Reddit mods dumped tokens hours before blockchain program termination
cointelegraph.com
cointelegraph.com
So if I understand correctly, this was a site level feature, and admins gave a 1h heads up to the moderators of the specific subreddits using that feature, allowing the moderators to sell early.
Wouldn't the blame here be more on the admins? Is there a reason this "heads up" was secretly only given to mods, and not just announced publicly right away?
Per the SEC's definition (and thus prevailing law of the land), this is already illegal insider trading. That said, it's a low enforcement priority, largely on account of the victims being unsympathetic.
the crass bullshit that people on HN say astounds me every day. the victims here are literally the people who need protecting the most
If you look at my comment history, you'll see I'm for enforcement. When I've advocated for it, this is what I've been told: crypto enthusiasts aren't a sympathetic victim block. That leads to reduced enforcement when they're the victims. When it's regular folk, like those depositing with Gemini Earn, we get enforcement.
Same reason we don't see enforcement against dealers of adulterated illegal drugs in respect of their adulteration. The victims aren't sympathetic.
Don’t tell me 13% of all Americans don’t deserve enforcement at least of the rules by which crypto currencies should operate. I’m not asking for the moon here.
Yes, it is. Some parties are trying to have it struck down. That hasn’t happened yet.
https://www.startupblog.com/sec-approves-token-sale-through-...
However they aren't paid so I could see how someone could easily justify doing this as "payment" for their hard Reddit mod work they have put in.
Singapore?
So paying mods might reduce that behavior since their power is tied to them doing their job properly and there is an authority to appeal to if they suck and abuse power.
Not to say dang isn't doing a great job only because he's paid to! But I agree with you, paid mods have different rewards and goals than volunteer mods.
Also, in this case, mods didn't use their power, they used their information.
I have a feeling you are correct in some ways (depending on which sub you were a mod of, r/the_donald was a very different crowd with different mod practices than something like r/pics) but a lot of the complaints also come from disagreements about particular interpretations of the rules and lack of recourse to an adjudicator with higher authority. I'm sure there are plenty of petty mod actions, especially on Reddit when posting in one sub can automatically get you banned in another if a mod checks your history.
Reddit is a special rodeo that I spent way longer than 8 seconds on. Positives came out of my time there but my, my was it too much time overall lol
Also fairly draconian punishments without a reddit-mandated ratcheting policy for further violations. I once got a 30 day ban for a first offense that was easily dealt with within 5 minutes of my post (which I was in the process of editing) by shadow-banning my post.
[0]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Buttcoin/comments/17cikr2/reddit_mo...
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/17a33ql/ser...
Most of the mods involved are no longer mods. At least one (TNGSystems) is still a mod since they waited until the official announcement before dumping their position. Here is their explanation: https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrencyMeta/comments/17b8lqe... In this argument you can only see TNGSystems's responses because all the comments from the other side were deleted by moderators.
Copied for posterity:
> If I’m an asshole for selling my moons in order to provide a guaranteed safety blanket while my wife is off on maternity leave and I’ve got to cover all bills & upkeep & all the new shit we have to buy for a baby, then so be it.
> I hadn’t made my mind up on selling, even when the announcement was posted. Otherwise I would’ve done it after 10 seconds, not 3 and 6 mins after it was posted.
> At the end of the day I decided to take a guaranteed chunk of cash in return for my contributions, time and energy rather than wondering if the system can be built back up by mods.
> Crypto is a zero sum game.
How long is the time lag between posting it there and when the typical holder of Moons would have been notified?
(Think: Efficient Market Hypothesis viz. time lag of disclosure)
(I didn't comment on his defense/explanation at all.)
Can anyone just answer what I asked?
It’s pretty shitty if he sold after the internal, and still even if he waited “3-6 minutes” after public, he still had an hour to prep his sell and make a decision on whether he would.
These "moons", or whatever, don't seem to have any connection with real world economic activity, and so are intrinsically worthless beyond the value that those involved in trading these notions give to them.
I wonder if there are any economic studies into the value that people place on assets and goods according to their direct connections with human wellbeing, e.g. food, housing, and clothing, vs capital, vs derivatives of capital such as shares etc, vs the crazy world of crypto.
https://blog.kraken.com/product/asset-listings/brick-and-moo...
Its a typical crypto scam bu with the extra step of reddi in between.
Unless everyone pulls their stake from the liquidity pool (it's the same "pull" in rugpull), there is always a counterparty to any sell/buy position.
From what I heard, this is exactly it. Going public as a crypto-tainted company would have reduced the pool of buyers and lowered the stock price.
