Anyone else remember those folks who suddenly realized climate change was actually happening and immediately started whining about how the media failed to tell them?

People failing to think critically about how media works while simultaneously whining about how the media works will never cease to amuse me. It is almost exactly like taking a bus to the end of the line and then yelling at the driver for taking you there.

Part of the problem is that the press is owned/regulated by the people in the very institutions that fund the scammers.

If you want to complain about BTC, complain about BTC. FTX was not BTC.

In the early days of Enron, an investigative journalist would have found a real gas trading company. But at no point in the history of Theranos would an investigative journalist worth their salt have found a real company.

Who does believe that for more than 1 second?

SBF and crew were probably basking in their own genius too much to realize how most Michael Lewis books end up. They probably thought they were more Moneyball than The Big Short.

Still, it's weird to have to read about this at poker.org first instead of any "respected" news source.

Especially when there were tweets as old as 2018 at the very least describing the very scam Alameda/FTX/SBF was pulling.

@bitfinex'ed, a Twitter account which exposes tether for the scam it is since maybe a decade (and tether shall eventually fall), has been posting proof of all the wrongdoings. Including the ties between Alameda an Deltec (tether's bank in the Bahamas) since the very start of the scam.

It's also the media's fault that they re copy/pasting everywhere that it's "leveraged trades gone wrong, sending SBF in a death spiral".

That's not the story at all yet that's what these scummy media are publishing.

The story is that the goal was, from day one, to not only defraud people/investors but also to do a regulatory capture of the crypto exchanges market by greasing politicians and working hand in hand with officials and ex- officials who all knew each other.

If there were still investigative journalists around, there's material for quite a story.

But it's better to present SBF as an altruistic woke kid who, sadly, was sent into a death spiral after a few bad leveraged trades.

The NYT is in the "providing content to lure people to advertisers" business. They don't sell ads to third parties. They could be very symbiotic with Google, for example. If Google was searching their content, bringing readers in, and supplying ads. But, instead, Google scrapes their content and helps people never visit their site at all.

https://youtube.com/shorts/BVjZsLafkz8?feature=share

You could say we don't have proof that Rishi Sunak isn't an alien from Alpha Centauri sent to Earth to eliminate donuts without holes, but you don't just make up extraordinary claims for no reason. It is logical to assume the simplest, boring thing is the truth unless you have evidence otherwise, a la Occam's razor.

What's with the snark? The title itself is technically accurate. That is "a link". There's nothing to justify. What you want to do is debate the strength of that link. That's fine, but it does nothing to change the accuracy of the title. A connection is a connection, like it or not.

(I think it works this way across the anglosphere, not just America. The average Briton can't bribe the average British cop, but their royals/etc certainly pay to make crimes go away.)

There's plenty of funding for and to reporters who aren't trying to discover the truth but instead manufacture it.

Is there a reason we think they persist?

Newsrooms are completely different from investigative digging into stuff.

[0]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204422...

I can too promise the moon and never deliver.

This stays very much viable. Right up to the point that it isn't. Then, people will wonder what is backing those tokens, and if they want to risk the event that they aren't worth their advertised value. Then, a liquidation crunch happens and the company collapses in onto itself.

The issue is lack of advertising revenue. No local classified adds or local firms. All gone to Facebook.

Let's talk about Andrew Hill and how a grant from Bill Gates resulted in him changing course on his Ivermectin findings.

I've been seeing articles here on hn for years disparaging corruption within academic journals, but suddenly with COVID, every journal maintained impeccable ethics right?

Continuing this line of thought, isn't the next level of "betters" the people who would readily employ violence to get retribution on those who scammed them? Or even those who would just employ violence to take what they want in general?

I can understand the law of the jungle as-it-currently-is point that boils down to "lol normie rubes fell for advertising", but extrapolating that out into an overarching moral judgement makes no sense unless you're also repudiating the specialization of labor that has led to most of our current prosperity.

I just don't understand all of the "BTC will never fall below <some level not far from the current price>" thinking.

Really no price? Even given the opportunity to buy at $10, you still wouldn't hold?

Bitcoin's value (not in terms of money, but in terms of usefullness) is an emergent property of the combination of proof of work, the difficulty adjustment, and its peer-to-peer nature. Other cryptocurrencies suffer because their founders have changed one or more of those properties in an attempt to "fix bitcoin" (bigger blocks! faster blocks! more blocks!), but that cripples the resulting emergent value.

If Bitcoin is directly cloned as Coinbit, and miners flock to it, and it achieves a greater total hash rate than Bitcoin, then its value supersedes Bitcoin's. Bitcoin's first mover advantage makes this unlikely (though non-zero).

Bitcoin has a real multi stakeholder maintainership, where no single party can hard fork the currency or change the rules in any important way from the ones the users signed up for. This is what people mean when they say hard forks should be close to impossible to pull off. The only exceptions are where there is absolute consensus, such as pure security issues.

