Crypto Crash Widens a Divide: ‘Those with Money Will End Up Being Fine’ | Hacker News Reader

Crypto Crash Widens a Divide: ‘Those with Money Will End Up Being Fine’

nytimes.com

16 pointspseudolus16 comments

This is such a ridiculous article. Sure, if you took all your life savings and threw them at one of the most volatile investments available then you probably didn't do well when it crashed. The difference between Ben Thomson and the Winklevii isn't that one of them was rich and took advantage, it's that the Winklevii are diversified and Ben wasn't.

Ben wanted free money, turns out Ben gave other people free money. Why shouldn't people take Ben's free money? He wanted to take theirs.

I was watching a TV show called Downtown abbey and one of the things that pleasantly surprised me was that the lord of the manor joined up in the British army and served as an officer in the trenches.

Fast forward a hundred years and the elite can basically avoid any crisis short of a meteor strike. If the US instituted a draft you'd see a thousand privately chartered planes head out of New York.

The big difference now is that there is a standing army. I don't particularly want troops led by some guy who gets to be in charge just because he's rich.

Note, by the way, that the British notion of service for their elites does still exist, at least for the royals. Both Prince Charles and Prince Andrew served in the military. Charles didn't serve in wartime, but his sons both served in Afghanistan. These were not ceremonial; they trained and fought. They certainly got a leg up, being easily admitted to officer training rather than enlisting, but they weren't simply dubbed "officers" the way Earl Grantham would have been.

I mean, it's _very much_ a sympathetic view of the early 20th century British upper class. Like, notably so.

For a more cynical take, see... well, virtually anything actually written during the period in question.

Indeed, a phrase you no longer hear about rich people: "They've fallen on hard times". Because they don't, the Fed keeps bailing them out.

> MusiCares, a charity that helps musicians recover from addiction

Of all the causes in this world, this has got to be just about the least deserving

No different to someone who goes into a casino and bests their rent on red. If you can't afford to lose it, don't speculate with it

Don't think casinos are allowed to say things like guaranteed 20% returns on your gambling investment. Admittedly anyone offered such returns should be suspicious.

It’s grey because it’s 20% guaranteed return in your “currency”. Nothing about 20% return in USD (or whatever fiat)

Many of these things didn't deliver that, though. You deposited your preferred form of magic beans, and they were supposed to give you 20% magic beans on them. Instead, well, they hung onto your magic beans, without even a cow in return.

The most egregious ones, the ones who basically had a "Hello we are a scam" banner on their website, did sometimes require people to use their _own_ form of magic beans, but that wasn't typical.

I never saw any cefi or defi exchange advertise "Guaranteed 20% returns", which exchange did this?

Anchor offered a fixed 20% APY. This required you to convert your funds to UST in order to participate, and was the fuel to the crazy UST/Luna/Terra scam run up and subsequent crash to zero.

https://www.ft.com/content/d459f435-edff-412c-85a5-0961d50ab...

Other than the casino in question being unregulated and marketing itself to be more like a high interest savings account...

Well said mate.

If you look around the poker table and can’t tell who the patsy is, you are the patsy.

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