Well, we're about to find out if the Bitcoin exchanges in China have all the assets they should. The PBOC told them to stop trading, turn over copies of their records to the PBOC, and refund the balances of their customers. We should know within days which exchanges were stealing customer assets.
The exchange executives were told not to try to leave China.
(Remember Big Vern? Paul Vernon, CEO of Cryptsy. Took the money and fled to Liaoning, China. Started a Bitcoin exchange in China. Wanted in the US. Might be a good time to push through diplomatic channels for the government of China to find and return him. The PBOC investigators may have found him by now.)
People actually knowledgable in the crypto community would have told you literally years ago that the Chinese exchanges were shit. ChangPeng Zhao who now runs binance out of Hong Kong, made a reddit post (now deleted) stating exactly what was going on. The issue of exchanges "investing" client funds was known two years ago, and most people stayed away from these exchanges.
Bitcoin and all of the other alt-coins are numbers on a screen. Few people pay taxes on them, and few places treat them as a real asset or fungible currency.
Why then, do the authorities in the US and China aggressively pursue those people who ("steal", "lose") the coins of their depositors?
Big Vern, Karpeles, Pirate@40, just to name a few.
Sure, these guys lost people's coins. But I was there back then. It was all wild west stuff. Buyer beware.
How can the government arrest someone for stealing an asset that doesn't really exist?
Would they arrest someone who stole water from my pool?
Edit: I don't know why I bother commenting here.
A downvote without counterpoint? What do you gain from that?
Grapple with my assertions with evidence. If you don't, it will just become even more of an echo chamber.
I think that the cryptocurrency/blockchain space is the next big thing in the world on-par with the internet. But it still has a long way to go. In the late 90s you could say "X on the internet" and get tons of investment. Now it's the same but with "X on the blockchain". We are going through growing pains now, and there definitely needs to be some regulation introduced to curb the many scams. My personal hope though is that the regulators work, not to try to stop this industry, but rather to shape it. I mean, why do I need to make $1M/year in order to prove to the US government that I'm worthy of investing into a startup. This is why ICOs are such a big thing right now for westerners, it circumvents that (and internationally, it allows people that would have otherwise not had any route to do such a thing). But there definitely needs to be some regulation behind that, because it's ridiculously easy to make a sleek marketing page that says "buy now and the price will go up later"... and people will buy into it.
Also, this quote:
> using cryptocurrency networks are cheaper to send money overseas than Western Union. No, it probably is not
Uhh, maybe not in some narrow cases (especially as pointed out in the source, for people that need to use cash agents or are unbankable), but for many people I know including myself, it is significantly cheaper to use bitcoin rather than Western Union (source: I receive my salary in bitcoin based on spot price tied to USD)
> why do I need to make $1M/year in order to prove to the US government that I'm worthy of investing into a startup
Bernie Madoff lost tens of billions of dollars of investors’ money [1] in a clear fraud. This is terrible, but nobody ended up destitute [2]. The systemic risk was contained.
Contrast that with the savings and loan crisis [3]. This lost retail investors’ money. People ended up destitute. That, and lots of retail investors (i.e. non-accredited investors) doing zero diligence allowing the problem to metastasise, turned a prosecution problem into a political problem. When masses are turned on the street, nobody cares that they should have done their diligence. They become a political problem.
The government's rationale for regulating retail investors more strictly than accredited investors is that a laissez-faire attitude towards the former's activity has, historically, resulted in massive fraud that then creates political problems. I believe there is a middle ground between our total-ban regulations and Bitcoin's laissez faire. Finding that, however, will require both sides understand why we have the regulations we do.
I mean, why do I need to make $1M/year in order to prove to the US government that I'm worthy of investing into a startup
Accredited investor is defined as either of $1m assets exclusive of positive home equity or income north of $200k for two years ($300k if you need to include a sompouse) and reasonable expectation of the same.
I sympathize with the general complaint but as this is a thing that many HNers will confront at some point I thought I'd correct the record.
People should take responsibility for their own actions. A lot of ICOs are fluff and high risk. People should be aware of that before they invest. If they don't do their research, they shouldn't blame lack of regulation for their laziness. How would regulation fix this?
