The lottery paying for schooling is a clever self-defeating policy because it moves the tax-burden to the same people who would most benefit from a good public school system.
Each time there is an update to training algorithms and in response poisoning algorithms, artists will have to re-glaze, re-mist, and re-nightshade all their images?
Eventually I assume the poisoning artifacts introduced in the images will be very visible to humans as well.
And that's the problem here. They would have ended up looking for different jobs anyway. Others will leave too. The only people working there will be other assholes.
If they operate in regulated markets, then the regulations thereof determine their legality.
A ponzi scheme in itself isnt illegal (which is why there are so many crypto ponzi schemes) - it is when it is considered securities fraud that it becomes illegal.
The thought is that by regulating cryptocurrencies (i.e. treating it as a similar asset class as stocks, commodities, etc), such "investments" would be subject to the same rules - whether it has any real inherent value or not is irrelevant.
Ponzi and pyramid schemes are illegal in many jurisdictions. It's possible to be charged with securities or commodities fraud for security-based ponzi schemes, but there are laws against such schemes outside of the securities market. E.g. https://www.azleg.gov/viewdocument/?docName=https://www.azle...
I didnt mention pyramid schemes specifically because there are (usually) other laws that deal wit those (as you have pointed out). They dont apply because the very definition requires the product to NOT be what you are purchasing. When it is the nature of the product that matters, it is the respective regulation that applies. Crypto has no regulation, hence the desire to treat it as another regulated asset class, so the existing laws apply to it.
Serious question: Do you think no people have been harmed by crypto? My guess is by the end, 10s of thousands of people will have been seriously financially harmed.
Netflix has fallen more than Bitcoin has this year. Netflix has no or very little in the way of underlying physical assets to back up their valuation -- they do have intellectual property that may or may not be worth something, but is not an intrinsically scarce good like, say, real estate or even like iPhones.
So, serious question for people who argue that Bitcoin deserves a special class of regulation: what differentiates Bitcoin and Netflix here?
One big difference is that Netflix is subject to securities regulations and must file regular reports with the federal government providing important information about how they have been making their money, how they plan to make their money in the future, and any potential issues they see on the horizon with their business plan. Major investors are disclosed. Names of managers are disclosed. And every potential investor can read these reports; they are public. If they lie, investors can sue.
I don't think Bitcoin has anything like that - its ledger is public, yes. But the important part, where fiat currency is turned into Bitcoin or vice versa... that is opaque, for the most part. This is a very big difference, in my mind.
Investors can sue if Netflix lies, though importantly if what you're worried about is a collapse in the value of the security, um... bad news. Suing is not going to recover the value of the security.
I don't think that Netflix itself has a responsibility to report the flow of fiat currency into and out of Netflix, certainly not in a timely enough way to prevent people from being burned by the outflow of capital from it (as, indeed, has happened this year). The stock exchanges themselves provide visibility into that.
Right, but if I'm sitting in the chair as a regulator whose goal is to reduce the harm that financial products can cause to an average member of the general public while still allowing the market to work on its own as much as possible... I'm going to look at Netflix and think "well, we did what we could." Do you honestly think I should look at Bitcoin and think the same?
I mean? Maybe? Bitcoin has generated more wealth for more people than Netflix and lost less value from its peak? Seems like things are going okay?
You seem to be hinting that there's a natural limit to what we "can" do for any given security. I don't think that's true: it's just all tradeoffs. Could a regulator have tried to stem the losses people experienced from Netflix? I mean, sure. They could've halted trading on Netflix. They could've artificially bought up Netflix's stock.
I don't think they should have done all that. The costs would have been extreme. But if you're all in on, "we did what we could," then I think the ball's in your court to describe exactly where the limits of that doctrine lie.
40% of bitcoin holders are underwater, and the vast majority of that so-called wealth is held by like 5 people. And for what? being in the right anarcocapitalist forum in 2009? Nice.
What percentage of Netflix holders are underwater?
That's the point of this whole thread: whenever you get crypto haters on these fora, they act like crypto is the only volatile asset that has no effective price floor. But in fact, there are loooooooooooots of assets that are volatile and have no effective price floor.
Are those assets dangerous to invest in? They sure are. I don't invest in crypto and I don't invest in Netflix, either.
But do those many other assets that are volatile and have no effective price floor draw all this apocalyptic talk and complaints? No, they don't. They may draw entirely reasonable discussions of the value of not investing all your eggs in one basket. Which suggests to me that all the hate that crypto draws is not in fact because they're volatile and have no price floor -- that's a smokescreen for people who, generally, are in some combination of: a. don't like the politics of some people involved in crypto, or b. are pissed off that they spent a decade saying that crypt was going to crash any day now and have been consistently wrong.
People have definitely been harmed by crypto. I was pointing out that pyramid and ponzi schemes harm people by definition. There is no mathematical way for them to benefit a majority of participants. That doesn't necessarily hold for crypto.
How not? The problem with pyramid schemes, gambling, ponzi schemes, and cryptocurrencies is: they're zero-sum games (or worse). As you say, there is no mathematical way for most people to benefit from cryptocurrencies.
Cryptocurrencies are not zero-sum due to the ability to create money via lending. E.g. if I make a currency with 100 tokens, I can lend them to you for a year at a 10% interest rate. Even though there are only 100 coins in existence, I’ve created an asset worth 110 coins. This is how money gets created in a fiat system created money as well. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation
The reason money creation is valuable in fiat currencies is because those are circular economies: the person taking on debt is presumably producing something of value, and able to pay back the interest.
Crypto is not a circular economy. It's a speculative investment whose expected return is always negative.
How is taking a crypto loan and using it to produce something "of value" in the U.S. different than someone taking a USD loan and using it to produce something of value in Turkey?
Let me be more clear: the value in money creation is the loan itself. Money creation in USD does not make the USD more valuable. It makes the economic output of the economic system (GDP) more valuable.
The point remains: someone spending $USD to acquire $<Crypto> should expect to lose $USD when they invariably want to sell their tokens for $USD later. Casino chips are also a negative-sum game, even though a loan shark may loan you some for interest.
Casino chips are a good example. It's the casino that is zero-sum, not the chips themselves. People don't do business in casino chips because of logistic and liquidity issues. If you could buy casino chips digitally from anywhere in the world, at any time, with no counter party risk, and write contracts against them, then I bet a lot of people would do so.
