Makes sense given how much attention the industry is getting in politics right now. Just look recent/upcoming briefings, not to mention Senator Lummis' planned crypto bill--of course the crypto industry is going full offense now while the regulatory landscape is still being shaped.
There is little question that many metaverse NFTs are investments, under the Howey Test. Pay now, maybe someday they build a metaverse. That's a speculative investment where success depends on the people you paid money to doing something.
These things have become too big to escape the attention of regulators. Yuga Labs's BAYC raised half a billion dollars for their "Otherside" metaverse. It doesn't exist. The people they claim are building it, Animoca Brands, don't say they're building it. That gets the SEC's attention.
There has always been financial fraud, but the thing I find particularly gross here is the large scale participation of retail investors. That seems new to me, at least since the days of wildcat banks.
It’s also an industry that seems to create virtually no value.
> There has always been financial fraud, but the thing I find particularly gross here is the large scale participation of retail investors.
Go back in financial history to the 1920s, and you'll see the same kinds of startup scams peddled to the public. Which is why most of them were criminalized in the US in the 1930s.
There's not much originality in the financial fraud field. Most of the large-scale scams were developed in the 19th century [1]. You need some kind of mass medium to scam large numbers of people, so, while scams go back far further, scams at scale had to await the development of newspaper printing presses.
If you know about Madoff, Enron, Milken, Amway, Florida real estate, Ponzi, the Mississippi Bubble, Tulip mania, and bucket shops, you can match most crypto schemes to one of those. This should be covered in schools.
I don’t disagree with you at all about the scammy nature of the industry at large. But the philosophical underpinnings of the crypto movement, especially the “hard money” idea at the heart of Bitcoin, feels very pertinent at a time when central banks have been doing exactly what the a Bitcoiners had been warning about: debauching money by printing it endlessly.
You can consider crypto a scam and you’d be largely right. But its also true that the current financial system is wildly corrupt and increasingly serves only those at the top of the totem pole.
Crypto might not be the answer but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t pose the right questions.
Bitcoin goes entirely too far in the opposite direction of fiat money. It’s hyperdeflationary, far more than gold. The extreme deflationary nature leads it to naturally manifest the structure of a Ponzi scheme.
It is always guaranteed to be more profitable to just hold than invest or use, and the way you ensure it keeps going up is to go out and shill for more people to buy and hold. That’s not how you run an economy if you want to do anything useful. It’s a pyramid scheme that must eventually collapse when no more HODLers can be recruited.
We do need a more transparent honest well run money system but this is not it.
The supply isn't deflationary, it's just very slowly inflationary, at a fixed (and decreasing) rate. Ethereum might actually be deflationary now though
Some are conscious of it but there are many people bowled over by either the supposed ideology or just a vague sense of it being a next big thing combined with FOMO.
Depends on the instrument. Something like Luna was people chasing yield. Something like NFTs, I'm pretty sure all the nuts know and treat it like a pump and dump.
The metaverse is already here. If you ignore the marketing, it’s just VR (and soon to be AR) online over the internet.
Barely anyone has tried it because the only affordable and easily accessible model is from Meta, which is still a toxic brand for now. Every other current offering is both too expensive and too complicated for most of the population.
It is one of them because it has the right capability at the right price at $299. Every other option ranges from $499 - $999 and requires a PC starting at $1699. Otherwise, there would be a growing amount of early adopters. Instead, we have many techies who refuse to even try it.
It's not just a vague sense of the "brand image", it's that they literally demand you open a Facebook account to use the device.
I'm sure if it was just the corporate connection with Meta but it was still an ethical device, most techies wouldn't care. After all, a lot of software engineer use their open-source libraries like PyTorch, React, GraphQL....
>There is little question that many metaverse NFTs are investments, under the Howey Test
Are we talking about bored ape NFTs or something else? If it's just an artwork NFT, I fail to see how they'd pass the Howey Test. Specifically, it lacks the "To be derived from the efforts of others" part. Moreover, if bored ape NFTs are securities, does that mean paintings and gold bars are securities?
Bored Apes are not just "a jpeg". From the very launch of the project their ownership gave you access to a private Discord group, and you were being promised future perks like airdrops and access to "metaverse" worlds. Almost all popular NFT collections are that way.
Governments only have that power cause the people vest them with it. If other individual citizens want to print money that’s their business. No one should be forcibly obliged to only accept certain forms of legal tender. There’s something to be said for taking this power away from governments as it’s been serially mishandled.
> No one should be forcibly obliged to only accept certain forms of legal tender.
You can start a business and accept monopoly money if you want, but that's not what most crypto promoters are after. The limits are on selling securities. All the crypto scams remind us why.