Who would enforce regulations? You would necessarily have to centralize things and hand over power to an authority. This would defeat the purpose of a dencentralized blockchain.
Most cryptos are definitely pump and dump ponzis designed to eat your money, there is definitely a technocracy-like barrier for entry if you want to join the crypto bandwagon. Focus your time and energy on BTC, ETH and an anonymous coin like XMR. Any other offering should be met with skepticism.
>Focus your time and energy on BTC, ETH and an anonymous coin like XMR. Any other offering should be met with skepticism.
To elaborate/explain on this point for those less familiar: those three cryptocurrencies actually are based on real technical innovation, and have developer communities producing more technical innovation. There are many other cryptocurrencies that have zero technical innovation (or completely nonsense innovation) and are merely clones of previous cryptocurrencies with some identifiers tweaked, made purely so investors can pump and dump.
The article in part 5 ("The decline of Maximalism") seems to be criticizing the idea that people would prefer some cryptocurrencies to others, which is completely ridiculous. There are real differences / issues with many.
I've seen some you could argue are a pump and dump, an actual Ponzi Scheme on a blockchain would be nearly impossible, it relies on a central ledger so the bad actor can disproportionately transfer the new investors' assets to old.
There's been a recent example of someone running a Ponzi using BTC, but that's not an example of a currency being a Ponzi, which is a thing more specific than "scam."
Would love to add Blocknet to this. They are the only project that currently has the capability of enabling cross-chain atomic swaps and creates interoperability by allowing data to be passed with these swaps as well.
«Bitfinex has provided no details about how it was hacked, who hacked it, or to where those funds were drained to.»
Actually, Zane Tackett, Director of Community & Product Development at Bitfinex, has provided information, including the complete list of Bitcoin addresses where the stolen funds went: http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitfinex-hack-2016/
Sadly I believe the ideals of cryptocurrency/blockchain technologies have been currently hijacked by those solely driven by a profit motive and greed. Altruism in the pursuit of a better way is for dummies I guess.
I think that Satoshi's main thoughts at the moment would be bemusement about how the cryptocurrency mania seen today so well illustrates human behavior.
I'm not sure what the author wants bitcoin to be. They are correct in pointing out the various scams that litter bitcoin, but they also seem to want to shut out crime (silkroad et al) with better analysis tools and centralization. Without the various scams pumping the price criminals are the only ones who would be using bitcoin, as they are locked out of the much simpler & easier to use alternatives that any normal person will use.
Well, there is undeniably spoofing and wash trading in these markets, I see both happen all the time- I'm not sure though why they are considered a bad thing: They obfuscate the order books, making it easier for other buyers/sellers to make trades without broadcasting their overall position to other traders.
I'd love to hear a good argument why these things are a "bad thing" besides just the argument that "it's wrong to lie". I don't really have a strong opinion either way and could probably be swayed- Any takers?
Most of the author's points are silly. I was a customer of Bitfinex, and I lost a significant sum of money in the hack, but they paid me back. I couldn't be happier with their handling of it. I'm upset that their poor security practices led them to get hacked in the first place, but once it happened, their handling was pretty ideal. I don't know anyone who was a customer of theirs and doesn't approve of how they handled it, and I know several others that were impacted by the hack.
So you think the author's very intricately written, detailed arguments are "silly" and all you can offer in retort is an anecdote about how you weren't effected by the Bitfinex hack (which was a tiny part of the author's argument).
As someone who has followed the crypto-currency scene for the past several years I don't disagree with a lot of the broad points presented about fraud being a problem but he is presenting some flat out false information to support his thesis.
To take one example, his claim that historically Coinbase has kept traction stats close to the vest is completely false. He says that the only accurate user numbers come from a filing in the IRS lawsuit. The IRS lawsuit was initially filed in November 2016 and has been ongoing. Coinbase has published user stats on their about page[0] since November of 2014 two full years before the IRS took Coinbase to court, you can go look in the wayback archive. So the claim that the lawsuit provides the only glimpse at the number of Coinbase users is categorically false.
Phenomenally detailed article and interesting subject matter. Thanks for sharing. Of particular concern to the community should be the issuance and solvency of Tether. An audit is long overdue.
