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Avynte posted:You fetishize an unregulated economic wild west, you get to deal with the consequences. The almost tragic thing about this is that there are heaps of earnest true believers who aren't out to scam others or want to take advantage of no regulation and commit fraud or whatever, but instead believe that the real world financial system is rigged and controlled by just a tiny few puppetmasters locking them into being poor, and that crypto is somehow the antidote to this. Except it's the exact same poo poo in crypto and if you're a retail "investor" you are always, always going to get hosed at one point or another and all the big money is going to get bailed out as we saw with the UST/Luna horror show. Crypto gives a direct line to the poor to feed their money to the rich like a reverse ATM. I now unfortunately know two people who have borrowed money from a bank to buy crypto, and one was right before the crash recently, the other during the 2017 boom and subsequent crash. Both of them share the same beliefs that they'll never be able to get out of the rent/work/rent/work never-own-anything spiral and both are probably correct in that appraisal of their future / prospects, but both barreled headfirst into crypto thinking it offered a way out. It's not funny, it's sad. Tons of people have gotten rich in crypto but it has always, always, always been at the expense of others. It's just bleeding the poor and desperate (and greedy) even more and funneling all of that money ever upward. Just like the real world, would you look at that.
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May 29, 2022 03:57
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PhazonLink posted:arent most buttcoinerz just a bunch of very very stupid computer touchers burning their over inflated disposable income? Most buttcoiners are actually just regular people looking for a get quick rich scheme who are getting brought into the scam to feed the early adopters' earnings. Those numbers that have been going around to show how many Black Americans and other minorities own crypto aren't just BS propaganda (though those stats are being used for propaganda). There's a real serious level of predation happening here, where the more wealthy class of techbros who've already bought into the ecosystem are desperately trying to rope in the underbanked, underrepresented, and disadvantaged into the system so they can be the ones left holding the bag. I would not be surprised if the vast majority of losers in the crypto space were already low-income people just looking for a way out of the pit they've found themselves in. It's an extremely exploitative system, and it's why I don't like mocking everyone who ends up losing money doing this. I save that contempt for all the others who have perpetuated the scam, which includes the promoters, the miners, even just anyone who has bought and sold crypto for a profit. Every single one has a special place in hell waiting for them. The amount of suffering they've inflicted or are about to inflict on the already-disadvantaged is immense. There's so much real money that has been invested in this space that is being sucked up by the elite few on a level that the already-horrid real economy can't compare to.
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May 29, 2022 04:14
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You didn't build that bridge (or a road, car, manufacturing facility, grow your food, kill your food, make tools to do so) My grandfather was part of the team that sunk the pilings to build the Aurora bridge. He sure didn't build it himself otherwise he'd still be there and he died before I was born!
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May 29, 2022 04:22
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PhazonLink posted:arent most buttcoinerz just a bunch of very very stupid computer touchers burning their over inflated disposable income? The vast majority of computer touchers I know want nothing to do with crypto because they understand how it works Jose Valasquez fucked around with this message at 05:05 on May 29, 2022 |
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May 29, 2022 04:30
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I assume they are mostly smart phone touchers
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May 29, 2022 04:59
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Yeah the one time I’ve had someone earnestly ask me about investing in Bitcoin (a friend of a friend, at a bar he literally said “you look like someone who knows about Bitcoin which is the biggest  of my entire life) was an HVAC technician with some savings and next to no tech knowledge whatsoever. His fiancé saw the number go up and even with good salaries they’ll never afford a home here easily so they were considering it. All the cult-y new financial world nonsense is just to convince the people that have bought in to stay there when the number goes down, I doubt most of the people that buy in know or care about that stuff at first. They’re aware they don’t know much about the technology but they see stuff in the media that seems to legitimize crypto and then they see some people get rich and it starts to look like their best option to break their financial chains.
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May 29, 2022 05:14
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Shrimp or Shrimps posted:It's not funny, it's sad. This is the only really incorrect part of your post, it's pretty goddamn funny, in a really dark way. I'm disabled. I'm going to be living in poverty the rest of my life. The fact that these folks have enough money to piss away on things that are obvious bullshit and have been since the start is loving hilarious. 
