Tell me again about how crypto is not a scam?
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.
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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.
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.