by definition less fit, and the attackers are by definition more fit?

I am not sure I care for this philosophy. It is timely though, I’ll give you that.

> doesn’t that mean “maybe it’s better” if fraudsters accumulate wealth with impunity?

It’s an argument against using public resources to pursue him. The victims could sue him for money damages, and in the process arrange the facts such that a prosecutor can jump off them versus launching an independent probe.

So, justice should be a privilege only to those who can afford lawyers?

The resources of the justice system are despairingly finite I assure you. People get away with worse crimes than financial scams.

Is anyone prosecuted for crimes less bad than these financial crimes? That seems like a better test than whether anyone gets away with worse.

So who becomes the arbiter of which victims are "worthwhile" to try to seek justice for and which get thrown to the wolves? Do you think going down this path is likely to end up in a good place?

Why would it be beneficial for society to filter out people who make poor business decisions? Many of the greatest generals, politicians, scientists, and artists in history were terrible at business and fell for scams many times.

> Afaik, Logan is just some internet moron. He has no credentials or life accomplishments, he’s just a pretty face with an attractive personality.

Yes, combined with what appears to be significant narcissism with malignant tendencies. He’s so shameless though that it somehow convinces people who want to love him that his malignancy isn’t that bad. In fact, maybe it’s funny! Maybe it’s cool. Just keep watching, I guess.

I don’t want him to profit off of other people, I don’t want people to be scammed by him, and I think the situation is awful. But it’s nothing new. People like him are uncommon, but not totally rare and their impact is broad. We should all practice far better awareness of this.

Having said that, I don’t agree that Darwinism and economics should necessarily be overlapped this way. The Venn diagram would seem to have some overlap, but people are worth much more than what they happen to accomplish financially. This is just a narrow aspect of what it is to be human, and largely mediated by nebulous things which arguably can’t determine one’s worth from a personal or evolutionary perspective.

Just want to say, thank you, for capturing so much wisdom and distilling it into a well written summary/reply.

That’s very kind of you to say. Thank you! I think of most of the words I dump onto the internet as incoherent rambling so it’s relieving and even gratifying if someone finds a signal in the noise.

> The Venn diagram would seem to have some overlap, but people are worth much more than what they happen to accomplish financially.

Beyond that, the money lost by those who were conned is being gained by a con artist who will presumably use it to create more and better cons.

Eventually one of them might be good enough to rope in someone you care about or big enough to cause widespread damage.

I watched the video the other day when it came out and he interviewed several people that invested between 10k and 500k into the project. Seems like all those folks got taken up by the hype but the part I just can't wrap my head around is even then, how do you just dump that much money into something without any due diligence.

All the "due dillegence" that these guys seemed to have done is: "well Logan is rich and famous so this must be legit". I would have a hard time investing $50 of my own money just based off that, I don't know how you can convince yourself that investing thousands into this one crypto project is a good idea.

Side effects of easy monetary policy and low education of the wealthiest population in the world.

I agree with all of this, my only guess as to how some of these people could dump that much money into something without any due diligence, is perhaps their source of the investment was other crypto gains so it didn’t seem like real money in the first place. (Ie was not money they actually work for/earned nor ever had in their “fiat bank account”, so it all seemed fake/like Monopoly money.

Did they invest that much, or are they conspirators saying that they invested that much in order to convince other people to invest that much?

> how do you just dump that much money into something without any due diligence.

They believe they are scammers too, not the victims?

> So if that’s who you’re going to trust to invest your money, maybe it’s good you don’t have as much money. Maybe that’s something that will actually improve our species.

That money doesn't just up and vanish though. It's now in the hands of an actively malicious person instead of someone who just makes poor decisions, and our society is structured such that that money gives the malicious person more legitimatcy and power, increasing the harm they can do. I can't see how society is better off that way.

Problem is they’re giving their money to someone who is equally stupid

That’s not a problem and it’s bizarre seeing all these comments repeating the same message.

Our economic systems were not designed nor ever intended to be a system where good or moral people prevail the most.

But in this age I’m not the least bit surprised that people will go to that great extent of mental gymnastics to for the satisfaction of “getting” someone they see as a villain.

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