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May 29, 2022 05:21
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abigserve posted:I've met two crypto people in tech; one was a true rise and grind machine who worked in sales and saw it as a get rich quick investment; he bought into a bunch of coins just before the first huge boom when Bitcoin went to 30k and then paid off his house. He wasnt a true believer at all and afaik only ever talked poo poo about how dumb the whole thing is.
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May 29, 2022 05:26
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PhazonLink posted:arent most buttcoinerz just a bunch of very very stupid computer touchers burning their over inflated disposable income? I think this is more the makeup of the NFT apeholders, like people with a .eth address in their twitter names and throwing around lots of money on NFT gambling project are either dumb tech or dumb finance bros
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May 29, 2022 05:30
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Bitcoin: To loose everything
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May 29, 2022 05:44
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Agents are GO! posted:This is the only really incorrect part of your post, it's pretty goddamn funny, in a really dark way. Again, I think you're overestimating the economic status of most of the people caught up in this. There are over 100 million crypto owners now, the vast majority of which will be fairly low on the economic ladder. And the bullshit is obvious to you, as someone who has been well informed of the nature of crypto for the last decade. Meanwhile, mainstream media coverage of crypto is highly credulous, and you will see pro-crypto go on major TV programs to peddle their scam with zero pushback. If that's someone's only exposure to the crypto ecosystem, then I find it hard to wag my finger at them. If all the regular authoritative sources in their lives are telling them that there's no problem with crypto, that image no longer applies.
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May 29, 2022 05:48
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I think it's easy to forget that the scammers, peacocks, and assholes we see in this thread probably aren't the majority of crypto people, they're just the loudest and easiest to laugh at. For each crypto evangelist, there's likely a whole bunch of regular people who aren't savvy enough on both computers and finance to understand that this whole thing is a trap.
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May 29, 2022 06:27
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People being scammed isn’t funny, but someone having their apes stolen is extremely funny
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May 29, 2022 06:52
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Dr. Video Games 0031 posted:Again, I think you're overestimating the economic status of most of the people caught up in this. There are over 100 million crypto owners now, the vast majority of which will be fairly low on the economic ladder. And the bullshit is obvious to you, as someone who has been well informed of the nature of crypto for the last decade. Meanwhile, mainstream media coverage of crypto is highly credulous, and you will see pro-crypto go on major TV programs to peddle their scam with zero pushback. If that's someone's only exposure to the crypto ecosystem, then I find it hard to wag my finger at them. If all the regular authoritative sources in their lives are telling them that there's no problem with crypto, that image no longer applies. I guess I can't get my head in the space where I'm willing to drop significant cash without doing some serious research. Hell, I did like 45 minutes of research just deciding which version of Elden Ring to buy. I also can't get my head in the space where I trust the same financial reporter talking heads which missed the dotcom crash and the housing crash, even though the lead up to those was so obvious even my stupid rear end could tell something was seriously wrong.* There's a level of, if not stupidity, credulity that strains how much sympathy I can muster. (*I remember wondering often how all these dumb dotcom companies were going to make money, and then with the housing crash seeing all the home equity commercials and getting the same "this is obviously unsustainable" vibe I'd felt during the buildup to the dotcom crash.) Agents are GO! fucked around with this message at 07:05 on May 29, 2022 |
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May 29, 2022 06:55
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Agents are GO! posted:I guess I can't get my head in the space where I'm willing to drop significant cash without doing some serious research. Hell, I did like 45 minutes of research just deciding which version of Elden Ring to buy. what exactly are you researching if not "financial reporter talking heads", funny youtube videos they also make funny youtube videos to sell people on crypto op
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May 29, 2022 07:03
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A Wizard of Goatse posted:what exactly are you researching if not "financial reporter talking heads", funny youtube videos I'm really unsure what you're saying here, but if I'm reading your post right, I'll admit that the ability to select good sources is sadly lacking in a lot of people.
