Price discovery is a major function of markets, insider trading adds more information and benefits all parties by allowing for more accurate pricing of whatever is being traded.
If you focus only on price discovery happening in a specific market center, sure.
However, because it’s 2022 and we have the internet and all I’m not sure it really makes sense to focus on specific market centers instead of the market as a whole.
Of course HFT makes this far more complicated so it’s difficult to come up with a clear answer in either direction.
Insider trading is a distortion of price discovery, because the insider possesses knowledge the rest of the market does not. That's why it's illegal.
Insider trading is not real buy-side demand pricing information because the insider (typically) intends to sell as soon as the price pops, once more market participants have been pulled into the trade because it's going up -- key knowledge the insider knew the market did not.
Markets as a price discovery mechanism relies upon all participants having access to the same information. Insider trading clearly breaks that fundamental rule.
Insider trading can lead to more accurate pricing at a particular time by releasing information earlier than it otherwise would have been released (albeit selectively in a way designed to maximise harm to people on the other side of the trade the insiders usually have some sort of fiduciary duty to).
It also creates incentives for insiders to act perversely to profit from asymmetric information, including acting with the intent of creating less accurate pricing at a particular time in order to create trading opportunities for insiders.
Suffice to say the dominant trend in crypto markets is not rapid convergence on a relatively stable price...
> (albeit selectively in a way designed to maximise harm to people the insiders usually have some sort of fiduciary duty to).
That doesn’t make any sense, prices go in both directions. If price goes up, there’s no harm to people who the insiders may have some fiduciary duty to.
> It also creates incentives for insiders to act perversely to profit from asymmetric information, including acting with the intent of creating less accurate pricing at a particular time in order to create trading opportunities for insiders.
In the US that’s just called “wire fraud” and not “insider trading”.
> That doesn’t make any sense, prices go in both directions. If price goes up, there’s no harm to people who the insiders may have some fiduciary duty to.
Of course there is. When prices go up, insiders profit at the expense of shareholders who sell to them. In the absence of insider traders, non-insider shareholders collectively achieve better returns; ergo they are harmed by the presence of insider trading on positive or negative information.
(The only time it wouldn't be the case is if the prices move in the opposite direction to the one the insiders are expecting due to some other unanticipated development which is far more significant than their information advantage)
> In the US that’s just called “wire fraud” and not “insider trading”.
Much easier to prove the insider trading in the run up to a profit warning than prove an entity was intentionally mismanaged to create that opportunity and its earlier predictions of success were fraudulent and not just incorrect.
If you want insider trading then take the company private and do all the trading you want. Public companies and investors should be able to count on insider trading being illegal. The punishments need to much more severe and extremely hard to get out of in court.
The price reflects the consensus knowledge of participants. Insiders cannot participate. Therefore, the price is accurate. Addition of new knowledge will happen in time, therefore I maintain this is a latency issue not an accuracy issue. The markets don't price in the future, they guess it.
Saying insider trading of material non-public information is beneficial to free markets because it allows for a handful of connected individuals to front-run the market on non-public news is certainly a take. A really weird one, but a take nonetheless.
Because I could, given enough experience in the industry and money to have servers close enough if it's highly time-sensitive signal, compete with said funds and specialists.
But I can't, without bribing executives, hacking into corporate servers or being at the negotiating table myself, front-run MNPI.
That difference is kind of the point behind free markets.
I struggle to wrap my head around someone thinking insider trading being a net positive. The only justification I see is if said person would like to themselves profit off of MNPI they have access to without fear of reprisal, in which case you should consider a career in the US senate.
Do you think that hedge funds paying credit card companies for transaction flow should be illegal?
> Because I could, given enough experience in the industry and money to have servers close enough if it's highly time-sensitive signal, compete with said funds and specialists.
What benefit does the existence of this competition provide as opposed to insider trading? Why do you think that artificially enabling such an industry is a net positive?
Yes, alt-data is different from insider information. You truly don't see a difference between someone analysing corporate flights to find and bet on potential M&A and Bobby Kotick (hypothetically) buying millions of ATVI ahead of announcing the deal he negotiated himself?
That's like playing poker with someone sitting at the table who's connected to the casino's management and knows the order of the cards coming up. We'll never come to an agreement that this behavior should be accepted and is beneficial for the game.
But it's certainly not for the other participants who are getting rolled over by insiders. Why play a rigged game?
And it's definitely not beneficial when the insider has the active ability to influence the price of the asset. If an executive could make money by shorting his firm's stock, the optimal strategy for every executive would be to sabotage their firm, while shorting its stock.
The latter two reasons are why it's illegal, by the way. It undermines confidence in markets, and it creates perverse, value-destroying incentives.
> But it's certainly not for the other participants who are getting rolled over by insiders. Why play a rigged game?
This only makes sense if you think of markets as gambling. Otherwise, other participants are always getting rolled by parties with better research, or perhaps just a faster internet connection.
> The latter two reasons are why it's illegal, by the way. It undermines confidence in markets, and it creates perverse, value-destroying incentives.
This doesn’t stand up to the most basic scrutiny. Sabotaging your publicly traded company is illegal whether or not you also engage in insider trading, what benefit is there to be had from criminalising the same thing twice?
> This only makes sense if you think of markets as gambling. Otherwise, other participants are always getting rolled by parties with better research, or perhaps just a faster internet connection.
Or if you think of markets as a way to encourage investment into the economy. Why should I invest if insiders are going to be scooping up a lion's share of the windfalls?
Anything that reduces the ROI on my investments creates an incentive for me to not invest.
> This doesn’t stand up to the most basic scrutiny. Sabotaging your publicly traded company is illegal whether or not you also engage in insider trading, what benefit is there to be had from criminalising the same thing twice?
1. Without these incentives, you have far fewer reasons to behave unethically and illegally.
2. You usually can't tell the difference between accidental incompetence and malicious sabotage. Being able to do sabotage under the guise of incompetence, while having a profit motive is a colossal conflict of interest, and any system that encourages it is going to produce a lot of poor outcomes.
3. When the executive doesn't benefit from either incompetence, or sabotage, and their rewards are based on good performance (stocks go up), their incentives are aligned to chase good performance.
Better price discovery is a good thing, but in this case, the juice is not worth the squeeze.
I buy and sell based on my availability of and need for money, not because I am timing the market.
It's true that markets aren't zero sum games, but some insider extracting value from a stock in this manner does not create value for me.
And the third point that I made very clearly creates incentives to turn it into a negative sum game. Good luck proving that Bob ran the company into the ground (and got rich doing so) because he's a crook, rather than just an idiot. You can't.
(You also can't make running a company like a well-intentioned idiot illegal.)
> Good luck proving that Bob ran the company into the ground (and got rich doing so) because he's a crook, rather than just an idiot. You can't.
Insider trading doesn’t make this any easier to prove. Bob can just start drinking or doing drugs before running the company into the ground, now his friends and family have a solid defense against any insider trading claims.
Bobs drug problem isn’t material nonpublic information, but it sure as hell explains why everyone around him started shorting the company.
Just like the “you should take a finance class” means nothing. Especially considering that anyone who has taken a couple of such classes understands that insider trading is a very contentious topic among economists.
What? I don’t understand your point. Credentials don’t matter. How is me saying the comment doesn’t mean anything, mean I care about credentials? I didn’t say “with proof of your credentials I would bow down to what you say”
Also, which part of my comment is shitting on some one? Saying something casually isn’t shitting on someone. There has to be some thing like bad faith involved. Like what you do including here.
>Credentials don’t matter. How is me saying the comment doesn’t mean anything, mean I care about credentials?
So you really meant to just say "this doesn't mean anything" rather than "You're anonymous. This doesn't mean anything." Turns out your comment was just another disingenuous "heads I win, tails you lose" where by your own self admitted stance, it would have also not meant anything if they weren't anonymous and actually did provide credentials (despite classes OP called for actually being a part of getting those credentials).
Information asymmetry is a fundamental, unavoidable feature of the markets.
It’s not illegal for me to pay Visa and Mastercard for an exclusive deal to access transaction flow and trade on the basis of that information. I will in fact be trading based on material nonpublic information, but not in the sense the law forbids.
