• 👍Maximum Derek👍@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    Next time reddit will cut out the middleman and just sell rugs.

    The “fuck spez” rug will be the best seller. When it inevitably gets pulled out from under each buyer they’ll act all shocked, say “better not do that again, spez” and then go right back to standing on it because their friends are all standing on theirs too.

  • ThatOneKirbyMain2568@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    What’s this? You’re telling me that crypto based on Reddit blockchain points—points from a company that’s constantly making rash decisions and removing large features—didn’t end well? And people with inside info were able to get out before this concept failed?

    Man, if only someone could’ve seen this coming….

    • Number1SummerJam@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Spez and the whole Reddit company culture seem to be very in touch with the whole crypto scam industry. I wouldn’t be surprised if Reddit admins moderate the crypto sub part time and they got in on this.

      • partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I get the feeling Spez and other Reddit execs tried for years to make money out of reddit seeing only modest returns, then crypto comes on the scene and with conversations on Reddit being a large part of the success. Crypto grifters get in, pump, dump and cash out rich. Spez and other Reddit execs are looking at each other shocked saying “WTF just happened!? A bunch of folks just used the platform we built to get rich and we’re still not! How can we do the same thing they did?”

    • neptune@dmv.social
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      1 year ago

      Reminds of that article about where crypto was speed running through the history of how all The securities rules got written in the first place. This is, of course, insider trading.

  • ExtremeDullard@lemmy.sdf.org
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    1 year ago

    From TFA:

    moderator u/Mcgillby. On-chain data reveals that this moderator transferred more than 100,000 MOON over two different transactions on the Arbitrum Nova blockchain, turning it into more than $23,000

    If there’s a dollar sign, it’s not play money anymore and the FTC should get involved.

  • HuddaBudda@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    There was no way that coin was going to sustain itself like Spez claimed it would.

    People weren’t going to buy crypto coins, just to give content creators medals. And the idea that medals would give more power to these people, except not really and only in polls.

    This was such a jigsaw puzzle of shit, before you realized that each community was supposed to make their own coin that could only be used in that community.

    At that point, it is a coin trying to be as complex as possible, without really doing anything that you paid money for.

      • HuddaBudda@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        I do think that crypto does have a place in the future, but not as a security, which is the current mindset behind most crypto.

        Where others deposit large amounts of wealth into a pile… and that money is supposed to grow infinitely…

        That’s not how you use a currency like the USD or British pound are used. Money is a tool for us to understand the value of our items that we exchange or our labor that we create.

        It has to circulate like a blood flow through an economy. And crypto is treating it more like a blood clot.

        • Trainguyrom@reddthat.com
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          1 year ago

          I think cryptocurrency has the best shot at relevance as a medium for internet tipping. Unlike processing most financial transactions its comparatively quite easy to accept tips and donations via cryptocurrency plus it allows very good portability between exchanges if you setup your infrastructure correctly. Almost everything else people and companies try to use it for appears to be nothing more than a grift of some sort, or at the very least profiting off of someone getting grifted

        • eskimofry@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I guess people are just tired of the currently rigged stock market. Wall Street and Hedge Funds have made it such that they never lose. It’s not cool that the SEC is not unbiased and even the U.S. Govt has interest in making anybody lose vs. the incumbents.

  • Naatan@lemdro.id
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    1 year ago

    Doesn’t this constitute insider trading? Sincerely hope some redditor takes them to court.

    • Neato@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Do insider trading and market manipulation laws apply to crypto, an unregulated speculative asset? This isn’t rhetorical, I’ve no idea.

        • resin85@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Yup. Anyone who received this non-public information and then traded based on that information is guilty of insider trading. I would also think that reddit has some liability here, as they shared this information to non-employees.

      • SpiderShoeCult@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        I am also curious. On the one hand, if you tax any gains from it you should also make sure it operates within some legal framework. On the other hand, would anybody investigate a magic bean salesman for insider trading? Would they rather charge them with scamming?

        • MrZee@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Edit: I just realized your comment wasn’t directed at the IRS specifically. I’ll leave my comment up because I still find the info interesting.

          I think the IRS tries to be agnostic to the legality of income. Yes, taxes are set in accordance with law, but their role isn’t make sure you obtained your income legally or ethically… not that I would trust them not to “tattle”.

