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Comment by Tectosage | Hacker News Reader

This pitch worked much better in the 80s and 90s when

A) most investors had a broker not just for advice, but because there was no easy way to trade individually or get live stock quotes until the internet was widespread and matured

B) telephone sales in general were more common then and less likely to be a scam (Stratton Oakmont and other boiler rooms played a large role in shifting public opinion on this)

C) The most desirable prospects (High Net Worth Individuals) were accustomed to dealing with legitimate brokers over the phone and being solicited by brokers from other legitimate firms in such a way

D) The markets were raging in such a way that everyone had FOMO and was dying to hear of a hot new tip

Almost nobody legitimate in the financial advising world acquires customers via cold call pitching anymore. Cold calling is still part of the toolkit for other sales niches (eg, tech sales) but it's a tough road with a low success rate.

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>telephone sales in general were more common then and less likely to be a scam

Caller had to pay long distance costs at the time and really until you got in the later 90s early 2000's did you start seeing unlimited long distance everywhere.

Getting cold calls from random people way back then was super rate because it was expensive.

"Extremely cheap global telecommunications accessible to everyone" came with a lot of drawbacks we didn't consider at the time they started to become viable. Although all the spam in our inboxes should have been a clue.

With enough technological development we can make everything in the future like getting off from the airport train in a big third world city and surrounded by beggars and fraudsters. Robocalls, AI blogspam, Email, Facebook etc.

Not exactly an advantage to pay a fee to a middleman. It's more like frictionless communication should be the default, and we had a period where friction accidentally acted as signal

I want frictionless communication with the people I've already communicated with, but very high friction communication with people I've never talked to before. I'd love a way to charge $10 to get into my inbox. If it ends up being a long lost friend or whatever, I'll Venmo them back the $10.

This use case is actually the reason we have bitcoin, tho it's a shame it took off as a protest to banks instead of getting implemented as a functional anti-spam tool. To this day spam is regularly in my inbox and I have to check my spam folder for legitamate messages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash

Well, no. That’s the reason we have hash cash (the pow algo for bitcoin)

Bitcoin itself, as with most early cryptocurrencies, is and was a protest against banks and centralized finance.

fair enough, I should say it was a prerequisite

There's nothing stopping this from happening. Build encryption into the email protocols and hide the decrypt key behind a block chain that costs even $0.01 of a fungible token to access.

the blockchain, as usual, is not necessary, the header is proof enough on that a penny worth of energy[0] was expended in generating the hash

[0] (or however much energy you want to demand before throwing the message in the spam folder - you just require whatever number of leading zeros in the hash ie crank up the difficulty, bitcoin's innovation was assigning ownership to these proofs-of-work via signatures and implementing a mechanism to update and broadcast that ownership)

Ye imagine if you got 50c for each call or email you received not on a whitelist and the social contract was to refund it by pressing #1 after the call ended or whatever.

Pay numbers are a thing so I guess it should be doable.

Yes please. SMS too.

If I was your long lost friend I probably wouldn't pay the $10 upfront.

Not much of a friend then eh

You can send everyone not on a list to spam and auto respond with a link to pay you $10 to get on the white list

should be doable

Not currently doable with phone calls.

From what I understand, the caller ID feature is completely useless. There is no willingness to implement rules that guarantee the number the call is coming from is the owner of the number. The best you can do is call them back and hope the routing doesn't get screwed up.

Depends on the circuit that you are dialling out onto.

I know where I work there are some rules about presenting whatever number you want on our trunk provider, but this is something they have put in place themselves with no "legal" reason for them to do it. We've been working with them for years so we are one of their trusted clients and have the ability to present any number we want as long as we have permission to do so from the number owner.

The fact its up to the trunk provider to put these rules in place and not just standard everywhere is wild to me.

There’s lots of services like this that I have seen, including a popular one where you can donate $1 to a charity in order for your email to reach someone’s inbox.

You'll have to just to send your reply!

You don't actually want frictionless communication. Frictionless communication will drown you in a mountain of spam.

A 'Frictionless' ability to transmit puts all the friction, pain, and negative externalities onto the recipient.

I mean if the signal isn't replaced by anything, then the onus is put on to the person receiving the call. If years ago, there was a barrier for an army of phone scammers from across the world throwing everything they can think of at an old person with borderline dementia, and suddenly that went away..I don't know how you can really justify the "frictionless communication" outside of a couple of options. A) "Well it's their fault, they should be on their guard all the time everyone is always trying to scam and manipulate you" -- (idk about you but this seems pretty grim and inhumane) B) "well it's a net benefit for ~someone~ so we should all be happy about it, and refer to A)"

> It's more like frictionless communication should be the default

No. We should have complete control on how much friction anybody gets to communicating with us. And frictionless should absolutely not be the default.