Lemmy is growing and it s at this "not big enough" phase that makes things seem great . It doesnt scale, but it will be interesting to see how popular it will get before hitting the limit. Hopefully it will find equilibrium at a level that makes it still usable.
On the topic of its limit: when Digg/Reddit communities came about, the overall feeling was that people wanted to share and discuss things. There was far less polarization at early stages, which allowed for a rapid growth. Lemmy is already extremely polarized, with instances being defederated, never-ending hostile bickering in comments. This does not look like a welcoming community, and therefore is unlikely to grow into something that can compete with Reddit.
It will be interesting to see how lemmy goes . For me it is imnportant that it has an infinite Overton window even if it only happens on defederated edges. Popularity and reach is not everything, but the mere existence of all opinions is important
EDIT: Done.
Even if they aren't securities, a rug-pull of any medium of exchange ("reddit bucks") would fall under wire fraud. https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
> the four essential elements of the crime of wire fraud are: (1) that the defendant voluntarily and intentionally devised or participated in a scheme to defraud another out of money; (2) that the defendant did so with the intent to defraud; (3) that it was reasonably foreseeable that interstate wire communications would be used; and (4) that interstate wire communications were in fact used
The moment the seller knows that the tokens they are selling have taken a big hit to their value, they are engaging in parts 1 and 2 above when they attempt to sell the tokens to those ignorant of this hit in value. Parts 3 and 4 are guaranteed with internet architecture.
If this doesn't fall under the SEC's authority, they can easily send it on to the FBI.
Meanwhile, 27 more crypto crashes/scams/thefts/rug pulls just this month.[3]
[1] https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2022/07/crypto...
[2] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...
> The American supermarket chain and cookie butter paradise, Trader Joe's, has filed a lawsuit against the popular Trader Joe decentralized exchange. According to the lawsuit, the supermarket believes the exchange is trying to benefit off the supermarket's popularity.
> This is actually the second such lawsuit by the supermarket against the exchange, after the first was thrown out when defendants claimed that they had simply named the project after the co-founder's brother, Joe. However, shortly after the victory, a co-founder admitted on their blog that they "just named it Trader Joe, after the supermarket".
> Trader Joe's is seeking all profits made by the exchange, plus damages and compensation for the failed lawsuit last year.
Why not a licensing fee with retroactive pricing?
I doubt the supermarket wants to be affiliated with a crypto exchange.
Because their goal is to get the exchange to stop using their name. Charging a licensing fee would be the opposite of that.
But I find it pretty dumb that some people consider it an "investment", thus what should just be a silly thing with almost null value, becomes a multi million dollar market (with it's inevitable insider trading, pump and dumps, etc).
I know a bunch of mods are close with the admins so maybe there was a private discussion somewhere.
Sarcasm aside, this is a great example of why a partially regulated market is a good thing.
I would not be surprised. The arrogance and self-righteousness in his character had gotten pretty out of control.
The thing is, you have to be crazy to see it early I guess. If you don't get in at the beginning of these things, you will miss your hockey stick. AND, there has to be a fundamental advantage OTHER THAN hype to carry it forward.
*(Don't bother hacking me. There are none left, unfortunately, because I got disgusted by the scamminess of the people entering the market around 2016 or so and I don't like money sitting in things I'm not watching. And I now of course wish I hadn't've bought that Tesla with 2013-era bitcoins... A Tesla that still runs like a top. I've also survived multiple hacking attempts already. So, sellers' remorse, partly. Anyway. I believed in crypto, and survived crypto.)
It’s not about the possible outcomes but how the game/market actually works.
Just shows how powerful network effects are.
Even Mastodon bungles and messes up very simple things like uploading a PNG image, and it's not trying to match even 80% of reddit's functionality.
There is this hard to place aura about it, that the closest word I would use to describe it might be elitism. Despite being prescriptively and almost cloyingly inclusive at times, it’s still somehow not a place for all people and walks. Contrast that to a place like Facebook or Reddit, and even if you’re uneducated, technologically limited, and by all accounts living a most ordinary and unexamined life, you can find a community to welcome you. The fediverse really doesn’t have space for that sort of person, or really even folks who just empathize with such people and don’t mind them around.
And yes I know the fediverse is beautifully principled in that it’s not one thing or platform or instance and anyone can make their own blah blah but that’s not really how it plays out.
I don’t think the fediverse is a bad thing. But I do think it’s more of a home for the kind of people who love RSS feeds and classical music and vim and GPL and adblockers than it is for the huddled masses that comprise the majority of internet space.
To be honest i don't even care about that. As a user i want a place to store my thoughts, outside the impossibly juvenile corporate gardens, even if very few people read it. And if censorship becomes too much of a problem i can still create my own instance.
