Comment by norswap | Hacker News Reader

Comment by norswap | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know how bankruptcy documents work, but this is not a filling, it's a general-audience article.

The truth is if you had one Bitcoin in FTX, that was worth 20k. You might have bought for more or less than that. Now it's worth 60k. You didn't get the 20k back immediately (in which case you could have repurchased the Bitcoin immediately and not lose anything).

- If you bought Bitcoin above 20k, you lost money, whereas you wouldn't have otherwise. - If you would have kept your Bitcoin, you would have 60k now. You didn't get a choice in the matter.

The problem if of course "what is money" — the thing you owned was a Bitcoin, and now you're getting back its value from back then in dollar terms. This value changed meanwhile, shocking! But quite clearly, most people would have had more money now if that hadn't happened.

So while it's possible that some people would have sold lower than 24k (it didn't stay that low very long), most people wouldn't have, and so they lost money, in the commonly accepted undertanding.

Imagine the government seized your house 10 years ago, then paid you back today its price from 10 years ago +20%. Did you not lose money?

This is such a bad faith argument.

Imagine you put up your house as an investment into some crypto exchange and the exchange goes bankrupt because it turns out they're misusing customer funds and defrauding their customers. You'll get your house back when legal proceedings are done. What value that house has before or after is sort of irrelevant except as a way for you to twist the issue to fit your narrative. Nobody made you put up your house in some nonsense crypto exchange. That was you.

Be glad the government is involved at all or you might not be getting anything back.

But what if instead of getting your house back, you're only getting the cash equivalent of what your house was worth THEN, plus some interest. Meanwhile, your house, which you no longer own, has tripled in value.

This is unironically the reason why stock trading is so heavily regulated.

If you looked at Bitcoin, whose entire pitch is that it's a poorly regulated speculative instrument, and thought "I'm going to put my house in this" you are an adult accepting unreasonable levels of risk.

Just because FTX (predictably) was run by a con man who got his whole company shut down DOESN'T MEAN that you're a victim. You gambled money you didn't have on a system you didn't care to understand and you are lucky to even get the money back.

>Be glad the government is involved at all or you might not be getting anything back.

This. I'm constantly surprised that the government helps people in these situations. If they want the government to be involved, they should push for crypto to actually follow all of the laws that apply to traditional financial things, which would eliminate a lot of these scams that end up requiring government intervention in the first place.

That's the job of a government, and why would people fund it through taxes if it doesn't do its job?

>That's the job of a government, and why would people fund it through taxes if it doesn't do its job?

Regulation and protection go hand in hand, if you don't want the regulation, you shouldn't be able to ask for the protection that goes along with it. If you want to gamble your real money by converting it to fake digital tokens, that's fine, but you shouldn't ask the government to use taxpayer money bail you out afterwards. If you want government protection for investments, you should invest in schemes that are regulated by the government instead.

Because many people do not want the government to regulate crypto.

Is that really a majority? I have big trouble believing so. The majority still doesn't know what is bitcoin (except "that money thing").

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