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May 29, 2022 07:07
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Pretty much everything about Western culture and economics is training people to fall for scams, snake oil, and get-rich-quick schemes.
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May 29, 2022 07:11
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Hammerite posted:has it occurred to anyone that vitalik buterin might not actually be a genius visionary, but just a dumb nerd He's a college dropout who received a grant from Peter Thiel's organization to work on his special brand of shitcoin. His entire existence now depends on propping up this shitcoin against reality because as the founder he of course gave himself a giant steaming load of it.
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May 29, 2022 15:55
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Sources that explain what "stock" is from first principles are surprisingly scarce. Neither Graham's The Intelligent Investor nor Fisher's Common Stocks even tries. Peter Lynch's One Up on Wall Street doesn't either. Jim Cramer? lol as if, he's a techie. He recommends an old book on horse-betting, seriously. People are mostly left to form their own fetishistic understandings that make no distinction between a share of Microsoft and a high-yield crypto bean. And during the dot-com boom, I remember Motley Fool and Yahoo Finance doing the same hype work that the various coiner web sites do now. That's the information environment people are in.
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May 29, 2022 16:58
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There's no shortage of textbooks that cover the basics of finance but they're expensive and also reading is for nerds.
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May 29, 2022 17:37
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Cyrano4747 posted:I'm going to self-quote something I wrote in the BWM thread when it got talking about wtf people are thinking when they get into crypto: This is a really good post, and tbh, while I have zero sympathy for libertarian bros who drank the crypto koolaid like five+ years ago, I do actually have a lot of sympathy for retail investors who came into this now after essentially being lied to, and who are desperately looking for a lottery ticket that is going to catapult them out of their lovely life and into some approximation of at least middle class. And as always, the people who can afford it the least are probably going to end up losing the most when this house of cards inevitably falls apart.
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May 29, 2022 17:59
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funeral home DJ posted:It looks like Sea Patrol. If there was ever an NFT that I could even think about buying (and there is not), Sea Patrol would be it.
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May 29, 2022 18:01
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The crypto ecosystem is a symptom of even stupider systemic issues with treating the capital markets as the US's social security account and/or a premier savings account. "Why no research" is completely missing the point of how devious the pipeline is of giving you a taste with your 401k, then your bank constantly badgers you to start an investment account if you can manage to keep a savings balance above $1k. Its a small hop into crypto exchanges or doing stupid poo poo with low caps in Robin Hood from there. Along the way is fine print that reads "this is risky but you're smarter than that obviously." In these threads I like to tell the story about how my parents got a broker in the dotcom boom, which is the thing you were meant to do as a good middle class aspirant saver. The broker, who is meant to be a certified advocate for their clients, gave advice that is worse than some of those crypto risk pyramids:$2k each in Microsoft, Ford, and GE; $15k in a low cap penny tech stock that was bound to take off any day. The dot com bust of the blue chips was annoying but par. But guess what, penny stock dropped by 90% and was liquidated before it got delisted. I think we got like $200 back from the class action 10 years later. That's $200 more than the equivalent back holders are gonna get from getting into crypto so I guess I should consider my family fortunate we had $20k lying around in 2000 and didn't end up destitute when half of it disappeared.
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May 29, 2022 18:30
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zedprime posted:The crypto ecosystem is a symptom of even stupider systemic issues with treating the capital markets as the US's social security account and/or a premier savings account. "Why no research" is completely missing the point of how devious the pipeline is of giving you a taste with your 401k, then your bank constantly badgers you to start an investment account if you can manage to keep a savings balance above $1k. This is huge, and it's a huge part of why the disappearance of defined benefits plans (e.g. pensions) in favor of defined contribution (401k) is loving evil and has been a big part of destroying the middle class.
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May 29, 2022 18:36
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tpink posted:who are desperately looking for a lottery ticket that is going to catapult them out of their lovely life and into some approximation of at least middle class. I think this gets to the disconnect I have: how can people even believe this exists? I guess I'm just jaded.
