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Comment by desmap | Hacker News Reader

@dang, you should think about adding a disclaimer to every crypto-related submission, just regex the title with the typical key words to catch them, with something like:

Be aware that crypto-related submissions like this one might be intended to trigger or influence a wanted market behavior by OP.

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A little superfluous. Couldn't we just assume that any blog post about any topic "might be intended to trigger or influence a wanted market behavior"? A news article critical of Amazon warehouse management could also be seen the exact same way.

That's absolutely true and every post can have a hidden agenda. However and in particular in this field hidden agendas are more common or let's call it pump and dump schemes. Cause and effect are so much closer together than in other fields, e.g. when I post how great Ruby is I cannot expect that the next day 10K new devs learn again Ruby haha and even if, I won't make any money over night. Maybe my Ruby course business (just an example, I don't have one haha) would get few more subscriptions but yeah.

Any article posted here could cause market movements. We discuss public companies all the time.

Apples to oranges. Manipulating stock prices of public companies is much harder/more complex than of crypto currencies.

Right but I do think the principle is the same. We're commenting on an asset. If the market moves due to that conversation then so be it. The GameStop fiasco proves that it's really not hard to manipulate public trading as one might initially think.

I don't think HN readers need us to tell them that.

The OP can be a victim of the original article's author as well. I agree with your intention though.

Also @dang, should require every user to add a tag/label that will show us if they are a Bitcoin speculator/owner, and would be great if then upvotes/downvotes had a stat that was viewable to see what % of upvotes/downvotes posts or comments have are by those who are financially incentivized for Bitcoin to succeed.

Edit to add: what are the odds this comment would be downvoted in a Bitcoin thread? Would be great to see the bias of upvote/downvoters and commenters in Bitcoin threads, then can have 2 thread columns: top comments for those who own Bitcoin, and top comments for those who don't own Bitcoin; obviously it'd an honour system and could be gamed.

We should also add a sour grapes label for people who missed out on Bitcoin despite being the "tech wizard" of their family and resent it.

Let's make people link their brokerage account while we're at it so that someone can't post Waymo news if they own GOOG stock.

That's a bad faith exaggeration argument you just made: we don't need to know everything someone has financial interest in, just if it's related to the topic. It's why VCs, for example, if writing a blog post about a company - they will write a disclaimer that they own shares in the company. We have laws to require people to disclose if something is sponsorship as well - because it changes the value of what's being said.

> we don't need to know everything someone has financial interest in

You wouldn't. You would just know that OP owns GOOG if the article is about GOOG. Only HN/the brokerage would have their entire portfolio.

> It's why VCs, for example, if writing a blog post about a company - they will write a disclaimer that they own shares in the company

As far as I can tell this isn't a legal requirement - shareholders have no obligation to disclose their position, even major stakeholders don't have to do so every time they post about the company - it's mainly to protect the writer's reputation and because they really don't want to mislead the reader. The point is that HN shouldn't be the one keeping the comments and submissions free of articles posted "for the intent of manipulating the market" regardless if we're talking about crypto securities or public securities.

"As far as I can tell this isn't a legal requirement - shareholders have no obligation to disclose their position, ..."

Very much seems like this should be remedied, it's part of integrity for people to know if you have a financial motivation behind what you say - at least if you want a society that has integrity and not as easily open to manipulation; it's ultimately why advertising is bad, the people didn't deserve to get the attention they've getting - and why in part Tesla has done so well - they created a good enough product to get word of mouth and receive the attention they deserve (for the good and bad) to receive.

Taleb would say that those people should be listened to more, because they have skin in the game.

That’s fair, but I feel compelled to point out that a penny stock pumper also has skin in the game.

Which that logic gets cancelled out because you could claim the person without bias, "skin in the game" - is who should actually be listened to more. Those cancelling each other out then just leaves the financial incentive that the person who owns Bitcoin has.

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