>The Securities and Exchange Commission announced today that it charged Bonan Huang and Nan Huang (the "Defendants") with engaging in illegal insider trading on the basis of material, non-public information about the sales of predominantly consumer retail corporations.
>In its complaint filed in the federal court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on January 21, 2015, the SEC alleges that the Defendants worked for a large credit card issuer as data analysts tasked with investigating fraudulent credit card activity. While employed there, Defendants searched their employer's nonpublic database that recorded the credit card activity for millions of customers at numerous, predominantly consumer retail corporations. The Defendants conducted hundreds, if not thousands, of keyword searches of this database. These searches, which were not done in furtherance of their employment duties, allowed the Defendants to view and analyze aggregated sales data for the companies they searched. The complaint further alleges that, in a breach of their duty to their employer, the Defendants made profitable securities transactions on the basis of this material, non-public information in advance of the public release of quarterly sales announcements by these companies.
No it's not. It allows easy market manipulation. How can the market succeed with things like pump and dump, insider's have extra knowledge and such? There's a good reason why it's illegal and punishable. I only wish the people caught did about 5X as much time including Congress members.
For me the word cryptocurrency and scam are synonyms. And in my mind people defending it on the internet are inside the pyramid scheme and trying to justify their investment.
Just one of the many cancers affecting our current society.
As author of the Cuckoo Cycle Proof-of-Work puzzle [1] and core developer of a blockchain that offers zero financial rewards for its creators and early adopters, I strongly take issue with your characterization.
I agree that most projects are cash grabs, but that's no excuse for insulting all developers without exception.
I can pick just about any project that's appeared here or elsewhere and be just as uncharitable and miserable about it if I wanted to. What's your point? What does this add to the conversation?
Whenever I see these takes, it just reads to me like "I know there are scams in the cryptocurrency world and am too lazy/disinterested to figure out which parts are the scammy parts, so I'm just going to cast the whole space as a scam and feel smug about it."
There's a lot of scammy stuff in the cryptocurrency world, but why do so many people feel the need to pompously proclaim the whole thing is a scam when they clearly only have a shallow familiarity with the space? Is it sour grapes or jealousy?
Can you link some resources that would help one figure out which parts are legit and which parts are scammy? Every time this kind of thing is posted it's an admonishment of others for "not doing they're homework", but I can't recall an instance where the aforementioned "homework" was actually provided. Indeed, from the reading that I've done, some of crypto's largest projects (Tether comes to mind) are plenty scammy. However they keep getting funding and many crypto insiders continue to use them. So should I trust the analysis or should I trust the crowd?
Any project that financially rewards its creators feels like a cash grab to me. The handful of projects that are built from scratch [1] and don't involve any ICO/premine/instamine/devtax, which includes Bitcoin itself, are in principle legit.
They're still potentially subject to pump-and-dump dynamics though. The capital cost of doing the pump is just > $0. I do agree that these are at least more honest than projects where founders/VCs already own tons of pre-mined tokens.
No, they're not. But they're not advertising themselves as public goods the way cryptocurrencies do. A "people's currency" should not concentrate wealth beyond what pre-exists in the fiat realm.
I think it's a mistake to compare crypto tokens to stocks. Stocks represent fractional ownership of an organization with assets and cash flow. Crypto tokens only represent ownership of... themselves. The closest analog is the commodity market (gold, oil, etc.). And indeed, if someone discovered an easily mineable "new gold", hoarded a bunch of it, then hyped it up on the market so they could dump their reserves at inflated prices I would call that scammy.
Edit: Actually we don't have to imagine this scenario. The diamond cartel[1] does something very similar already and yes, it's a scam.
I would say crypto's largest project is "Bitcoin" and would recommend reading the whitepaper (its surprisingly digestible). It is functioning as designed and successfully working as described for over a decade, so I think calling it a 'scam' would be a stretch.
Everything in the crypto world is built off of the core decentralized consensus idea described by the whitepaper, so I think it's really the foundation of understanding everything else.
My personal appraisals of other parts of the crypto space that aren't scams: Ethereum, Lightning Network, hardware wallets, Coinbase, Proof of Stake (may not like the incentives, but it can work as designed), DAOs (inherently risky because they have an implicit bug bounty for their total value, too risky for my taste, but glad they exist and people are learning how to make them more robust)
I think reading a whitepaper only gives you, at best, half the picture. However, because crypto tokens are fundamentally financial products, a whitepaper says little about whether a particular project using said technology is a scam. The long list of scammy ICOs and rug pulls is plenty of evidence of that. Ironically, while blockchain technology decentralizes the bookkeeping of digital assets, you often have to trust the intentions of a very small group of unaccountable individuals to not get taken advantage of by insider trading, front running, wash trading, rug pulls, and various other financial scams.
It's obviously a matter of both degree and ROI. A TON of money has been poured into crypto with very little social benefit to show for it. Meanwhile, it has become an effective tool for taking money from the ignorant and giving it to criminals.
Parent is painting with broad negative strokes, but they aren't far from reality.
Exactly. More broadly, the stock market has less "social benefit" than crypto; it's just a glorified way for people to gamble/invest in things loosely tied to economic performance.
Personally I think real estate a an "investment market" is doing much more harm to society than anything else right now
If only crypto didn't exist there'd be so much more funds we could sink into adtech, maximizing engagement and outrage within propaganda platforms, SEO, email spam, adding subscription billing to software which previously a single upfront payment, anti-competitive walled-garden tactics, bundling spyware in to apps so you can sell user info to data brokers, and all the other lovely things that tech gives us!
/s
Assuming you work in tech, do you feel a personal responsibility for all of those cancers?
When I walk into a store, I can pick up anything on the shelf and buy it, fairly confident that it's going to meet some minimum standard of quality and not harm me.
When I walk into a restaurant, same deal. I don't have to really worry.
The amount of legwork I have to do separate the bad parts from the good parts is incredibly low.
The crypto space is the complete opposite of that. I have to do a shitton of legwork to find out if it's a scam or not. And to top it all off, most of them are, in fact, some form of scam. At some point, it's not laziness, it's efficiency.
Especially when you consider I have to do all the work no matter who is promoting it. There are absolutely no trustworthy voices. Because either the voices are the scammers themselves or have been taken in by scammers.
> "I know there are scams in the cryptocurrency world and am too lazy/disinterested to figure out which parts are the scammy parts, so I'm just going to cast the whole space as a scam and feel smug about it."
As an example, I believe ALGO is a legitimate blockchain coin but when your marketing copy reads like this, it doesn't take laziness/disinterested to pass sniff tests.
"Examples include bond issuance, escrow account creation, loan payments & fee executions, limit orders, subscriptions, collateralized obligations, disbursements, programmatic fees, delegated high- security account management, interface with off-chain data providers, HELOC (Home Equity Line of Credit), decentralized exchanges, crowdfunding, voting and more."
These all sound great! Who's offering HELOC's using ALGO right now? Crickets - so how would you convince me this isn't a scam?
Well that's the thing though, shocking as it may be, there are other societies out there.
Living in a Third World country with a controlled currency, Bitcoin was the only way I could actually buy things online.
So yeah, to me, it does have an actual value. Disregarding something completely just because you don't think is useful is very shortsighted. It's akin to people thinking x programming language is complete trash.
So you mean you used to to break the law? What a glowing review, it's used by criminals like you to escape the currency controls. Once again proving bitcoin is the coin of choice for hardened violent criminals. Hope the crying drowning polar bears are worth the ruthless environmental damage you inflict.
Edit: lol to the people not realizing this is intentional satire meant to poke fun at the meme-like representation of the stereotypical crypto-hater
Edit: And I say this as someone who's pretty much, "fuck crypto". OP said they're from a third world country and were vague with what they purchased and, especially, why. Yet you've painted them as an absolutely disgusting individual. Geez.
>Edit: lol to the people not realizing this is intentional satire meant to poke fun at the meme-like representation of the stereotypical crypto-hater
It can be difficult to understand if something is sarcastic or satire when there is no tone of voice or facial cues to help. Especially when you don't exaggerate, and simply type out the same things as the group your satirizing. Maybe the only difference/give-away was the "crying" part of the polar bears. The rest is pretty much verbatim of some of the nastier comments I've seen in other threads.
