I started to notice this trend where tech workers get shat on when ChatGPT became popular, with people claiming that it was the end for developers because apparently they could easily be replaced by AI despite the fact that if that was the case, many other jobs would be easily replaced as well.
If my perception is accurate and this resentment is not a product of my imagination then I find it silly considering that there are other careers where many people are way more highly paid than FAANG engineers (lawyers, doctors, some salespeople) yet no one seems to be mad at them.
Would someone explain to me what the endgame of these fraudsters is? I mean, of course they are trying to get rich quick pulling these schemes but you would believe that they do it because they perceive that there is some sort of opportunity to cash out without inevitably going to prison some day, right? What is the thought process in the mind of these criminals when shit hits the fan? Maybe just hire very expensive lawyers or move to some weird jurisdiction where they can't get arrested?
FTX, 3AC, Celsius, etc. took the crypto pill and believed their investments were going to the moon with no way to stop it. That's why they took such risky bets (with customer money, too) - because in the certain case that Bitcoin hit $1M they would be trillionaires.
Of course because of this attitude there was way too much leverage in the system, which drove up prices to ATHs temporarily, but when the money supply ran out things quickly came back to reality and that leverage turned into bankruptcy.
Though in an alternate universe, the fed never raised rates, GBTC became a spot ETF, crypto fervor continued, and SBF is the richest man on earth having leveraged customer funds in a scam that actually worked out.
> in the certain case that Bitcoin hit $1M they would be trillionaires.
I never could understand this. Crypto currently makes up about 7% of the world's money supply, according to a quick search.
Bitcoin is currently ~30k USD.
If you bumped that to 1 million USD, a 33x increase in value, and assume that other crypto would go up roughly the same amount...
... You get the impossible answer that crypto would be worth well over 200% of the entire rest of the money in the world.
This is ignoring inflation but from what I heard crypto nuts really thought this was possible in a short time frame, like 5-10 years, in which case inflation of real money wouldn't make a huge difference.
This is just ridiculous. All the possible outcomes don't make sense:
* you end up with a small group of mostly men controlling nearly
all crypto so it's no different from the old system.
* Except there's even less checks and balances.
* It would massively destabilize the world economy and cause all kinds of inequality issues for people who don't have internet/technical ability
* But most importantly, the existing world governments would never accept it. At some point they would see this new force destabilizing their economies and established power structures and just say hell no. It would start with China and US, but eventually
nearly every country in the world followed this. Then crypto is worthless because you can't spend it in a legal way and there's no way it would maintain a high value.
A 33x in Bitcoin price would put it just above the value of all the world's gold. Obviously not really realistic but if you're a crypto-piller and believe Bitcoin will be the next Gold then it's a decent benchmark moon price.
Also the article you posted very specifically says that the market cap of cryptos is equivalent to 7% of the narrow money supply (not the full money supply, and NOT that crypto currently makes up about 7% of the world's money supply). Doesn't make sense to compare non-narrow with narrow IMO - i.e. you need to include ALL assets with the same liquidity.
Ok, thanks for the feedback. Do you think my points are still valid under this less extreme scenario?
Let's assume a 25x - 50x increase of the value of all crypto in a 5-10 year time span.
What percentage of all relevant assets would that make up? And would it be enough to destabilize world economies enough for governments to take action?
> Notoriously weak prosecution of white collar crime makes more people willing to take risks
This is more a perceptions problem in Silicon Valley. Every fraud announcement is followed by hand wringing around the lack of prosecution. Every prosecution, convictions. Every conviction, sentencing.
In the case of Celsius, this seems like one of those a case of starting with good intentions, but quickly turning into fraud city in desperate attempts to keep the boat afloat.
For the more run-of-the-mill crypto scammers, there's a combination of over-confidence that no one can touch them, or will bother to come after them. Or they just don't even think that far. For a lot of the bullshit influencer pump and dumps, the worst that's happened has been ZachXBT or Coffeezilla exposing your bullshit. Which is a good thing, but the influencer just pops back up with another get rich quick scheme in a couple months for a new group of rubes.
Some of them do exit. There are many crypto pump-and-dump schemes where the project website is zombified, and the founders are MIA (and are probably sipping cocktails on a beach somewhere).
The big fish though... The FTX founder was described as being a gambling addict: he would take any risk as long as the outcome was statistically favorable. And I think this attitude was pervasive among many of the biggest crypto names. They were't looking for exits, they were looking to go even bigger because they can't help themselves.
One of the things you have to understand about fraud is that much of it isn't rationally planned from the get-go. People get into situations and get caught up in the dynamics of them.
Imagine a founder. He has an idea he thinks is brilliant. A sure money-maker. He's a bit of a dreamer, and objective observers would question whether it's possible. But the nay-sayers have been wrong before, and he believes in the idea. So he goes looking for money.
As part of that process, he learns to pitch. He figures out the most convincing things to say, and how to say them with maximum persuasion. Is what he saying true or correct? That doesn't really matter. It might not even be knowable at this point. The key incentives for him are whether people respond emotionally in ways that they give him money.
So imagine he does that and he gets the money. He has some investors who expect big returns. They may not really understand the topic, but they liked his confidence, and they too started to believe. But what they really want is more money back, and their belief is going to be partly contingent on seeing that happen.