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May 29, 2022 18:40
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Found a fun one on the local news: Home sellers say they got a raw deal from the "godfather of real estate's" crypto option I'm not gonna paste the whole thing because I'm on a phone but here are some key excerpts: Joe Cebalos thought he knew what he was getting into. He thought he was getting in on the ground floor of a growing cryptocurrency called Troptions during a real estate deal. “I was like, ‘Oh, he’s giving away free money,’” Cebalos said. But another homeowner, who asked not to be identified, said she had no idea what a Troption was, until looking over the final sale agreement for her metro Atlanta home. “There was a significant amount of money that was placed into a Troptions account,” the homeowner said. Troptions are a cryptocurrency. About 30% of the payment for both homes was going to be paid in Troptions, not U.S. dollars. -- “Nobody told me how to get the Troptions out of the account and translate it into cash,” the homeowner said. That’s because you can’t. According to the Secret Service, which is charged with protecting the country’s financial infrastructure, the main red flag with Troptions is that, unlike Bitcoin, you can’t cash out. Troptions can’t be turned into U.S. dollars or any other currency. “If the major exchanges aren’t going to trade it, you have to find someone on a peer-to-peer level to offload it,” Espinosa said. That’s why after watching the paper value of his Troptions skyrocket to more than $1 million, Cebalos came to the realization that they were actually worth nothing. -- “If I offered you Troptions for this house, would you make a deal involving Troptions being the purchaser?” Gray (reporter) asked Cherwenka(scammer). “I have Troptions, so I’m not interested in selling the house,” Cherwenka said. “You don’t want more? If it’s so great, wouldn’t you want more?” Gray asked. “I have plenty of Troptions, don’t bait with these questions,” Cherwenka said. About an hour after the interview, Cherwenka texted Gray to say he wanted to correct that, saying he would sell Gray his house if Gray paid in Troptions. But that is a deal that experts like the Missouri secretary of state and the U.S. Secret Service would warn Gray against taking. Cherwenka also emailed Gray a few days after the interview to say that if and when Troptions are traded on exchanges, buyers can cash out their investments.
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May 29, 2022 18:46
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Agents are GO! posted:I guess I can't get my head in the space where I'm willing to drop significant cash without doing some serious research. Hell, I did like 45 minutes of research just deciding which version of Elden Ring to buy. ultrafilter posted:There's no shortage of textbooks that cover the basics of finance but they're expensive and also reading is for nerds. The American educational system is set up to completely avoid teaching people how to adequately do research on their own, and instead just trust and regurgitate what people in authority (or with the trappings of authority) say. This creates two kinds of scam victims: The kind who get intimidated by big words and assume that accepted sources of information like the news media are always correct; and the kind that realize that authority can be wrong, but then extrapolate that to mean that authorities and experts are all full of poo poo, and that Common Sense Average Joe can be as much of an expert with just a little googling. Also as someone who was raised to constantly distrust advertising and research to get good prices... that is really not a common attitude or skill, and it takes a lot of mental wherewithal, of the sort that isn't readily available to people in stressful and tiring situations such as "Working my rear end off in the Capitalist Horrorscape because otherwise I might end up completely homeless and destitute." That kind of thing tends to have an effect on a person's cognition. ETA: Agents are GO! posted:I think this gets to the disconnect I have: how can people even believe this exists? I guess I'm just jaded. Humans are a social species, and tend to automatically share the beliefs around them. Most of our beliefs are not arrived at out of careful reasoning, but because the people who were around us when we were tiny and didn't know better influenced us to believe them. It's the same reason we believe that it's important to say "Thank you" to someone for doing a thing for us, or that romantic relationships operate a certain way, or that it's important for a particular sports team to win a competition. It's not a failing of other people to believe the things they've been told in various ways literally all their lives. Especially when that belief is basically, "There is some way out of this dismal situation," since outside that, what is there for them? Like, if you literally think that you and your family are stuck in an unwinnable situation, where there's no chance of future success, and everything is hopeless... what else can you do? Do you seriously expect people to just completely give up on life? Because to them, that's the only perceivable option. Puppy Time fucked around with this message at 19:03 on May 29, 2022 |
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May 29, 2022 18:53
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Cyrano4747 posted:This is huge, and it's a huge part of why the disappearance of defined benefits plans (e.g. pensions) in favor of defined contribution (401k) is loving evil and has been a big part of destroying the middle class. Sorry, but defined benefit plans are literally evil, and are just another way the elderly are stealing from the next generations. It boggles my mind people stand up for them. They are completely unsustainable and the bagholders are subsequent generations who pay in to bail out the last but get nothing.