The sad thing is I think maybe you're right, I guess didn't even exaggerate enough that a reasonable person would think it goes beyond the typical anti-crypto sentiment. I knew things had gotten bad, but I didn't realize they were that bad.
It sounds like you're being the equivalent of an online Karen or any generic unpleasant person that lacks critical thinking, awareness, and so on. There's nothing specifically stereotypical about what you wrote when it comes to people who dislike crypto. For example, the YouTube documentary, Line Goes Up, isn't remotely focused on what your satirical attempt goes on about.
Considering posters below genuinely took it as in line with what they'd read in other threads and indeed did not even realize it was satire because that's specifically in line what stereotypical commenters were saying, I'm just going to say you're full of shit. Otherwise maybe you should direct your unpleasantness their way, since they're so wrong.
See comment below:
>It can be difficult to understand if something is sarcastic or satire when there is no tone of voice or facial cues to help. Especially when you don't exaggerate, and simply type out the same things as the group your satirizing. Maybe the only difference/give-away was the "crying" part of the polar bears. The rest is pretty much verbatim of some of the nastier comments I've seen in other threads.
>Maybe the only difference/give-away was the "crying" part of the polar bears. The rest is pretty much verbatim of some of the nastier comments I've seen in other threads.
> pretty much verbatim
So yeah, your peers disagree with you. What I said is apparently "pretty much verbatim" of the stereotypical ilk, apparently. So which of the two of you are lying? Have that debate down in your counterpart's thread if you like.
>There's nothing specifically stereotypical about what you wrote when it comes to people who dislike crypto
The hilarious thing is I meant for my post to sound over the top and exaggerated vs the stereotypical meme. It was supposed to sound a bit ridiculous. Then I simultaneously get accused no one could possible understand it is satire because I didn't exaggerate enough while also being accused it's not satire because I exaggerated too much. The honest to god truth is I didn't realize people were actually saying shit quite this ridiculous until I was told this while being scolded in this thread, that people were saying such ridiculous things that my statement couldn't possibly be interpreted as satire because it was the verbatim argument of the people I was poking fun at. Maybe that hit too close to home for you, idk.
> while also being accused it's not satire because I exaggerated too much
Who did this? I certainly didn't. I said the extremism of sounding like an unhinged loon* is what is coming out. Not satire of a stereotypical person against crypto.
I also didn't think what you wrote was satire or exaggeration either. I read your comment as a seriously written one. Yet I don't think it's indicative of your narrative.
--
Your entire logic appears to be literally one comment agreeing with your narrative. I’ll focus on one example.
> The honest to god truth is I didn't realize people were actually saying shit quite this ridiculous until I was told this while being scolded in this thread, that people were saying such ridiculous things that my statement couldn't possibly be interpreted as satire because it was the verbatim argument of the people I was poking fun at.
It isn't people. It is one person. The other two people just like i did, are taking your comment at face value. That doesn't mean they agree with your narrative .
One person's hearsay shouldn't convince you. I actually brought up a specific anti crypto piece, Line Goes Up. Tons of discussions on it online. There aren't enough examples of your narrative in the real world about this for example (outside the consistent but small amount of unpleasant Karen sort of people)
> Maybe that hit too close to home for you, idk.
This is sad. If personally insulting me helps you, go for it!
* why would you take offense to me calling your fake talking as unpleasant. The unpleasantness is your admitted satire. So it's not saying you're unpleasant, heh. That still doesn't stop you from talking about my unpleasantness.
Rather than replying in any meaningful way or really even reading what you wrote, I'm just going to sit back and relish the time wasted you'll never get back writing that, and not make the same mistake on my end. Adios.
You didn’t “get me”. You got yourself. I write my comments for me. I have a log of my comments.
It appears you write comments on here for others. It could be that’s what makes you speak in such bad faith? It sucks to live life for others. Even worse you don’t even like them.
but then ultimately "disregarding" something has no effect on anything, so what are you worried about? you want a stranger to have regard for something because it has value for you, even though it doesn't for them?
Ok, but please don't repeat flamewar clichés in discussion here. This must surely be the biggest one of recent years and the flamewar has been repeated a thousand times already, if not more. Repetition to that degree is off-topic on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
They looked at Coinbase listing announcements from September 25, 2018 to May 1, 2022, and tracked four wallets that bought listings ahead of the announcements and earned an estimated profit of 1003 ETH ($1.5 million).
Of course, if you don't want to give those people your money, there is a simple solution: Don't buy shitcoins.
A pipe dream and a bit too late to think about a complete ban to make this even a reality, otherwise the regulators would have already banned all of it entirely a long time ago 100% and completely.
Now the SEC and other regulators continues to use the chain to trace up many insider trades and charge other projects for violating regulations. [0]
Like it or not as long as there is no complete and 100% blanket ban on the entire cryptocurrency industry, they will always be buyers / sellers in this market with the certainty of tough regulations to come.
If two coins A and B are the same in every respect except that
A emits its capped supply of N coins evenly over 10 years, while B emits
its identical capped supply of N coins evenly over 20 years,
then B's emission rate is half that of A (twice as slow). After 10 years, when A's emission finishes,
A's marketcap will be much higher than that of B, maybe twice as much, since B has only emitted N/2 coins, and A's price should roughly at least that of B.
In other words, a coin's price is determined more by its total supply than by its current supply, to reflect future dilution.
It's funny, people like to exacerbate the difference between cryptocurrency and shitcoins, but both of them are leagues away from the security of government tender. Even in the middle of a global recession, government cheese held it's value better than Ethereum or Bitcoin ever did. Principle-driven projects are getting sanctioned across the globe, everyone who wanted to 'rethink global finance' can go home now. Sure, a few other cryptocurrencies have been given special treatment based on their legacy, but it's only a matter of time before the shitcoin curse permeates them, too. L2 chains and non-custodial wallets have pushed that particular doomsday clock 2 ticks closer to midnight.
I'm not convinced there's 1-5 projects left after you "take out the trash". There's nothing. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero... all of these legacy projects have no use besides P2P transactions. It's cool, and can scale well, but that's not going to drive prices in the long-term. Crypto's hands are tied, and it can do nothing except trade sideways until it dies forever, like SoulSeek or LimeWire. Betting on Bitcoin going back up is like betting on Tastetations showing up again at your local CVS; abysmal odds, all hours of the day.
One type is a copy-paste of an existing coin with a few parameter tweaks or mostly meaningless change (like the PoW algorithm).
Another type is a cash grab where scammers write a buzz-word filled whitepaper with grandioseor bogus claims to raise money in an ICO and then only deliver some half-baked product or simply run off with the money.
This is just insider trading prior to listing. Not insider trading prior to crashes, where the insiders know a crash is coming and exit before the suckers find out.
> We estimate that insider trading occurs in 10-25% of cryptocurrency listings and as a lower bound, insiders earned $1.5 million in trading profits. Our findings identify cases that are yet to be prosecuted.
25% is still too low for how huge of a scam this thing is. I assume this only addresses insider trading, while the more common scheme is pump and dump?
I love seeing financial minded folks talk about how the price of cryptocurrencies will go up and that they're good investments. They're gambling entirely on the fraud working, and most of them don't know it's fraud all the way down.
The only financial minded folks that are involved with crypto are the ones that are selling the buckets and pickaxes. The expense ratios on these BTC funds are immense.
> continue to engage in serious violation of US security and trading laws
So, I think this is an underappreciated point. Coinbase, to the best of my knowledge, does not engage in crimes that would send people behind bars. (edit to clarify: Coinbase employees occasionally do, and I believe some are facing jail time, but this does not seem to be something Coinbase is doing).
They do engage in "crimes" that result in fines and other regulatory action. Why the scare quotes? Because the main way they commit these crimes is by taking laws/regulatory guidance that is vague, and pushing boundaries to see precisely where the boundaries are. This makes them like every other financial institution that wants to try something new, and the inevitable regulatory smackdowns they eventually get are just a cost of business.
