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Erica

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freelance illustrator, designer, and idk buncha stuff

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erica
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vogon
@vogon

over the past 24 hours FTX has gone from billion-dollar company to smoking hole in the ground

links to more reading below the fold

FTX was the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange on the internet, and its CEO was simultaneously a luminary in the "effective altruism" space, democratic fundraising, and also the money behind a bunch of weird ballot propositions in seattle (a city in which he has never lived) about approval voting and whatever the hell "seattle for a healthy planet" was going to be.

yesterday, it was widely reported that there had been a run on the bank and that it was going to be acquired by their largest competitor, binance, which today abandoned its acquisition offer because they had discovered that FTX was completely out of actual assets and was just a -$10 billion hole; the only valuable asset they were interested in was FTX's US-based subsidiary, which binance was probably trying to acquire because they're knee-deep in criminal investigations for fraud and probably want a clean name to do more fraud under. in the wake of this, another $130 billion in "market capitalization" has vaporized from the cryptocurrency space in the last 24 hours, which is now off like $700 billion since its peak earlier this year.

crypto people are still, to a person, trying to rip the world off and you should never trust them about anything.

https://twitter.com/edzitron/status/1590464210303320064 (thread)

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in reply to @vogon's post:

Dave
@Dave

It's really tragic. Most of what I've seen from the EA space is folks actively espousing being more deontological in response to this disaster, so hopefully there are lessons learned and the damage is limited. Needless to say, a wider utilitarian view would also consider "discrediting the ethical movement you vehemently believe in" to be a net negative impact.

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vogon
@vogon

yep! I know the popular support of it, such as it was, was mediated through someone who's in admin at SIX; a friend of mine who's a net admin fell for it on the grounds that approval voting was better than FPTP and I'm glad the mayor and city council got 1B on the ballot

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thenumeralone
@thenumeralone

Oh interesting. I didn't know the effective altruism space was adjacent to the crypto space. I almost got into it years ago until a friend pointed out that everyone involved is a hack.

Crypto should burn. I still feel sad for all the peeps losing their jobs over the crypto shit tho.

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nothe
@nothe

I was really expecting it to pass more easily, it was like folks spent so much time arguing about approval vs ranked choice that they forgot to say why EITHER were better than what we do now...

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vogon
@vogon

yeah, absolutely; I still have a personal gripe with the stranger for how they handled the 2017 mayoral election, because I think they were the deciding factor in nikkita oliver missing the top 2 and (as a consequence) jenny durkan beating cary moon in the runoff

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vogon
@vogon

it's really a bummer and I have tons of sympathy for the folks who were on the "consumer" end of the space -- like, yeah, it would be nice for the finance industry to choke and die, and the only mistake a lot of people made is getting suckered into buying something that's backed by all of the same money men!

my brother got badgered by one of his coworkers into buying a bunch of dogecoin at 25 cents right around when elon musk went on SNL to shill it, and thankfully my mom and I talked him into selling at 20 cents and cutting his losses (thankfully, only a couple hundred bucks) instead of hanging onto it

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NoAffiliation
@NoAffiliation

Oh yeah, I definitely do feel sympathy for those who really got consumed into it. I know two people in my immediate irl life who are into crypto. One of them was on his way to quitting his job to day-trade it, and I have no idea if he followed through with it. The entire space is a massive rabbit hole of fucked up stuff, and I really do feel bad for some of the people who think it'll save them.

And maybe it did "save" some people, I wouldn't know. All I know is that I can and should avoid crypto.

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tankgrrl
@tankgrrl

100%

I keep thinking about this tweet which sums the whole culture up perfectly. https://twitter.com/LeiracalMuse/status/1493304284380868611

For those who eschew twitter, a tweet from @LeiracalMuse re crypto/NFT magical-selfish-thinking: "I've never met a person in this entire headspace that didn't come across as demanding a reshuffling of the social order, not to create equality, but because they truly believed that they had stumbled across a cheat code they could utilize to end up on top of the pack this time."

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