Hacker News Reader

Comment by Sakos | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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?

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").

>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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com