My understanding is that this basic structure is normal in finance, to the point where "regulation by enforcement" (as opposed to regulation by regulation, where you write out in advance what is and isn't allowed) is a meme, and Coinbase only really stands out by being in crypto, where there are a lot more unclear boundaries and therefore more opportunity to push them.
tl;dr Violations of US security and trading laws are normal to some extent, and Coinbase generally stays within the "understood to be okay" standard, which is a lot looser than a "tries to never break laws" standard.
Your „crimes“ aren’t crimes, because it’s civil law, not criminal.
Coinbase is, however, tempting fate. The „regulation by enforcement“ you speak of may be what’s happening to the industry. The company, however, might end up as a token skull on a post by the side of the road, metaphorically speaking.
yet crypto meets Howeys Test in every sense of the word. Is calling a security different names like Token or Crypto protect it from the same security laws from being applied? You wouldn't wash trade your own company's stock would you?
technicalities aside, what they are engaging as a company is highly unethical
It's a functional decentralized value transfer system. Computerized systems can create wallets and transact without the consent of a third party. Properly secured cryptocurrency cannot be seized without the consent of the owner.
Edit: your edit is nonsensical - there is no blockchain without crypto - blockchains do not function with the financial incentive because that's what makes potentially-adversarial actors cooperate.
IMO to bootstrap the first cryptocoin you had to solve lots of problems that aren't present for subsequent ones. What if people merely tried it out - download for a week, do some mining and then delete it? That could have made the network very unstable in its genesis, which discourage developers and users from taking Bitcoin seriously. It makes some sense to reward early adopters who invest time, energy and cycles.
On a related note - I don't think proof-of-stake would have worked for bitcoin. First of all, equitable distribution is a big deal and mining can do that but PoS by itself can't. But if you solved that problem I still think you would have a harder time convincing people that there was any value in a staker's signature, and whether it makes sense to trust transactions secured "only" by stake.
A fixed block reward (i.e. no halvings) would also have rewarded early adopters to the extent that were fewer miners competing with each other, but would have avoided the large wealth concentration and deter most of the speculation.
You're correct to note that PoS is not a coin distribution method and thus made no sense for bitcoin.
> Currently, the network has secured its storage for like 1000 years in theory.
Claims like this are ridiculous on their face. In 1000 years the cryptographic primitives used for this project will be obsolete and broken. That's if we're not all using quantum computers of some kind and "traditional" computing is a relic of the long past.
As a result, why should I trust any other claims made about Arweave? Clearly the project has no sense of its own limitations.
The graphics card I just bought said "military grade" on it. What's military grade on a 3070? Not a clue. Obviously it's just bullshit marketing, written by someone who thought "military grade" sounded good or something.
But I still trust nVidia to render my video games.
Sometimes marketing department and copy-writers get ahead of themselves. It shouldn't discredit the entire project unless there are other signals as well. Which there might be with Arweave! I have no idea. But discrediting the technical part of a project because of the marketing part of the project can be short-sighted.
> But discrediting the technical part of a project because of the marketing part of the project can be short-sighted.
Fundamentally, I disagree. "Too good to be true" marketing is a great sign you're being scammed. I wouldn't trust a used car salesman who's throwing in free "undercarriage protection" and other junk after "talking to his manager". Why should I trust a website that's doing the same?
What's more, because Arweave like all crypto projects probably depends on users continuing to buy and mine tokens to function, unrealistic marketing contributes to boom-and-bust dynamics that might put my data at risk if enough people give up on the project/token. Whatever the underlying technology, this is enough of a reason to stay away. When Luna collapsed, a lot of people lost all their money. If the Arweave token collapses, users might also lose their "permanent" data.
Incidentally, this prompted me to look at the Arweave "yellow paper", and I found this gem:
> While the Arweave’s mechanism design is generally engineered to promote adaptivity to new circumstances, the core Arweave team does not expect that the network as it is currently formulated will continue to produce blocks in true perpetuity. This does not, however, mean that we expect that the information stored inside the weave will be lost after the final block is mined. It is our expectation that when eventually a permanent information storage system more suited to the challenges of the time emerges, the Arweave’s data will be ‘subsumed’ into this network. After the mining of the final block, the financial incentive mechanisms for data preservation will subside and give way to social incentives for data preservation. This effect will likely be compounded by the exceptionally low cost of storing the data from the network, due to its decreasing relative cost over time.
So data is stored "forever", assuming someone comes along and archives all the data at some point in the future for free.
>Fundamentally, I disagree. "Too good to be true" marketing is a great sign you're being scammed
Sure, there is definitely a scale where something becomes "too good to be true" and increasing your own skepticism in proportion with that scale is a sensible approach. My point was that it can be short-sighted to judge something off a single data-point when that data-point comes from the marketing departments copywrite rather than the technical aspects of the project.
I'll just go back to my example. If I swore off nVidia solely off the single data-point of the card being advertised as "military grade", that'd be rather unfortunate because the product itself is really quite good in my opinion. Even though "military grade" is a wildly stupid thing to advertise a graphic card as.
All I'm saying is that technical projects should not solely be judged based on a single marketing claim. In the large projects I've been a member of, I have absolutely zero say in how it is advertised. And the marketing department making the advertising could not possibly care less about the technical merits of the project.
The rest of what you said is applicable specifically to Arweave, which I don't care one bit about, so I don't have any specific comments on that.
Completely agree, they make claims like this and I'm instantly turned off because it feels like they are lying to my face.
I think they've set up a system that incentivizes long term storage (and possibly a better setup than IPFS) but theres no way in hell they can make a guarantee for more than a few years at best.
Cocaine is great stuff, with a lot of medical uses, safe enough to include in popular soft drinks.
But when you introduce a delivery system that short circuits your brain's reward circuitry, it's incredibly dangerous and destructive.
Ponzi tokenomics are the crack rocks of blockchain technology, which is itself really nifty. The only thing that can and will stop the tokenomics craze is a popular backslash, which is building.
And as with cocaine, blockchain will be forever slimed by association with this ponzi scheme fad and its devastating impact on millions and millions of families and fortunes.
Only privacy coins which deliver on the original cypherpunk goals of blockchain will survive. And smart contracts won't find any general utility unless and until one arrives that offers reliable homomorphically encrypted private smart contract resolution.
> privacy coins which deliver on the original cypherpunk goals of blockchain
They don't deliver on one aspect, which is full auditability. I think all existing privacy chains are completely broken by knowledge of the discrete log of one particular curve point.
I'm not sure I fully understand how XMR guarantees fungibility of its token, but I think a big part of it is the construction of ring signatures to prove transactions are zero sum, with a pool of participating signers that all have statistically valid plausible deniability. Start here maybe https://web.getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/clsag.html?
I fully understand how privacy coins like XMT audit their supply. They assume that Pedersen commitments r*G+v*H can only be openend in one way. Which is false if the discrete log of H w.r.t. G is known.
I said "I think" because there might by privacy coins not based on Pedersen commitments that I'm just not aware of.
Whelp, I'm gonna be bullish on some kind of move from cryptocurrency to a cypherpunk / plan9-esque Renaissance of distributed social computing, maybe taking ideas from e lang, and sprinkling in some web of trust auditable ledger if its appropriate and get the heck out of (web3) Dodge.
> And as with cocaine, blockchain will be forever slimed by association with this ponzi scheme fad and its devastating impact on millions and millions of families and fortunes.
Maybe you missed the irony of using a term that was coined and invented in traditional markets, but they seem to be fine and not very "slimed".
Crypto is certainly going through pre/early regulation gesticulation but ... most of the crypto scams were already done in traditional financial markets in their early days.
> Crypto is certainly going through pre/early regulation gesticulation but ... most of the crypto scams were already done in traditional financial markets in their early days.
The question is: what would the market cap of crypto be if a bunch of novice investors weren't lured in by scams and promises of 20% APY? I suspect it would be a lot lower than what we see today. Indeed, how many crypto ecosystem participants would care about BTC if they weren't expecting to get outsized returns on their investments?
Without the scams to pump up the value, I don't think cryptocurrency would have legs. Not many people care about Bitcoin's ideological goals (breaking free from fiat, etc.), and the genuine use cases that work today (mostly remittances and cheap wire transfers) have a limited audience.
> The question is: what would the market cap of crypto be if a bunch of novice investors weren't lured in by ..
