There is a German saying: "Wo ein Trog ist kommen die Schweine." roughly translates to "Where there is a trough - the pigs will come." Rather fitting for all the crypto meltdowns in the last years.
Crypto has attracted almost every type of criminal under the sun, to the detriment of 'regular' people who got conned into this stuff and is now left holding the bags.
> Crypto has attracted almost every type of criminal under the sun
This is actually quite a profound statement.
Is there actually anything in human history that can come close to rivalling this ?
We have everyone from teens promoting shitcoins on TikTok, to household celebrities like Matt Damon, to white collar criminals, to arguably VCs, all the way to nation states like Iran and North Korea.
Doing the wild west days America had a bunch of what was called wildcat currencies issued by private banks with dubious backing in either non existing gold reserves or over inflated property holdings.
"Crypto is a great experiment where people who didn't live in the 19th century get to relive at 10x speed all the bank runs and regulatory changes that happened then"
Early in Bitcoin we came across the 1923 "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator", https://gutenberg.org/ebooks/60979 -- which described some of the scams we were seeing cropping up.
Much of the altcoin industry seems to have picked it up as an instruction manual.
(Not that there aren't scams in Bitcoin land-- but they've mostly been concentrated into the altcoin ecosystems, which tend to be overweight in the exuberant and gullible even compared to Bitcoin. It's completely unsurprising to see the FTX implosion happening at a scamcoin casino who's CEO had been publicly attacking Bitcoin -- it would have been much more surprising to see it at a Bitcoin only or mostly organization)
Altcoins prey on gullible, ignorant, greedy people - the best people to scam. Those are also the targets of Nigerian princes and all other get rich quick schemes.
Shitcoins represent a technological breakthrough in scamming because they scale so much better than operating a call center and have no physical footprint
I would give a pass to any celebrity that was paid to be in advertisements. They are paid to make an appearance and say lines convincingly.
We don't have written accounts of the tulip craze but I would imagine there were a lot of nefarious activities underway then. This is more global and the movement of money is transparent but anonymous in some ways. I think a hard part for a criminal enterprise like a drug cartel is the cash to crypto laundering that needs to happen in the amounts that it needs to. My guess is it was easier for shady banks and other crypto products to do shady things since its all just bits and bytes.
If there’s a moral obligation to fully vet the industry and operations of a company before accepting a short contracting job from them, why would one’s bank balance matter?
Does everyone fully vet their companies executive suite, board of directors and operations before accepting a job? Or the bank they use? Or the owner of the coffee shop they frequent?
Everyone walks around with a computer in their pocket built in a factory where people were to have known to be treated poorly, possibly to the point of suicide and then they use that device to type in comments about moral superiority.
Yes. And wait until you hear about how US railroads, which we in the US all depend on, were built.
Civilization is a story of gradual improvement. Insisting that anything be completely beyond reproach overnight is not a productive view. And yet some people can't resist.
There are problems with using the suicide factory as a moral point expecting someone to give up an iphone.
We're generally not given a baseline for the surrounding city, area, and country. The west has suicides, China will have suicides, how does this factory compare to those? Our impact isn't explained, along with the replacement for it, on the worker, the company, demand, and so forth. If there are any better alternatives and for who, and what the apples-to-oranges weighting for that decision is. The feelings and preferences of current, post, and hopeful company/industry employees and other citizens in that area.
Every choice and action a human makes is on some spectrum of consent.
At one extreme is a literal "gun to their head" moment where it's obvious there was no real choice and correspondingly the person shouldn't be held responsible (eg, someone points a gun at you and says hand over your wallet. That doesn't mean you really "gave" your wallet to them).
At the other end of the spectrum is a person with a tremendous amount of power, freedom and choice- eg, a rich person living in a Western country, making a decision where they have lots of options and/or can opt out or decline an opportunity freely.
It's easier to forgive a person doing something unethical to survive than a person living in luxury doing something unethical to have slightly more luxuries.
And many if not most celebrities happily and frequently turn down jobs to protect their reputations. And that is not only turning down reputable jobs, but jobs for perfectly respectable businesses, because they don't want to sell out. I was literally reading of one yesterday, where George Clooney turned down $35 million for a day’s work on an airline advertisement.
Sure, they can almost always find someone willing to do the advert. But that does not absolve that person of the moral consequenses of doing the work.
>>I would give a pass to any celebrity that was paid to be in advertisements. They are paid to make an appearance and say lines convincingly.
The exact same moral structure can be said about this, even though it is an extreme example:
"I would give a pass to any assassin that was paid to kill the targets. They are paid to accurately deliver lethal doses of bullets or toxins and ensure that the targets end up dead."
