When you read crypto-related indictments, it shows how little is novel about crypto scams. They're almost all scams that were known in the 19th century, or earlier. There are Ponzi schemes. There are pumps and dumps. There are fake assets. There are bucket shops. The classic fraud of just stealing the assets in the customer accounts remains popular.
Bloomberg points out that the SEC, the CFTC, the FTC, and the Justice Department seem to have arrived at a common position that it's just good old-fashioned crime. It can be dealt with by following the money and putting people in jail.
I quit crypto in 2018 after 5 years. It had become clear to me that there were no safeguards in the industry to prevent scams like Celsius, and that the scams would quickly out-compete the quality companies. There's just no way to compete with someone who can make up fake returns to raise billions of dollars, if you're not willing to do the same.
It did occur to me to just play that game and make off with some cash at least. After all, I might not have another opportunity like that in my lifetime. But I don't think it would have worked. I'm just not that good a liar.
There is a giant pension fund in Canada which had $150M locked up in Celsius earn. We're talking actual professional fund managers who thought it was a good opportunity. The grift was good and it was probably more massive than FTX.
How these people self-defend themselves internally? Usually the answer is simple, along the lines of "oh, just sociopaths"... I mean you have to go to conferences, tweet, interact with people, get articles written about you, basically become famous, even build tech or at least organize that, they often have families, and basically ALL burn at the end, like lose everything.
Particularly in finance, I think a lot of these people convince themselves of an overly cynical view of the world: "They all do this - I'm just playing the game like everybody else."
When risk is involved, there's also often some hubris in the assessment. These crypto orgs obviously never intended to go broke. They probably honestly thought they'd likely have so much money that they'd cover their customer commitments without any issue. And if they did, they frankly probably wouldn't have ended up exposed and in legal trouble.
Which comes back to the first point: people cynically thinking all the orgs who made it big also did all this shady stuff but got away with it.
Politicians are way worse. They're supposed to be acting in the best interests of the population. Meanwhile, they're eg accepting duffel bags of money to look away from human rights abuses[0] and...a million other things. At least those in the finance world admit they're about the money.
The problem with Celsius is that nice weather in Fahrenheit is 70 to 80, but in Celsius it's only 20 to 25. 5 degrees is too narrow to talk about the difference between a little too cool and a little too hot!
For cooking in ovens or whatever, it's fine because you're up at 350/175 or 500/250. Once you're up that high, precision doesn't matter.
60 is a pretty useful base with many factors. Not sure if that is a very useful property for expressing temperature, but it's not a completely random number either.
I’m sorry to single you out but I’m seeing more and more knee-jerk responses like this, similar to what’s common on Reddit, and I don’t like it. I come to HN for thoughtful discussion, and this adds nothing to the discussion but only sets a combative tone that’s making further considerate discussion even harder
These comments irk me as well. Most of them could add substantive material to the discussion simply by tacking on a few sentences -- you can still start the comment with "Water is wet", but then explain specifically which elements of the story you feel are history repeating itself. And maybe link us to a few of those historical parallels so we can get a sense of how these things tend to evolve over time, or discuss the nuances of the similarities/differences.
Anyways, thank you for calling out low-value discussion. It would be amazing if we could raise the bar a bit.
That ship has sailed my friend. Comments like this have been proliferating for some time. And then they take off on their own uninteresting threads like you see on Reddit, with people just repeating low-effort meme responses on and on and on.
It even has its own useless follow-up comment: "Frozen water?"
Yeah the old refrain that the Redditification of HN is an illusion[0] becomes less true with each passing year. Communities obviously change with time, but the Covid era and the tumult with Reddit really did a number on this one.
As a postscript, the comments linked in the "illusion" claim of the guidelines are very interesting. Several of them are pointing out distinctly un-HN like behavior, though others point out things that have already become normalized on HN. The frog is boiled slowly.