Umm ... what? Why is that the question? Because you have an agenda? Sure ok, but you haven't provided any information to the context of the topic of conversation -- that crypto scams are more-or-less rehashes of scams in traditional finance.
> Only privacy coins which deliver on the original cypherpunk goals of blockchain will survive.
No.
That ship has already sailed and it is not early days anymore; just like the failure of the free software movement or the privacy movement who have both failed to stop spyware and privacy invasive technology from proliferating and proxied / developed by the majority of big tech.
Why is it that regulators are chasing after privacy tools / coins, like Tornado.cash, Monero, etc and not attempting to ban the others? The regulators have made it totally clear that they don't want these certain coins / tools to be around or used as a side benefit by scammers, criminals, etc.
I would say only the compliant few coins, crypto projects, etc that comply with regulations will survive and it will allow companies to accept crypto and use it safely.
Regulators absolutely love blockchain btw. A public ledger with a machine readable consistent interface that everyone's activity can be data mined through? Hell yes.
The privacy coins are going to get axed first. The rest are just tooling up to see what scumbags law enforcement can rake in with CI jobs.
Anyone who thought digital currency was going to do anything to help privacy has been smoking the highest quality cocaine.
> Regulators absolutely love blockchain btw. A public ledger with a machine readable consistent interface that everyone's activity can be data mined through? Hell yes.
Indeed they do. As long as they are able to see everyone's transactions and also identify and trace up illegal transactions easily, why would they ban it? Of course they won't hence they instead went after the privacy coins and will keep a compliant few that will survive regulations.
> Anyone who thought digital currency was going to do anything to help privacy has been smoking the highest quality cocaine.
Correct, and crypto is here to stay, just like spyware and closed-source software is. Anyone who thinks that crypto or closed-source software would go away entirely or having all of it get banned completely 100% is also already on the highest quality of cocaine or LSD to dedicate their whole life to try stopping all of it completely.
Dude, have you read about some of the early fuckery around stock markets circa 1800's or so? I forget who but one of the great American business barons fought off a hostile takeover by cajoling his share certificate printer to print more shares.
I don't think very highly of crypto but if the stocks can shrug that off, so it can too.
stocks have some inherent value as a holder of value, crypto currentcies don't and don't have any utility beyond making the ponzi schemers at the top a bunch of money whereas companies actually make stuff that people use.
There´s a reason why in the 90s there was huge SPAM on pumping penny-stocks. Right now, there are a bunch of crypto-currencies that do hold some inherent value (ETH, Golem, FileCoin, STORJ, Augur, Polygon, Polkadot, are some of them), and I am sure with time, more will appear.
A friend did an thing where he shadowed a neurologist for a week. He saw the neurologist use cocaine in an arm surgery: its a vasoconstrictor (stops bleeding) and local anesthetic. Dabbed a little on the cut and it stopped bleeding or hurting. Pretty amazing.
If it wasn't for the pesky reward-system hijacking, cocaine would probably be in everyone's emergency first aid kit.
All of which can be done without a blockchain, without the massive environmental damage and mostly on a free Postgres instance running on a Raspberry Pi in the corner of your bedroom.
All of these are absolutely fine, they are dumb to have on a blockchain.
No they can't. You can't have ENS running on a RaspPi in someone's bedroom because you don't want a naming system to be dependent on some random dude not unplugging their RaspPi, or modifying the database to change who owns which names for their personal benefit.
Yea but it hasn't though, so maybe the incentive models a blockchain-based approach provides is what actually makes this practical, consider that.
> without the massive environmental damage
That's a silly argument, but regardless the chain all these projects are built on (Ethereum) is about to move to Proof of Stake in a month, which makes it's carbon footprint nothing.
I assume that whoever is commenting here has read the whole paper rather than reading the headline and screaming in the comments section. It seems like the paper is assuming that nothing is happening and the SEC is also doing nothing to enforce it. Quite the contrary is happening in reality.
The SEC seems to be still enforcing and investigating many projects this for some time [0], which tells us that crypto will most definitely be regulated rather than a total full scale and complete ban which opponents have been screaming about are have been dreaming for years.
Due to the transparency and traceability of the majority of blockchains, it makes it possible to trace up all of this activity easily. Thus, is it not a surprise to see regulators banning blockchain privacy tools / coins off of exchanges and allowing the others or a compliant few. This is why they won't be a. complete ban and I would expect stricter regulations for the exchanges to reduce these problems.
But as always, anything critical of cryptocurrencies or crypto projects in general here is quickly raced to the top of HN, despite regulators still actively investigating the mentioned projects and many others from time to time. [1]
You're so far down the contrarian rabbit hole on this take, you're arguing the nuances of why, precisely, insider trading is illegal. It doesn't really matter why, it is, and for good reasons (agree with or don't, whatever). This ain't the hill.
That's obviously not what I'm saying; you're being difficult for the sake of argument. I've already stated why insider trading is and should be illegal.
They're literally arguing it from the selfish position of an insider trading rather than from the general societal and market benefits. I agree with you 100%
177 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 262 ms ] threadUS regulators would rather specialist companies with the fastest algorithms and connections to process corporate announcements reap all the benefits.
However, because it’s 2022 and we have the internet and all I’m not sure it really makes sense to focus on specific market centers instead of the market as a whole.
Of course HFT makes this far more complicated so it’s difficult to come up with a clear answer in either direction.
The Clean sweep study (https://zero.sci-hub.ru/5176/a262ebfad2436662b8fb5d7362ff297...) seems to suggest that ISOs have a greater impact on prices and add more information to markets than “regular” orders.
Insider trading is not real buy-side demand pricing information because the insider (typically) intends to sell as soon as the price pops, once more market participants have been pulled into the trade because it's going up -- key knowledge the insider knew the market did not.
Markets as a price discovery mechanism relies upon all participants having access to the same information. Insider trading clearly breaks that fundamental rule.
It also creates incentives for insiders to act perversely to profit from asymmetric information, including acting with the intent of creating less accurate pricing at a particular time in order to create trading opportunities for insiders.
Suffice to say the dominant trend in crypto markets is not rapid convergence on a relatively stable price...
That doesn’t make any sense, prices go in both directions. If price goes up, there’s no harm to people who the insiders may have some fiduciary duty to.
> It also creates incentives for insiders to act perversely to profit from asymmetric information, including acting with the intent of creating less accurate pricing at a particular time in order to create trading opportunities for insiders.
In the US that’s just called “wire fraud” and not “insider trading”.
Of course there is. When prices go up, insiders profit at the expense of shareholders who sell to them. In the absence of insider traders, non-insider shareholders collectively achieve better returns; ergo they are harmed by the presence of insider trading on positive or negative information.
(The only time it wouldn't be the case is if the prices move in the opposite direction to the one the insiders are expecting due to some other unanticipated development which is far more significant than their information advantage)
> In the US that’s just called “wire fraud” and not “insider trading”.
Much easier to prove the insider trading in the run up to a profit warning than prove an entity was intentionally mismanaged to create that opportunity and its earlier predictions of success were fraudulent and not just incorrect.
“Latency” just means that the future isn’t priced in, which results in less accurate pricing.
Insider trading adds to consensus knowledge.
It’s a handful of connected individuals in either case.
But I can't, without bribing executives, hacking into corporate servers or being at the negotiating table myself, front-run MNPI.
That difference is kind of the point behind free markets.
I struggle to wrap my head around someone thinking insider trading being a net positive. The only justification I see is if said person would like to themselves profit off of MNPI they have access to without fear of reprisal, in which case you should consider a career in the US senate.
> Because I could, given enough experience in the industry and money to have servers close enough if it's highly time-sensitive signal, compete with said funds and specialists.
What benefit does the existence of this competition provide as opposed to insider trading? Why do you think that artificially enabling such an industry is a net positive?
That's like playing poker with someone sitting at the table who's connected to the casino's management and knows the order of the cards coming up. We'll never come to an agreement that this behavior should be accepted and is beneficial for the game.
But it's certainly not for the other participants who are getting rolled over by insiders. Why play a rigged game?
