There have been ICOs which definitely have been represented as securities and have been regulated/quashed/fined.
But when not used as a representation of ownership of currencies or assets... what is a cryptocurrency and does it fit into existing law about securities fraud?
Another way to ask the question: should the SEC regulate pump and dump schemes with collectables? (I'd say beanie babies and pokemon cards to date myself, I don't know what people are speculating on these days)
> The question is are cryptocurrencies securities?
The tax guidance in Canada says yes, they are.
I don’t think they’re being advertised like collectibles. They’re advertised like investments. This is the first time I’ve actually heard them compared to collectibles.
My personal experience makes me believe there’s not much liquidity. Also, as a class of currency the crypto scene is printing money faster than anything we’ve ever seen in history IMO.
There is a difference between an investment and a security.
A security is very specifically an instrument which represents the value of something else.
And tax guidance isn't the same as general classification of something (there are lots of really weird tax rules. For example: the US supreme court decided that a tomato was a vegetable, not a fruit for tax purposes while it is without any question actually a fruit.
The SEC regulates how companies represent themselves to investors and how certain things representing ownership are traded and represented. The exact surface that fits inside the SEC I don't know exactly and one has to be an expert to know (and the SEC doesn't necessarily know itself).
Cryptocurrencies went from being completely outside regulation to somewhat inside, but the laws, courts, and regulations are starting to slowly catch up. Everyone is still figuring out things as they go along.
When cryptos are used to represent a piece of ownership though, it is cut and dry, they are securities and subject to existing regulations.
When cryptos don't correspond to the value of something external though, they are somewhat new and just don't yet fit into the existing regulatory framework and the attitude of regulators is generally wait and see while going after the most clear abuses and easy cases first to build up a framework for whatever the future will hold.
"common sense" of what cryptos are or aren't doesn't work, whatever regulators do, there will be high profile lawsuits for the courts to decide what they are and aren't, shaping this process and doing things which are clearly legal or illegal first in the best interests of the regulator is what happens. (in other words, they don't want to go out on a limb right away in tricky edge cases, they want to get things in a pattern and decided with the easy cases first)
Ok. That makes sense. If I own a coin, the coin is the only thing I own. There’s no underlying security (asset) that gives it value.
So then it would be more accurate for me to have said that in Canada all crypto gains and losses are considered income or capital gains/losses for tax purposes. IE: You have to track your gains/losses like you do for stocks.
I only considered my side of the view where there’s not much difference. I’m guessing you’re talking about the side that creates coins where the technicalities of whether or not they’re securities makes a huge difference for regulatory requirements.
A broader question in my mind is: can smart people create anything ingenious that escapes being coopted / subsumed by the establishment? Or, can such a thing survive popularity on its own terms?
In the case of the Web, the answer clearly turned out to be a deafening No. Years ago, I had higher hopes for Bitcoin in this regard. Same for so called “censorship resistant decentralized platforms”. I spent years pondering how such a thing might work, before I realized that no technology, no matter how advanced, cannot be struck down by a single act of Congress. Save for cases of crystal clear constitutional protection, if any technology becomes a big enough problem, or a problem for the right people, it will have its day, and then it will be kneecapped.
Once you get popular enough, you become the establishment.
Once something becomes the lowest-common-denominator populist solution or the solution for the privileged, those use cases become "bad" because of value judgements of the people using them.
It's a kind of romanticism for rebellion, and with cryptos usually a broad misunderstanding of what money is, what it does, and how it works.
Indeed nothing can be the growing rebellious trend forever. It either wins and becomes the standard or dies failing to live up to whatever ideals it didn't actually have.
>can smart people create anything ingenious that escapes being coopted / subsumed by the establishment? Or, can such a thing survive popularity on its own terms?
No, everything has vulnerabilities that will be eventually exploited.
The American constitution and the many governments around the world inspired by it have done a pretty good job of avoiding a complete consumption (in ways that, for example, communism did not), in part by specifically designing not just to handle or avoid greed and control, but to use those characteristics of societies as a feature.
wasnt crypto's entire usp its decentralized nature? No Fed,SEC or other centralized body that would breathe down your neck. People didnt want these institutions controlling thir assets, i guess the obvious downside of no regulatory support when things go wrong should be part of the risk one takes when investing in crypto.
> wasnt crypto's entire usp its decentralized nature? No Fed,SEC or other centralized body that would breathe down your neck.
I can plant tobacco and make "unregulated cigarretes" with the goal of not being regulated by any government. The goal is that you can smoke it anywhere, no regulations on its composition, and I can advertise it anywhere.
That does not matter, it is still regulated and I cannot unilaterally opt-out of government regulations. (Or I can, but that is a crime and is what crime organizations do).
Not familiar with his crypto hustle, but I watched some Martin Kleppman talks on YouTube, and Tech Lead commercials started devouring my YouTube. The algorithm mistook me for not knowing how to code? Not sure.
Apparently this tech lead guy created programming videos to teach you how to get hired at big tech companies. It turned out the partner guy in the videos wasn’t even a developer but had maybe interned somewhere in data science? And both of these guys were claiming to be career professionals, as if they were staff or principal engineers.
The ads reminded me of another character from many years ago that would show off a Lamborghini or some sports car in his garage with a wall of books - another scammy self help guru.
