Think of it like poker. People lose money playing poker too. Is poker a scam? Nope. You might call it unethical or gambling, but unless a player is cheating, its not a scam. And any participant willingly agreed to the rules before playing.

Same with BTC. If you bought BTC, you willingly agreed to the rules. If you didn’t “win”, that’s on you, not the “game” itself.

A scam would be you buying a phone from Amazon and getting a brick. BTC is exactly what it describes, nothing more, nothing less.

If you got greedy enough to dump your BTC onto a centralized service for 3% yield, that's on you. As is the decision to buy BTC.

No serious crypto person will tell you to use CeFi.

"Not your keys, not your coins" is the first rule of crypto.

As an end user in this country, it definitely looks like a business that's close to capitulation.

0: https://www.news18.com/news/business/uber-explored-options-t...

Its been searching for the next Alibaba since.

Of course that wasn’t going to happen and should have been obvious to anyone. The pandemic is over and the “new normal” has just gone back to the “old normal” with marginal changes in work/play patterns.

This was always going to happen, with or without current rate hikes. The rate hikes just accelerated everything by 2 years.

Nope. State's fiat powers come from its monopoly on violence.

Completely opaque and corrupt states have fiat currencies too. Many thriving ones. The only reason people use these fiat currencies is because not doing so invites violence from the state - imprisonment and fines at best, actual physical violence at worst.

Alex Mashinsky was tweeting how Celsius hasn't blocked any withdrawals.

Without a source of income, these retirees - the wealthiest generation in America and much of the world - will shift their investments to less risky assets. This, along with higher interest rates, will starve the world of cheap capital.

Wonder how much of an impact this has had. The risk profile of a 60 year old senior exec at a Fortune 500 company looks different from the risk profile of a 65 year old retiree.

That's literally the reason for practically all empires and imperial expansions.

Rome didn't conquer Spain because they liked the weather.

Most of the good traders I know managed to cash out 30-90x. All within two years.

Money has started feeling like a joke. It's thrown around for anything and everything.

An ERC-20 memecoin called Shiba Inu hit a market cap of $41B. A dying video game retailer hit a market cap of nearly $30B. A taxi aggregator swallowed $33B in funding and never turned a dime in operational profit in 12 years of its existence. A house bought in 2019 doubled in price in under 2 years.

Its complete and utter insanity.

You can't have retail demand for something that's only meant to go up and do nothing else. There are no "normal" users buying NFTs because they love the art, or buying ETH because they want to use it to get overcollateralized loans on AAVE (when they can get undercollateralized loans for cheaper).

I can't understand how VCs wouldn't get something every crypto degen instinctively knows after a single bullrun.

The target customers for crypto are other investors, degens, and gamblers. Most of the money in crypto is house money, i.e. money that was made from existing crypto investments. Just see the transaction volume on OpenSea (decentralized ETH house money) vs CoinBase's NFT marketplace. Retail neither cares nor has the money for shitty jpegs.

FTX understands the target market. Which is why it has focused so aggressively on futures. You can short/long practically everything on FTX with leverage. That's the investor/degen/gambler class - the bulk of money in crypto.

Binance doesn't do anything extremely well, but whatever it does, it simply works. Withdrawals work, support is clumsy but works, perps work, spot trading works, even their awful chain, as full of scams as it might be, works.