And it's definitely not beneficial when the insider has the active ability to influence the price of the asset. If an executive could make money by shorting his firm's stock, the optimal strategy for every executive would be to sabotage their firm, while shorting its stock.
The latter two reasons are why it's illegal, by the way. It undermines confidence in markets, and it creates perverse, value-destroying incentives.
This only makes sense if you think of markets as gambling. Otherwise, other participants are always getting rolled by parties with better research, or perhaps just a faster internet connection.
> The latter two reasons are why it's illegal, by the way. It undermines confidence in markets, and it creates perverse, value-destroying incentives.
This doesn’t stand up to the most basic scrutiny. Sabotaging your publicly traded company is illegal whether or not you also engage in insider trading, what benefit is there to be had from criminalising the same thing twice?
Or if you think of markets as a way to encourage investment into the economy. Why should I invest if insiders are going to be scooping up a lion's share of the windfalls?
Anything that reduces the ROI on my investments creates an incentive for me to not invest.
> This doesn’t stand up to the most basic scrutiny. Sabotaging your publicly traded company is illegal whether or not you also engage in insider trading, what benefit is there to be had from criminalising the same thing twice?
1. Without these incentives, you have far fewer reasons to behave unethically and illegally.
2. You usually can't tell the difference between accidental incompetence and malicious sabotage. Being able to do sabotage under the guise of incompetence, while having a profit motive is a colossal conflict of interest, and any system that encourages it is going to produce a lot of poor outcomes.
3. When the executive doesn't benefit from either incompetence, or sabotage, and their rewards are based on good performance (stocks go up), their incentives are aligned to chase good performance.
Better price discovery is a good thing, but in this case, the juice is not worth the squeeze.
It's not a large tax on each individual participant, but it's not magical free money.
I think the crucial detail you might be missing here is that markets are not zero sum games.
It's true that markets aren't zero sum games, but some insider extracting value from a stock in this manner does not create value for me.
And the third point that I made very clearly creates incentives to turn it into a negative sum game. Good luck proving that Bob ran the company into the ground (and got rich doing so) because he's a crook, rather than just an idiot. You can't.
(You also can't make running a company like a well-intentioned idiot illegal.)
Insider trading doesn’t make this any easier to prove. Bob can just start drinking or doing drugs before running the company into the ground, now his friends and family have a solid defense against any insider trading claims.
Bobs drug problem isn’t material nonpublic information, but it sure as hell explains why everyone around him started shorting the company.
You’d prefer for whatever company has the fastest algorithms to process corporate announcements to reap 99% of the $$$? How is that any better?
Edit: algorithmic option is available to anyone but insider trading rewards a select few "insiders". No meritocracy.
So what? How does artificially helping algorithmic traders help society at large, or even just market participants at large?
This is just creating a worthless industry that could be entirely replaced by insider trading.
>>Self taught programmer.
>> Learning CS fundamentals, Algo + DS alongside leetcoding as I’ll fully switch to a software dev career when I can land a solid programming job.
>> always enjoy talking to people - helping one another out, bouncing ideas.
---> 'helps another out' by shitting on someone for meaninglessness when he doesn't produce formal credentials
Bravo brother!
Also, which part of my comment is shitting on some one? Saying something casually isn’t shitting on someone. There has to be some thing like bad faith involved. Like what you do including here.
So you really meant to just say "this doesn't mean anything" rather than "You're anonymous. This doesn't mean anything." Turns out your comment was just another disingenuous "heads I win, tails you lose" where by your own self admitted stance, it would have also not meant anything if they weren't anonymous and actually did provide credentials (despite classes OP called for actually being a part of getting those credentials).
> I write my comments for me.
Why would I answer your questions. You said you write your comments for yourself, that means the question is for yourself, not me.
It’s not illegal for me to pay Visa and Mastercard for an exclusive deal to access transaction flow and trade on the basis of that information. I will in fact be trading based on material nonpublic information, but not in the sense the law forbids.
>The Securities and Exchange Commission announced today that it charged Bonan Huang and Nan Huang (the "Defendants") with engaging in illegal insider trading on the basis of material, non-public information about the sales of predominantly consumer retail corporations.
>In its complaint filed in the federal court in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania on January 21, 2015, the SEC alleges that the Defendants worked for a large credit card issuer as data analysts tasked with investigating fraudulent credit card activity. While employed there, Defendants searched their employer's nonpublic database that recorded the credit card activity for millions of customers at numerous, predominantly consumer retail corporations. The Defendants conducted hundreds, if not thousands, of keyword searches of this database. These searches, which were not done in furtherance of their employment duties, allowed the Defendants to view and analyze aggregated sales data for the companies they searched. The complaint further alleges that, in a breach of their duty to their employer, the Defendants made profitable securities transactions on the basis of this material, non-public information in advance of the public release of quarterly sales announcements by these companies.
https://www.sec.gov/litigation/litreleases/2015/lr23179.htm
Those guys did a bad thing because they deprived their employer of the opportunity to profit from this data.
Just one of the many cancers affecting our current society.
You can work in crypto as long as you have no morals.
I agree that most projects are cash grabs, but that's no excuse for insulting all developers without exception.
[1] https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo
There's a lot of scammy stuff in the cryptocurrency world, but why do so many people feel the need to pompously proclaim the whole thing is a scam when they clearly only have a shallow familiarity with the space? Is it sour grapes or jealousy?
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1geg5HHgDO-ht0u6CSTHp...
Are all non-crypto startup businesses 'cash grabs' in your opinion? Does that make them scams?
Edit: Actually we don't have to imagine this scenario. The diamond cartel[1] does something very similar already and yes, it's a scam.
[1] https://are.berkeley.edu/~sberto/debers.pdf
Everything in the crypto world is built off of the core decentralized consensus idea described by the whitepaper, so I think it's really the foundation of understanding everything else.
My personal appraisals of other parts of the crypto space that aren't scams: Ethereum, Lightning Network, hardware wallets, Coinbase, Proof of Stake (may not like the incentives, but it can work as designed), DAOs (inherently risky because they have an implicit bug bounty for their total value, too risky for my taste, but glad they exist and people are learning how to make them more robust)
Is the cost of settling a transaction on a blockchain still greater than the value of the transactions, in electrical bills?
This is smugness. It's being aware of a cancerous growth and doing what we can to avoid and excise it.
No, I'm not smug. I'm upset. Crypto has displaced a lot of good investment and effort.
Ah, because scamming doesn't happen inside the other classes of investments you're talking about
Parent is painting with broad negative strokes, but they aren't far from reality.
Money attracts sociopaths, who seek positions of power. I don't think crypto is special or unusual in this sense.
Personally I think real estate a an "investment market" is doing much more harm to society than anything else right now
/s
Assuming you work in tech, do you feel a personal responsibility for all of those cancers?
I bought Ethereum in 2015.
Raised a 7-figure fund in 2017.
Closed everything down in 2019.
My take of the space is that all of the projects are on a spectrum.
Total scams <--------------> Completely superfluous
When I walk into a restaurant, same deal. I don't have to really worry.
The amount of legwork I have to do separate the bad parts from the good parts is incredibly low.
The crypto space is the complete opposite of that. I have to do a shitton of legwork to find out if it's a scam or not. And to top it all off, most of them are, in fact, some form of scam. At some point, it's not laziness, it's efficiency.
Especially when you consider I have to do all the work no matter who is promoting it. There are absolutely no trustworthy voices. Because either the voices are the scammers themselves or have been taken in by scammers.
As an example, I believe ALGO is a legitimate blockchain coin but when your marketing copy reads like this, it doesn't take laziness/disinterested to pass sniff tests.
"Examples include bond issuance, escrow account creation, loan payments & fee executions, limit orders, subscriptions, collateralized obligations, disbursements, programmatic fees, delegated high- security account management, interface with off-chain data providers, HELOC (Home Equity Line of Credit), decentralized exchanges, crowdfunding, voting and more."
These all sound great! Who's offering HELOC's using ALGO right now? Crickets - so how would you convince me this isn't a scam?
https://www.algorand.com/technology
Well that's the thing though, shocking as it may be, there are other societies out there.
Living in a Third World country with a controlled currency, Bitcoin was the only way I could actually buy things online.