Edit: I looked tech lead up on YouTube as I read the Reddit post and typed up this post. I can’t tell if this guy is trying to be a parody/using dry humor or if he’s a narcissist sociopath.
Sounds like you need to build some passive income streams and generate wealth. Please buy the online course I'm hucking on YouTube because I'm such an expert in these topics.
Seriously though, it pains me to see the young and naive fall for these scams. Also, wasn't there a data science YouTuber recently that was busted for more or less plagiarizing their content?
“Here in my garage, just bought this new Lamborghini here. It’s fun to drive up here in the Hollywood hills. But you know what I like more than materialistic things? Knowledge. In fact, I’m a lot more proud of these seven new bookshelves that I had to get installed to hold two thousand new books that I bought. It’s like the billionaire Warren Buffett says, “the more you learn, the more you earn.””
If you think about it that video is really a masterclass in how to instantly capture advertising audience attention. I'm willing to bet that ad had magnitudes lower skip rates than 99% of other YouTube ads.
I agree. I‘m guilty of doing so, because I found them bizarre and impudent. They are like a window into another grotesque and worrisome world, but I still had to look.
There was a great series of videos on this called "Contrepreneur Bingo" by Mike Winnet. He took on all the usual suspects - Tai Lopez, Dan Lok, Dan Pena, Tony Robbins, Grant Cardone...
Unfortunately it looks they all got pulled from youtube. Not on bitchute either.
He had a whole series of videos called "Contrepreneur Bingo" where he would rip into them on an individual basis. Scrubbed from youtube. Kicking myself for not downloading them at the time.
> I looked tech lead up on YouTube as I read the Reddit post and typed up this post. I can’t tell if this guy is trying to be a parody/using dry humor or if he’s a narcissist sociopath.
He's clearly comedic, the question is whether he's also an unhealthy person. I lost interest in him when it looked like he was destroying his own life while simultaneously making a show out of it. I do hope it truly is just a show, because otherwise it's sad that he basically lost his family while being absorbed into an absurd YT personality.
I never enjoyed TechLead's main channel content but respected him (and still do) for covering the 2019 employee suicide at Facebook when they tried to sweep it under the rug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbEQriZEfoI
Backstory: an H-1B Facebook Ads-team employee was on a PIP, was denied internal transfer, and had a SEV follow-up task he was called to present at a SEV Review. I don't have any first-hand knowledge of pressure-levels within Ads, but considering that's where the money comes from I assume it's pretty high. He tried to request more time, but a task nagbot kept changing the task "due date" back any time he tried to adjust it. He never made it to that SEV Review #JusticeForQin
I just found the LinkedIn of Yi Yin, he got a job from Google just in time after being kicked out of Facebook for speaking up: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yi-yin/
Was FB objectively wrong for firing him and he was a good employee? When you say FB tried to sweep it under the rug - what were they exactly in the wrong for? Losing your job being the reason to commit suicide sounds like this employee had bigger mental health issues.
Not defending FB, and I don’t use their products nor believe in anything they’re doing.
Narcissist sociopath. I'm a huge fan of dry humor (and British) so should be able to read sarcasm or dry humor but he just annoys me. Putting "as a millioaire" in video titles is the most crass thing I've seen.
I think you are missing the joke. The crassness of plastering "as a millionaire" everywhere is a joke on its own. Sort of a parody on other tubers who throw in similar catch phrases. In his early videos he talked about how being a "millionaire" isn't actually that uncommon. Now it is a meme to the viewers of the channel.
I don't like his sense of humor either, but I have to admit he exposes certain aspects of tech life and attitudes that people in general don't talk about, and maybe this is what make us uneasy (or: is funny to some). Things like badly camouflaged pride in one's achievements, position, being successful, being better than others. He is deliberately ambiguous.
> Narcissist sociopath. I'm a huge fan of dry humor (and British) so should be able to read sarcasm or dry humor but he just annoys me. Putting "as a millioaire" in video titles is the most crass thing I've seen.
You would describe someone as a narcissistic sociopath from the basis of your web psychoanalysis?
There were two options in GPs edit and I stand by my choice. The guy thinks he's some sort of god for a mid-level fang role while scamming his followers.
You're stating that TechLead is a narcissistic sociopath who is engaged in scamming, such as with this alleged pump and dump scheme? There's over a hundred comments in this post, and so far nobody wants to detail the alleged criminal behavior.
It's a very serious claim to say that someone has mental illness, or that they are engaged in criminal behavior over cryptocurrency scams, especially in a public forum where you have zero ability to unring a bell.
I would argue that the reason you get "this is serious" vibes is because he's actually more serious than satire.
I really don't think he's playing a character. His videos have been like this for years, it's only in the last year or so that he's ramped up the "satire" content to a ridiculous level.
I genuinely struggled to understand if it was satire before. But given how often the words he’s chosen are deliberately sarcastic - or other situations where he would have the opportunity to save fact to make himself look better, but leans in to the character (for comedic effect I don’t doubt) makes me believe it must be satire.
Like the numerous “this one tip” videos where he goes on and on about the tip and then it turns out to be “be predestined for this job” or “get referred” or something.
It seems to me like we are somehow blurring the lines of what is and isn't a scam because things like this are so obviously a scam.