Will this always be true though? I'm not even sure it's true now. Regardless, crypto was originally intended to be exactly this: an alternative currency. With all this regulation going on, I wouldn't be surprised if we end up with something to the equivalent of "only the government can make and distribute a medium of exchange".
If they refuse the donations, that's a strong statement on cryptocurrencies, which is a controversial issue they'd probably prefer to ignore, since it's not particularly relevant to their aims.
If they choose to take the money, they risk having to defend that choice if the cryptocurrency industry collapses in disgrace.
Hahaha. They have already accepted millions of dollars donated by him to various PACs, among them Pelosi's "House Majority PAC". He was among the largest donors to Bidens campaign.
He also donated USD 10 million to "Protect Our Future" PAC, which supposedly is about protecting the environment and caring about "biodiversity" according to their website, but has actually forwarded that money to politicians. They exclusively give to Democrats as a ProPublica investigation has shown¹. $13.5 million to some candidate for Oregon that ended up losing for example.
I don't know Sam Bankman-Friend personally but we have some connections in common and I'm also somewhat involved in the Effective Altruism community which he is also a part of. While it is difficult to disentangle where he is advocating for his own business interests versus personal interests, I think especially when it comes to the money for the "Protect Our Future" PAC and subsequently for the Carrick Flynn campaign ("some candidate for Oregon" that you mentioned) these donations were more about longtermist beliefs, especially around pandemic prevention than anything around crypto.
What sort of altruist has no qualms about billionaires blatantly influencing the democratic process and a political system where candidates outright take bribes in the millions?
It doesn't matter much what they purport the donations are for, no one in their right mind would admit they lobby senators for power and control. It's always for the children, for the environment, for "our" future etc. Everyone sufficiently rich enough has a tax exempt foundation in their name. There is a long line of mega rich "altruists" controlling politics, an earlier generation of web company founders with people like Gates, Bezos and Zuckerberg is highly active with their charitable foundations and their corporations largely control what the public thinks and what people are allowed to say online. Now a new generation is rising, riding on the wave of decentralization.
And just so you don't get me wrong, decentralization is a good thing and Bitcoin was a great innovation. The likes of Bankman-Fried don't represent the spirit of it, just as the likes of Microsoft represent the polar opposite of what the internet was meant to be: A means of free expression and information flow around the world. A democratizing force. These people are corrupting it.
If you think climate is the top issue facing the planet, the most effective step you can take is getting Democrats elected in the US. And since the other side is onboard with unlimited political spending, there is no choice but to match them.
Of course, it's done wonders over the past 100 years. Only the single worst CO2 emitter in the entire history of the world and the Democratic Party was in charge half of the time. Very effective.
It wasn't a political issue for most of those years. There's no question who is being serious right now and who isn't. When voters torched Jimmy Carter, environmentalism went backwards for a long time. Obama and Biden have tried and been very marginally successful at reversing climate damage while Bush and Trump ran us backwards as fast as they could. Don't be obtuse there's an abundantly clear winner on this topic.
Of course. Apologies for being obtuse. Just... I don't know if you've ever looked at the data but can you explain why the emissions fell faster under both Bush and Trump than their Democratic successors?
Going by the actual emissions, the decrease seems to be slowing when a Democratic candidate gets elected. Not to speak of Clinton under whom emissions actually increased, not decreased!
For recent history, CO2 drops correlate almost 1:1 with recessions. Trump was legitimately terrible on policy he was just in office during the most dramatic economic contraction in our history.
Not to mention all the well-intentioned liberal policies like increase vehicle fuel efficiency standards or the Clean Power Plan that got reversed by Trump before they came into effect. We need a good 20 years of complete liberal control of 3 branches of government and we haven't gotten anywhere near that.
> If they choose to take the money, they risk having to defend that choice if the cryptocurrency industry collapses in disgrace
Take the money. If he collapses, there is nobody to whom any favours must be paid. That’s a win. This giving by Bankman-Fried looks like the same mistake Jen Bush’s campaign donors made in ‘16, thinking a cheque and a cheque alone buys power.
> Bankman-Fried is a supporter of effective altruism and pursues earning to give as an altruistic career.[16] He is a member of Giving What We Can and has claimed that he plans to donate the great majority of his wealth to effective charities over the course of his life.
Can someone enlighten me? So according to his wikipedia article, he used arbitrage to gain enormous wealth, he took money away from others, and then pledges to donate that money?
Yes, but if you look at it through a pair of utilitarian glasses this is a net good for the world. He made most of his money arbitraging the difference in price of bitcoin between Western and Asian exchanges, to be fair. Notably he's the only person I've ever heard of who said "I want to be a billionaire to Earn to Give" and actually become one within two years! He was at Jane Street prior to his crypto work.
