Lately I’ve come to the conclusion that, if Gwyneth Paltrow is involved in something, that’s a very clear red flag to me.

It’s almost unbelievable how every single external person who said anything in this article sounds like a disgusting scamming used-cars salesman.

It’s just the irony of it that is interesting to me. I personally don’t think UST was a scam; but I find there is a real possibility they saved themselves in the end. Like you said it doesn’t really matter much, but it’s interesting that all these revolutionary ideas who attract so many people end up back at square one all the time. It’s like a communist who gets some money/power and becomes basically the same or worse than a normal capitalist kingpin. I think people need to be a bit more humble and understand that Rome wasn’t built in a day and certainly not by a single person.

Just wanted to thank you again for all the valuable information. It’s certainly food for thought during a couple of coffee breaks!

Which is exactly what happened and we seem to agree. Thanks!

The point is that, when all is said and done, we’re supposed to trust them that it’s alright. But wasn’t that supposed to be the exact problem that blockchains were supposed to fix, remove trust from the equation? Why is it that people are so willing to trust them all of a sudden? It is contradictory and seems to me like pure tribalism. In the lack of evidence either way, I think we should assume the worst, not the best. This is what would happen if the same thing was done by a non-crypto company who disappeared with the money.

P.S. If anyone ever reads/replies to this comment I can predict that the answer will be: “yeah but that’s what wall street does, so what” So what, first of all it actually isn’t, but let’s assume it is: people invest in blockchains with the promise of descentralized trustless, so this means the promise was broken, because at the end of the day the whole thing is actually supposedly backed by a centralized trust-based fund (which failed horribly even so). In case people wanted to invest in centralized trust-based funds they have a myriad of other options with actual security features in them, and not just “I promised to do the right thing, cross my heart”. Now tell me something: what would you call a company that disappears with US$ 2b and promises to do the right if it wasn’t crypto?

I live in a Nordic country which I semi-jokingly call a “anthropophobic” country. People simply don’t want to deal with each other. Whenever you need to do anything that is predicted by the system and happens by the book, it is an extremely pleasant and comfortable experience. The moment you “fall in the cracks” and needs to somehow have a custom solution to something, it becomes hell. And all that simply because you will actually need to talk to someone to solve your problem, and people simply don’t want to talk to you, period. When you call someone, you have to actually get them to answer the phone in the first place (in the 30 min per week that they have allocated for phone calls, if you get through the 20+ queue before the 30 min are up). Then, after a cold greeting, you explain your problem and immediately feel like you are (a) stupid because you had to ask a question and couldn’t solve your problem silently by yourself, and/or (b) a nuisance because you have to bother another human being and put them through the extremely unpleasant experience of having to talk to another human. Then, they will forward you to someone else, you go through the whole ordeal again (because the next person doesn’t know your problem and nobody explained it to them), they will forward you again, until after the 3rd or 4th jump you are back to the first attendant. The whole system is designed to wear you out in the hopes that you’ll give up, which most people do (nordic people are averse to conflicts), but if you are resilient enough you’ll eventually find someone to actually help you. And don’t even think about getting angry; in the nordic countries getting angry and making a scene is extremely looked down, and if you do, you are immediately wrong and they won. No problem solving for you.

The reason I told the anecdote is that I think the main point of the article was the last one: a bit of trust can go a long way.

It seems to me that people advocating for stuff like DAOs and “code is law” believe so strongly that the human is the broken link in the system (which it probably is) that they want to take the human out of the loop completely. They are “anthropophobes”: they want to find a way to make deals and business without having to deal with the fellow humans. Obviously, it fails miserably. You always need to deal with humans; if it’s not the person/company administrating a service, it’s the hacker who is asking for ransom or the judge who will decide about your case when you sue the DAO or whoever else. We should invest more in people and their communication instead of trying to replace them with blockchains and algorithmic contracts, IMHO.

“Analysis from the company shows that 52,189 bitcoins were moved to a single account at crypto exchange Gemini”

Oh yeah sure they saw their coin going to s*%t and thought “yeah let’s just throw away a couple billion dollars just so people won’t think we are scammers”. Sure. The Vatican has started a process to canonize these saints.

Cool, thanks a lot! But why is it then that these currencies are not as attractive or hyped as Tether and UST? Could it be that the fact they are properly backed makes them less interesting for those who want a more adventurous kind of investment?

Just because you don’t understand how the traditional market works it doesn’t mean it’s a scam. Sure, there are scams, and sometimes they are big and problematic, but there is also a global network of honest people working, producing, creating, and selling real, useful things, and all that is connected by the global market. It is not perfect, but human beings aren’t, so it will always be flawed, but the good things far outweigh the bad ones. Investing in crypto is not a scam by nature, in theory; it is a scam in practice. It is just how people use it, because there simply is no other use. The only reason someone buys crypto is to wait for it to grow, for whatever reason, so they can get rich easy. There is no other reason (right now) to expect crypto coins to grow in value other than speculation and hope. And scammers feed on that hope, that’s just how it is. They are not that different, by nature, from the traditional market, but right the bad parts are exacerbated and there are no good ones to counterweight. Once cryptocurrencies are connected with enough real products, services, etc they will have a better reason to exist, and to become a better investment. After all a currency is just a way to trade things, it is not a value in itself.

Could you tell us why you chose to do that?

A trustless descentralized system that manages to process a handful of operations a second by spending as much energy as a country?

I’m genuinely curious, can you point me to credible information showing that some other stablecoin is actually fully backed?

If you can’t learn from examples, I guess you’re gonna have to learn by experience.

What do you mean it’s a “solution in search of a problem”? It solves a very clear problem: lack of scalability of traditional Ponzi schemes. That’s why most of the answers to criticism of cryptocurrencies is usually “it’s not much worse than the kind of thing that led to the 2008 crash”. For crypto enthusiasts the problem is not that scams exist; it’s that they didn’t get to join them early enough.

What sustained value? If you bought bitcoin 6 months ago you lost 50% of your money.

Why did I give the impression that I’m the “only” one? My sister is a psychiatrist who uses her computer for MS Word and Facebook. But for whatever reason you and the other people replying seem to think it’s ok to lose 10k for nothing. Would you invest in diamond mines, or milk farms, or wind energy, if you knew nothing about what you are doing, without consulting someone close to you who works with something similar? Sorry but you guys sound just like scammers who are drooling for new easy money to come into the “market”.

My sister is a psychiatrist who uses her computer for MS Word and Facebook. She will not make money out of this. She is not playing any games either. You and the other people who replied to this thread are really strange.

No, I’m not an authority on investing, but I read about crypto all the time and I know the risks involved. All of you replying to this thread know exactly how risky it is for a person to invest on something as volatile as crypto without understanding what they are doing. Yet, you still want her to do it. That is exactly what I expect from scammers.

I don’t get to authorize anything; I want to advise her with an informed perspective. My sister is a psychiatrist who uses her computer for facebook and MS word. I ask her advice all the time when I need to talk to my friends about sensitive subjects. There is no harm in me giving her advice on technology-related stuff.