Suppose I see a guy on the street selling 1 dollar raffle tickets for a nearby sports car. If I buy the ticket knowing that I'm probably not going to win and there's a decent chance the guy on the street doesn't even own the car and is just going to run off - am I really getting scammed, or am I knowingly participating in a high risk and high reward bet?
With the Million Token thing, he's not even pretending that the token does anything. I had honestly understood it as a comedic illustration of the uselessness of cryptocurrency. You can buy into it and if you sell at the right time you might make money, but it is definitely a zero sum game. Is this a scam?
Obviously it's a scam if he promised he would buy the token at a minimum of 1 dollar and he isn't doing that. He should face whatever criminal or civil penalties are applicable if he's committing fraud. But, if he does what he said he would do, then it seems like a transparent bad odds gambling game where he gets a significant cut/advantage.
It’s a scam, targeting unsavvy people who think there is a good chance they will make money or get rich. He grossly misrepresents the truth to trick them.
I have met people like him before and I am not sure he is playing a character. Doesn’t he trash talk his ex wife on his channel? Dude is toxic and probably doesn’t know it because of his arrogance.
I thought his channel was satire at first too, but to a great degree, I don't think he's joking. Now I think he disguises his douchebaggery through deadpan humor.
Maybe it's humor, maybe he's serious, maybe it's both. When you do both, you can always run for cover when you go too far and claim it was humor. The problem is, after a while you're not so sure who you are anymore. Are you saying things because they're funny, or you really believe them?
For the record I always thought he was somewhat on the spectrum but much of what he does is his attempt at humor(and I often find it funny).
That's part of his meme/satire. I am still surprised at reading a few comments here which think he's doing the "as a millionaire" in his title as a serious/arrogance thing. He often has very good advice on his videos. I also like how he incorporates his "ads" into the video so well. This "Why programmers are so UNHEALTHY... (as an ex-Google software engineer)" for example:
Not surprising, I've seen people complain on reddit that TechLead 500$ video courses is basically Cracking the Coding Interview book repackaged and leetcode problems copy-paste.
"If you were to sell 0.001 token for $1.00, you'd then have a Billion Dollar Valuation. ;-)
This reminds me of a stock market simulation in my Econ 102 class. With a fellow student, we picked a few stocks, and sold them to each other for a very low price, and then bought all of them up as the other students watched the trends. We repeated this for 1/2 of the stocks in the simulation. We then sold each other 1 share of those stocks for $99.99 (the maximum price in the simulation), and ended up with almost all the money. 8)
The professor thought we must have hacked the computer, but we played by the rules."
It is obvious that all the new cryptocurrencies are just like that econ 102 class simulation, and just as vulnerable to gaming, but this time with real money.
> The professor thought we must have hacked the computer, but we played by the rules."
Sounds like a terrible prof then. What is such a simulation supposed to teach if not that those kinds of attacks are possible? These are inherent in the construction of the system and your prof should have just given you cudos for having understood that.
> we picked a few stocks, and sold them to each other for a very low price, and then bought all of them up as the other students watched the trends. We repeated this for 1/2 of the stocks in the simulation.
I can see how you could use this strategy to exchange a fairly low amount of money for these stocks. But that would mean you have less money than you started with, and more stock.
> We then sold each other 1 share of those stocks for $99.99 (the maximum price in the simulation), and ended up with almost all the money.
And then this trade causes you to have the same amount of money and the same amount of stock. How did you get the money back? Did you actually end up with almost all of the money, or did you end up with almost all of the market capitalization?
It shouldn't be possible to make any sales of a stock at the maximum price, because the only thing that can happen to you, if you buy a stock at the maximum price, is that the price of your stock goes down.
The goal of the class was maximum stock portfolio value (as set by market valuation).
Everyone in the class started with a random set of stocks, and a set amount of funds. We looked at our portfolios and decided which to pump, and which to dump... then reversed when it was time to max out our portfolio values.
When everyone is focused on the small picture, it is really easy to play the macro game.
Note: You could put any price on a sell order, but someone had to match it in order to buy, so two people could quickly set the price of anything with a 1 share transaction.
It's been almost 40 years, but I think we maxed out things with few hours work across a semester.
Sounds like the answer is "yes, we maxed the total market cap" which is distinctly different from "we ended up with almost all the money". You didn't have the money, you only had a fake stock valuation bubble.
You go to the bank leverage your amazing portfolio, now you have real money.
And when everything comes crushing down, you're too big to fall, so the govt/banks bail you out.
I'm talking about the game. In reality, stocks don't have a maximum value.
But it also sounds like it's worth noting here that in reality, you cannot borrow money based on a stock valuation set by a very low-volume trade to which you were a party.
It is obvious that all the new cryptocurrencies are just like that econ 102 class simulation, and just as vulnerable to gaming, but this time with real money."
Isn't the whole stock market? I always wondered, they call these companies "billion dollar companies", but does that take into account the order book and how steep sorted order prices drop of?
As far as I can tell the only criteria is price at close. I assume that all the outstanding sell orders below a given price are filled first, so you couldn't just double the price of Apple, Inc. by swapping two shares at twice the previous closes.
If you are familiar with the term 'Drama channels', they are a very toxic genre where the group finds a target and gives their opinion about the alleged offences.
