Judging the entire Crypto based on SBF / Luna is like judging the entire Silicon Valley based on a handful of big-name adtech scums. Sure, they dominate the zeitgeist but there is a lot more to those ecosystems.
It's victim shaming to say that and not push for the behavior of people who, for instance, told reporters that Luna was doomed while happily making money off people using his platform to buy it to be criminalized and shamed:
One of the most interesting phenomenon happening right now is the rise of Luna and UST. Luna has this Treasury Reserve consisting of a lot of Bitcoin, which seems a little dicey, but some people say any idea of an algorithmically-backed stablecoin is a perpetual motion machine – it’s only a matter of time before it fails. Do you believe there can be a truly decentralized stablecoin? What do you make of these projects?
SBF:
I do have some sympathy to the perpetual motion machine crowd here. They can serve some useful purposes, but if you do zoom out, right, and you say, this is a stablecoin, backed by volatile assets, what’s gonna happen in a big market move. Right? Like, you know how this plays out.
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Is there a word better than "despicable" for believing that at least some things in the ecosystem are a scam but still profiting off helping people get scammed by those things?
Why would you just feel bad about the tragedies and not also furious at these people happily making money off of the tragedies?
Those who criticize SBF most harshly now are in the crypto industry. It is not impossible that, after SBF is completely expelled from the crypto industry, SBF's critics will engage in similar behavior.
Alternatively they could be from non-crypto tech startups, 90% of which are working on stuff that is just as bullshit and never would have been funded in the first place if not for post 2008 monetary policy. Crypto isn’t special in being bullshit, this whole industry is full of a lot of bullshit.
I don't think there's as clear a line here as you think. It's not like crypto was just some small-time grifters who would otherwise be running crooked pop-the-balloon games at carnivals. Notable portions of the "real" economy got in on the game. And it's hardly just crypto where people have been hoovering up credulous money claiming they had the next Google all ready to go.
No doubt it was both, to some degree. The latter doesn't excuse the former.
And the whole matter is only made worse by (or, perhaps, 'highlights') the surrounding incestuous cesspool of other crypto exchanges and funds, and the 'crypto media' arms which they own and run. Several of whom are almost certainly engaging in, at the least, grey-area practices, in order to accrue vast and lightly regulated profits.
The fact that many of crypto's best-known names are basically digital bankers-for-profit, illustrates how the scene went off the rails some time ago. From a tech perspective.
The fact that so many Wall Street types flocked to these cryptos solely because it is/was an unregulated market that they could manipulate speaks volumes about what it really is.
I don't recognize any of these team members as having made any substantive contributions to major areas in blockchain security or scaling; Having raised a lot of money in funding is not relevant experience here; Nor is building a few side-chains and inefficiently linking them together.
Reading between the lines here: the real message seems to be that a bunch of opportunist nobodies decided to get together to exploit Libras public image for their own benefit. It's the same pattern I've seen done many times over the years. "Hey, these people are really evil for being so wealthy. We of course secretly want to be wealthy too but we're totally different to they are." Then when you reach your goal you become the new "villain" for someone else and the cycle repeats.
Blockchain companies love to paint themselves as the hero. Completely outside the reach of regular politics or capitalistic desires. It's even been a popular launch tactic for a while now. Dark wallet did it to great effect; And every iteration of dark web market has done it since; You can even see it in the 'us' vs 'them' mentality inherent in most "decentralized" system design. Only, here the architects are the main influences and not the regulators... But lets be honest here: this group shouldn't be trusted any more than a normal, profit-seeking company. And I see no reason to believe this team could deliver a more secure or scalable cryptocurrency than any that already exists.
It is overall very interesting. And accurate in my opinion. Current batch of cryptos are very much an MLM. And I am saying this is a quiet sympathizer of crypto ( you know - actual crypto currency intended to bypass old gatekeepers with all the benefits and threats coming with it ). As it stands right now, the ridiculous push for centralization and greater control is everything crypto was trying to undermine.
It is possible that is emblematic of how we approach systems as a species, because everything seems to tend towards one or two major players.
Right now only monero, and to a much lesser extent bitcoin, still resemble the original promise of crypto.
Pleasantly surprised this isn't a curated list of the new generation of so called crypto influencers, the HODL and To the moon idiots and join-any-two-points on a graph pump and dump YouTubers. The scene has become a toxic shithole (granted it wasnt a pristine land before), but at least most of folks on this list have some credibility and or real past.
Everytime crypto gets harangued as a money laundering cesspool, I think of HSBC’s highest performing branch in Sinaloa and Germany’s fintech giant payment processor run by a GRU spy. As in two money laundering behemoths right out in the regulated open. Give me a break.
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