This is like being the owner of a casino, which is itself a perhaps benign thing. Let’s say poor uneducated people lose billions of dollars of wealth at said casino. Regardless of the casino owner’s admitting that his business is a speculative bubble or a ponzi scheme or whatever, he’s still profiting off of peoples’ losses at said casino.
most crypto projects are at least trying to do something.
But whether something amounts to anything is the true question, right? There are so few uses for cryptocurrencies, and nearly none of the people that invest in them are truly invested in the mission of decentralized finance.
as a rough guess, 40% of EA wealth is in crypto
Woah...if 40% of wealth were wiped out, that would have no impact on investment? I think we have different assumptions about the elasticity between wealth and donations (my prior is that it’s fairly elastic). This is an empirical question, but I would tend to be more biased in favor of over-estimating the negative effects of wealth depletion on investment.
I think whether crypto is a bubble—whether crypto is a ponzi scheme—are irrelevant. The key is that crypto is an extremely volatile asset that is now a significantly sizeable portion of EA wealth, and has negative optics implications (all of which you agree with), and when it falls, has negative implications on future funding flows (which you disagree with).
On future funding flows, I specifically said “[i]n the event of a crypto crash, fewer new projects would be funded, and the bar for continuing to fund existing projects would be higher,” so I don’t think we disagree about that. But I disagree with the “lots of good projects (would) have to be ended” statement in your original post.
Woah...if 40% of wealth were wiped out, that would have no impact on investment? I think we have different assumptions about the elasticity between wealth and donations (my prior is that it’s fairly elastic).
This Open Phil blog post is interesting in this context. (Though note in this case the underlying wealth change was, I believe, not driven by crypto and instead mostly by the bear market for tech stocks.)
I mean, ok, to be more technical SBF is “charging commissions to people in the ponzi and trading against them”.
This is like being the owner of a casino, which is itself a perhaps benign thing. Let’s say poor uneducated people lose billions of dollars of wealth at said casino. Regardless of the casino owner’s admitting that his business is a speculative bubble or a ponzi scheme or whatever, he’s still profiting off of peoples’ losses at said casino.
But whether something amounts to anything is the true question, right? There are so few uses for cryptocurrencies, and nearly none of the people that invest in them are truly invested in the mission of decentralized finance.
Woah...if 40% of wealth were wiped out, that would have no impact on investment? I think we have different assumptions about the elasticity between wealth and donations (my prior is that it’s fairly elastic). This is an empirical question, but I would tend to be more biased in favor of over-estimating the negative effects of wealth depletion on investment.
I think whether crypto is a bubble—whether crypto is a ponzi scheme—are irrelevant. The key is that crypto is an extremely volatile asset that is now a significantly sizeable portion of EA wealth, and has negative optics implications (all of which you agree with), and when it falls, has negative implications on future funding flows (which you disagree with).
On future funding flows, I specifically said “[i]n the event of a crypto crash, fewer new projects would be funded, and the bar for continuing to fund existing projects would be higher,” so I don’t think we disagree about that. But I disagree with the “lots of good projects (would) have to be ended” statement in your original post.
fair. let’s agree to disagree.
This Open Phil blog post is interesting in this context. (Though note in this case the underlying wealth change was, I believe, not driven by crypto and instead mostly by the bear market for tech stocks.)