All good and well except they started to create the drama and their fans would dogpile on people or as twitter would describe 'Targeted harassment campaigns'.
CoffeeZilla is a drama channel often with dubious opinion driven videos. There a few other drama channels in the professional world but I won't give them spotlight.
Nah, scam debunking is a good and fun genre. There are so many YouTube ads promising so many false get rich quick schemes that it’s shooting fish in a barrel. Exposing the affiliate marketing, fake guru, forex, dropshipping, class hustling frauds of social media is an entertaining public service.
Sure, but where is the line between bad first product and being a scammer.
As a dev my first products are generally pretty average and my prices are high to filter to people that actually want the solution I'm selling.
My opinions is being a scammer you have the intention to take someone's money with out delivering any marketed value.
So there is the problem who can comment on someone intention.
I remember when coffeezila went after a youtuber who created a course. It was his first course but he sold 2 millions worth, everyone's first course sucks, he was unlucky enough to have a lot of people buy his first product. Then be labeled a scammer by drama channels because it wasn't university quality content.
These people are producing nothing themselves just amplifying problems in other people.
Coffeezilla himself has become a brand and puts out a ton of content, some I’m sure of dubious accuracy. But overall it’s pretty damn easy to tell whether or not these YouTube ad classes, not unlike the late night infomercials of yesteryear, are selling a fake bill of goods. Many use obviously fraudulent tactics. They don’t peddle dev courses but obvious get rich quick schemes. Drama channels are the closest thing to muckrakers or even regulators in our deregulated scam-spam choked internet. I shed no tears for someone who made $2m from a bad course whether the quality was intentional or not. He can go cry in Tai Lopez’s garage.
It's the same argument as for profit prison systems.
While you are doing a social good by keeping violent offenders behind bars you also have a profit motive to ensure you have a stready stream of working entering the system to keep up with contracts and order quantity. Leading to many prisons being nothing more than forced labour camps.
In the same way, drama channels start out doing a social good. But they have a profit motive to find 'problematic' people, were the bar is lowered to ensure you have enough content.
You are basically punishing trying, raising the risks of failing to the level of social outcast.
Most of the obvious scams are obviously scams. So at what point do drama channels provide any more value than entertainment, when anyone can clearly see you are not going to make a million dollars drop shipping toasters.
Now their is the grey area, where its uncertain if a product is a scam. Talking about it is fine, but that's not how drama channels work. They make black and white claims, more often black because sensational content sells.
Let's not confuse things, these channels are for entertainment not social good.
I my girlfriend watches drama channels and I watched curiously as each and every successful female pop culture channel was targeted and brought down for being 'problematic'. I thought it was funny at first because they participated in the system that brought them down. Then I realised these channels were a form of social policing were after you remove the threat, the treashold for normal behaviour is lowered until you became the target of the mob.
I later figured out its envy that drives these channels, its entertaining to people to watch others fall from grace.
This is my favorite YT channel atm. His video on Tether is excellent. There's also an episode of him on the Jordan Harbinger podcast that is worth a listen.
Well I have to give him credit for one thing. He let me know what valley salaries were like. He is the reason I came to the valley. Now, it kind of sucks that all of my vested RSUs are worth what I would have if I'd have kept my old house in SoCal, but assuming I can hold on to my FANG job for another year it will be worth it. It also got several of my friends to look for higher paying jobs outside of SoCal, and a couple of them are now millionaires after choosing a better company than I did. So hey, thanks Tech Lead.
I also have to feel sorry for him since his wife left him and took his kid. Maybe it was deserved... I don't know. As a fellow survivor of a California divorce(why I needed a FANG income to begin with), I can't help but pity him. It could be why he's pushing the scams so hard now.
How can companies like Google change their hiring process and avoid toxic engineers like this? I’m sure he did well on the Leetcode interviews and even accelerated up the engineer ladder relatively quickly by “playing by the rules”
These are not incredibly hard traits to identify upon talking with people. The problem is when you willingly dance with the devil because of how much value he delivers.
I get the angle you’re coming from, but the Google interview is more mechanical and rubric driven
It tries to avoid making biased or personal assessments about people in order to be inclusive. Obviously major red flags or cheating will be noted, but you don’t want to assume someone is an a*hole just because they are matter-of-fact ( IMO, there’s a thin line between the two ) and you have different communication styles
Additionally, it attracts those who are pedigree driven and proud about their school ranking.
It seems the solution is to have a real world pair programming or collaboration where there is areas to disagree, debate, compromise on. Algorithmic Interviews that have a clear right/wrong answer leaves little room for personal opinion
I completely disagree I think that those people are extremely hard to identify, because they are able and willing to game the interview process. I also don't think that people like that deliver positive value to the company.
Maybe at systemic level it’s hard to train employees to identify, but I’d like to believe I have a decent intuition of assessing character ( this goes back to the problem of personal biases tho )
Obviously there are cultural differences, where an article that was trending on HackerNews was how Russians don’t smile as much.
They say that a true narcicist is easy to spot, because they're not trying to hide their behaviours.
In plenty of interviews I've had the "this person seems difficult to work with" vibe. In the few situations where I've hired that person, the reality has been much worse than I expected.
