What I really want to know is, why is this flagged? HN full of low quality BS semi-technical Medium articles, but once something about crypto comes up it gets flagged.
While the analogy is correct, a key difference is that startups are illiquid by definition. Founders can't just cash out and are thus incentivized by build something of value. With protocols, there is no incentive to build something of value. Instead, the incentive is to building something that looks valuable on the surface to generate liquidity and cash out at the best point.
But you used a binary term "illiquid" rather than opting for something more open like "most illiquid". Just wanted to make a clarificaiton for other readers.
Are you aware that most crypto projects also opt into vesting patterns - and this is an increasing trend overall?
Another thing that might be interesting to you is that in most countries we have close to no public information if founders sell on secondaries. Your C-Suite might have maximized their secondaries in mutliple rounds and you wouldn't even know that incentives have changed.
In Crypto this is fully transparent and there are people bringing these to light on a consistent basis.
It's kind of a Ponzi scheme, but not really since it's not (usually) orchestrated by one malicious entity. Instead, it's a collaborative community effort with the community doing marketing and driving the price. In other words, the dirty work if customer acquisition and advertising is outsourced. It's not so different from crazy startup valuations that are often a result of market forces and competition, with the hope of exiting through acquisition to generate returns before anyone notices not much of value actually exists.
It's a fun game to play, just like casinos are fun. In 99.9% of cases nothing of value is behind these protocols.
Sick of people calling everything in crypto a Ponzi scheme. Some crypto projects are pump and dump schemes, while others are pyramid schemes. Others are just standard issue fraud. Others are just middlemen skimming of the top. Stop glossing over the diversity in the industry.
What I don't like about this terminology is that I associate these "schemes" with a malicious actor. Someone trying to scam you. But often that's not the case with these crypto projects. Often, nobody is explicitly trying to scam anyone, but everyone looks out for themselves first and wants to make money, which inevitably results in other people losing money if they are too late.
If a traditional startup is valued at $10M, I'm sure many founders would choose abandon it and take $5M in cash if only they could. The difference is that the liquidity is not there, so the option doesn't exist. In crypto, protocol founders may not start the project with the goal of abandoning it, but once they can choose between cashing out with $5M by abandoning it, they take that route because they can. People then call this a "rug pull" or "ponzi scheme" but I don't think the intentions are the same.
With startups, the "value" comes from investors who are willing to buy stock at a certain price with certain conditions, one of which is that the rule of law prevents you from stealing company money. If that law were not there, or could not be relied upon, investors would not be willing to invest at that price, and the "value" would be much less.
Or at least, that is my theory of how things should work, because crypto valuations seem to have proved me wrong.
You need to be able to see true malice through Hanlon's razor. Not every bad thing is just a stupid person, sometimes (often) it actually is people doing bad things on purpose.
Even if someone is so stupid that they design a Stablecoin backed by leverage that fails if the market goes down 20%, that is malice by negligence, because that stupid person should know that they do not have the capabilities to produce what they are promoting to people. If they are doing harm to society they must be stopped; motive is really not important.
> It is a lot of fun until people start becoming homeless and consider ending their life.
It's still fun. People make bad decisions all over the world all the time. The fact you read and dwell on the consequences some people suffer over it is not a problem, for other people, to solve.
> The fact you read and dwell on the consequences some people suffer over it is not a problem, for other people, to solve.
Unless those other people are the government. In which case it is their obligation to reasonably check predatory fraudulent activity, including ponzi schemes.
And unless those other people are simply concerned citizens who bring dubious schemes to the attention of the public at large.
> it is their (US government's) obligation to reasonably check predatory fraudulent activity
Crypto, by-in-large, is not predatory. Most fraud checks are after the fact. Fraud can be triaged, but there is no getting around the reality that there will always be people who don't value risk properly. Again, this is not a problem for other people to solve.
This is not a reason to pretend it's a larger issue that will affect your gambling experience.