          Here is an overview on the IRS’s guidance for reporting illegal income:

          https://taxfoundation.org/blog/irs-guidance-thieves-drug-dealers-and-corrupt-officials/

  • hark@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    So does this count as some kind of fraud or insider trading that can be prosecuted by, say, the SEC or CFTC?

    • Graz@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      Sure does! But nothing will happen, you’re essentially a 100% safe running pump and dump schemes as long as you only rip off poor people.

      Check out Coffeezilla’s yt channel, there’s loads of obvious fraudsters out there, nothing ever happens to them.

    • KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      Wasn’t this information public for days before the dump? I don’t think this can be considered anything illegal if that’s the case, everyone had the same information available. Mods don’t get some sort of special insider preview of most things like this.

      • hark@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        When clicking on the article, the line under the title says: “Analysis suggests at least three Reddit moderators dumped thousands of dollars worth of Moons just minutes before the actual announcement.”

      • bl4ckblooc@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The majority of communities I followed on Reddit did not live to Lemmy, or they did and got abandoned in a couple weeks. None of the sports or gaming communities I followed are here/alive here.

        • Number1SummerJam@lemmy.worldOP
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          1 year ago

          Keep letting people know that this is an alternative to Reddit! There’s still hope, and getting Lemmy to grow starts with you.

          • bl4ckblooc@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Not the main communities, but the smaller ones. I’ve had to resort to Facebook for getting information and news about teams I follow, and for new indie games that get released the only communities I can find are on Reddit.

    • Number1SummerJam@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      It’s a cult too. It feeds on hype and marketing so people will say anything to keep the value of their worthless investments up. That’s probably why you’re getting a couple downvotes even though you’re 100% right. Wouldn’t be surprised if some coins got big from bot network spamming on social media.

      Edit: they won’t even argue about it, they just keep downvoting. Proves my point exactly.

      • TeachersPet1992@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Crypto is used to scam, it doesn’t mean the technology or the idea is a scam. I find it really ironic how Lemmy seems to hate it so much. I don’t have any investment in it anymore because I don’t like how profit-focused it became but I first got into it for the same reason I’m here on Lemmy, Bitcoin was an open source and federated alternative to money. Anyone could run a node and mine it. No more proprietary apps like PayPal.

        While I don’t think we will ever recapture the original spirit the tech had in the early 2010s I do find it quite sad that people think crypto = scam. Is HTTP a scam because scam websites exist? Are phones a scam because scam calls exist? I really wish people would separate the underlying technology (which is actually really cool) and the people using it.

        • Number1SummerJam@lemmy.worldOP
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          1 year ago

          I can totally see how it used to be more ideal, however it’s been completely perverted from a legitimate currency into a MAGA-style investment fraud cult. At this point people need to start denouncing crypto- every new crypto project now is a get rich quick scam and people who don’t know any better will fall for it. I think that crypto’s days are numbered, coins will probably be heavily regulated by the end of the decade.

          Besides all that, my personal opinion is that investing in “nothing” is scammy. There are no physical or heavily regulated securities like when you invest in stocks, precious metals, and art.

          • Zahille7@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            The physical value of it is what gets me. Or rather, lack of physical value.

            Cash is real. We can hold it in our hands, see it with our eyes and so on. Similarly with a debit/credit card, you know what that physical card in your wallet represents, and you know what the amount tied to it is/means.

            Cryptocurrency is literally just digital code made to be similar to money. But there’s no physical value tied to it. It doesn’t represent anything other than it’s code. If the world’s economies and governments were to suddenly fall tomorrow, we’d still have cash and other physically valuable objects to trade and barter with. You most definitely would not be able to walk up to someone with a hard drive of Bitcoin to trade for anything.

          • chicken@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 year ago

            however it’s been completely perverted from a legitimate currency into a MAGA-style investment fraud cult

            Rather than a currency or a movement that is the sum of everyone who uses it, a more accurate way to think of crypto is as a sort of anarchist technology. It empowers people to take financial action without asking permission, without guardrails, without having to go through a company or a bank that will monitor you and shut you down if they feel like it. Naturally people will use that agency for things like online drug markets, ransomware payments, and pyramid scheme style gambling. But that doesn’t mean the technology itself is bad, just that it is powerful. Stablecoins in particular are seeing increasing use all over the world just because there is a lot of dysfunction and oppression in the banking systems of most countries and great difficulty in interfacing with other countries. If you want to buy a VPN or web hosting or anything else anonymously online, crypto is really the only answer to digital cash. It is a real, viable way to cut out middlemen and central authorities and that deserves respect even if it also makes it the de-facto medium for certain criminals.

