He raised over $1 billion?!…there was really too much money floating around begging for where to invest circa 2020. The same goes for many questionable startups that raised money.
Notice how these schemes have disappeared in tough times.
Notice how these schemes have disappeared in tough times.
Much of the crypto market is a digital Potemkin village designed to make you feel like you're not nearly as alone as you are.
[1] https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8369-21
[2] https://news.bitcoin.com/ipo-coinbase-pays-cftc-6-5-million-...
<https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/3hrum5/degenerate...>
"Potemkin exchange, Potemkin conversation, it's Potemkins all the way down. Like a matrioshka doll each layer deeper is identical to the one before, but smaller and less articulately defined. "
Also, what on God's green flat earth was that article about? The one you were responding to, lol. I mean the late Mircea Popescu was a real piece of work, but, just, wow.
Although I will say in his direct company, he was fairly well-mannered and clearly had a curious mind but one warped by what must have been some sort of Trisomy on the asshole gene.
That article was lifted directly from his blog which, I'm not sure may still be active even now, that contain much of his musings on that same topic as well as lots of others, all as reprehensible and in my view absolutely would have entitled him to an early death - assuming he didn't fake it.
Sierpinski scheme, hah! Now I really want to somehow tie that end with Zooko's triangle. Reminds me of the guy who made a guide to "writing your first ethereum contract in Pyramid Scheme" oh another variation just occured to me: Fractal Fraud
Liquidity is liquidity.
If liquidity goes away when big boys start selling, then, well, someone would have picked up on that, shown that, with data.
Otherwise, the (very real!) accusations of wash trading and other price fixing don't have tons to do with available liquidity, which as a term, refers to an investors ability to sell in a timely fashion.
I doubt anyone would try and liquidate it in a single transaction on public markets.
There is pretty decent liquidity for ETH and BTC at least, both on and off-chain.
Maybe Ethereum is "liquid" enough to absorb that withdrawal (Madoff was plenty liquid until he wasn't), that doesn't mean there's actually any real value.
https://ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2020-12-31-bitcoin-pon...
https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-pon...
or if that's too long then consider how any of these crypto"currencies" with transaction fees are negative sum games and such they are scams (and no, stocks, gold and cash are not such).
> https://www.ic.unicamp.br/~stolfi/bitcoin/2021-01-16-yes-pon...
Points 3, 4, & 5 apply similarly to any investments made in commodities (gold, silver, copper). A direct source of revenue for those commodities themselves is not provided: There are no dividends being paid out just because I hold 1 kg of gold in a safe. Instead, the people that want to use that gold for other purposes is what provides revenue.
Point 1 & 2 can similarly be demanded from commodities as well. The only difference being is that the public market is where I can cash out my 1kg of gold to.
> *By that definition, gold too is a ponzi.* No, gold clearly fails to satisfy that definition on two counts.
> First, few if any gold investors have expectations of profits. They generally invest in gold as a hedge -- a "store of value" -- that they hope will retain its value in case other assets go sour.
There is no difference between the expectation of profits & stores of value: They're facets of the same diamond - Value. The pursuit of one is a masked notion of the other & vice versa - Expectations of profit are a consequence of wanting to retain & accumulate resources against the eroding forces of inflation & entropy in general, & a desire for stores of value is of similar expectation that the overall value grows faster than the eroding forces themselves.
> Second, as a commodity, gold HAS a source of revenue besides the investors; namely, the purchases by consumers like jewelers and industry, who take gold out of the market (2/3 of the production) for uses other than re-sale. When one buys 1 oz of gold, one gets a chip of a metal that one can sell to those consumers, and thus obtain some money that does not come from other investors.
Again, as stated above, the gold itself doesn't have inherent value: It's value comes from what can be done with it after being transformed/used for something else.
Similarly, digital services have already been shown to be commodifiable via AWS' EC2 Spot Instances & their fluctuating prices as demand changes.
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/spot/pricing/
The consequence of this logic is that in the long term, such compute can eventually be accessed by *anyone* from *anyone* willing to sell it via public markets. HOWEVER, such a public market was not yet feasible due to the possibility of such computations not actually being done & fraudulently being reported as such. The stopgap between that future is what we have now: Centralized companies selling compute under trust-based assumptions that do currently work, but that present significant problems related to control over said compute.
The technology was not there yet, but it's being launched now.
EVM-based & Turing-complete VMs in general will generally be made more verifiable with the rollout & integrations of ZK (0-knowledge) proving systems into said VMs. When such computations can be verified to have been genuinely computed within 1/2^n (n >= 64) of an error rate, the addition of a public market to make such compute sellable to people that want said compute is the next logical step, to which Ethereum, its L2 solutions (zkSync, Polygon zkEVM, Optimism, Arbitrum, etc.), & all Lx (x > 2) markets that will come in the future, have already & will provide.
[1] Negative carry means it costs money to hold an asset on an ongoing basis. Given most assets have transaction costs when you buy or sell, anything with negative carry will be a negative sum game in your terminology. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/costofcarry.asp
> as a commodity, gold HAS a source of revenue besides the investors; namely, the purchases by consumers like jewelers and industry, who take gold out of the market (2/3 of the production) for uses other than re-sale.
So for that reason it is still a negative carry asset (ie it costs money to hold on an ongoing basis).
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/122214/what-differe...
This lets them claim truly astronomical levels of participation to better sucker people in to participating... but it turns into a liability when the SEC prosecution comes a knocking.