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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29350 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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This is really making crypto sound like the biggest scam ever created, all crypto. Anyone who believes crypto is the future of finance, this is not alone two black eyes for the cause, it's breaking arms and legs as well. Anybody who has fond dreams of decentralised finance, the sheer lack of accountability or accounting around billions is going to break that back too.

I'm so tired of keeping up with the stupid story and people just taking random pot shots at crypto in general. This scam has as much to do with crypto as a concept as 2008 has to do with loans as a concept. Yes, it's a high profile scam, but it's a scam that makes no use of anything crypto related besides the abundance of credulous money. Everything about crypto, besides that it is new and unregulated, makes it harder for this to happen by making wallet balances public.

This scam has as much to do with crypto as a concept as 2008 has to do with loans as a concept.

Which some of the committee members have pointed out. But Bankman-Fried was presenting himself and FTX as the respectable face of crypto, of being regulated, of not being a shady fly-by-night scam scheme. How did that pan out? How is the ordinary person watching the news going to take it? "One more billion dollar scam of this weird dodge".

You can talk about wallets until you are blue in the face, but when people are making and losing fortunes like this, it's not sounding like "this is the future of money", it's sounding like "one more crook fooling people with a get rich quick scheme".

How is the ordinary person watching the news going to take it? "One more billion dollar scam of this weird dodge".

Ordinary people are not watching this at all.

Maybe, maybe not. But it is certainly a news story, and even if people aren't familiar with the ins and outs of it, they will have some idea about "oh another big financial scam in the news".

Wives who are angry that their husbands listened to Tom Brady and put their life savings on FTX might qualify as fairly ordinary.

Depends on how you define “ordinary people” this is huge news in the business press. Enron is certainly a household name because of their much more sophisticated and difficult to understand scandal.

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