LeafGuild

Well if I'm the one who's uninformed, you're not telling me anything I don't already know. Yes, I know you can see the transactions they made in that particular token on-chain. You have to get the information about who owns any of those wallet addresses from somewhere else. The chain doesn't tell you anything other than that they sent a token somewhere. Yes the other data is public but that isn't because of any feature of blockchains. The blockchain also won't tell you the actual details of the deals this guy was making or the favors he was calling in, you gotta look through his phone and emails to get that. As I said, it still doesn't paint the full picture because the real money is off-chain and can never be tracked on the chain. No, a USDT or a USDC isn't a real dollar, those movements may or may not represent actual money changing hands.

>Wow you are uninformed.

Avoid this style of comment, please.

>Miners don't maintain a price any more than a whale maintains a price.

Yes, my point is both of them have a means and incentive to manipulate the price in ways that may not be favorable to the trader.

>The rest of the miners would step in and start making more money, actually.

Yes, at the cost of removing some of the security of the system. They can only maintain security if they have immediate access to more hash power which they probably don't. In that moment because of the sudden drop in hash power, the network is vulnerable to an attack by other malicious miners coming in and taking over. Alternately, if the rest of the miners notice what's going on they could see this as increased opportunity for them to conspire and become malicious.

>Not much of a rug pull to sell the tokens you've legitimately acquired through mining or fiat buying. That's just selling. High volatility selling, yes, but still just selling.

This right here is the conversation I most dread having with crypto people. It's fraud. You can call it fraud. Manipulating the market so the price is artificially high and then dumping it off onto unsuspecting buyers is a fraud. It doesn't matter how you initially got the coins. Yes, we can group different types of selling into different categories, like ones that are fraudulent and ones that aren't.

>Oh yes, Bitcoin has died thousands of times.

The exception that proves the rule, huh? There are definitely thousands of shitcoins that have crashed and burned and won't ever recover because they were plain old ponzis. Bitcoin crashed a lot of times, not thousands, but enough to wipe lots of people out every time it happens, relative to the number of people using bitcoin at the time. It's still not clear that any of the money moving around in bitcoin is actually real money or assets. I'm certain it's a ponzi too.

>Maybe you'll be right one day, but I doubt it.

So you're saying bitcoin is too big to fail, is that right?

If I'm trying to arrange a trade on the exchange so I can get a pizza for my dogecoins, because the pizza guy says he only wants BCH and not dogecoins, and I would rather not pay double transaction fees just to buy a pizza, how do I know the other person is a real pizza chef and not a bot trying to scam me?

Well I'm not a politician or lawmaker and I have no problem blaming blockchain for this. I'm technically a "business person" because I have a job, but technically all crypto people who intend to use it to make money are also business people. The way bitcoin and all its friends are designed is intentionally done so in a way that allows centralized entities to run amok and cause havoc without any accountability until the entire thing collapses. It's blockchains that are the fraud. The designers of blockchains, including Satoshi, were aware of these problems and the risks of the system becoming unstable or getting targeted by scammers. They went forward with their designs anyway knowing the risks. Because they thought they were better than the central banks and they wanted to say they were sticking it to the man. How were they better though, when their inventions gave way to one giant fraud after another in a shockingly small amount of time? These Enron-level and WorldCom-level events are a weekly occurrence in crypto.

That's a marketing line, it's not true. Nobody actually has any custody of anything in crypto. The value of the tokens is completely and totally dependent on a consensus of crypto miners doing their job within the parameters of the system, assuming you want them to maintain a price and trading volume that's favorable to the token holders. If the majority of miners suddenly go bust due to outside circumstances, or they decide to conspire together and attack the system, or conspire with some whales to perform a rug pull, or any number of other malicious actions, then it's extremely likely that your tokens aren't going to be worth anything anymore. This applies to every token, including bitcoin.

No blockchain can ever guarantee there's any visibility or accountability. Defi means are only useful to trade cryptos for other cryptos, and you only have visibility if no one launders the money through crypto mixers. Once you want to cash out and trade your cryptos for any real assets, like buying a pizza, you instantly lose visibility again because all that has to happen off chain. Just because something is a tradfi problem doesn't mean it also can't be a defi problem. In this case, and in a lot of other cases, it's both. Blockchains cannot solve this problem in any meaningful way because you can never force everything to go through that chain. Fraudsters will just move it off the chain and lie about it, and that instantly puts you back into a spot where blockchains aren't doing anything for you.