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May 29, 2022 18:58
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Spazzle posted:Sorry, but defined benefit plans are literally evil, and are just another way the elderly are stealing from the next generations. It boggles my mind people stand up for them. They are completely unsustainable and the bagholders are subsequent generations who pay in to bail out the last but get nothing. Yes, let's blame the people who worked for them and not the corporations and institutions that didn't fund them and kept kicking that can down the road. They would've been fine if money had been put towards them properly and not put into huge executive compensation packages or pissed away in other, equally stupid ways.
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May 29, 2022 19:13
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Spazzle posted:Sorry, but defined benefit plans are literally evil, and are just another way the elderly are stealing from the next generations. It boggles my mind people stand up for them. They are completely unsustainable and the bagholders are subsequent generations who pay in to bail out the last but get nothing.
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May 29, 2022 19:13
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Best case scenario with defined benefit they are actually contributing to the pension fund and prudently investing it, in which case they could just give that money to me in a 401k or similar. In reality, pension funds are horribly underfunded and are a time bomb that ends up screwing over current employees (and/or taxpayers, if public) in favor of retirees. That doesnt even count the many pension funds that completely implode and leave the retirees screwed too.
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May 29, 2022 19:24
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Lol 401k Stan’s now I’ve seen everything. The Bitcoiners of their time
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May 29, 2022 19:25
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I have plenty of Troptions.
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May 29, 2022 19:28
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Astrochicken posted:I have plenty of Troptions. With Garland E. Harris' miraculous new invention, I dont even have to carry around my pig to trade! 
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May 29, 2022 19:34
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Agents are GO! posted:I think this gets to the disconnect I have: how can people even believe this exists? I guess I'm just jaded. Because it does, especially in past generations. For both of my grandfathers (and thus my parents, and thus me) it was the GI Bill. My dad's dad never finished 8th grade and was a sharecropper. In 1940 he joined the Army because it would pay him more and, importantly, they would feed him. This meant he could send his pay home to his brand new wife. Then WW2 happens, he's getting combat pay for 5 years, and saves a poo poo ton of it. But most importantly he ended up with a benefits package that was HUGE in helping him do poo poo like, right after the war, buying his own farm. A farm which by the early 50s was a poo poo ton of acreage in what became a major suburb of a major city. That's how the sons of a sharecropper with an 8th grade education ended up all going to private high schools, good colleges, and eventually graduate and professional programs. More or less same story for my mom's dad, only in his case he gambled like a fiend all through the war and still came home with enough to open a gas station. Again, a guy who never went to high school, and who was able to turn combat pay plus a poo poo load of cheaply loaned money into a middle class lifestyle. Both my parents have college degrees, my father has a post-graduate degree, and none of my grandparents so much as set foot in a high school. This was all helped by some big changes in how mortgages worked between the 30s and 50s, which was part of a major policy goal of creating homeowners. The tl;dr on it is that pre-1930 typical mortgage rates were something on the ballpark of half down with 10 year terms. The 30yr 20% (or less these days) loan that we all know now is a product of those post-war policy changes. There are HUUUUUGE swaths of American society who have basically that same story. My family's own tale is comically common. Just one little hitch: you more or less had to be white. Not to say that absolutely zero minorities benefitted, but a lot of it hinged on making access to credit easier, and red lining was a thing so . . . But that's ancient history, who gives a gently caress about that. The more recent example that a lot of people look at are the tech stocks. No, not the ones that went tits in the air in the 00s and are worth nothing today, ignore those. They're looking at the people who got Amazon or Google stock at IPO and made out like bandits. Those people got in on the ground floor, and launched themselves and their families to entire new economic classes. Now, most of the people getting early tech stocks were already comfortably middle class, but a lot of the more vocal crypto bros are too. For them it's not about getting middle class status, it's about becoming motherfucking wealthy. The language they use shows that, what with all the lambo references. Basically a lot of this needs to be seen against the backdrop of the 1940s-1980s being a period of jaw dropping economic opportunity in the US (especially if you're white), and then the 90s-00s being a period when a poo poo ton of technological change happened that created an entire new class of tech million- and billionaires. The former sets the baseline for what people expect, the later creates the beautiful fantasy that if you just pick the right stock or right coin you can ride it to the moon. As an aside, I'll also mention that the 70s-00s is also where the system that let the WW2 generation and the boomers pull together that lifestyle was dismantled in favor of maximizing profits for the very top of the economic food chain, but that's another rant entirely. I mean, not really, because that then gets into the stock craziness and the venture capital and the alure of hitting it big with some no-name company that moves from being an online book store to the biggest retailer in the world.