            My hope is that what will be regulated is the type of shit Reddit has done here, and the type of shit FTX did, which is really more traditional investment fraud with a crypto smokescreen than something that is genuinely founded in the technology. With the Reddit tokens, nothing was decentralized except the tokens, they controlled everything the tokens could possibly be used for, and the only thing giving them value was Reddit’s implied promise to leave that potential revenue for the tokens instead of just taking it for themselves, which ultimately of course they did. You don’t even need crypto for that, they could have done the exact same thing with their own centralized game tokens, and it would have been just as much of a scam. Don’t blame crypto for that, blame Reddit and companies like Reddit trying to get away with this type of thing.

          • nutomic@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            There are plenty of crypto projects which are not get rich quick scams. For example Monero is a community project which allows fully anonymous transactions. Ethereum is quite corporate but they are really working hard to improve the technology, like introducing staking. And there are many more, but it can be hard to distinguish them from the scams. Anyway it’s not as simple as crypto bad.

        • Rod_Orm@lemmy.ml
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          1 year ago

          what technology? slower database and you can’t edit it is the TEchnOloGy?

    • thantik@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      It’s, by design, a deflationary asset. There’s a limited amount of it, the difficulty to mine it goes up as there’s more of it, therefore it’s designed to grow in value over time. So since its inception it’s been a scam. Sure, a scam some lucky people have been able to get in on early, but a scam none-the-less.

        • thantik@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I initially replied but deleted my reply because I wasn’t sure of myself but I’ve looked it up just to be sure and I can reply again in confidence: Gold isn’t deflationary.

          Gold is a standard in which remains stable among the currencies when compared to commodity goods. As other currencies inflate, gold also inflates, because it’s somewhat stable. Gold’s value does not increase over time, even though its value in relation to inflating currencies does.

          Essentially, as an example but one pulled completely out of my ass here: If bread cost 1 gram of gold 200 years ago, but that was a single shilling but now it takes 1000 shillings to buy bread, gold is now worth “1000 shillings”, but still buys the same bread. So it’s not increasing in value vs the things around it, only other currencies because they are inflating.

          • nutomic@lemmy.ml
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            1 year ago

            Which means that it’s deflationary against euro or usd. Also “there’s a limited amount of it, the difficulty to mine it goes up as there’s more of it”. So according to your definition gold is a scam. I wonder who is going to pull the rug on it.

            • thantik@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Wrong. Which means it’s stable, and the USD and EURO are inflationary. That’s why gold is gold. That’s why it’s a staple stock. Because it’s stable against everything that those currencies buy. It will basically, always be worth the same amount as it was 1000 years ago. Gold is the reference of a “stable” value. In the example I made, 1 gram of gold 200 years ago buys the same amount as 1 gram of gold today. That’s exactly how gold works. That’s why economies use it as a measuring stick of their own currency.

      • Zippy@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Worse, it’s value is based on the work it requires to grow/maintain it. And that work is based on how much electricity/world resources it uses. Aka. Bad for the environment. And if you were to make say a new crypto currency that used far less processing power, that would be less work and thus have little value.

        In other words, you can’t fix the crypto currency problem of massive energy usage without destroying the value of it. When Bitcoin does die, it will have emitted millions of tons of green house gases while providing very few real services/transactions.

        • ayaya@lemdro.id
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          1 year ago

          That’s not true at all. That only applies to coins using “proof of work.” Ethereum for example is extremely popular and doesn’t use that. You should really learn more about the topic before spreading misinformation.

          • Zippy@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Yes I am familiar with that and heard that argument before. It does provide some other functions that can negate some of the proof of work. But it is also subject to proof of work to a lesser degree but that means it will also hit some equilibrium. Will that outweigh the benefits it provides and this be ultimately viable and more important, environmentally viable? With my experience in it, I am dubious.

  • Gestrid@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    I’m starting to lose track of all the changes Reddit’s made to its award system in the past few months. Is this the same crypto thing they started a few years ago, or was it part of the awards overhaul from a couple months ago?

  • Number1SummerJam@lemmy.worldOP
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    1 year ago

    Apologies for the crypto website as the article source- it summarized things well and was written by someone who knows a lot about the subject. That being said, if you’re going to invest, invest in something real and tangible.