I disagree and believe crypto is by-in-large predatory. The crypto handbook seems to be:
1. create coin
2. promote coin and get people to 'invest' in it
3. move the 'invested' money ("rug pull") into your personal account
4. disappear or do it again
> there will always be people who don't value risk properly
This is true. But we cannot compare making a wrong call on the direction of highly regulated Microsoft stock with 'investing' our money with people who are almost certainly going to steal all of it with zero consequences.
> will affect your gambling experience
You call this gambling. But the crypto creators promote their coins as investments with 'exchanges' and so on.
Financial investments and gambling are both highly regulated industries but crypto is subject to regulations from neither.
> Financial investments and gambling are both highly regulated industries but crypto is subject to regulations from neither.
We are not arguing about if there is fraud or not because that is not the issue at hand, nor in dispute. Again, this has nothing to do with the original point. Other people's bad choices do not affect the enjoyment of gambling. GL with whatever.
Disclosure: I don't hold any crypto and I don't work in the space, but I have worked in traditional finance hedge funds for many years.
Don't get your crypto, or more generally finance, news from HN. Reading most comments here it's obvious that most have no idea what they are talking about. They are so far removed from anything finance-related and just jumping on a bandwagon.
The value of web3 is difficult to explain because different aspects of it appeal to different people. For example, the vision of having the same financial instruments globally accessible to anyone with all transaction data publicly available is appealing to me. Imagine you had all of Robinhoods data public and could copy it to make a better product. Wouldn't that be cool? That's happening all the time in web3. The same goes for AMMs, which is a different paradigm than traditional HFT MM liquidity provisioning that's less transparent.
Even though there are many flaws, I can see it becoming a viable alternative to the current fully centralized and regulated alternative, which in many cases is just as scammy. The difference is that the scams aren't obvious because they are not public. Due to the developer platform, market cycles in crypto are much faster than in traditional finance. TradFi breaks just as much as crypto does, but the clock time is slower. On the other hand, this "code is law" approach makes no sense to me, but it may appeal to others.
Perhaps more than being bullish about web3, over the last few years I've become more bearish about web2. Looking at how bad Google search has gotten, how spammy reddit comments, youtube comments, and all social media are, how full of bots twitter is, etc. Many of these emergent behaviors are due to the advertising model that underlies the current web. I don't know how web3 can fix that, but currently it seems to be the only, or at least most significant, push to try something different here.
The metaverse angle is another one. Take games for example. People have always spent money on digital items, even 20 years ago when we played the earliest MMOs. Yes, NFT are 99% scams, but the idea that you want to build a global shared economy with provable ownership around goods not tied to the physical world is pretty obvious.
On the very highest level, I think people are are overestimating how important it is that goods are tied to the physical world (like a company owning physical assets reflected in the stock price). As lives are becoming more and more digital, your amount of e.g. Twitter followers is such an asset as well, not so different from owning a building.
"over the last few years I've become more bearish about web2. Looking at how bad Google search has gotten, how spammy reddit comments, youtube comments, and all social media are, how full of bots twitter is, etc. Many of these emergent behaviors are due to the advertising model that underlies the current web."
You're 100% right about this. This is one of these things that seems so obvious, but I hadn't considered until I read this. Infact I'd say there is a large portion of the popular (web2) internet which is junk.
> The value of web3 is difficult to explain because different aspects of it appeal to different people.
The problem with web3 is that no one can actually explain the value of web3, even when they are free to point out what they feel is the absolute best example available.
Instead, web3 proponents degenerate their discussion to buzzword-riddled hand-waving, without providing any explanation on what value can be proposed, backed up with a real-world tangible usecase.
It happens with technology sometimes, but all time the with finance. Having worked in hedge funds most of my career (as an engineer but I see enough of the business side) it's hilarious how clueless but confident people on HN are about anything that touches finance, trading, stocks, crypto, etc. Nothing wrong with being clueless, but the hilarious part is the confidence of the posters about what they are writing, which they probably got from Medium. If you don't know better you'd think they know what they're talking about.