Friction is signal.

I recall I used to individually send snaps to like 30 friends each time, back before Snapchat invented Stories. I had to think a tiny bit, and put a tiny bit of effort, for each person. We lost that when people started posting to stories only.

This is a great point. "More common" wasn't the best choice of words because it implies a higher frequency, which was not the case. "More acceptable/accepted/normalized" would have been better phrasing.

I mean, if you want to be pedantic about it, I suppose it depends on whether or not “telephone sales” implies something actually being sold.

Up until the early 90's if you wanted a stock price intraday, you had to call your broker. Your alternative was waiting until the morning and getting previous close from NYT or WSJ.

Totally.-

PS. Brings back memories. Won an US, national high school "paper trading" contest back in the day. Out of 14000 participants. Was quite proud ...

Trick to winning is to make a couple of insane bets that end up panning out, yeah?

Can't speak to that, but I remember spending hours and hours and hours pouring over stock listings after hours.-

I distinctly remember we used a newspaper that I think is still around called IBD "Investors Business Daily", and they had this system that worked really well ("C-A-N-S-L-I-M").-

And I remember pouring over thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of possibilities each day, and basically doing fundamental and technical analysis. I would filter out the candidates with broad technical analysis and then review the fundamentals of each, looking up each company on huge binders - yes, paper - from a subscription service the school had that had all financial and other info for all listed companies.-

And it worked out. At some point, I caught a few big ones that just went ballistic. And it worked out great. One of the things it did is it taught me the value of effort. And I distinctly remember another thing, too. I distinctly remember being called by the organization to let me know I was winning, having won, all but certainly.-

And the day after that, right before the closing of the ranking, running out of trades - because one had a limited amount of trades to perform during the competition. So I could not close a position I had, which had earned me a lot, so I wound up at a loss after having won, which, and I shall never forget this, ended up with my teacher basically saying, "I have seen how much effort you put into this, so I will give you -my account- to handle, so you can continue trading, so you will always remember that hard work and effort pays off in the end".-

In the end I did loose my ranking and with too little time could not catch up, even with the second account.-

So, I lost, but - in a way - I won, because I "won" that lesson ...

And gush bump it, it's a lesson I've never forgotten.-

So thank you, Mr. Brown.-

IBD - The ol' cup and handle. I still use it to this day when selling puts.

I mean they had (O'Neil and Co.) some great, solid points.-

(And, in the days before the internet their listings were great ...)

Did you become a trader?

Ah! The "fundamental" question :)

No, I did not.-

PS. Funny thing is I remember being asked, by the organization - whether I was going to go into finance at the time. Of course, I emphatically said that I was.-

I guess "life" took over. It is what happens to you while you make other plans, after all ...

... but the lesson(s) learned have remained with me.-

I remember doing something similar with a website in high school. Some people made reasonable investments and did well. Some people made insane bets that panned out and did better. The winner correctly guessed that the site wouldn't properly account for stock splits and merges and went hunting for stocks that were about to merge.

> The winner correctly guessed that the site wouldn't properly account for stock splits and merges and went hunting for stocks that were about to merge.

Smart, actually.-

Ahh, the "Stock Market Game". It still exists: https://www.stockmarketgame.org/

It's more sophisticated now, and like you, when I was in school (middle school in the late 80s), we just tracked our portfolio performance using daily newspapers. I remember buying a couple of symbols for companies I'd never even heard of, and knew nothing about. Probably not the best that this was a thing led by our social studies teacher.

Fascinating to know that it still exists. Thank you for bringing it up ...

Actually, these "wargames" serve another IMHO crucial purpose - and another lesson I gathered from the whole experience, early: Learn to invest. And learn to invest as an structural part of one's development.-

Also worth noting companies like Cutco use a similar script and a cold-calling approach, it doesn't work nearly as well as it used to though because most people don't answer numbers they don't know, so they train people to leave a message and say that a close friend (the reference) told you to call them

Remember, this was not too far removed from the era of https://youtu.be/2MXqb1a3Apg?si=J7Q_9hBYin2KWKwN

In our world of limited source credibility and disdain for expertise, this video and the script do seem like throwbacks to another time.

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