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May 29, 2022 19:38
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CharlestheHammer posted:Lol 401k Stan’s now I’ve seen everything. 
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May 29, 2022 19:41
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Astrochicken posted:I have plenty of Troptions. I've been investing in Ploptions, which are a refined financial tool I mint at least one of in my toilet each morning. Each one is unique and artisanally crafted! Who'll start the bidding for tomorrow's Plop Drop at $1000 dollarydoos? also once you got your plop you're not allowed to get rid of it, u gotta white-knuckle hodl that Ploption until it squeezes out from between your fingers a little
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May 29, 2022 19:41
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Well bitcoiners also have true believers that think they are doing some vague greater good so that’s probably an unfair comparison to them
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May 29, 2022 19:49
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The thing to keep in mind about this is that people think that can become wealthy - not rich, all-caps WEALTHY - because there are always a few examples of people who did pick the right stock, or the right coin, and were in the right place at the right time and smart enough to cash out on top. This isn't a new thing, either. Some people made a fuckload of money off the Depression (like Joseph Kennedy, JFK's dad - he made bank trading stocks in the 20s and then shorted a bunch right before everything came crashing down. Remember the dude from The Big Short? Yeah, that just 80 years earlier). You're always going to be able to find someone who really did make it. The way I make sense of it is by looking at another low-probability, high-reward opportunity that people also get fixated on: professional sports. It's really easy to go and find a bunch of stories about people from really impoverished backgrounds who were good enough to get that big deal, sign that big sponsorship, and become wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. Of course, for every one of them there are thousands upon thousands who get ground into paste in college athletics and leave without a diploma or a professional career. And for every guy who ends up not being quite good enough for the NBA after college, there are even MORE who were decent in high school and never get that scholarship, but who still hosed up their secondary school studies by focusing on athletics instead of school. I saw the latter a lot when I taught at a community college. Kids who weren't good enough for a university team but who were still focusing on basketball at the community college level because they thought they might be able to get picked up by a university, and who weren't paying any attention to their classes at all. It was tragic all around. I had more than one reference Cam Newton to me as a guy who did time on a community college NFL team before making the pros, and all of them were ignoring that he was good enough to get a university scholarship first and then ended up in a CC because he hosed up and got kicked out. Basically it's all survivorship bias. You've got people looking for a way out who see someone who did it - be it via sports or stocks or coins - and decide that that's how they're going to get out too. Only what they aren't seeing are the thousands of other people who tried the same thing and ended up owning a portfolio full of Pets.com and OnMoney.com.
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May 29, 2022 19:51
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Cyrano4747 posted:Basically it's all survivorship bias. You've got people looking for a way out who see someone who did it - be it via sports or stocks or coins - and decide that that's how they're going to get out too. Only what they aren't seeing are the thousands of other people who tried the same thing and ended up owning a portfolio full of Pets.com and OnMoney.com. And, for that matter, the dozens of other things those same people tried or were trying before the one thing that ended up working clicked into place.
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May 29, 2022 20:10
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