As mentioned, our CEO, Arthur Hayes, wrote on Chinese exchanges running their customers' deposits in local bonds & stocks back in 2015 [1]. It's worth a read. We at BitMEX have brought a full-time writer into our employ just to bring more of these stories to the fore and help create the facts-first, inquisitive atmosphere crypto desperately needs. [2]
Great article (less the typos, but I feel that's understandable for something so lengthy in which the author did clearly put forth lots of effort to do his research).
I'm in the camp of people interested in cryptocurrencies due to their libertarian qualities and largely motivated by what I perceive to be repeated irresponsible behavior by governments in how they administer their currency (most recently notable in the years surrounding 2008 - just before Bitcoin was activated). In fact, I find it curious that the article did note even allude to the setting in which Bitcoin was born, as its roots go very much against regulation by governments.
The whole idea behind blockchains is distributed consensus. One of the greatest values behind bitcoin is its lack of centralization and a sort of distributed governance surrounding it (more so with some other cryptocurrencies, but bitcoin does have primitive mechanisms for users to vote towards such things as protocol evolution). It has some other advantages that government-operated currencies could make use of, such as being difficult to forge, but the real innovations are centered around the user not needing to trust third parties (govt included) to behave in the user's interest. If you embrace regulations to the extent that they exist in traditional currencies - if transactions/addresses are ever forced to be blacklisted (and thereby reversible), or funds made to be seizable by design, for example - then what value do cryptocurrencies provide that couldn't be replicated by a non-cryptographic/centrally operated digital currency, and why then _wouldn't_ they be superseded by something easier to use/control?
It seems to me that the lack of regulation is a large part of the value behind bitcoin. So when the article quotes:
> The cryptocurrency world is basically rediscovering a vast framework of securities and consumer protection laws that already exist; and now they know why they exist.
I'm skeptical. If consumers want regulation, they'd use the established currencies. Bitcoin exists to be unregulated.
----
On a less political note, this article was full of useful information and thoughts, so thanks to the author. I popped out of the cryptocurrency world in 2013 and fell back into it two months ago, and it's disappointingly difficult to find articles like this that actually have some depth to them. There's too much get-rich-quick hype and not enough interest in understanding the social or technical developments associated with cryptocurrencies most places I visit.
All these articles make it sound like anyone can launch a successful ICO and make millions on the spot but it's not true at all. Doing a successful ICO is very difficult and requires deep connections within the industry... It's probably only marginally easier than raising funding from a VC.
> The cryptocurrency world is basically rediscovering a vast framework of securities and consumer protection laws that already exist; and now they know why they exist.
Can this framework be re-invented, perhaps on the blockchain, to be more efficient (less friction), more comprehensible, and machine checkable?
In my opinion, the regulators should focus on exchanges applying KYC and make the exchanges function the same a stock exchanges. If I buy a stock in the US through a brokerage house, they have my info and every year they send me a 1099 with my profit/loss for the year that I give my accountant to add to my income tax report.
Once the exchanges are regulated like that it would be very difficult to launder money or avoid paying taxes on profits.
> In other words, the ICO rackets have recreated many aspects of the financial services industry (underwriters, broker/dealers)
This is all you need to know, end of article.
Of course, the tone of this article is "racket", "boiler room" etc. I call it price discovery, efficient, economic growth.
The article's only objectiveness is by saying that they don't have transparency and financial controls that the securities industry does. But makes no mistake in calling it controversial that one fund or one ICO is investing their proceeds in other ICOs, news flash this is how all economies work. But here it is controversial because "shareholders" don't know, except there are no shareholders, BUT WAIT THEY SHOULD BE SHAREHOLDERS as if these are equity securities!
It is hard to debate this article because each aspect has to be taken individually.
But this author consistently describes an aspect of cryptocurrency as controversial, while inadvertently describing how all capital markets work, but holding bitcoin at a different non-existent standard.
I think cryptocurrency has reached or has perhaps just passed the peak of inflated expectations on the hype cycle chart and is now decending into the trough of dissolutionment. There are some pretty wild claims out there - it does seem like lots of the rhetoric out there is that cryptocurrency and blockchain technology will solve ALL of the problems. But i think blockchain has a ways to go before we see which problems it is particularly good at solving. People will learn, overtime as companies fail in their attempt to apply blockchain to every aspect of life. When a few of these companies to succeed, which im certain at least one will, we will see the real, unhyped value of the blockchain.
