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- Hacker News
- > "A platform that the federal regulatory apparatus has agreed to treat as adjacent to a derivatives market listed, ran, settled, and paid out a binary contract on the eschatological return of the Christian messiah."
How is this not the coolest shit ever?
by zeafoamrun - You might be surprised what legitimate insurance companies have issued policies against in the past - it has always been the case that insurance and gambling are more closely adjacent than you might think.
For example: https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/ca/news/breaking-news/d...
“One British insurance company came to the rescue of three Scottish sisters … concerned about the cost of raising the Son of God should one of them be selected to give birth to the Messiah.”
Of course the big difference is insuring yourself against the personal risk of loss in the event of a specific outcome is not seen as quite the same as merely speculating on its occurrence. Insurance is just betting against what you want to happen happening.
by jameshart - Note that this post includes a major spoiler for the show The Good Place. The show is fantastic, so I'd suggest not reading unless you've already finished season 1, or have decided it's not for you.by SquareWheel
- It is, in fairness, a pretty common trope. See also https://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=936 , and also Iain M Banks' Surface Detail; both predate _The Good Place_.
(WARNING: The above comic contains the same spoiler as the article, more or less.)
by rsynnott - I am ride or die Good Place; my family has the Trolley Problem party game. Don’t spoil it if you haven’t seen it.
But honestly I feel the Darkest Timeline is more apt, ala Community.
by nytesky - Now I know there's a spoiler, the title of the article is a spoiler.by normie3000
- I only started watching it after I got spoiled, and didn’t mind it. Before I knew about the premise I thought the show looked boring. Didn’t pick it up based on the excerpt on Netflix.
The show doesn’t really rely on not knowing the twist. And even saying there’s a spoiler for season 1 will probably clue most people onto what the twist is anyway
by audunw - Isn’t this related to financial nihilism where normal people can’t invest or earn enough to grow money for basic life costs like housing and college with standard investments or jobs. They need a moonshot, hence gambling has become normalized. It isn’t even about the White House or crypto per se, it’s a desperate embrace of risk to catch up.by nytesky
- It's the same with everything speculative, including polymarket, spaceX , tesla etc. Where previous generations inflated physical goods values (and real estate), the new ones are inflating digital air.by seydor
- The phrase “financial nihilism” is explicitly mentioned and discussed in the article.by cgh
- I do agree that there's a huge amount of fraud and scams, and obviously that's only got worse since the President of the US started being part of that ecosystem.
But at the same time there is also finally real finance happening on-chain too. Backpack launched a SpaceX token at IPO that can be moved between on-chain and your brokerage. I think Coinbase announced their on-chain equity offering will have the same capability. Just yesterday Bailie Gifford launched a tokenised fund where the actual register of record is on-chain. I still think crypto has significant potential as financial rails, and that does seem to be being explored by real financial players now too.
by mcintyre1994 - Not sure "real finance" is a meaningful value-add? Finance itself is shockingly antisocial in its own right.
When you see fintech companies talking up the virtue of "looping" stablecoins, or pushing wobbly derivatives like the spaceX synthetics, it's hard to see anything good coming from the integration of "crypto rails".
by spopejoy - Is it possible that these companies simply fork the existing protocols and use the technology without buying into the existing "crypto world"?
Yes it won't be quite so decentralised, but say a number of major banks all spin up a node for say a JPM asset trading blockchain, it becomes semi-decentralised, so they have some advantage of a using a more secure shared ledger, but they also retain more control and thus probably more acceptance within banking, as big players can keep a walled-garden of sorts.
- > Backpack launched a SpaceX token at IPO that can be moved between on-chain and your brokerage
What is the actual societal value of this? Do you seriously believe that such a token helps price discovery?
by dgroshev - I've been sharing author's view for quite a while now, namely that there must exist a market of goods to give a currency real value.
But I must contradict the author, because there is a market of goods, and bitcoin is indirectly involved in it. Namely the dark web market of drugs.
People love drugs, and they use a lot of them, drugs turnover a huge amount of value. And right now people are buying bitcoin, because it's often safe to buy, and exchanging it for monero, that they then use to buy drugs.
I'm very much interested in this market, and how it affects crypto.
by INTPenis - Ive been saying this for a while. Cryptocurrencies are an index tracker for the underground economy.
They're not without value and theyre not all speculation but what value they do have is almost entirely about facilitating transactions which at least one state considers illegal.
I used to think that this would mean that they'd be outright banned eventually but it seems that the "index tracker for the underground economy" proved to be too profitable an investment for western oligarchs and the chance to undermine rival countries' capital controls proved too alluring for the imperialists in government.
by pydry - In the UK, you have to do KYC checks, and any crypto you buy will be visible to HMRC (taxman). If you dispose of it for monero, this is a taxable event, and they can tell your crypto has moved. You may not get pinged immediately, but HMRC can and do come after people retrospectively.by munksbeer
- Actually, this industry routinely runs what you'd call "hero marketing," and what makes it especially dangerous for young people is that they're being sold success stories by actors playing people who don't exist, fictional characters who supposedly got rich through crypto.
1.A tiny handful of success stories are pushed to the front.
2.The vast majority who lost money are made invisible.
3.It manufactures the expectation that this time, you could be the one.
4.The price movement itself becomes the reward stimulus.
5.The platform, the exchange, the issuer, and the early investors all hold an advantage in fees or liquidity.