> People being jerks may only manifest in certain environments
That’s true. But I’ve met jerky people who feel secure about their tenure , or secure that people are too nice to call them out (Google’s not the most confrontational place, everyone has a cushy job), irregardless of the environment. If those people are comfortable doing in that environment, it’s not unlikely that TechLead’s character is very much real
He got fired from Facebook his comments on woman working in STEM, then later he was shadow banned on his main account for making videos linking BLM donations to the domains of the biden campaign - which went viral on twitter leading people to label him as a racist. After that he started 'Tech lead show' channel.
Also him and another youtuber domain squatted another coding prep site which they sued for and won it back.
Asking for other people to comment on someone's reputation instead of doing that research yourself to make up your own mind is not a good habit. That's an easy way to get manipulated.
You could say this about literally everything in the world. It’s at best a meaningless statement, and at worst a “you’re stupid”. Why? Because you’re always stuck synthesizing from someone else’s options unless you chase everything back to first principles, and who has time for that crap?
It’s simply not worth the effort to spend a couple of hours on Google for some half remembered internet celebrity.
Unsurprising here folks. As any new 'tokens', minted by any old Joe that are listed this year and are sitting on a famous blockchain like Ethereum already look like they are waiting for an exit scam to happen.
Not the most elegant pump n dump, exit scams I've seen so far, but really, if anyone is saying "to the moon" or mentions the 'moon' it is a red flag here. Come on. Its obvious in the name: 'MillionToken'
TechLead is a satirical channel and a satirical character. And this is a satirical project.
The coin is worthless. It is 4 lines of original code. Basically just saying the supply is fixed at 1 mio tokens.
It was introduced via Uniswaps liquidity provider mechanism with a thousand USD or so in liquidity. This will buy back the coin at 1 USD as long as the liquidity provider is running.
Giving the coin a "market value" of 1 mio. USD even though it is of course absolutely worthless.
Seeing this the crypto community started to traded it - higher and higher - while the founder of course sells into it.
In 2021 I find it hard to see anyone losing money on crypto as a victim.
Buying it is pure speculation. Bitcoin pivoted from exchanging value to storing it due to high cost and friction on transactions. And it will pivot again after it fails to store the value next time it crashes.
Crypto is speculative and SEC are to some degree allowing people to gamble a bit - until something seriously blows up and gives them a reason to step in.
TechLead’s coin is a play on DOGE, the original meme coin. Whoever got hurt it this must have ignored loud warnings from all sides.
I want to assess this situation by facts and not by sentiments for or against TechLead. Could someone please help me understand some facts:
- The reddit post only provides an etherscan link to the transaction in which he adds liquidity. Where did he remove liquidity?
- Permanent removal of liquidity clearly breaks the promise of 1MM for at least 1 USDC. But a temporary removal does not, correct?
- As long as more people want to buy MM, a temporary removal of liquidity leads to a shortage of MM thereby driving price quicker.
- I flat out don't understand the "selling without selling" part.
It appears to me so far neither "MM will go to the moon" nor "1MM for 1USDC is guaranteed" appear to be false statements. Let's not call him a fraudster just yet.
Anybody can provide liquidity to a uniswap liquidity pool and withdraw it at any time (ofc you will stop earning rewards). In uniswap v2 an LP is tied to a token pair. Here: (MM, USDC).
In v3 there are some additional pricing range factors.
> I flat out don't understand the "selling without selling" part.
He HODLS 1M in his wallet in solidarity with the community to show he is not selling, but simultaneously secretly sells inflation to profit the same - is what the author is claiming.
I don't understand. First, naturally he is selling (and also buying) in the sense that he participates in a MM-USCD liquidity pool. Second, inflation of the token price happens due to social media hype and has no relation to him selling. Third, of course the whole project is profitable for him - cannot see anything wrong with that.
He removed money from Uniswap. Uniswap is a decentralized exchange. At the heart of it there is the ability to provide liquidity by funding the exchange wallets.
Imagine Dollar and Apples as our currencies. The exchange rate is 1 to 1 for this example. So in order to provide Uniswap with liquidity you give them 100 dollar and 100 apples. People can trade against those assets, in turn you get a small fee for every trade. If person A comes along and buys 40 Apples, the Uniswap wallet now contains 140 dollar and 60 apples. These still belong to you, as they represent your share in the wallets.
What Techlead did is, he created a coin (like our Apples) and provided Uniswap with his coin and USDC (basically a coin tied to the dollar). This way people could buy his coin. No, after them buying he pulled out money from the wallets, now his shares are predominantly in USDC. By removing the liquidity the pools are now incapable to provide sellers of his coin with USDC, therefor the market is dead.
Imagine trillions of joules of energy was going into a process that was securing money for the planet, without its legacy gatekeepers being able to control or dictate their arbitrary rules. A revolutionary peer to peer system that allowed value to be transferred digitally!
Then imagine folks that just fail to see this after 10+ years still think about coal power plants!
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadIt’s so hard to take crypto seriously.
There have been ICOs which definitely have been represented as securities and have been regulated/quashed/fined.
But when not used as a representation of ownership of currencies or assets... what is a cryptocurrency and does it fit into existing law about securities fraud?
Another way to ask the question: should the SEC regulate pump and dump schemes with collectables? (I'd say beanie babies and pokemon cards to date myself, I don't know what people are speculating on these days)
The tax guidance in Canada says yes, they are.