I argue this is what they wanted out of blockchains. I remember all the rumblings in the days of Silk Road and Mt Gox. The enthusiasts that are responsible for propagating this system into today wanted it to be a wild west where anything goes. They said all the same things back then. I heard people saying it was good that Mt Gox got hacked because it meant all the scammers got what they deserved and they learned their lesson. Well, they didn't! It continued to be a wild west and more scammers just showed up. They'll keep scamming and they won't stop as long as they can make money from it. I don't know why crypto people are so reluctant to acknowledge this. Scammers seek out anywhere they can latch onto and they don't leave until forcibly removed. If a malicious person finds a risk-free way to get free money from unsuspecting victims, with no downsides, why would they ever want to stop?

>If you are the only person in the world with the private key to your coins, you are the only person who can move them. Period.

This is completely and utterly irrelevant and has not stopped anyone from performing massive fraud. Just look at the long history of crypto scams. They still happened constantly despite blockchains having that feature. It's just impossible for a blockchain to prevent these frauds. It doesn't matter if you still have all your coins if the value of that coin drops to zero after it's revealed the whole market for that coin is fraudulent, which is exactly what happened this week! And multiple times earlier this year, and multiple times before that! It doesn't matter if it's stored on a DEX either, when you're still stuck with a worthless coin that no one will trade you for! How many shitcoins need to collapse before this is understood? Blockchains do not and will never solve this problem because they create the problem, by design, by allowing anyone to manipulate and dump tokens anywhere they want with no regard for what's fraudulent and what isn't. On a DEX you can't even know if the person on the other end is a real person or not without going outside the chain. I can't believe I'm still talking about this after the long, long string of fraud that's happened over the last 12 years. FTX is not the problem, they are the symptom. The problem is blockchains. They're intentionally built to enable fraud. They have no other purpose, and they aren't even particularly good at that because they stop working when everyone notices the fraud.

I should also mention, your statement isn't even correct! There's a very easy way to get someone else to move their coins for you: threaten them. That's the entire principle that ransomware is built on. It's real easy for criminals and the police and anyone else using the threat of force to get people to give up their coins, blockchains don't prevent that and it's impossible for them to do so because they can't affect anything that happens in the real world outside the chain. I really can't understate this. Blockchains are a fraud. Every claimed authority or security provided by a blockchain is trivially defeated by just routing around it or by gaming the market, which is ridiculously easy for anyone with some cash to throw around because there are no real rules or safeguards. They're probably the worst "invention" that's come out of the tech sector in the last 15 years. I really hope this crash is the end for crypto.

>but that kind of thing is hard to avoid in any system.

No it isn't, that's what limit orders are for. There's still the exact same counterparty risk there anyway, in the form of USDC. Circle is another big dodgy centralized provider. The major critical flaw with all this defi stuff is that it can only reliably trade cryptos for other cryptos. Once you actually try to get any of it out into real assets, the counterparty risk immediately comes back again. No crypto defi stuff can ever solve that. The idea is just bad, it's a scam from the very beginning.

It is absolutely a blockchain failure. Blockchains are intentionally designed to facilitate this. They have no possible way to stop this kind of fraud. Even if you built an elaborate set of smart contracts that could audit participants, they would still not stop anything. That activity can just be moved to another chain and avoid the audits. This kind of thing can just keep happening over and over again, as it already has for the last 12 years. Remember Mt Gox? Nothing fundamental has changed about blockchains that could ever prevent this from happening. It's viewed as a feature that everyone just loses their money sometimes. The designers of blockchains want this to happen. From speaking to them, they view any kind of fraud prevention as an affront to their definition of "economic freedom" and what it entails.

>Just because some stuff in crypto doesn't have regulations doesn't mean it is a free-for-all.

It pretty much does. The free-for-all disregarding of laws (including laws against fraud) is the stated purpose of crypto. They've been pitching this as Fight Club For Finance since the very beginning. The exchanges with a legitimate appearance are just fronts to get you to the back room with all the unregulated tokens offering insane interest rates. If you didn't come for a scam-or-be-scammed fight to the death, there isn't any reason to use crypto. The crypto bros just missed the part where Fight Club falls apart if you tell everyone about it. Or maybe they got too excited and forgot about that rule.

Are you actually comparing a billionaire CEO who's very obviously trying to use Twitter to pump and dump his investment, to a writer selling a book at a normal price for books? I'm not selling any books, and I'll tell you that all of crypto is a giant fraud. The technology is fundamentally useless and the economics are just ponzi scams on top of ponzi scams. There's no reason to try to "both sides" this. All crypto is a negative sum game by design, where the HODLers are expected to absorb all losses while the miners take a cut in fees. It's mathematically impossible for it to be a good investment. There's zero possibilities there. None. This isn't a new thing I'm saying either. We already tried the "print your own money" idea during the free banking era in the 1800s, we've known for that long it's a terrible idea that doesn't work.