Edit(spelling)
Thinking 'blockchain', which is just a linked-list with hashes, is going to solve anything is silly. It's even sillier than thinking internal intranets or TCP/IP would create huge value, when really the Internet, something much more than internal intranets and TCP/IP, was the innovation.
Bitcoin is an open, borderless distributed network with an economic and social system built on top of a data structure called a blockchain. The real innovation has very little to do with the 'blockchain' hype corporations are pushing.
There are also some philosophical issues that add to the hype.
- BTC or some other cryptocurrency as taking over local currencies in long term. There is such things as optimal currency region. Global single currency would not work well.
- Money as good long term store of value. That's hoarders dream, but it would be harmful for economy as a whole. It's the idea that you work hour in 2017, store the value as a money and take that hour out 2027 and it's value has retained value or increased while the work done in 2017 is less valuable than work done in 2027 due to productivity increases. This kind of imbalance leads to deflationary spiral.
What they really won't tell you about is; if you sign your account with a weak password, someone will brute-force it open and transfer your coins. Which is considerably more interesting and exciting than this article.
This article should be the README before getting into Crypto world.
First article to point out 21.co. What is their product ???
Read on twitter - A guy asked MA a question for 100$ on 21.co platform, got "NO" as answer.
100$ for a NO...So a guy spent his hard earned 100$ on a question to a VC.
VC made money, Donated that to charity to show off and gather "philanthropy" point in his smug circle, got tax savings maybe, his invested firm 21.co made money, 21.co vanity metric of donating to charity increased further.
[+] [-] Animats|8 years ago|reply
The exchange executives were told not to try to leave China.
(Remember Big Vern? Paul Vernon, CEO of Cryptsy. Took the money and fled to Liaoning, China. Started a Bitcoin exchange in China. Wanted in the US. Might be a good time to push through diplomatic channels for the government of China to find and return him. The PBOC investigators may have found him by now.)
[+] [-] dreit1|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quuquuquu|8 years ago|reply
Why then, do the authorities in the US and China aggressively pursue those people who ("steal", "lose") the coins of their depositors?
Big Vern, Karpeles, Pirate@40, just to name a few.
Sure, these guys lost people's coins. But I was there back then. It was all wild west stuff. Buyer beware.
How can the government arrest someone for stealing an asset that doesn't really exist?
Would they arrest someone who stole water from my pool?
Edit: I don't know why I bother commenting here.
A downvote without counterpoint? What do you gain from that?
Grapple with my assertions with evidence. If you don't, it will just become even more of an echo chamber.
[+] [-] earlz|8 years ago|reply
Also, this quote:
> using cryptocurrency networks are cheaper to send money overseas than Western Union. No, it probably is not
Uhh, maybe not in some narrow cases (especially as pointed out in the source, for people that need to use cash agents or are unbankable), but for many people I know including myself, it is significantly cheaper to use bitcoin rather than Western Union (source: I receive my salary in bitcoin based on spot price tied to USD)
(disclaimer: co-founder of a blockchain project)
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|8 years ago|reply
Bernie Madoff lost tens of billions of dollars of investors’ money [1] in a clear fraud. This is terrible, but nobody ended up destitute [2]. The systemic risk was contained.
Contrast that with the savings and loan crisis [3]. This lost retail investors’ money. People ended up destitute. That, and lots of retail investors (i.e. non-accredited investors) doing zero diligence allowing the problem to metastasise, turned a prosecution problem into a political problem. When masses are turned on the street, nobody cares that they should have done their diligence. They become a political problem.
The government's rationale for regulating retail investors more strictly than accredited investors is that a laissez-faire attitude towards the former's activity has, historically, resulted in massive fraud that then creates political problems. I believe there is a middle ground between our total-ban regulations and Bitcoin's laissez faire. Finding that, however, will require both sides understand why we have the regulations we do.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madoff_investment_scandal
[2] https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2013/12/11/five-years-a...
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal nor securities advice. Follow securities laws.
