Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logicalmonster | Hacker News Reader

It's arguably a good thing if depositors at SVB are made whole by the Feds, but I'm curious about the double standards with how banks vs crypto exchanges are treated when they fail. When a crypto exchange fails, there's been a sort of glee and "I told you so", never any concern for the people involved. Nobody went to bat for these people to (in some cases) even get a portion of their life savings back. If we as a society are saying it's a good thing for the Feds to make depositors in institutions that fail whole, why is this only applying to one form of exchange? If crypto is a legal thing, then I'm not seeing a strong case for treating it any differently by the financial system. Just something that rubs me the wrong way about this case.

Crypto's unique selling point was freedom from government intervention.

It's bizarre to argue that such a service is equally deserving of the rare privilege of government intervention to protect losers as a financial product whose unique selling point is stability and government intervention to prevent deposit holders. And of all the entities governments could theoretically bail out from badly run "unicorns" to individuals who can't make mortgage payments to Vegas gambling addicts, crypto is arguably the least deserving, and as a mostly-self contained shell game it had no contagion effect on the economy at all. There's no double standard whatsoever.

(The glee came from imagining it was the sort of person that spent their time running round the internet saying "enjoy being poor" that lost out - which unfortunately, it was probably mostly wasn't - but whether that was misdirected or not, it doesn't make gambling tokens that use lack of government oversight as a marketing angle something the government has special responsibility to prop up)

How many failed crypto exchanges are based in the US?

Last year Celsius and BlockFi crumbled and are domiciled in the US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com