Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

Comment by majormajor | Hacker News Reader

A couple knee jerk reactions to the headline in here, but the article makes a compelling case that in that case, there needs to be a lot more restriction on how wildly speculative "investments" can be advertised. It's a "stop blaming the people misled by overwhelming advertising campaigns instead of the sharks" claim. Especially the "shouldn't have" past-tense.

Steph Curry telling people FTX made it so they didn't have to be a crypto expert, for instance. But maybe inexperienced non-experts tossing money into a whole bunch of random tokens is NOT a great recipe for success...

A whole lot more time and money is spent on telling people you should put your money in this thing than is spent telling them to think twice, that there's no such thing as a free lunch, that promised double-digit rates of returns suggest it's not a safe investment, etc.

So either turn down the volume on the one, or turn up the volume either louder on the latter. I'd pick the former, though.

>that there's no such thing as a free lunch

I would not believe anyone who said they did not already know this deep down. Even children learn this early on by just observing the world.

Nobody gives away something for nothing. All these "investors" were aware they were gambling and hoping to earn something for nothing.

Can you point me to any well-broadcast government or expert warnings that it was a scam or that some of them in particular would fall apart much more quickly than others?

Cause on the other hands, here's all the competing information you're wanting people to filter out:

* government officials were getting on board with "pay me in crypto!" bullshit and similar

* millions were spent on advertising campaigns about how actually, these days, you don't have to think about it

* millions were spent on advertising campaigns trying to get people afraid of being left behind

* government policy in the US, due to conservative politics, has made investing for your future an increasingly individual responsibility rat-race for several decades now

* new computer technology, in the past five decades, has created something from nothing wealth-wise MANY times, often (but not always) in sustainable ways

Even a relatively skeptical investor, who hadn't heard of it in 2012, and who sat on the sidelines in 2017, at this point may have looked at a ten-year chart of BTC, said "ok, there's some solid history now, maybe the chicken-littles are actually the same sort who say that the whole stock market is a scam, even the government is starting to get on board with crypto"... and then you want them to be able to dig deep enough to understand why they're all castles in the sky to some extent, but some are more or less guaranteed to fall apart more quickly than others?

Even the two articles that the essay cites from the NYT and New York Post, once you get past the headlines, go on at length about how these things were risky and volatile, or even downright scams. Almost every article about cryptocurrency in these traditional venues tends to have at least one paragraph where they will describe cryptocurrency skepticism.

Now it could be that people started to treat these as a kind of pro forma disclaimer, like the small text about "past results are not guarantees of future returns" that you see with traditional investments. But the warning was there.

I mean we've minted plenty of millionaires by way of the stock market and startups and generally hail those people as geniuses when they're often just lucky. Uber is no less of a Ponzi than crypto.

Yes, maybe there is some willful self delusion. Then again, I don't think anyone really understands economics --- well enough to predict the future, anyway. There's no shortage of folks who understand it well enough to "explain" the past.

> Uber is no less of a Ponzi than crypto.

What?

Unlike crypto Uber actually generates revenue from sources besides new investors..

Cryptocurrencies do not generate revenue from investors. They don't generate any revenue.

Uber stock doesn't generate revenue either as it's not a profitable company. In the current meta paying dividends is worse that doing stock buybacks so it's unlikely for the stock to ever be a revenue generating asset.

For some reason people call pump and dumps Ponzis.

Uber isn’t a Ponzi, it’s a transfer of money from SoftBank to Uber drivers and employees. It’s an investor charity, like Amazon.

What? Royalty get a free lunch. Lottery winners get a free lunch. Trust-fund babies and the children of the wealthy get free lunches. All children who must legally be fed and raised by their parents for years get literal free lunches, and many get free lunches at school. Dividend receiving shareholders get free lunches, passive income businesses are free lunch generators. Poor people can visit charitable places such as some Sikh Gurdwaras and get literal free lunches. People who forage, pick fruit off trees or go fishing get free lunches. People find money on the streets and use it to buy lunch. People dig free lunches up from archaeology sites or beachcombing. People on welfare get free lunches. Government officials who take bribes get free lunches. People get free lunches for Christmas or Birthday. People attend seminars and conferences for the free lunches, and accept free lunches from prospective business partners or vendors. Thieves get free lunches. Landlords get free lunches. Foodbanks hand out free lunches.

Free lunches are everywhere. Children who learn that they aren't just by observing the world, aren't very observant.

> "Nobody gives away something for nothing."

Open Source software props up a lot of the internet, much of it given away for nothing. College students make a point of going round the dorms of wealthy international students who buy furnishings and electronics for the year, then leave it all out on the kerbside instead of shipping it back home. People around the wealthy Western world send stuff to the dump or to charity shops just to avoid the bother of putting it up for sale and collecting money for it. There's an entire website (FreeCycle) created just to organise giving things away for nothing. Google N-Grams records people giving away dogs with the term "free to good home" in the 1940s.

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