[+] [-] patio11|8 years ago|reply
Accredited investor is defined as either of $1m assets exclusive of positive home equity or income north of $200k for two years ($300k if you need to include a sompouse) and reasonable expectation of the same.
I sympathize with the general complaint but as this is a thing that many HNers will confront at some point I thought I'd correct the record.
[+] [-] walterstucco|8 years ago|reply
with the difference that internet worked exactly as planned from the beginning, had a clear goal and solved a real problem.
[+] [-] OJFord|8 years ago|reply
Why would you want that? Why not just receive USD, and buy BTC each month if you like the price?
[+] [-] prostoalex|8 years ago|reply
How can you tell if it's westerners investing for the future or Chinese miners trying to get liquidity through any means possible?
[+] [-] snappyTertle|8 years ago|reply
Who would enforce regulations? You would necessarily have to centralize things and hand over power to an authority. This would defeat the purpose of a dencentralized blockchain.
[+] [-] tbv|8 years ago|reply
Do you think it’s possible to square the desires to make startup investing accessible to retail investors and to prevent fraud? If so, how?
[+] [-] TheLilHipster|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AgentME|8 years ago|reply
To elaborate/explain on this point for those less familiar: those three cryptocurrencies actually are based on real technical innovation, and have developer communities producing more technical innovation. There are many other cryptocurrencies that have zero technical innovation (or completely nonsense innovation) and are merely clones of previous cryptocurrencies with some identifiers tweaked, made purely so investors can pump and dump.
The article in part 5 ("The decline of Maximalism") seems to be criticizing the idea that people would prefer some cryptocurrencies to others, which is completely ridiculous. There are real differences / issues with many.
[+] [-] gnu8|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SippinLean|8 years ago|reply
There's been a recent example of someone running a Ponzi using BTC, but that's not an example of a currency being a Ponzi, which is a thing more specific than "scam."
[+] [-] tradersam|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JelteF|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hanniabu|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zorpner|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrb|8 years ago|reply
Actually, Zane Tackett, Director of Community & Product Development at Bitfinex, has provided information, including the complete list of Bitcoin addresses where the stolen funds went: http://blog.zorinaq.com/bitfinex-hack-2016/
[+] [-] aryehof|8 years ago|reply
I think that Satoshi's main thoughts at the moment would be bemusement about how the cryptocurrency mania seen today so well illustrates human behavior.
[+] [-] swfsql|8 years ago|reply
I won't judge, but just state it's different from yourself: who apparently thinks egoism or profit-seeking is bad or undesired.
[+] [-] goatsi|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verroq|8 years ago|reply
https://hackernoon.com/meet-spoofy-how-a-single-entity-domin...
[+] [-] drcode|8 years ago|reply
I'd love to hear a good argument why these things are a "bad thing" besides just the argument that "it's wrong to lie". I don't really have a strong opinion either way and could probably be swayed- Any takers?
[+] [-] tpallarino|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darawk|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] calcifer|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prostoalex|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamiek88|8 years ago|reply
Or are they Cryptsy points on the exchange?
[+] [-] pmorici|8 years ago|reply
To take one example, his claim that historically Coinbase has kept traction stats close to the vest is completely false. He says that the only accurate user numbers come from a filing in the IRS lawsuit. The IRS lawsuit was initially filed in November 2016 and has been ongoing. Coinbase has published user stats on their about page[0] since November of 2014 two full years before the IRS took Coinbase to court, you can go look in the wayback archive. So the claim that the lawsuit provides the only glimpse at the number of Coinbase users is categorically false.
[0] https://www.coinbase.com/about
[+] [-] STRML|8 years ago|reply
As mentioned, our CEO, Arthur Hayes, wrote on Chinese exchanges running their customers' deposits in local bonds & stocks back in 2015 [1]. It's worth a read. We at BitMEX have brought a full-time writer into our employ just to bring more of these stories to the fore and help create the facts-first, inquisitive atmosphere crypto desperately needs. [2]
1. https://blog.bitmex.com/crypto-trader-digest-nov-30/#shadow-...