Obviously, none of us would consider giving a pass to the assassin because it was a "professional paid job", even if (s)he was doing to feed his/her starving family.
Why should we give a pass to the actors? While different levels and directness of harm, both are taking money to do harm to others.
You're comparing murder to an actor speaking lines in a 30 second commercial. Its an advertisement and you are questioning people's morals.
If any of the actors did any research they likely were convinced it was a solid thing to do at the time. It could have even been a "oh so-and-so is doing an ad, then I'm in" type of thing. Its pretty obvious whoever was involved at FTX was pretty convincing and doing wrong/illegal things behind the scenes so that's why I said they should get a pass.
Thanks for changing your argument, and validating my point.
Your first argument was that "...paid to be in advertisements. They are paid to make an appearance and say lines convincingly."; i.e., you justified it on the fact that they were paid professionals; the type of work doesn't matter and no judgement should be done.
Now, you admit that there is indeed a moral/amoral issue in making advertisements, but argue that in this case the FTX players must have been good liars and the actors must have been fooled.
Considering the actors to have reasonably vetted the thing as worthwhile & ethical, but having been fooled, is indeed a much better grounds to give someone a pass.
Especially so for the celebs who also invested their own money and have now lost it.
Of course the assassin example is extreme, I said so, and selected it because extremes can make the point more obvious. That makes it no less valid. I'm not questioning people's morals — I making obvious the foundational element that something being a "professional job" does not remove the actions from the sphere of moral judgement.
Certainly the celebs who invested along with promoting the thing were also fooled. That does not mean that they were absolved of moral judgement because it was a professional job, but that they can indeed be judged and given a pass because they were also fooled. Sure, the end result of both is that they pass, but the reasoning matters.
Your second argument is a good one in probably most cases; the first was not.
Whenever you have a space where boundaries are not imposed and actions merely have externalities rather than consequences for the actor, malicious actors that find it difficult to act how they want elsewhere flock to this space; this makes being in that space more and more painful, and so if the space remains lawless, people who can exist elsewhere abandon it, until the space is inhabited mostly or only by malicious actors.
We see this in online communities. We see it in the real physical world. And, yes, we are seeing it play out in crypto.
An online community without restrictions or boundaries doesn't look like one's fond memories of university dorm chats over a glass of wine; it looks like 4chan or the dark web.
A country without effective governance doesn't look like the romanticised media depictions of the wild west or your favourite science fictional post-scarcity anarchy utopia; it looks like Somalia.
A financial system without regulations doesn't look like your family kitty; it looks like, well, the crypto ecosystem.
Humans can't do better unless we all start to consistently choose cooperate/cooperate in prisoner's dilemma, and one quick look at, well, any community anywhere today shows we are a long way away from that.
This is not a technical problem, and cannot be solved with a technical solution. Humans do not know how to solve it. I wish we did. Historically, the most aspirational attempts to solve this problem have been the ones with the most gruesome outcomes.
Incorrect. There was less violence overall in the wild west. Modern America has insane violence at much larger scales (inner city gang violence in Chicago, millions of civilians killed over the past 2 decades via Iraq, Drone programs, etc).
The wild west was only wild because Hollywood needed a narrative.
Interesting. Do you have any sources of information to back that up? It contradicts my perception of things, and I would like to know if I've been operating under a faulty understanding. Example: according to this [1] article : per-capita murder rates were something on the order of 30/100000 in colonial times, 15/100000 in the "wild west" period compared to 6/100000 today.
First our cities today are as safe as they have ever been. Crime is slightly up from 2018 but 2018 was the lowest ever. Small bumps in crime are not usual.
Second, googling murder rates in that region is possible and they are an order of magnitude greater than even the worse US cities.
I would clarify further. High rates of violence were an exaggeration of 19th Century East Coast newspapers that created a myth that was perpetuated by Hollywood.
Actually, this seems like a rather interesting defense of crypto. To use the metaphor, did the trough create the pigs? Or did it only draw a horde of pre-existing pigs to one place? Perhaps the amount of quasi-criminals that we are seeing in the crypto sector right now is just a sign that crypto was highly successful and not a condemnation of crypto in and of itself.
You are half right. It obviously did not create the pigs, but the "trough" is the place for easy pickings: Crypto. Of course Crypto did not create scammers, scammers simply have an easy time scamming people there.
Agreed 100%, but troughs are good for other things besides feeding pigs. I hope the actually innovative, non-scam projects don't have their name tarnished too much by all the pigs.
