I mean there are also other stories; an acquaintance (he invested in my business with cash in 2018) got out end 2017 with around 60m$ in cash; he was a waiter making minimum wage who borrowed 50k$ from his family who remortgaged their house (not rich people but at least house owners) in 2014 and gambled his families future and accidentally (he was a real believer, but the 'business scams' around blockchain made him a non-believer) gambled right. It's a weird casino.

Maybe it is my circle (but I read it on reddit all the time the past 10 years though) but the financially illiterate seem far more likely to 'invest' with borrowed money, do not diversify and put 'everything on red'/all-in kind of thing and then don't know what to do when that goes wrong (lie to their spouses and kids about it). An senior sales guy of my (then) company invested ALL his money and borrowed more (totaling many millions) in a Dutch web stock (worldonline) and lost everything; his wife, son, house, cars; basically life.

As in, it's easy to be the best in your local club, but it's a real wake-up call when you try out at a regional.

Terra certainly has an element of complicated financial dynamics behind it such that people who know a little--but not a not--may think it's the greatest idea since sliced bread, and get eaten by the professionals. I agree with you there.

But a lot of the crypto ecosystem seems to be much more mundane than that. As far as I can tell, there isn't any financial wizardry behind NFTs; they're just a sort of weird social phenomena (is it a game? is it a market? is it sports betting?) where you can buy a thing at a price that has no basis in reality except insofar as someone else might buy the thing at an even higher price. I think that many--most?--people "investing" in NFTs realize and embrace the greater fool theory.

But, importantly, it seems to me that a random yahoo might actually be better able to predict when the gravy train will stop than an elite trader. So in some sense, it's quite egalitarian (if also stupid)!

The Luna "automatic peg" stuff is genuinely clever, but with genuinely surprising implications (at least for me, a casual observer/layperson) for dynamic instability.

But yes, I agree with you; they will be taking most the winnings because it's their job. That doesn't mean you cannot make money as an amateur. The real naive people can just send their money directly to the Blackrock bank account; saves a lot of stress.

If your luna stop loss was done in UST, you are also effed, even if you took the precaution of stop loss, because the "stable"coin dipped. Not saying that this was "safe" to do, but there are surely people out there who did this and got screwed, and I guess that would feel terrible.

Absolutely; there are proud whales saying they lost millions and laughing (not sure why) but I am very sorry for the people who lost a few k$ and now are in deep shit because they didn’t understand what they were doing. The ‘how can this be; I will get my money back right?’ type of thing.

A lot of crypto grifters (and even mainstream celebrities) have been actively encouraging these people to sink literally all their capital in coins or NFTs with unrealistic promises and FOMO. They did this because they knew it would work and drive up prices enough for them to be able to cash out by dumping their worthless void money on the unwashed masses.

Let’s be real, much of the market activity is money laundering, ransomware and other payoffs, and Chinese people bypassing currency controls.

It’s no coincidence that China cracked down on miners and the price dropped a few months ago. It’s plain as day now that with Russia being removed from the internet and most markets, buy-side demand for crypto is sinking.

First movers want to sound and convince others they are right and “now” is the right time to step in.

Most of it can be debunked if you had a good economy course that tells you how value is created.

Unfortunately, reality is a harsh mistress.

Now they might find some new investors, but it will only delay the inevitable.

Sounds like a classical pump-and-dump scheme.

Also known as "please continue holding the bag".

See Reddit's "apecoin" subreddit, which had two suicide threats yesterday.

Outside NFTs? C'mon. Signed JSON blobs with a URL you pay for? All equally worthless.

Let's not "my god is better than your god" this.

Why would NFTs be worth anything more than the digital tulip bulbs of cryptocurrencies? NFTs are just as worthless IMHO.

NFTs are a bit like celebrity signatures. They are worth what someone will pay. If a celebrity verifiably digitally signs something and they only do it once, that is worth something to some people as a collectible. It is not worthless as long as someone is willing to pay something. And, like other collectibles the market can have huge swings and sometimes never recover (like all my baseball cards lol).