So yeah, to me, it does have an actual value. Disregarding something completely just because you don't think is useful is very shortsighted. It's akin to people thinking x programming language is complete trash.
Edit: lol to the people not realizing this is intentional satire meant to poke fun at the meme-like representation of the stereotypical crypto-hater
Edit: And I say this as someone who's pretty much, "fuck crypto". OP said they're from a third world country and were vague with what they purchased and, especially, why. Yet you've painted them as an absolutely disgusting individual. Geez.
It can be difficult to understand if something is sarcastic or satire when there is no tone of voice or facial cues to help. Especially when you don't exaggerate, and simply type out the same things as the group your satirizing. Maybe the only difference/give-away was the "crying" part of the polar bears. The rest is pretty much verbatim of some of the nastier comments I've seen in other threads.
See comment below:
>It can be difficult to understand if something is sarcastic or satire when there is no tone of voice or facial cues to help. Especially when you don't exaggerate, and simply type out the same things as the group your satirizing. Maybe the only difference/give-away was the "crying" part of the polar bears. The rest is pretty much verbatim of some of the nastier comments I've seen in other threads.
>Maybe the only difference/give-away was the "crying" part of the polar bears. The rest is pretty much verbatim of some of the nastier comments I've seen in other threads.
> pretty much verbatim
So yeah, your peers disagree with you. What I said is apparently "pretty much verbatim" of the stereotypical ilk, apparently. So which of the two of you are lying? Have that debate down in your counterpart's thread if you like.
>There's nothing specifically stereotypical about what you wrote when it comes to people who dislike crypto
The hilarious thing is I meant for my post to sound over the top and exaggerated vs the stereotypical meme. It was supposed to sound a bit ridiculous. Then I simultaneously get accused no one could possible understand it is satire because I didn't exaggerate enough while also being accused it's not satire because I exaggerated too much. The honest to god truth is I didn't realize people were actually saying shit quite this ridiculous until I was told this while being scolded in this thread, that people were saying such ridiculous things that my statement couldn't possibly be interpreted as satire because it was the verbatim argument of the people I was poking fun at. Maybe that hit too close to home for you, idk.
Who did this? I certainly didn't. I said the extremism of sounding like an unhinged loon* is what is coming out. Not satire of a stereotypical person against crypto.
I also didn't think what you wrote was satire or exaggeration either. I read your comment as a seriously written one. Yet I don't think it's indicative of your narrative.
--
Your entire logic appears to be literally one comment agreeing with your narrative. I’ll focus on one example.
> The honest to god truth is I didn't realize people were actually saying shit quite this ridiculous until I was told this while being scolded in this thread, that people were saying such ridiculous things that my statement couldn't possibly be interpreted as satire because it was the verbatim argument of the people I was poking fun at.
It isn't people. It is one person. The other two people just like i did, are taking your comment at face value. That doesn't mean they agree with your narrative .
One person's hearsay shouldn't convince you. I actually brought up a specific anti crypto piece, Line Goes Up. Tons of discussions on it online. There aren't enough examples of your narrative in the real world about this for example (outside the consistent but small amount of unpleasant Karen sort of people)
> Maybe that hit too close to home for you, idk.
This is sad. If personally insulting me helps you, go for it!
* why would you take offense to me calling your fake talking as unpleasant. The unpleasantness is your admitted satire. So it's not saying you're unpleasant, heh. That still doesn't stop you from talking about my unpleasantness.
It appears you write comments on here for others. It could be that’s what makes you speak in such bad faith? It sucks to live life for others. Even worse you don’t even like them.
does the posting war need to continue?
actually, what am i even doing here?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. For clarity: I'm not making an argument about cryptocurrency here. Just about HN threads.
Of course, if you don't want to give those people your money, there is a simple solution: Don't buy shitcoins.
Don't buy any cryptocurrency.
Now the SEC and other regulators continues to use the chain to trace up many insider trades and charge other projects for violating regulations. [0]
Like it or not as long as there is no complete and 100% blanket ban on the entire cryptocurrency industry, they will always be buyers / sellers in this market with the certainty of tough regulations to come.
[0] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...
- premined (the creator reserves coins for themselves or for "development purposes" before releasing to the public)
- the coin is named after a dog
- centralized governance (one person/group/company controls development or makes frequent hard forks)
- been around less than 5-10 years (these aren't necessarily scams, but at best you're gambling on something unproven)
- small market cap (again, not necessarily a scam, but a big red flag. let other people be the ones to dig through the trash and hunt unicorns)
Take out the trash and you're left with between 1 and 5 projects, depending on how you feel about the details.
That's not a red flag if the emission is very slow, e.g. a pure linear emission that takes a century to reach the soft total [1].
[1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...
In other words, a coin's price is determined more by its total supply than by its current supply, to reflect future dilution.
I'm not convinced there's 1-5 projects left after you "take out the trash". There's nothing. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero... all of these legacy projects have no use besides P2P transactions. It's cool, and can scale well, but that's not going to drive prices in the long-term. Crypto's hands are tied, and it can do nothing except trade sideways until it dies forever, like SoulSeek or LimeWire. Betting on Bitcoin going back up is like betting on Tastetations showing up again at your local CVS; abysmal odds, all hours of the day.
25% is still too low for how huge of a scam this thing is. I assume this only addresses insider trading, while the more common scheme is pump and dump?
It has placeholder text in it like "[Insert Figure 1 Here]" and "[Insert Table 2 Here]".
Is this a draft?
https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
I love seeing financial minded folks talk about how the price of cryptocurrencies will go up and that they're good investments. They're gambling entirely on the fraud working, and most of them don't know it's fraud all the way down.
A) how Coinbase got past YC vetting process
B) continue to engage in serious violation of US security and trading laws
C) a large portion of HN seems to downvote, flag, critical comments towards Brian Armstrong and coinbase
I couldn't stop laughing when he said older banking systems run on "cobalt".
while for the rest of us the bar is so much higher and trusted with far less.
our world is run not based on merit, ideas, gumption but a closed group of people brought together by common skin color, religion, class.
I don't think Brian Armstrong would've gone very far with YC if he was black or asian
This is an outrageous statement and demonstrably incorrect.
So, I think this is an underappreciated point. Coinbase, to the best of my knowledge, does not engage in crimes that would send people behind bars. (edit to clarify: Coinbase employees occasionally do, and I believe some are facing jail time, but this does not seem to be something Coinbase is doing).
They do engage in "crimes" that result in fines and other regulatory action. Why the scare quotes? Because the main way they commit these crimes is by taking laws/regulatory guidance that is vague, and pushing boundaries to see precisely where the boundaries are. This makes them like every other financial institution that wants to try something new, and the inevitable regulatory smackdowns they eventually get are just a cost of business.
My understanding is that this basic structure is normal in finance, to the point where "regulation by enforcement" (as opposed to regulation by regulation, where you write out in advance what is and isn't allowed) is a meme, and Coinbase only really stands out by being in crypto, where there are a lot more unclear boundaries and therefore more opportunity to push them.
tl;dr Violations of US security and trading laws are normal to some extent, and Coinbase generally stays within the "understood to be okay" standard, which is a lot looser than a "tries to never break laws" standard.
Coinbase is, however, tempting fate. The „regulation by enforcement“ you speak of may be what’s happening to the industry. The company, however, might end up as a token skull on a post by the side of the road, metaphorically speaking.
technicalities aside, what they are engaging as a company is highly unethical
Edit: your edit is nonsensical - there is no blockchain without crypto - blockchains do not function with the financial incentive because that's what makes potentially-adversarial actors cooperate.
On a related note - I don't think proof-of-stake would have worked for bitcoin. First of all, equitable distribution is a big deal and mining can do that but PoS by itself can't. But if you solved that problem I still think you would have a harder time convincing people that there was any value in a staker's signature, and whether it makes sense to trust transactions secured "only" by stake.
A fixed block reward (i.e. no halvings) would also have rewarded early adopters to the extent that were fewer miners competing with each other, but would have avoided the large wealth concentration and deter most of the speculation. You're correct to note that PoS is not a coin distribution method and thus made no sense for bitcoin.