I don't think anyone knows for sure. There is a decent chance that Tether is (or was before the crash) decently backed by "stuff" - just not with what it claims to be backed by. I'd imagine other crypto holdings were a significant part of it. In other words, it's not really a stablecoin, but some other complex derivative instrument. So it depends on how you define scam. It's certainly false advertising and has always been.
Basically tether mints a bunch of USDT, 'loans' it to bitfinex which then creates an asset on tether's balance sheet of the loan. Bitfinex then goes and buys BTC with the USDT raising the price of BTC.
The problem here is that there is no actual USD anywhere in this system. Net, the system is just one where tether is getting minted out of thin air and then sold to the public for BTC or whatever coins.
I'm generally not a fan of these kind of high-level tutorials that tell you "use X library to get Y result" - it's just not good for learning. But any content that tries to sell you on learning ML/NLP/etc in a few weeks is just that. I understand people want to make money by targeting a large audience, but it makes me sad when I see (the vast vast majority) of practitioners not having any understanding about ML (or NLP) and just blindly applying libraries.
I don't think you necessarily need a linguistics background for NLP, but I think you need either a strong linguistics OR ML background so that you know what's going on under the hood and can make connections. Anyone can call into Huggingface, you don't need a course for that.
Everything eventually gets boiled down to libraries. The purpose of technology is to get things done. I could say the same that it makes me sad that today’s developers use high level languages without ever knowing assembly. A chip designer could say that assembly language developers are saddened that the assembly language programmer never had to learn how processors are created.
Yes, the challenge people then face is that if they lack too much intuition for the subject, they can't spot obvious issues.
We've all seen how ML people don't necessarily have to have the skills to solve a problem (ie i don't need to speak Vietnamese to make a "passable" ML translator) but it's not long before the lack of knowledge starts to show up embarrassing shortfalls - being too arms length about any topic is a recipe for disaster!
Doing non trivial things (more than .train or .generate) with huggingface models def requires tutorials or other resources, not sure what you're on about at all.
I no longer see Google as a neutral "search engine" the way it used to be. Now it's just another company that owns and promotes certain types of content, no different from reddit. For some things Google has the best content, for some things Twitter or Reddit have the best content.
Back in 2000s Google used to be the place for any type of search (IIRC).
Now, I've been conditioned to use it only for specific use cases, mostly for convenience. Some examples include:
1. Anything programming related (searching for man pages, error codes etc) is straightforward. (I do have some UBO filters to exclude SO copycats)
2. Utility stuff like currency conversion, finding time in another city, weather etc.
Where Google has really fallen behind is in multimedia search. Not sure if it's due to copyright issues or not but Bing and Yandex provide way better service in this regard.
Not to mentions the "reddit" suffix I need to add to any search that even remotely calls for public opinion. In many cases, Google is just a shortcut to take me to the relevant subreddit.
Programming-related stuff seems to have gotten a lot worse in the last couple of years. Now most terms, at least for common things, return a ton of blogspam, when the official docs or SO are usually the best source.
I find one of the best ways to find interesting content on specific subjects using Google is now to start blocking all their top returns (a lot of SEO spam). This is somewhat tedious (lots of -site:seospam.com) and Google doesn't like automated queries. However, a few rounds of this often turns up interesting content down low in the search results. Just don't take what's on offer on page one of search results, basically.
Where it's gotten really bad is on news searches as Google either now has some kind of shitlist of independent news sites that it won't allow to show op on, for example, site:youtube.com searches - or, it's filtered through a guest list. It's hard to tell which strategy they're using, but news is definitely being heavily filtered based on very dubious propaganda-smelling agendas.
You might be interested in using uBlockOrigin and https://letsblock.it/filters/search-results to easily block these domains. In addition to your own domain list, you can use the community-maintained SO / github / npm copycat lists.