2. https://research.bitmex.com
[+] [-] wallacoloo|8 years ago|reply
I'm in the camp of people interested in cryptocurrencies due to their libertarian qualities and largely motivated by what I perceive to be repeated irresponsible behavior by governments in how they administer their currency (most recently notable in the years surrounding 2008 - just before Bitcoin was activated). In fact, I find it curious that the article did note even allude to the setting in which Bitcoin was born, as its roots go very much against regulation by governments.
The whole idea behind blockchains is distributed consensus. One of the greatest values behind bitcoin is its lack of centralization and a sort of distributed governance surrounding it (more so with some other cryptocurrencies, but bitcoin does have primitive mechanisms for users to vote towards such things as protocol evolution). It has some other advantages that government-operated currencies could make use of, such as being difficult to forge, but the real innovations are centered around the user not needing to trust third parties (govt included) to behave in the user's interest. If you embrace regulations to the extent that they exist in traditional currencies - if transactions/addresses are ever forced to be blacklisted (and thereby reversible), or funds made to be seizable by design, for example - then what value do cryptocurrencies provide that couldn't be replicated by a non-cryptographic/centrally operated digital currency, and why then _wouldn't_ they be superseded by something easier to use/control?
It seems to me that the lack of regulation is a large part of the value behind bitcoin. So when the article quotes:
> The cryptocurrency world is basically rediscovering a vast framework of securities and consumer protection laws that already exist; and now they know why they exist.
I'm skeptical. If consumers want regulation, they'd use the established currencies. Bitcoin exists to be unregulated.
----
On a less political note, this article was full of useful information and thoughts, so thanks to the author. I popped out of the cryptocurrency world in 2013 and fell back into it two months ago, and it's disappointingly difficult to find articles like this that actually have some depth to them. There's too much get-rich-quick hype and not enough interest in understanding the social or technical developments associated with cryptocurrencies most places I visit.
[+] [-] jondubois|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jackfoxy|8 years ago|reply
Can this framework be re-invented, perhaps on the blockchain, to be more efficient (less friction), more comprehensible, and machine checkable?
[+] [-] kwelstr|8 years ago|reply
Once the exchanges are regulated like that it would be very difficult to launder money or avoid paying taxes on profits.
[+] [-] trakout|8 years ago|reply
Regulation will become more difficult when these become mainstream.
[+] [-] ringaroundthetx|8 years ago|reply
This is all you need to know, end of article.
Of course, the tone of this article is "racket", "boiler room" etc. I call it price discovery, efficient, economic growth.
The article's only objectiveness is by saying that they don't have transparency and financial controls that the securities industry does. But makes no mistake in calling it controversial that one fund or one ICO is investing their proceeds in other ICOs, news flash this is how all economies work. But here it is controversial because "shareholders" don't know, except there are no shareholders, BUT WAIT THEY SHOULD BE SHAREHOLDERS as if these are equity securities!
It is hard to debate this article because each aspect has to be taken individually.
But this author consistently describes an aspect of cryptocurrency as controversial, while inadvertently describing how all capital markets work, but holding bitcoin at a different non-existent standard.
[+] [-] deevolution|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quantdev|8 years ago|reply
Bitcoin is an open, borderless distributed network with an economic and social system built on top of a data structure called a blockchain. The real innovation has very little to do with the 'blockchain' hype corporations are pushing.
[+] [-] Nokinside|8 years ago|reply
- BTC or some other cryptocurrency as taking over local currencies in long term. There is such things as optimal currency region. Global single currency would not work well.
- Money as good long term store of value. That's hoarders dream, but it would be harmful for economy as a whole. It's the idea that you work hour in 2017, store the value as a money and take that hour out 2027 and it's value has retained value or increased while the work done in 2017 is less valuable than work done in 2027 due to productivity increases. This kind of imbalance leads to deflationary spiral.
[+] [-] nurettin|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PretzelPirate|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 4010dell|8 years ago|reply
First article to point out 21.co. What is their product ??? Read on twitter - A guy asked MA a question for 100$ on 21.co platform, got "NO" as answer. 100$ for a NO...So a guy spent his hard earned 100$ on a question to a VC. VC made money, Donated that to charity to show off and gather "philanthropy" point in his smug circle, got tax savings maybe, his invested firm 21.co made money, 21.co vanity metric of donating to charity increased further.
Poor soul who asked question, got scammed.
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
[deleted]