Claims like this are ridiculous on their face. In 1000 years the cryptographic primitives used for this project will be obsolete and broken. That's if we're not all using quantum computers of some kind and "traditional" computing is a relic of the long past.
As a result, why should I trust any other claims made about Arweave? Clearly the project has no sense of its own limitations.
But I still trust nVidia to render my video games.
Sometimes marketing department and copy-writers get ahead of themselves. It shouldn't discredit the entire project unless there are other signals as well. Which there might be with Arweave! I have no idea. But discrediting the technical part of a project because of the marketing part of the project can be short-sighted.
Fundamentally, I disagree. "Too good to be true" marketing is a great sign you're being scammed. I wouldn't trust a used car salesman who's throwing in free "undercarriage protection" and other junk after "talking to his manager". Why should I trust a website that's doing the same?
What's more, because Arweave like all crypto projects probably depends on users continuing to buy and mine tokens to function, unrealistic marketing contributes to boom-and-bust dynamics that might put my data at risk if enough people give up on the project/token. Whatever the underlying technology, this is enough of a reason to stay away. When Luna collapsed, a lot of people lost all their money. If the Arweave token collapses, users might also lose their "permanent" data.
Incidentally, this prompted me to look at the Arweave "yellow paper", and I found this gem:
> While the Arweave’s mechanism design is generally engineered to promote adaptivity to new circumstances, the core Arweave team does not expect that the network as it is currently formulated will continue to produce blocks in true perpetuity. This does not, however, mean that we expect that the information stored inside the weave will be lost after the final block is mined. It is our expectation that when eventually a permanent information storage system more suited to the challenges of the time emerges, the Arweave’s data will be ‘subsumed’ into this network. After the mining of the final block, the financial incentive mechanisms for data preservation will subside and give way to social incentives for data preservation. This effect will likely be compounded by the exceptionally low cost of storing the data from the network, due to its decreasing relative cost over time.
So data is stored "forever", assuming someone comes along and archives all the data at some point in the future for free.
Sure, there is definitely a scale where something becomes "too good to be true" and increasing your own skepticism in proportion with that scale is a sensible approach. My point was that it can be short-sighted to judge something off a single data-point when that data-point comes from the marketing departments copywrite rather than the technical aspects of the project.
I'll just go back to my example. If I swore off nVidia solely off the single data-point of the card being advertised as "military grade", that'd be rather unfortunate because the product itself is really quite good in my opinion. Even though "military grade" is a wildly stupid thing to advertise a graphic card as.
All I'm saying is that technical projects should not solely be judged based on a single marketing claim. In the large projects I've been a member of, I have absolutely zero say in how it is advertised. And the marketing department making the advertising could not possibly care less about the technical merits of the project.
The rest of what you said is applicable specifically to Arweave, which I don't care one bit about, so I don't have any specific comments on that.
did it cost 10x RRP?
Thankfully it did not appear like I paid the 'military-grade' tax.
I think they've set up a system that incentivizes long term storage (and possibly a better setup than IPFS) but theres no way in hell they can make a guarantee for more than a few years at best.
But when you introduce a delivery system that short circuits your brain's reward circuitry, it's incredibly dangerous and destructive.
Ponzi tokenomics are the crack rocks of blockchain technology, which is itself really nifty. The only thing that can and will stop the tokenomics craze is a popular backslash, which is building.
And as with cocaine, blockchain will be forever slimed by association with this ponzi scheme fad and its devastating impact on millions and millions of families and fortunes.
Only privacy coins which deliver on the original cypherpunk goals of blockchain will survive. And smart contracts won't find any general utility unless and until one arrives that offers reliable homomorphically encrypted private smart contract resolution.
They don't deliver on one aspect, which is full auditability. I think all existing privacy chains are completely broken by knowledge of the discrete log of one particular curve point.
Whelp, I'm gonna be bullish on some kind of move from cryptocurrency to a cypherpunk / plan9-esque Renaissance of distributed social computing, maybe taking ideas from e lang, and sprinkling in some web of trust auditable ledger if its appropriate and get the heck out of (web3) Dodge.
> And as with cocaine, blockchain will be forever slimed by association with this ponzi scheme fad and its devastating impact on millions and millions of families and fortunes.
Maybe you missed the irony of using a term that was coined and invented in traditional markets, but they seem to be fine and not very "slimed".
Crypto is certainly going through pre/early regulation gesticulation but ... most of the crypto scams were already done in traditional financial markets in their early days.
The question is: what would the market cap of crypto be if a bunch of novice investors weren't lured in by scams and promises of 20% APY? I suspect it would be a lot lower than what we see today. Indeed, how many crypto ecosystem participants would care about BTC if they weren't expecting to get outsized returns on their investments?
Without the scams to pump up the value, I don't think cryptocurrency would have legs. Not many people care about Bitcoin's ideological goals (breaking free from fiat, etc.), and the genuine use cases that work today (mostly remittances and cheap wire transfers) have a limited audience.
Umm ... what? Why is that the question? Because you have an agenda? Sure ok, but you haven't provided any information to the context of the topic of conversation -- that crypto scams are more-or-less rehashes of scams in traditional finance.
That will help many of us escape, but for normal people, it will just be part of the path.
No.
That ship has already sailed and it is not early days anymore; just like the failure of the free software movement or the privacy movement who have both failed to stop spyware and privacy invasive technology from proliferating and proxied / developed by the majority of big tech.
Why is it that regulators are chasing after privacy tools / coins, like Tornado.cash, Monero, etc and not attempting to ban the others? The regulators have made it totally clear that they don't want these certain coins / tools to be around or used as a side benefit by scammers, criminals, etc.
I would say only the compliant few coins, crypto projects, etc that comply with regulations will survive and it will allow companies to accept crypto and use it safely.
The privacy coins are going to get axed first. The rest are just tooling up to see what scumbags law enforcement can rake in with CI jobs.
Anyone who thought digital currency was going to do anything to help privacy has been smoking the highest quality cocaine.
Indeed they do. As long as they are able to see everyone's transactions and also identify and trace up illegal transactions easily, why would they ban it? Of course they won't hence they instead went after the privacy coins and will keep a compliant few that will survive regulations.
> Anyone who thought digital currency was going to do anything to help privacy has been smoking the highest quality cocaine.
Correct, and crypto is here to stay, just like spyware and closed-source software is. Anyone who thinks that crypto or closed-source software would go away entirely or having all of it get banned completely 100% is also already on the highest quality of cocaine or LSD to dedicate their whole life to try stopping all of it completely.
I don't think very highly of crypto but if the stocks can shrug that off, so it can too.
There´s a reason why in the 90s there was huge SPAM on pumping penny-stocks. Right now, there are a bunch of crypto-currencies that do hold some inherent value (ETH, Golem, FileCoin, STORJ, Augur, Polygon, Polkadot, are some of them), and I am sure with time, more will appear.
If it wasn't for the pesky reward-system hijacking, cocaine would probably be in everyone's emergency first aid kit.
All of these are absolutely fine, they are dumb to have on a blockchain.
Yea but it hasn't though, so maybe the incentive models a blockchain-based approach provides is what actually makes this practical, consider that.
> without the massive environmental damage
That's a silly argument, but regardless the chain all these projects are built on (Ethereum) is about to move to Proof of Stake in a month, which makes it's carbon footprint nothing.
The SEC seems to be still enforcing and investigating many projects this for some time [0], which tells us that crypto will most definitely be regulated rather than a total full scale and complete ban which opponents have been screaming about are have been dreaming for years.
Due to the transparency and traceability of the majority of blockchains, it makes it possible to trace up all of this activity easily. Thus, is it not a surprise to see regulators banning blockchain privacy tools / coins off of exchanges and allowing the others or a compliant few. This is why they won't be a. complete ban and I would expect stricter regulations for the exchanges to reduce these problems.
But as always, anything critical of cryptocurrencies or crypto projects in general here is quickly raced to the top of HN, despite regulators still actively investigating the mentioned projects and many others from time to time. [1]
[0] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...
[1] https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2022/comp-pr2022-1...
Whether or not insider trading should be illegal is a hotly contested topic among economists.
>It doesn't really matter why, it is, and for good reasons
Would you like to share the good reasons why it doesn’t matter?