Closely related to the above, the issuance model is clearly known to everyone in advance and will not change. The issuance is not the same thing as the consensus rules. That helps force stakeholders to play fair.

There is no founder or foreground representative that has an undue influence in development. Even the core developers will have to convince everyone that their changes are sound and will not change the rules of anyone's investment, and more often than not, ends up with them dropped if consensus can not be reached.

Again related to the above, there was no pre-mine. Since there was no central party, no one owned any coins before the public blockchain started. So no one could sell or promise any future winnings. There's this whole founding myth to build culture on, and npt everything may be true, but what's clear is that an effort was made to prove there was no pre-mine (someone included today's paper in the genesis block, before which per the protocol no coins can exist).

The first mover advantage does not enter this. You could start a new serious attempt at a currency along the same lines as above, but very few bother when you are competing with outright scams. Personally I believe we have to wait some time to shake out the scammers before we can see any serious attempts at competing.

Correct answer.

People dramatically underestimate the extent to which reporters are stenographers: they go to relevant people, get quotes, write some background around the quotes (which itself is derived from previous statements), and hit publish.

Almost every business article you see is push-driven. The business being covered will issue a press release and it gets rewritten into articles.

The press are pretty good at attribution: if the NYT says that "Bob said X", you can be pretty sure that an NYT reporter heard Bob say X. That doesn't tell you anything about whether X is true or not.

I think it’s entirely possible that an industry with low competition and high nepotism could just be doing their jobs poorly.

Isn’t that why Joe Rogan is more popular than CNN?

Vass you dere, Charlie? [1]

Misinformation/disinformation may, I suppose, have always been pretty much this bad, but the writing quality and intelligence in the mainstream media was not.

"Journalism" today reads like an assignment written by a near-illiterate freshman engineering student in the compulsory English class, by the standards of the mid-90s. At best.

And I think the reason is obvious - modern advertising technology proved that decent writing adds essentially zero value and forced everybody to accept it.

So the people with liberal arts degrees are not wrong to hate techies. But once, even techies wrote better.

We used to live in a world where elites guessed at what ordinary people wanted, and once the data-driven creed took over, it turned out they were mostly wrong. But optimization taken too far is evil.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Pearl

Sounds like the "Yuppie Nuremberg Defense" from Thank You For Smoking, in which a tobacco lobbyist excuses himself by saying he has a mortgage to pay.

It's even worse. 50 years ago that's still what they were, but they had the "power" of defining reality. Politicians, millionaires, and other actually powerful people had to suck up to them or with the narrative-shapers against them they would have real problems.

But that reality is breaking (if not totally broken). Social media, feed algorythms, recomendation engines, etc, are taking those narrative-shaping powers from them. So they get less respect.

look up https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wildcat_banking it's kind of an interesting period in finance that got kind of forgotten as it did not exactly end well.

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.

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.

1. This has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. There is literally nothing about a decentralized trustless architecture that makes this happen. You're falling into the common trap that crypto people fall into where they equate criticisms of the current centralized system with 'possibilities of a decentralized system,' when really what they mean is any hypothetical new system could be better than the current one. All else equal, a centralized system will be faster no matter what (i.e. this is a major reason why servers are centralized) and I agree we should be working on better/faster centralized systems.

2. You definitely need the permission of the miner/validators/whoever to transact [0]. You also need to convince them to put your transactions into the block and there is nothing that compels them to do so other than the same economic incentives that motivate Visa. You are again, criticizing the system now and imagining that a decentralized system is better.

2A. To break down the problem a little more clearly for you - Visa's main service (what it makes money doing) is actually fraud protection, since as you must know bank's can very easily settle between each other over other rails. Visa chooses not to process transactions that are at high risk of fraud/illegal activity, because they have regulatory liability. Miners not having regulatory liability isn't a function of decentralized trustless architecture, it's a function of being new. Either blockchain is similar to a wire transfer (something that porn companies still have full access to) or it's similar to Visa and will face the same problems.

3. I suggest you google the countries where it is illegal to use crypto to buy goods/services (governments plan on keeping currency controls intact after all!). The shear number will astound you!

4. Not sure on the monopolist point there, but again, Visa/Mastercard/Amex compete on swipe fees (look at the Costco example!) so I'm not sure what this decentralized point you're making really is.

[0] https://cryptobriefing.com/solana-blockchain-halted-for-eigh...

So yeah, some credit, that's fair. But I think the lesson is that good management recognizes when quality is falling off the bottom of the bottom rung, and makes adjustments to get back on that bottom rung.

Shitcoins represent a technological breakthrough in scamming because they scale so much better than operating a call center and have no physical footprint

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.

You say this as if it's an inherently bad thing. There's nothing wrong with some MSG as a flavor enhancer.

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.

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.