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Comment by jasonwatkinspdx | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, you can say "they should have known it was too good" but I mean seriously, huge sporting events are plastered in cryptocoin logos. High profile papers like the WSJ spent years portraying cryptocoin as at least something as relevant as traditional finance if not its proximate replacement. The biggest banks and VCs are deeply involved and trumpeting loudly. Huge old school tech companies like IBM suddenly talking about the blockchain revolution. And my 80 year old aunt is somehow supposed to read that all this is just an astoundingly massive bubble? I just don't think it's a realistic expectation. This has happened many times before, which is why we have these regulations in the first place. Lessons relearned indeed.

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The way we protect 80 yo grandmas is by sounding alarms to anyone that will listen that this is a scam. Especially if that 80 yo grandma is yours.

It's why the anti-crypto crowd has been so vocal. They're not haters. They're trying to warn others.

The frustration in that crowd is that you're ridiculed for your lack of faith. Hence the schadenfreude.

> And my 80 year old aunt is somehow supposed to read that all this is just an astoundingly massive bubble?

No, she's supposed to read "8-18% per year guaranteed, no risk*" and say "there's no legal way that's possible and there are too many asterisks, I'll stay with Vanguard".

What about the endless warnings about hyperinflation and dollar deprecation in order to encourage crypto? Not everyone's aunt is out for a Lambo.

The parent comment is totally correct that innocent people were slammed from every angle to the point where even pro investors or techies couldn't see through the SCAM.

Def! If your grandma says that please pass on my atta' girl! Nice to know somebody has got a grandma with the good kind of attitude

The concept of an average Joe holding an index fund only became popularized in the 1980s or even 1990s. A lot of grandmas kept their money in a savings account or in bonds for decades while becoming significantly poorer on a relative basis.

How is a person with early stage dementia supposed to differentiate between "new thing that's actually an incredibly wise investment decision" (i.e. Vanguard, popularized in the WSJ in the 1980s) versus "new thing that's actually mostly a scam" (i.e. most of crypto, popularized in the WSJ in the 2010s) when their once-trusted sources of information have failed them so miserably?

> huge sporting events are plastered in [x] logos

Not to pile on, but if one is getting financial advice from sporting event logos, it is yet another timeless lesson to learn not to do that.

Yeah but it's way more subtle than that. Nobody's going "oh, the Heat play at the FTX Arena? I gotta get in on that...". A whole host of things - sports sponsorship, advertising, celebrity endorsement, backing by traditional finance and media - all contributed to making crypto seem to the layperson like just a new type of asset like any other. They maybe didn't fully grok it, but they also don't grok exactly how ETFs, Index Funds or Mutual Funds work either and a few of these exchanges played along and allowed people to pretend that they were buying a Real Thing.

Are you suggesting some kind of mechanism or rule to prevent people making unwise investments? If so, how would it work? Who decides wise versus unwise a priori? What happens when the Committee of Wise Investors is wrong about something? Or corrupted?

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