For one thing, they're by definition tied to a shitty blockchain and you have to deal with any potential bullshit affecting said chain including fees, slow transactions, potential scams, etc. For another, they're not really an object, just a bit of json pointing likely pointing towards a flat image hosted somewhere else (that anyone can freely access via the link). Sure, they enjoyed a brief popularity and lots of media attention, but already the NFT marketplace seems to be waking up to the reality that most of these "investments" will never turn a profit. And that's the real issue I see: most of these purchases were not someone who wanted to collect something, they were made by someone who wanted to invest in an asset that would later be worth something. And so the actual value as a "collectible" has been inflated and is due for a huge crash, which is already happening.

I know some are meant to carry benefits towards the holder, like exclusive access to X service or community... that is a small minority currently though, and many of those benefits are shaping up to be just empty promises, and even then an NFT seems like a poor vehicle for systems that could have been done better without any "decentralization" or crypto integration.

NFTs are worth nothing to me, but so are celebrity signatures. That doesn't mean they are generally worthless b/c people collect all sorts of stuff.

Mobile games have taken this much further, with people buying fungible tokens for hundreds of dollars for the enjoyment they get, though this has become questionable as more of the game is engineered towards feeding an addiction which will cause players to pay more for their enjoyment.

The issue is the approximate cap on this value. Even by the inflated standards of whales paying for mobile games, we still see a cap of value around $1,000s for a month of value. Thus an NFT that provides value in a similar ecosystem should be able to max out at a similar evaluation, assuming it is tied to a system with as much investment in the fun as the big hit mobile games (which is often quite a lot of investment compared to what any single player, even whale, is spending).

We see NFTs going for much more than that in systems that have far less investment in being enjoyable, which I think can be contributed to people investing to get rich by selling at an even higher price.

In conclusion, I think that NFTs can have some inherent value, as much as fungible tokens in a game can, but that such value would be far below where the market currently is. Someone should only spend as much on NFTs when the enjoyment they get from spending on NFTs matches the enjoyment that similar amounts of money would bring from their other hobbies.

One of the big appeals from crypto people is essentially “all money is bullshit, so buy my bullshit”. The even nuttier people would position Bitcoin as gold.

It's because they know. I think everybody knows that crypto is a bubble. I think everybody believes everyone else that buys into it is dumb, financially illiterate, whatever. The crypto market has been propped up and boosted by an influx of people like that, each one knowing it's a bubble, believing everyone else is an idiot... but still wanting a slice of the pie, just in case there's another big wave coming and they will make it rich themselves. It's an interesting study in idk, doublethink? Self-delusion? Wishful thinking?

I lauched at friends of my fatherinlaw back in 2018 when they were buying bitcoin at 15k. Obviously it popped.

Today it's down 50% on ATH, but it's still more than double it's 2018 bubble level.

If you meant “in the future it may be again more than double its 2018 bubble level” you could have phrased it more clearly.

The 2018 peak was above 19k, by the way.

Today it will buy you €96, ¥13000, CHF100, £82

Not a great deal of movement

Source: savings accounts.

Six years ago daily usdt volumes would not break 3 percent of bitcoin trade volume. Now they routinely break three hundred percent. It is an indisputable scam and needs the flush it so richly deserves. And I say this as somebody pro crypto who honestly wants to see legitimate crypto do what it can for the world. Transparently manipulating this market the way it has for so long now is not doing that. We need real prices.

There was a very brief period when bitcoin might have been the start of such a thing. When companies were adding support for it, and people were spending 200+ bitcoin on pizza, actually doing useful things like transferring money internationally, etc.

But these days? It's all speculation, gambling, and HODLing to the moon.

Maybe in the future we'll have a cryptocurrency which is actually usable as a currency, spent, and being in circulation, not being mined and hoarded by people who expect 1000000% returns.

Constant booms, busts, and panics. The period of the most financial instability in history occurred under the gold standard.

A dollar is X milli-ounces of gold, a Pound Stirling is Y milli-ounces.

They are effectively pegged at an X:Y ratio. But currency pegging has issues in practice, with Governments only able to keep it stable within certain limits. Outside those limits bad things will happen if you don't update the peg ratio. But when using a gold standard, if you have to adjust how much gold your unit of currency is worth, it makes people upset. If you make a dollar worth less gold people with dollars get quite upset. Also if people expect such a redenomination will be occuring, it can cause on run on the gold reserves.

Meanwhile, if you make a dollar worth more gold, you piss off anybody holding gold.