I don’t think they’re being advertised like collectibles. They’re advertised like investments. This is the first time I’ve actually heard them compared to collectibles.
My personal experience makes me believe there’s not much liquidity. Also, as a class of currency the crypto scene is printing money faster than anything we’ve ever seen in history IMO.
A security is very specifically an instrument which represents the value of something else.
And tax guidance isn't the same as general classification of something (there are lots of really weird tax rules. For example: the US supreme court decided that a tomato was a vegetable, not a fruit for tax purposes while it is without any question actually a fruit.
The SEC regulates how companies represent themselves to investors and how certain things representing ownership are traded and represented. The exact surface that fits inside the SEC I don't know exactly and one has to be an expert to know (and the SEC doesn't necessarily know itself).
Cryptocurrencies went from being completely outside regulation to somewhat inside, but the laws, courts, and regulations are starting to slowly catch up. Everyone is still figuring out things as they go along.
When cryptos are used to represent a piece of ownership though, it is cut and dry, they are securities and subject to existing regulations.
When cryptos don't correspond to the value of something external though, they are somewhat new and just don't yet fit into the existing regulatory framework and the attitude of regulators is generally wait and see while going after the most clear abuses and easy cases first to build up a framework for whatever the future will hold.
"common sense" of what cryptos are or aren't doesn't work, whatever regulators do, there will be high profile lawsuits for the courts to decide what they are and aren't, shaping this process and doing things which are clearly legal or illegal first in the best interests of the regulator is what happens. (in other words, they don't want to go out on a limb right away in tricky edge cases, they want to get things in a pattern and decided with the easy cases first)
So then it would be more accurate for me to have said that in Canada all crypto gains and losses are considered income or capital gains/losses for tax purposes. IE: You have to track your gains/losses like you do for stocks.
I only considered my side of the view where there’s not much difference. I’m guessing you’re talking about the side that creates coins where the technicalities of whether or not they’re securities makes a huge difference for regulatory requirements.
Thanks for explaining.
In the case of the Web, the answer clearly turned out to be a deafening No. Years ago, I had higher hopes for Bitcoin in this regard. Same for so called “censorship resistant decentralized platforms”. I spent years pondering how such a thing might work, before I realized that no technology, no matter how advanced, cannot be struck down by a single act of Congress. Save for cases of crystal clear constitutional protection, if any technology becomes a big enough problem, or a problem for the right people, it will have its day, and then it will be kneecapped.
Once something becomes the lowest-common-denominator populist solution or the solution for the privileged, those use cases become "bad" because of value judgements of the people using them.
It's a kind of romanticism for rebellion, and with cryptos usually a broad misunderstanding of what money is, what it does, and how it works.
Indeed nothing can be the growing rebellious trend forever. It either wins and becomes the standard or dies failing to live up to whatever ideals it didn't actually have.
>can smart people create anything ingenious that escapes being coopted / subsumed by the establishment? Or, can such a thing survive popularity on its own terms?
No, everything has vulnerabilities that will be eventually exploited.
The American constitution and the many governments around the world inspired by it have done a pretty good job of avoiding a complete consumption (in ways that, for example, communism did not), in part by specifically designing not just to handle or avoid greed and control, but to use those characteristics of societies as a feature.
I can plant tobacco and make "unregulated cigarretes" with the goal of not being regulated by any government. The goal is that you can smoke it anywhere, no regulations on its composition, and I can advertise it anywhere.
That does not matter, it is still regulated and I cannot unilaterally opt-out of government regulations. (Or I can, but that is a crime and is what crime organizations do).
Apparently this tech lead guy created programming videos to teach you how to get hired at big tech companies. It turned out the partner guy in the videos wasn’t even a developer but had maybe interned somewhere in data science? And both of these guys were claiming to be career professionals, as if they were staff or principal engineers.
The ads reminded me of another character from many years ago that would show off a Lamborghini or some sports car in his garage with a wall of books - another scammy self help guru.
Edit: I looked tech lead up on YouTube as I read the Reddit post and typed up this post. I can’t tell if this guy is trying to be a parody/using dry humor or if he’s a narcissist sociopath.
Seriously though, it pains me to see the young and naive fall for these scams. Also, wasn't there a data science YouTuber recently that was busted for more or less plagiarizing their content?
You might be thinking of Siraj Raval?
https://mobile.twitter.com/AndrewM_Webb/status/1183150368945...
(Or not, I’m sure there’s been a dozen other cases of this in data science alone)
“Here in my garage, just bought this new Lamborghini here. It’s fun to drive up here in the Hollywood hills. But you know what I like more than materialistic things? Knowledge. In fact, I’m a lot more proud of these seven new bookshelves that I had to get installed to hold two thousand new books that I bought. It’s like the billionaire Warren Buffett says, “the more you learn, the more you earn.””
Unfortunately it looks they all got pulled from youtube. Not on bitchute either.
Art imitates life imitates art...
He's clearly comedic, the question is whether he's also an unhealthy person. I lost interest in him when it looked like he was destroying his own life while simultaneously making a show out of it. I do hope it truly is just a show, because otherwise it's sad that he basically lost his family while being absorbed into an absurd YT personality.
That's his shtick.
