alt Hacker NewsThis exactly. And Crypto's biggest "innovation" by far was giving us an entirely new unregulated financial market with zero consumer protections that included, as a bonus, the trappings and added complexity of software and let con men the world over dust off every money scheme from the last hundred years and do a fresh round.
Edit: Further, "education" shouldn't even be a factor here. You should not need to protect yourself from being scammed. Taking advantage of people's trust and stealing their money should be illegal, the offenders should be punished, and the victims made whole. There is no reason in a civilized society to permit financial crimes, which is what this shit is. Stealing is fucking stealing, whether you take something from a store, whether a bank issues bullshit fees, whether an employer doesn't pay fair wages, whether a con man tricks you into buying ape pictures.
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The difference between theft and a scam is that a scam requires participation from the victim based on a false premise, whereas theft requires no participation from the victim.
>whether a bank issues bullshit fees, whether an employer doesn't pay fair wages, whether a con man tricks you into buying ape pictures.
So basically giving someone a bad deal is therefore theft? This isn't a principled idea to hold, it is pretty much a slippery slope to call any transaction you don't like theft afterwards.
One advantage of cryptocurrency is that it prevents parties from "renegotiating" deals like this after they've made them. Fraud is pretty uncommon on say, the silk road or something for the same reason it's uncommon on ebay or craigslist: when consumers have to actively consider the trust networks they are using, the market becomes more transparent and trustworthy. When you defer to some arbitrary, opaque authority to settle transactions, that's when you get situations like this.
Yep. Much of cryptocurrency content is just "Discover Why Financial Regulations Exist" speedruns.
> You should not need to protect yourself from being scammed.
Under the current administration, you need to protect yourself far more than before.
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is gone.
- The Justice Department will focus on "violent crime", even though that's mostly the job of local law enforcement and the FBI doesn't handle 911 calls. In terms of dollars, white collar crime is far bigger than violent crime. (Burglary in the US is way down, about a fifth of what it was in 1990.)
- The administration plan is to move crypto enforcement from the Securities and Exchange Commission to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Heavy payoffs by the crypto industry have enabled this. [1]
It's called "deregulation", suckers. Open season on Americans.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/06/technology/crypto-industr...