Our founder starts to spend the money, trying to make it real. Maybe the product works. Maybe he has some success selling it. (Maybe he is even selling it despite it not working, a surprisingly common outcome.) It's not going as well as he hoped, but he's still confident. He still believes. Because that's the performance his investors want for him. But he's used to putting a positive spin on things, so he tells investors what they want to hear that it's going great.
At some point, some of the investors get nervous. They expected returns. He led them to believe there would be big returns. So he pays some of those people some money. An accountant might say he has to pay them profits, not other investors' money. But the money's all jumbled up both in his head and in the world. If there's any impropriety, something his brain will anxiously skip over, he knows he'll make it right in the end. Because this is going to be a big success.
From there, the cycle continues. The founder digs the hole deeper and deeper over time. As long as he's confident, as long as he performs success, new money will keep rolling in. And with it comes hope. Maybe it will all work out! Maybe they'll be so successful that they'll pay everybody back and nobody will notice a little early corner-cutting.
Objectively, of course, things are getting more and more obviously criminal. But there's nobody objective around. The founder is instead surrounded by dupes, fools, and the complicit. To the extent that anybody honestly recognizes the criminality, they mostly don't talk about it or they get out ASAP.
So to answer your question, there is generally no planned endgame, the same way I didn't have a planned endgame for eating a lot of cheeseburgers in my 20s. I may have heard about the consequences, but they didn't affect my behavior. It's not that I had a bad plan. I not only had no plan, but didn't think enough about the future to even have a place in my mind where a plan would go.
I think the end game is something like making enough money such that doing some time would make it worth it, and we all know how white collar crime is punished. Of course they stash a lot of money so even after a lot of it is clawed back they keep enough.
All evidence from the people I know who have gone to work in that industry is that it's a mix of true believers, and 50% outright narcissistic sociopaths who know how to manipulate true believers.
And then about 20% of people who just think the whole thing is "nifty" and getting to write fancy software or build a business around it is kinda fun, and they paid lots, so whatever.
>Then at the exact moment "fiat money" has a spike of inflation at 8% to 10%, the value of the "sound money" inflation hedge plummets 70%.
>Now, at the exact instant it appears "fiat money" inflation is moderating, suddenly the "sound money" jumps up 35% from its lows.
Because a devaluation of the dollar is not what's actually causing the price of BTC to appreciate as much as speculation about the future monetary policy that could come as a result of lower inflation numbers (i.e less hawkish Fed). Which is funny because the way the CPI is calculated has been very controversial and subject to change. One common narrative is that the Fed will be forced to pivot to avoid a major recession.
It's not just BTC but the stock market in general behaving this way.
I read this part using Patrick Bateman's voice in my head:
>"The rest of the experiment continued in a similar fashion (albeit less hectic), with me doing yoga and working out in the morning, working my job, working on my company, reading books, doing my UI/UX course, writing blog posts, working on some side projects, all interspersed with ping pong and breakdancing classes."
Most of people who used Tornado Cash are not criminals. How can you say it exists "primarily to aid criminals"? A fleeing criminal breaks into your house and hides while you are on vacation, apparently it was intended as a hideout for criminals all along...
What are you basing “most” on? It’s kind of hard to tell, after all. Do you think that “most” is roughly the same by volume?
I’d bet that there’s a chance a majority of users aren’t breaking local laws, at least if you exclude small scale tax evasion, but it takes an awful lot of people who care enough about privacy to pay extra for it to balance out the $450M USD-equivalent which just one North Korean group is alleged to have laundered. People who care about privacy will use it some of the time if they remember but someone with a lot of stolen money is going to use it every time and that will start to dominate the transaction volume, especially any time gas fees go up and people who don’t need to decide they don’t care that much.
>Pretending that it's totally fine because it's "privacy" not money laundering because crypto is special... is likewise absurd.
Privacy is definitely a legitimate use for something like Tornado Cash, what are you talking about? Hell, if someone found out what my address is and it's not in my best interest that this person knew about it, I would definitely use it just to move my funds to another address.
If you sell me a screwdriver and then I go and kill someone with it, should you be prosecuted for it?
>Ackman realised that payment companies, when they want to, can act decisively. “They have to be de facto regulators of what’s permissible content and what’s not,” he says.
No, they should not? This guy is insane. Yeah, just let the big middlemen monopoly decide the fate of your business on a whim.
Things like these are what makes me hope that cryptocurrency someday becomes the norm. We don't need more parasitic middlemen deciding how we want to spend our money, especially not because of fear of backlash by some activist groups.
What are the legal implications of having registered on this forum once with a personal email account but not having ever engaged in any transaction or downloading any leaked data, just lurking a few threads of nothing interesting at most.
Such lists can be queried by those that are properly connected, typically LE/three (and in some countries four) letter agencies if your name ever turns up in some other context and then it might be given some weight, but other than that I wouldn't expect anything to come of it assuming that you are telling the truth. Such inter-service requests for information on particular individuals are pretty regular but someone first has to ask for you by name, and in a country with proper privacy protections typically a judge would have to sign off on such a broad request, but these mechanisms are not always perfect.
Reading threads isn't a crime, but hanging out in places where lots of criminals hang out doesn't help you in the association department.
Hard to say, but rest assured that countless "white hat" infosec companies have also signed up and probably purchased stolen databases in furtherance of their own business activities.
If my perception is accurate and this resentment is not a product of my imagination then I find it silly considering that there are other careers where many people are way more highly paid than FAANG engineers (lawyers, doctors, some salespeople) yet no one seems to be mad at them.