I personally think he's the real deal (as much as any billionaire can be). He's about as far from materialistic as one can get (literally bought a cheap suit off the shelf so he could provide testimony at the house financial services committee, didn't even bother retying the shoes)
He's also vegan, which I think says something about his willingness to make personal sacrifices for a more ethical lifestyle.
At that point it's a deliberate choice to broadcast a certain image. Someone who actually didn't care would dress well and tie their shoes to an important hearing.
He's just the younger, less conservative equivalent of someone like Romney working at Bain Capital while ironing his own shirt and sleeping on a hard mattress etc. This isn't genuinely anti-materialistic, it's so materialistic that mere materialism wasn't enough, you had to add a level of spiritual purity on top of it. Same reasons Brahmin don't eat meat.
Doesn't matter if someone does altruism for selfish reasons - some people argue all altruism is inherently selfish - as long as the actions happen. And with SBF they do.
Ah I've been deep in Effective Altruism for a while and have a fairly reductionist view on these topics now. I also happen to know SBF donates to good causes, along with how those good causes operate. If that money has been made by arbitrage between exchanges & liquidating gamblers resulting in literally > tens of thousands of lives saved, I'm okay with that :)
> [...] the biggest spender thus far is Sam Bankman-Fried, the billionaire co-founder of the FTX exchange. [...] Overall, he’s pumped in about $32 million, 75% of the industry’s total [...] Bankman-Fried said his political agenda extends well-beyond crypto regulation, and his spending is now primarily focused on pandemic preparedness. [...]
>The FTX CEO has used a super political action committee known as Protect Our Future for most of his spending. While several Democrats supported by that PAC have won primary contests, its biggest outlay of $11.4 million failed to boost Oregon Democrat Carrick Flynn, a political newcomer who ran on increasing readiness for a pandemic.
Based on this, it seems safe to conclude that this is less "entire industry massively lobbying for favorable regulations" and more "a crypto billionaire splashing money around for causes he wants to support".
Defense is a necessary evil, it doesn't make the world better, it just protects interests/the status quo. I'm not anti defense but the most positive outcome is you kill others before they kill you or at best intimidate them enough so that they don't attack. If that's "positive" in your view then nuclear weapons are the biggest success story, they've caused the least amount of death of all weapons we've developed so far. And yet saying they aren't very popular among the majority of the world's population would be an understatement.
Humanity would be better if there were no armies, in an ideal utopian society. The same goes for the pharma industry in its current form - it's just pure evil. Leeches on society that are extracting as much money as possible from the IP they hold.
I agree, in an ideal utopian world there would be no need for armies or defense. But that's not the world we live in, and at least in my personal belief, it's unlikely we ever will and we must judge what things are and act accordingly.
I think nuclear weapons are a fantastic success story in preventing major war between nations for the past 77 years. Probably the single greatest enabler of peace in the 20th and 21st century. Do I wish that they weren't needed? 100%. I would love if we could focus on using nuclear for non-destructive purposes. But I firmly believe they are the reason there was no WWIII or even WWIV during the Cold War or now during rising tensions between the USA and Russia and/or China. I respect that nuclear weapons are terrible devices, awful in their destruction beyond comprehension, but unless humanity as a society evolves into some kind of "better" race, I would not wish for a world without them. Popularity does not mean that something is needed.
I will grant that we should strive toward that better world, and constrain the military from acting toward it's easier, destructive attitudes and maybe one day we will no longer need it. But to simply say that the most positive outcome is that it "intimidates others so that they don't attack" and to treat that as something that's barely worth mention and almost "evil"? That's beyond reckless and a dangerous, misguided, and ultimately against the best interests of humanities future.
I won't claim to be as deeply knowledgeable about pharma, it's an industry in clear need of reform and regulation, but it also proved itself during COVID to make vaccines for the world, and while I completely agree that it prioritizes profit over saving lives, and likely allowing people to die because it's just not profitable to produce a drug it researched, it has developed many life saving drugs that have saved more lives. I would not call them "pure" evil, if for no other reason than as soon as you start treating an industry, a people as "pure" evil, they have no reason whatsoever to listen to you and work with you.
I really don't understand why there is so much money in American politics. The numbers absolutely floor me, tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. Other countries have campaign financing and spending limits for very good reasons, but Americans seem to be totally fine with elections being financed by special interests??
There is a long history of non-fiat currencies before the current system. Would you mind quantifying some of the measures that you think make fiat a fiasco compared to e.g. gold standard?
https://www.theblockcrypto.com/post/149186/heres-a-full-draf... https://homeland.house.gov/activities/hearings/terrorism-and... https://www.agriculture.senate.gov/hearings/examining-digita...