What do you want? Regulated or unregulated securities?
You can't invest in unregulated FTX and then whine when they went and lost all your money -- (not ai emdash) because it was -- wait for it -- UNREGULATED!
I personally like the emdash -- I've been using for years -- I'm not an AI -- And I will continue to use it in the future with the "(not ai)" annotation. I will fight for the freedom -- for me and for others -- to use the emdash however I please.
I thought "Code is Law". So now crypto bros want to fight this out in TradLaw just like the TradFi institutions do?
That point was the crux of Matt Levine's argument: Terra and Luna were unregulated and easy-to-game securities. So you can't complain when the smartest people on Wall Street figured out how to pop the balloon in their favor -- (not ai emdash) particularly when it's their job.
I will quote the first few paragraphs leading up to it though:
>The basic story of Terra is:
>Terra was a big crypto project, led by a company called Terraform Labs and a guy named Do Kwon, which at its peak had a market value of about $50 billion.
>It had a token, the currency of its blockchain, called Luna, which at its peak traded at almost $120 per token.
It also had an algorithmic stablecoin, TerraUSD, whose mechanism was that it could always be redeemed for $1 worth of Luna.
>That’s a bad idea! The problem, which was extremely obvious and which everyone knew about, was that, if people lost confidence in Luna, there would be a death spiral: People would redeem TerraUSD for Luna and sell the Luna, which would drive down the price of Luna, which would lead to more redemptions, which would create even more Luna, until Luna was trading at a tiny fraction of a penny and every TerraUSD would be redeemed for millions of them.
>In May 2022 that very much happened. Terra collapsed, people lost a lot of money and Do Kwon got 15 years in prison for fraud.
>At its peak, though, Terra was a pretty big crypto project, and it had various dealings with some very smart and somewhat sharky trading firms like Jump Trading and Jane Street.
“Can’t complain” doesn’t make it legal. I had this argument a number of times with cryptobros at the time “if it’s on the chain it’s fair game” I heard quite often. Just, no. Just because some code allows you to get away with something doesn’t make it not illegal[1].
The thing is you or I don’t get to say what is or isn’t a market that is covered by market abuse laws. Regulators do, and while it’s true to say none of the relevant regulators had stepped up and conclusively shown these markets were under their jurisdiction, they had repeatedly said they were looking into them and given hints they felt they had jurisdiction. Heck, I was in a meeting with Kevin Warsh around 2014 or so[2] where he asked about bitcoin so it’s clear the fed was at least looking into crypto at that time long before they made public comment. ISTR talking to the cftc at the same time and they asked about it too.
So “unregulated” in this context doesn’t mean “not covered by regulation” it means “regulatory status extremely uncertain”. If you want to go in with a very aggressive strategy you’re taking some risk that regulators will post facto go after you because they do that a lot in conventional markets.
[1] Market abuse in this case, but it’s obviously the case in cybersecurity also.
[2] This isn’t some kind of weird boast btw, cbankers and regulators meet with people from industry all the time as part of their normal information-gathering process and he met with a group of us who were working with some bank on detecting things like market abuse. He had some sort of academic position at Stanford at the time iirc looking into various types of bank regulation, but he was still plugged into the fed governors because he had only just left that.
> I had this argument a number of times with cryptobros at the time “if it’s on the chain it’s fair game” I heard quite often. Just, no. Just because some code allows you to get away with something doesn’t make it not illegal[1]
But that is/was the cryptobros argument: Code is Law! And now instead of fixing the algos they're going right to suing each other just like TradFi with TradLaw.
Currently agriculture in western states requires maybe 2-5 times the water that people need. So many people see that as an opportunity to convert farmland that needs heavy irrigation into solar farms.
Further, in Nevada, the US governement owns 87% of the land give or take a percentage point.
The land is available. It's the politics and the expense required to build it.
Eh. Maybe. But I do see people who are pretty consistent when they have power. It may be somewhat unpredictable before they get power, but somewhat more predictable once you’ve seen how they act with it.
This principle of relative consistency is baked into how I test employees for management and friends for trust, and in the past, roommates as well. Though I do acknowledge potential for growth as well, but in my older age I generally also need to see evidence of motivation to give strong benefit of the doubt wrt possible trajectory.
It's not interesting because it's not representative. Pair this with some stat that shows it happens the same way most of the time and then it's interesting.
If you lost someone, you might feel differently. And the people that lived that day, almost most certainly don't want to die like that.
That's the problem with those style of arguments. As logical as you want them to be, it doesn't remove the trauma burned into the psyche of the people who lived that day.
If you deny someone's humanity in your argument, you've lost.
The US military has used microphone arrays and radar as well to determine the trajectories of local threats, from snipers to field artillery.
Probably next would be "lasers" to disable any threats.
Styropyro and Tech Ingredients both have had youtube videos on high powered lasers.
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