Bitcoin and Digital Currencies

Well, one positive thing about Bored Apes is that they demonstrate that art isn't just about perceived scarcity; it's about the culture, and so its founders took great pains to build a phenomenon around the art. We can argue for days about the qualities of that culture, but it inarguably exists.

I don't see how they're needed to demonstrate that? One look at any artistic product ever would show the same thing. That's the entire reason that corporations try to build brand loyalty, humans are social organisms and that naturally extends to our art.

Of course culture is crucial component of that, anyone could of told us that.

Did they? Or did they just manage to sell people on the "value" of it? The culture seemed to see the actual art as incidental. It was also super fucking toxic and built entirely around how to scam as much money as possible.

Edited by Zendervai on Sep 23rd 2023 at 3:41:51 PM

Apparently the NFT bros needed to learn it.

The fact is that every market is made up of a mix of producers, consumers and traders.

Producers are self explanatory as they provide the market input, consumers buy a good so they can put it to some kind of use (eating food, living in a house, hanging art on their wall, turning raw goods into goods for another market, etc…) and thus remove it (at least for a reasonable period of time) from the market, while traders buy a good so they can sell it to somebody else at an increase.

A market needs traders because otherwise goods only move from producers to local consumers or over distance from producers with major supply capabilities. I’m not sure what the balance between consumers are traders should be, but the stock market is already on the wrong side of that equilibrium and the NFT market is basically 100% traders, so the moment everyone realised there were no consumers to offload product to the market crashed.

Edited by Silasw on Sep 23rd 2023 at 8:42:40 PM

And it is compounded that NF Ts aren't scarce, most of them are A.I. generated which creates a copyright issue because no legal institution recognizes authorship from A.I. generated images; they aren't scarce since all you need to create or duplicate NF Ts is literally a few presses of some buttons; NF Ts also don't mean you own the copy rights to the picture, it supposedly represents a token of a cryptocurrency value.

Essentially NF Ts are just hustlers looking for suckers.

Even the NF Ts worth "millions" have been sham transactions to "prove" there is a demand. And stunts like buying one rare print of the Dune book, scanning each page and then selling it as NF Ts because they would be "scarce" still went through a lot of legal issues, because they couldn't sell the pictures of the pages because of copyright infringement.

Additionally, the permutation that NF Ts took with BAYC and its ilk is to promise that holding one of them would grant you access to the perks of the “community” as if it were a regular bond in a company.

This also creates another incentive to not sell the NF Ts because you would be losing your “access key” to any of these groups if you did and, with the way the value of NF Ts fell, this meant giving up on the potential value that could be earned down the line.

In this sense, Bored Ape is technically successful because it was able to find value beyond the NF Ts and thus was able to weather the collapse of the market.

Today's the day where the $8 billion trial against Sam Bankman-Fried begins.

Per CNBC:

Typo on my end. It's $8 billion.

Edited by XMenMutant22 on Oct 3rd 2023 at 2:16:52 PM

Only $8 million?? Seems to me like he'd owe way more than that!

Meanwhile, in my own life, my crazy younger brother told me about something called Hytopia, which is basically Minecraft with blockchain crap in it. He's excited for it because a token (a crypto) is being offered for it and he expects it to blow up and be worth a lot more, so he told me I should buy in, wait for it to blow up, then cash out. He claims that the game itself is supposed to "fix what Microsoft messed up when they bought Minecraft."

I told him that Hytopia won't possibly stand a chance, and he tells me it doesn't need to beat Minecraft, just get a decent number of players, and that it's being targeted to gamers, and that 100,000 people signed up already.

And how'd he hear of this? Via some private Discord server that he claims rich crypto people hang out at, and which he was invited to. (He is financially well off, but not due to crypto, but due to dropshipping.)

Sounds like one hell of a scam. At least he's smart enough to not put too much of his fortune into it.

It's $8 billion.

With the FTX trial underway, Coffeezilla ^Who? an online finance YT detective, who's made a name with his high profile exposé on various financial scams. Relevantly, he's been covering the FTX situation for months, and interviewed Sam Bankman-Fried personally on a couple of occasions. talks finance author Michael Lewis (The Big Short; Moneyball), who recently been on an oddly apologia streak in Sam Bankman-Fried's defense ("a letter to the jury"). Coffeezilla covers Lewis's newest book, "Infinite Growth", and recent 60 Minutes interview about his FTX thoughts in this 11 minute video.

Sam straight-up confesses to sociopathy. I guess that's an admirable trait in the finance industry. :shrug:

Has a side effect of not understanding why certain very stupid moves are very stupid though.

Assuming that we're talking about SBF, the idea is that he's not stupid; he's overtly criminal, something Michael Lewis seems quite willing to overlook.

If you know a thing you're doing is illegal, and you do it anyway because it gets you lots of money, you don't get to claim stupidity. That's not how anything works.

He's not even necessarily an idiot for thinking he could get away with it. Relatively few white-collar financial crimes result in serious legal consequences.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 6th 2023 at 11:18:45 AM

I mean more things like the atrociously terrible book-keeping that repeatedly fucked himself over. Short-term convenient because you don't want to think about it, but long-term awful.

One of the things that can trip up genuine sociopaths is that a lot of the time, they don't value their own future well-being. So they'll do bizarre or ridiculous things because of an extremely short-term gain and it won't occur to them that they should care about the future version of themselves that'll get metaphorically punched in the face over it.

Sure, but another possibility is that the terrible bookkeeping was a deliberate attempt to cover against criminal liability. If there are no records, there's no way to prove wrongdoing, or at least that could have been the idea.

Given that he repeatedly fucked himself over by doing that well before regulators started paying attention, I don't think that argument really holds up.

It's likely that, when we weigh SBF in the "stupid vs. evil" scales, the answer is "both".

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 6th 2023 at 1:55:36 PM

An evil person can also try to do evil things in a stupid way.

Sam Bankman-Fried found guilty in federal fraud and conspiracy trial, could face 110 years in prison

Bankman-Fried was charged with seven counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering in what federal prosecutors have described as "one of the biggest financial frauds in American history."

He was accused of using customer deposits on the crypto trading platform FTX to cover losses at his hedge fund, pay off loans and buy lavish real estate, among other personal expenses.

Fucked Around; Found Out.

great,now watch as sentence of 100 years gets reduced,I don't expect the sentence to stick

It didn't help that his defense's best strategy was to frame SBF as a fucking idiot.

What's happened is that he's been found guilty, his sentencing hearing isn't until March 28th of next year.

The 110 year figure is the theoretical maximum for the crimes he was convicted of, but it's almost unheard of for someone to actually be sentenced to the theoretical maximum sentence. But even 10-15 years behind bars and the loss of his assets to fines/restitution will likely put him out of business for good.

Edited by Falrinn on Nov 2nd 2023 at 6:30:50 AM

He even found his time in jail while waiting for the court date to be unbearable. Not having access to good vegan options or League of Legends apparently sucked for him.

Tiny violins and all that.

League of Legends is the root of the problem I tell you!