The problem is that this is identical to gambling. But it's dressed up as "finance." The industry obscures the fact that crypto functions as gambling by making people think of it as a new kind of financial asset.
Of course, crypto is technology. It's true that there are technological components, blockchains, smart contracts, and the like. But just because something contains technology doesn't mean the mass marketing around it qualifies as technology investment. Anti-counterfeiting technology is also technology. That doesn't make putting money into circulating counterfeit bills an "investment in currency security technology." By the same logic, the fact that crypto contains technological elements is being used to justify the marketing structure built on top of it, and that, precisely, is the deception.
And for all the talk of decentralization, the reality that USDT and similar tokens end up tethered to a single dominant exchange, heavily coupled to nation states, essentially proves that true decentralization is impossible in practice. This is only natural. Decentralization makes trading inconvenient, so people gravitate toward a single centralized exchange. And at that point, what exactly is the difference between that exchange and a government?
by jdw64 - Kalshi was just exposed doing this "hero" stuff, running social media spots with paid actors using a fake mockup of their site to simulate real wins on camera.by spopejoy
- It's gambling, and it's gambling in dodgy unregulated casinos.
"This guy won big!" is absolutely a part of the marketing that pulls in the other suckers. It's not a counter-example, it's part of the scheme.
I know people who really enjoy a night out losing a 3-digit sum of money in a casino. Somehow they get sufficient reward from that to make the expense worthwhile for them.
The difference is, that unlike the Crypto enthusiasts, they don't afterwards try to convince me at length that gambling can and should replace money transfers, foreign exchange, banks in general, pension funds, the governmental exchequer etc. That would be cultish lunacy.
- While true about that 'hero' marketing, you can claim the same about literally any marketing campaign, or things like American Dream (TM).
How many teenagers looked with starry eyes into US military recruiting PR campaigns, then get send to Iraq / Afghanistan, and instead of glory and cool adventures that were promised they saw death of peers and civilians on massive scale, they became invaders for at best questionable causes, experienced huge human suffering and destruction... which at the end didn't achieve anything positive at all, neither for US nor for locals, massively in contrary. Heroes look very differently in hindsight.
by kakacik - Yes, and: it's not completely exclusive to crypto. The UK FCA had to ban "binary options", a financial instrument using traditional money, due to the high volume of scams. https://www.fca.org.uk/consumers/binary-options-scamsby pjc50
- >Meet Mike. Mike is a college freshman who is exposed to crypto through social media. He downloads Coinbase, buys ten dollars of CumRocket because his friend group is in on it, watches the price move, and feels for the first time the dopamine rush of gambling on non-economic random walks. By his sophomore year he is onto harder drugs: 0DTE options on triple-leveraged single-stock ETFs he does not understand, traded on a gamified brokerage built to look like a video game. By twenty-two he has a Kalshi account, because betting on the outcome of a presidential primary or a reality television show winner has been reframed as participation in financial markets. By twenty-four he has hit rock bottom in the sportsbook, firing off ten-leg parlays on Tibetan ping-pong and third-division water polo at two in the morning because the games he has actually heard of no longer move fast enough to feel like anything. Mike believes he is investing. Mike is gambling. Mike is on the express train to a gambling addiction, and he is meaningfully poorer at every stop along the way.
tbh that reads a bit like the war on drugs propaganda we got in school back then. You don't want to try the devil's lettuce cause in 2 years you will be a homeless heroin addict in San Francisco, or worse!
by thrownawaysz - The war on drugs, due to its targeting of specific socioeconomic and racial groups, is probably not the best analogy here.
While I do get your point about the FUD it generated, a better parallel might be the rise (and eventual fall) of the tobacco industry. There was a lot of fraud and deception in the 20th century about the health effects of smoking. There were ads touting that more doctors preferred brand X. The idea was to correlate something genuinely dangerous and lethal with good health.
Crypto and betting markets, to the author’s point, are repeating this pattern again today in terms of personal finances.
by samch - Yeah like why is Mike thinking he is investing if he is betting on a literal sportsbook? That is delusion and has nothing to do with crypto. I am not pro crypto but the logic here doesn't make a lot of sense.
You can say buying crypto is like gambling sure but it literally is not. It's investing in an extremely risky asset that can go to 0. But it is very different than placing a bit on Kalshi or a sportsbook.
I actually have bought CumRocket before but I also bought a lot of crypto and sold it at a profit. I did not use Kalshi later or sportbooks to gamble. I moved to invest in stocks later in life but bought boring etfs and index funds. Trading bitcoin actually taught me risk management and stocks seem much easier to handle in terms of strategy.
Sure I could've turned into a degenrate gambler but that's literally not crypto's fault
by altmanaltman - > and he is meaningfully poorer at every stop along the way.
or meaningfully richer as the case may be
by chasd00 - Just because the methods used by the war on drugs failed doesn’t mean that drugs are somehow good for you. It just means that the methods were ineffective.by keiferski
- Well it's not wrong, the solution isn't abstinence though, it's proper education, help for those who struggle with it, and making it legal and regulating it.by lionkor
- Propaganda always works best when it's true, but selective. People that ended up homeless heroin addicts 2 years after smoking cannabis exist, the propaganda just neglected to mention that they are a minority.
Just like the failure of the war on drugs, trying to ban crypto and arresting anyone that owns it would almost certainly be a dismal failure.
by RobotToaster - >tbh that reads a bit like the war on drugs propaganda we got in school back then.
Well, propaganda or not, hard drugs are bad for you.
by coldtea