I mean if you want to join an instance with no rules that is a hive of horror and villainy, I'm pretty sure they are out there. They just won't be widely federated.
Basically, 99% of the people on the Fediverse are tech-savvy, anti-corporate, chronically-online people*. Which also means that there's a much smaller population, because it only consists of these types of people. Meanwhile, there are more "normal" people on Reddit so it has more/more active communities and the viewpoints are more diverse.
It's ironic seeing Lemmy have even worse left-wing bias than Reddit, because there's a lot of left-center people on Reddit, but mostly only radical leftists are motivated to participate in Lemmy.
* Excluding the nearly-separate Fediverse of right-wing groups, who move to alternative platforms because they're banned from centralized ones. Except it's also an extreme echo-chamber, just a different one.
Early Quora was a bit like that. I also used to visit a non-English website with a blog section that was amazing - wide variety of mostly smart people with memorable personalities and diverse set of opinions. There were heated debates on various topics, humor, technical posts about some niche field and a specific atmosphere, it felt a bit like a small-town pub. It was not an echo-chamber like most places today, probably because there was no comment voting. Little to no moderation. I still remember a lot of the people, which I can't say about HN or Reddit.
It's been a while since I took an econ class, but aren't all currencies, by definition, assets / stores of value?
Edit: Oh, you mean they're only assets but don't meet other criteria to be currencies?
Before eCommerce took off the internet was almost exclusively used for scams and arguably that is still the case even if not exclusively it's still a big part, so we should declare the internet a scam I suppose.
Disclaimer: I am not even heavily invested (in any sense). It's just a means to pay for stuff for me.
Yes and no. Modern currencies separate the medium of exchange and unit of account functions, on one hand, from the store of value and standard of deferred payment functions, on the other hand. Paper and deposit dollars are the former, Treasuries are the latter. Someone complaining about inflation eroding their cash under a mattress's value is literally using their dollars wrong.
So you're actually agreeing with me, that crypto currencies are not a scam. The number of currencies is also irrelevant even in a more colloquial sense. What's more important is how much is really invested in a given currency and the bad tokens are a niche. Ponzi scheme (or just new) coins are usually for gamblers and not in broad use and are comparable to jettons in a casino. Are jettons a scam in that sense?
The standard gambling that happens with "our current money system" can also happen with self-written IOUs. This kind of gambling isn't about the money, per se, whereas with crypto you get an additional kind of gambling on the currency itself.
I give you the point that it is harder (not impossible) to enforce any regulations on these currencies. It's like cash in that sense, but it has easy access and there are plenty of options of cash, which is unlike regular cash.
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What happened here is a rugpull. Not insider trading. The coin was collapsing, but plenty of people figured out how to make money even in the collapse.
Rugpulls don't really happen in the regulated market. But they are a dime a dozen on cryptocoins.
Sounds like they had...insider information?
Because most insider trading is trivial to catch. An insider trader has to act ex ante. That's difficult on multiple levels: acquisition of the information, predicting its effect and executing the trades all while evading capture. Detection, on the other hand, is ex post facto: find unusually profitable trades after the information has occurred. That's what the SEC does. To the extent insider traders aren't caught, it's because they failed to turn a profit.
Look at the people being caught insider trading; they're rarely professionals. Because professionals know how hard it is relative to the gains. Instead, it's mostly numpties who heard about an acquisition from their spouse or whatever.
With crypto, we have the tape. But linking the wallets to the numpties is hard. (Also fewer people care about the victims, let's be honest.) Imagine if this chain had real names attached to it. We'd have a predictable list of offenders to prosecute.
I think if blockchain projects offered a comparable value, people would have better ways to defend it than assuring everyone it's definitely not all a scam.
Anyway, Namecoin seemed like a pretty nice use case, even if it didn't take off. Smart contracts seem like a good idea to me. Behind all the hype and idiotic money chasing behavior and criminality there are some niche but proven-useful technical innovations. And despite people throwing blockchain-everything at the wall to see what sticks for some time, there's still plenty of opportunity for new applications to emerge.
People can't overpay if they can't buy it at all. By putting it on the market the seller aids and abets their buying at higher than the true market price. This is a social bad.
Heck look at the scandal (which imo should have been bigger) around congresspeople trading around mask/healthcare/vaccine stocks early in 2020 based on their reports while publicly downplaying risks.
That's because the US government at least hates competition. If people get too good at discovering the value of something those methods become illegal because it isn't fair to those who don't want to actually go after information and just want to read news headlines and earning reports.
Though maybe you're right. If it really loved competition it would be better at preventing monopolies, would bar patents, and do sundry other things that would guarantee an unregulated (by anyone, not just government) free-for-all.