Backstory: an H-1B Facebook Ads-team employee was on a PIP, was denied internal transfer, and had a SEV follow-up task he was called to present at a SEV Review. I don't have any first-hand knowledge of pressure-levels within Ads, but considering that's where the money comes from I assume it's pretty high. He tried to request more time, but a task nagbot kept changing the task "due date" back any time he tried to adjust it. He never made it to that SEV Review #JusticeForQin
Not defending FB, and I don’t use their products nor believe in anything they’re doing.
Luckily he's a very bad actor as well, he doesn't sound very trustworthy when trying to pull a fast one.
It's a meme.
You would describe someone as a narcissistic sociopath from the basis of your web psychoanalysis?
It's a very serious claim to say that someone has mental illness, or that they are engaged in criminal behavior over cryptocurrency scams, especially in a public forum where you have zero ability to unring a bell.
The problem I have with it is the extreme deadpan delivery, the arrogance and closeness to reality.
Obviously he’s playing a character; but I wish I didn’t get so much of a “this is serious” vibe.
I really don't think he's playing a character. His videos have been like this for years, it's only in the last year or so that he's ramped up the "satire" content to a ridiculous level.
Like the numerous “this one tip” videos where he goes on and on about the tip and then it turns out to be “be predestined for this job” or “get referred” or something.
Of course I could be misreading it.
Suppose I see a guy on the street selling 1 dollar raffle tickets for a nearby sports car. If I buy the ticket knowing that I'm probably not going to win and there's a decent chance the guy on the street doesn't even own the car and is just going to run off - am I really getting scammed, or am I knowingly participating in a high risk and high reward bet?
With the Million Token thing, he's not even pretending that the token does anything. I had honestly understood it as a comedic illustration of the uselessness of cryptocurrency. You can buy into it and if you sell at the right time you might make money, but it is definitely a zero sum game. Is this a scam?
Obviously it's a scam if he promised he would buy the token at a minimum of 1 dollar and he isn't doing that. He should face whatever criminal or civil penalties are applicable if he's committing fraud. But, if he does what he said he would do, then it seems like a transparent bad odds gambling game where he gets a significant cut/advantage.
For the record I always thought he was somewhat on the spectrum but much of what he does is his attempt at humor(and I often find it funny).
https://youtu.be/2RzhJ_uqYj8
EDIT: wrong thread nevermind
Sounds like a terrible prof then. What is such a simulation supposed to teach if not that those kinds of attacks are possible? These are inherent in the construction of the system and your prof should have just given you cudos for having understood that.
> we picked a few stocks, and sold them to each other for a very low price, and then bought all of them up as the other students watched the trends. We repeated this for 1/2 of the stocks in the simulation.
I can see how you could use this strategy to exchange a fairly low amount of money for these stocks. But that would mean you have less money than you started with, and more stock.
> We then sold each other 1 share of those stocks for $99.99 (the maximum price in the simulation), and ended up with almost all the money.
And then this trade causes you to have the same amount of money and the same amount of stock. How did you get the money back? Did you actually end up with almost all of the money, or did you end up with almost all of the market capitalization?
It shouldn't be possible to make any sales of a stock at the maximum price, because the only thing that can happen to you, if you buy a stock at the maximum price, is that the price of your stock goes down.
Everyone in the class started with a random set of stocks, and a set amount of funds. We looked at our portfolios and decided which to pump, and which to dump... then reversed when it was time to max out our portfolio values.
When everyone is focused on the small picture, it is really easy to play the macro game.
Note: You could put any price on a sell order, but someone had to match it in order to buy, so two people could quickly set the price of anything with a 1 share transaction.
It's been almost 40 years, but I think we maxed out things with few hours work across a semester.
Sounds like the answer is "yes, we maxed the total market cap" which is distinctly different from "we ended up with almost all the money". You didn't have the money, you only had a fake stock valuation bubble.
Had the Prof been a better teacher, he might have pointed it out, instead of me learning that lesson on HN decades later. 8)
I never worried about the funds, only the portfolio value, since the funds were a zero sum game.
Amazing system we got.
But it also sounds like it's worth noting here that in reality, you cannot borrow money based on a stock valuation set by a very low-volume trade to which you were a party.
Isn't the whole stock market? I always wondered, they call these companies "billion dollar companies", but does that take into account the order book and how steep sorted order prices drop of?
He has a very good video recently on a scam being run by influencers and provides some pretty damning evidence: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kv6ne6VQCZI
All good and well except they started to create the drama and their fans would dogpile on people or as twitter would describe 'Targeted harassment campaigns'.
CoffeeZilla is a drama channel often with dubious opinion driven videos. There a few other drama channels in the professional world but I won't give them spotlight.
As a dev my first products are generally pretty average and my prices are high to filter to people that actually want the solution I'm selling.
My opinions is being a scammer you have the intention to take someone's money with out delivering any marketed value.
So there is the problem who can comment on someone intention.
I remember when coffeezila went after a youtuber who created a course. It was his first course but he sold 2 millions worth, everyone's first course sucks, he was unlucky enough to have a lot of people buy his first product. Then be labeled a scammer by drama channels because it wasn't university quality content.
These people are producing nothing themselves just amplifying problems in other people.
While you are doing a social good by keeping violent offenders behind bars you also have a profit motive to ensure you have a stready stream of working entering the system to keep up with contracts and order quantity. Leading to many prisons being nothing more than forced labour camps.