The changing of the ratio is even worse if you are using precious metal coinage that have the specified amount of gold (or silver, for the silver-standard) in them. If the ratio needs to change, now you have all this money with a face value, precious metal content mismatch.

And all this is on top of the fact by using the gold standard, the rate of gold mining can heavily impact the economy.

Imagine a world of 100 people and 100 dollars.

If the population doubles, and the 100 dollars remains fixed, the value of the dollar has increased.

If more dollars are not printed to maintain some inflation, people will slow spending hoping for 300 people the next year.

Now, in the case of BTC, it’s not global population that matters, but the population of interested users, which could go from 10,000 to 100,000,000 in months. If BTC can’t be mined fast enough to maintain a balance of coins/users as interest skyrockets, it is, by definition, deflationary.

I have heard the argument that deflation is just an unthinkable disaster for my entire life but I'm not convinced, rather it seems like a convenient excuse for countries to print their way out of budgetary problems.

That's the key. With a deflationary currency you want to keep the money, but need to buy goods. With an inflationary currency you want to buy the goods, so you only keep as much money as you need. This means that an inflationary market has shorter dependency chains, less disruptions (because value is more easily predictable) and generally runs more efficiently. Deflationary value incentivizes consuming less; inflationary value incentivizes consuming more. This is why economies grow and produce more value.

Of course this can be overdone by having an inflation that's so fast that deep production chains become impossible to manage, so you generally want inflation that's low enough that investment-based value gain is not affected, but high enough that money is not a viable investment vehicle.

Remember that money is what you have instead of something useful.

edit: For instance, if you have hyperinflation, you cannot buy a fabrication machine for your factory, because the monetary value of the machine grows faster than your ability to save money. The best use of money is always consumptively spending it immediately. This is also inefficient. So you want to balance between those two problems.

This might be true for food, but a lot of our economy is based on investments and things we don't strictly need. Why would I give money to a startup if I can simply leave it on my bank account and have a guaranteed return?

> Conversely in in an inflating currency scenario yes I might spend the money sooner than I would otherwise, but then in the future I won't be able to spend it again, why is it so much better that I buy today instead of tomorrow?

Because it keeps the money in circulation. You might spend the money, but that money then gets to a business. This business also doesn't want money lying around, so they might, for example, build something. Which gives the money to a building company. Which then gives the money back to the worker. That's a lot of movement and value creation. Also, you really want to spend or invest the money sooner, since you won't get as much for your money if you buy something tomorrow instead. With deflation, this whole reasoning is reversed - why would you spend any more money than necessary, if you can buy much more with it tomorrow? You wouldn't and this kills the economy.

The only thing it's useful for is financial crime though - if your problem is just making a payment you can do it in dollars relatively easily and safely.

Transferring money from the EU to UK, or EU to USA, Peru, or Canada get more complicated and expensive though. Those are the kind of transfers I had in mind.

There are transferwise, and similar services, but even so it's not as cheap as it should/could be.

I was visiting Montreal from the US a couple decades ago, and I wanted to exchange some US dollars for Canadian, and in the financial center, I found five different exchanges with five different rates. I had to walk about six blocks total to hit them all, but the difference between the lowest and highest was significant.

Why do you need to convert currency when transferring to someone in another country in the first place? Because the banking infrastructure in that country is denominated in their currency. Because their bank account only permits them to hold balances in that currency. And because only funds in that currency are guaranteed by the banking laws in that country.

If it weren’t for that, currency conversions could be ignored! If everyone in the world had bank accounts that could handle euros, say, you could transfer funds globally; people could make purchases by transferring euros, etc etc.

In fact there’s not a lot stopping you from doing that. You can have an account denominated in whatever currency you like. Provided you don’t care about things like deposit protection.

And that’s all Bitcoin and other crypto really add to the mix - a uniformly available currency for denominating non-deposit-protected balances.

Saying someone committed a financial crime depending on jurisdiction can be entirely different things.

And to be frank, I don't buy that financial Total Information Awareness is necessarily a good thing for a society to have.

Privacy is only useful for crime?

And indeed, digital fiat is used in production all the time and very useful.

So we know USD is a scam and manipulated heavily. Learn about The Fed..

> BTC

And here we have an alternative. This is one of the primary reasons why BTC is so important.