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Comment by VoodooJuJu | Hacker News Reader

The most enlightening things to come out of the crypto craze:

1. There is an overwhelming abundance of rich idiots in this world. Wealth-merit determinism has been publicly dealt a serious blow that I hope people will take to heart.

2. Finance is a mature and ever-evolving complex technology in itself that has proved why it is the way it is, and no amount of idealist nerds and their "investor" fools can possibly knock it down. It must be humbling to rediscover every regulation and facet of finance, one crypto-blunder at a time. Finance as an industry attracts some of the world's most intelligent and most ruthless individuals, but you think they're somehow leaving money on the table? You think you can do better because you know python and cryptography 101? Really?

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Software engineers have been re-inventing concepts again and again since the 1970's. It isn't that much of a stretch to believe that they would do the same thing to finance.

Too bad most of them don't bother to learn anything about finance before trying to disrupt it and instead fall back on libertarian wet dreams of feeling the ghastly embrace of the ghost of Ayn Rand.

Software also kind of has reinvented finance. The crypto thrust specifically not so much, but the modern financial system does not look the way it does without software.

> The most enlightening things to come out of the crypto craze:

> 1. There is an overwhelming abundance of rich idiots in this world. Wealth-merit determinism has been publicly dealt a serious blow that I hope people will take to heart.

And somehow people still say poor people are poor because they lack financial intelligence and we could fix their poverty by giving them finance education. No poor people are poor because they lack money, because of that they must be smarter with their money, they can't afford to loose it.

Rich people on the other hand don't need to care. I would even say that many don't even notice the money they lost here

I think only rich people say the poor need financial intelligence and then they make things like Robinhood so the poor can feel like they have financial intelligence while losing money and the rich get richer.

Probably not so much actual poor people but I expect some non-trivial number of not-rich people bet money on cryto that they couldn't really afford to lose either from simple greed/FOMO or because they convinced themselves that their only ticket to the good life was to gamble.

3. Certain politicians pretend to care about privacy until it comes to financial privacy, pretend to oppose crypto for environmental reasons but think no differently when they become unmineable, and pretend to oppose crypto for technical reasons but support CBDCs which inherit all technical shortcomings of cryptocurrencies minus the privacy and security guarantees. If you believe in the right to controlling other people’s money, just say that instead of hiding behind a facade of investor protections and other nonsense that you make illegal to opt out.

> an overwhelming abundance of rich idiots in this world

One of the smartest things I heard said about crypto is it’s an unvarnished metric of the animal spirits in our world. Its optimal price isn’t zero. But somewhere just above it. Enough to inspire productive work, but not enough to gain animation of its own.

People had money.

People made poor decisions re: FTX and lost a lot of that money.

So now they have less money.

How else do you expect it to work?

If someone had a lot of money, and they didn’t blow it all, then they’re just less rich.

If someone had a little money and they didn’t blow it all, now they’re just a bit more poor.

If someone had a lot of money and blew it all, they’re now broke.

If someone had a little money and blew it all, they’re now broke too.

Seriously, what is the alternative here?

Honestly, if you're a con artist, the list of FTX victims (that will eventually come out) and the people screaming about the future of NFTs on Twitter are a wonderful rolodex of soft targets.

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