In the same way, drama channels start out doing a social good. But they have a profit motive to find 'problematic' people, were the bar is lowered to ensure you have enough content.
You are basically punishing trying, raising the risks of failing to the level of social outcast.
Most of the obvious scams are obviously scams. So at what point do drama channels provide any more value than entertainment, when anyone can clearly see you are not going to make a million dollars drop shipping toasters.
Now their is the grey area, where its uncertain if a product is a scam. Talking about it is fine, but that's not how drama channels work. They make black and white claims, more often black because sensational content sells.
Let's not confuse things, these channels are for entertainment not social good.
I my girlfriend watches drama channels and I watched curiously as each and every successful female pop culture channel was targeted and brought down for being 'problematic'. I thought it was funny at first because they participated in the system that brought them down. Then I realised these channels were a form of social policing were after you remove the threat, the treashold for normal behaviour is lowered until you became the target of the mob.
I later figured out its envy that drives these channels, its entertaining to people to watch others fall from grace.
Elderly folks getting scammed?
That's how he's gotten a million subscribers.
I also have to feel sorry for him since his wife left him and took his kid. Maybe it was deserved... I don't know. As a fellow survivor of a California divorce(why I needed a FANG income to begin with), I can't help but pity him. It could be why he's pushing the scams so hard now.
It tries to avoid making biased or personal assessments about people in order to be inclusive. Obviously major red flags or cheating will be noted, but you don’t want to assume someone is an a*hole just because they are matter-of-fact ( IMO, there’s a thin line between the two ) and you have different communication styles
It seems the solution is to have a real world pair programming or collaboration where there is areas to disagree, debate, compromise on. Algorithmic Interviews that have a clear right/wrong answer leaves little room for personal opinion
Obviously there are cultural differences, where an article that was trending on HackerNews was how Russians don’t smile as much.
In plenty of interviews I've had the "this person seems difficult to work with" vibe. In the few situations where I've hired that person, the reality has been much worse than I expected.
People being jerks may only manifest in certain environments.
That’s true. But I’ve met jerky people who feel secure about their tenure , or secure that people are too nice to call them out (Google’s not the most confrontational place, everyone has a cushy job), irregardless of the environment. If those people are comfortable doing in that environment, it’s not unlikely that TechLead’s character is very much real
https://guruscoach.com/techlead-patrick-shyu/#Making_over_a_...
When someone has different opinion on certain thinks, it does not make them toxic.
Also him and another youtuber domain squatted another coding prep site which they sued for and won it back.
It’s simply not worth the effort to spend a couple of hours on Google for some half remembered internet celebrity.
Not the most elegant pump n dump, exit scams I've seen so far, but really, if anyone is saying "to the moon" or mentions the 'moon' it is a red flag here. Come on. Its obvious in the name: 'MillionToken'
> "as a millionaire".
This time as a scamillionaire.
Secondly. There is "no rug pull" whatever that means.
The coin is trading at 17 USD after being introduced at 1 USD less than a week ago:
https://info.uniswap.org/#/tokens/0x6b4c7a5e3f0b99fcd83e9c08...
The coin is described here:
https://milliontoken.org
TechLead is a satirical channel and a satirical character. And this is a satirical project.
The coin is worthless. It is 4 lines of original code. Basically just saying the supply is fixed at 1 mio tokens.
It was introduced via Uniswaps liquidity provider mechanism with a thousand USD or so in liquidity. This will buy back the coin at 1 USD as long as the liquidity provider is running.
Giving the coin a "market value" of 1 mio. USD even though it is of course absolutely worthless.
Seeing this the crypto community started to traded it - higher and higher - while the founder of course sells into it.
- The reddit post only provides an etherscan link to the transaction in which he adds liquidity. Where did he remove liquidity?
- Permanent removal of liquidity clearly breaks the promise of 1MM for at least 1 USDC. But a temporary removal does not, correct?
- As long as more people want to buy MM, a temporary removal of liquidity leads to a shortage of MM thereby driving price quicker.
- I flat out don't understand the "selling without selling" part.
It appears to me so far neither "MM will go to the moon" nor "1MM for 1USDC is guaranteed" appear to be false statements. Let's not call him a fraudster just yet.
He HODLS 1M in his wallet in solidarity with the community to show he is not selling, but simultaneously secretly sells inflation to profit the same - is what the author is claiming.
Imagine Dollar and Apples as our currencies. The exchange rate is 1 to 1 for this example. So in order to provide Uniswap with liquidity you give them 100 dollar and 100 apples. People can trade against those assets, in turn you get a small fee for every trade. If person A comes along and buys 40 Apples, the Uniswap wallet now contains 140 dollar and 60 apples. These still belong to you, as they represent your share in the wallets.
What Techlead did is, he created a coin (like our Apples) and provided Uniswap with his coin and USDC (basically a coin tied to the dollar). This way people could buy his coin. No, after them buying he pulled out money from the wallets, now his shares are predominantly in USDC. By removing the liquidity the pools are now incapable to provide sellers of his coin with USDC, therefor the market is dead.
imagine digging dirt out of the ground in your backyard and claiming it has value
thats how i view crypto
Then imagine folks that just fail to see this after 10+ years still think about coal power plants!