They looked at Coinbase listing announcements from September 25, 2018 to May 1, 2022, and tracked four wallets that bought listings ahead of the announcements and earned an estimated profit of 1003 ETH ($1.5 million).
Of course, if you don't want to give those people your money, there is a simple solution: Don't buy shitcoins.
> We estimate that insider trading occurs in 10-25% of cryptocurrency listings and as a lower bound, insiders earned $1.5 million in trading profits. Our findings identify cases that are yet to be prosecuted.
25% is still too low for how huge of a scam this thing is. I assume this only addresses insider trading, while the more common scheme is pump and dump?
Cocaine is great stuff, with a lot of medical uses, safe enough to include in popular soft drinks.
But when you introduce a delivery system that short circuits your brain's reward circuitry, it's incredibly dangerous and destructive.
Ponzi tokenomics are the crack rocks of blockchain technology, which is itself really nifty. The only thing that can and will stop the tokenomics craze is a popular backslash, which is building.
And as with cocaine, blockchain will be forever slimed by association with this ponzi scheme fad and its devastating impact on millions and millions of families and fortunes.
Only privacy coins which deliver on the original cypherpunk goals of blockchain will survive. And smart contracts won't find any general utility unless and until one arrives that offers reliable homomorphically encrypted private smart contract resolution.
> And as with cocaine, blockchain will be forever slimed by association with this ponzi scheme fad and its devastating impact on millions and millions of families and fortunes.
Maybe you missed the irony of using a term that was coined and invented in traditional markets, but they seem to be fine and not very "slimed".
Crypto is certainly going through pre/early regulation gesticulation but ... most of the crypto scams were already done in traditional financial markets in their early days.
A friend did an thing where he shadowed a neurologist for a week. He saw the neurologist use cocaine in an arm surgery: its a vasoconstrictor (stops bleeding) and local anesthetic. Dabbed a little on the cut and it stopped bleeding or hurting. Pretty amazing.
If it wasn't for the pesky reward-system hijacking, cocaine would probably be in everyone's emergency first aid kit.
> Only privacy coins which deliver on the original cypherpunk goals of blockchain will survive.
No.
That ship has already sailed and it is not early days anymore; just like the failure of the free software movement or the privacy movement who have both failed to stop spyware and privacy invasive technology from proliferating and proxied / developed by the majority of big tech.
Why is it that regulators are chasing after privacy tools / coins, like Tornado.cash, Monero, etc and not attempting to ban the others? The regulators have made it totally clear that they don't want these certain coins / tools to be around or used as a side benefit by scammers, criminals, etc.
I would say only the compliant few coins, crypto projects, etc that comply with regulations will survive and it will allow companies to accept crypto and use it safely.
> privacy coins which deliver on the original cypherpunk goals of blockchain
They don't deliver on one aspect, which is full auditability. I think all existing privacy chains are completely broken by knowledge of the discrete log of one particular curve point.
Dude, have you read about some of the early fuckery around stock markets circa 1800's or so? I forget who but one of the great American business barons fought off a hostile takeover by cajoling his share certificate printer to print more shares.
I don't think very highly of crypto but if the stocks can shrug that off, so it can too.
I assume that whoever is commenting here has read the whole paper rather than reading the headline and screaming in the comments section. It seems like the paper is assuming that nothing is happening and the SEC is also doing nothing to enforce it. Quite the contrary is happening in reality.
The SEC seems to be still enforcing and investigating many projects this for some time [0], which tells us that crypto will most definitely be regulated rather than a total full scale and complete ban which opponents have been screaming about are have been dreaming for years.
Due to the transparency and traceability of the majority of blockchains, it makes it possible to trace up all of this activity easily. Thus, is it not a surprise to see regulators banning blockchain privacy tools / coins off of exchanges and allowing the others or a compliant few. This is why they won't be a. complete ban and I would expect stricter regulations for the exchanges to reduce these problems.
But as always, anything critical of cryptocurrencies or crypto projects in general here is quickly raced to the top of HN, despite regulators still actively investigating the mentioned projects and many others from time to time. [1]
You can find the figures at the end of the paper. It's a somewhat common style in the social sciences and humanities to format a manuscript like this. Figures either in separate files or at the end, with "insert figure here" annotations inline in the text. If the paper's accepted, then journal production staff would use those annotations to put the figures in approximately the desired place in the typeset version, using whatever layout software the journal uses. (In comp. sci., typically the author does this kind of figure placement themselves in LaTeX, so most drafts shared on HN don't have that style.)
This is just insider trading prior to listing. Not insider trading prior to crashes, where the insiders know a crash is coming and exit before the suckers find out.
I love seeing financial minded folks talk about how the price of cryptocurrencies will go up and that they're good investments. They're gambling entirely on the fraud working, and most of them don't know it's fraud all the way down.
The only financial minded folks that are involved with crypto are the ones that are selling the buckets and pickaxes. The expense ratios on these BTC funds are immense.
For me the word cryptocurrency and scam are synonyms. And in my mind people defending it on the internet are inside the pyramid scheme and trying to justify their investment.
Just one of the many cancers affecting our current society.
Ok, but please don't repeat flamewar clichés in discussion here. This must surely be the biggest one of recent years and the flamewar has been repeated a thousand times already, if not more. Repetition to that degree is off-topic on HN (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...).
Whenever I see these takes, it just reads to me like "I know there are scams in the cryptocurrency world and am too lazy/disinterested to figure out which parts are the scammy parts, so I'm just going to cast the whole space as a scam and feel smug about it."
There's a lot of scammy stuff in the cryptocurrency world, but why do so many people feel the need to pompously proclaim the whole thing is a scam when they clearly only have a shallow familiarity with the space? Is it sour grapes or jealousy?
Well that's the thing though, shocking as it may be, there are other societies out there.
Living in a Third World country with a controlled currency, Bitcoin was the only way I could actually buy things online.
So yeah, to me, it does have an actual value. Disregarding something completely just because you don't think is useful is very shortsighted. It's akin to people thinking x programming language is complete trash.
No it's not. It allows easy market manipulation. How can the market succeed with things like pump and dump, insider's have extra knowledge and such? There's a good reason why it's illegal and punishable. I only wish the people caught did about 5X as much time including Congress members.
But it's certainly not for the other participants who are getting rolled over by insiders. Why play a rigged game?
And it's definitely not beneficial when the insider has the active ability to influence the price of the asset. If an executive could make money by shorting his firm's stock, the optimal strategy for every executive would be to sabotage their firm, while shorting its stock.
The latter two reasons are why it's illegal, by the way. It undermines confidence in markets, and it creates perverse, value-destroying incentives.
[+] [-] TakeBlaster16|3 years ago|reply
Of course, if you don't want to give those people your money, there is a simple solution: Don't buy shitcoins.
[+] [-] dimgl|3 years ago|reply
Don't buy any cryptocurrency.
[+] [-] melenaboija|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] s1k3s|3 years ago|reply
25% is still too low for how huge of a scam this thing is. I assume this only addresses insider trading, while the more common scheme is pump and dump?
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wikitopian|3 years ago|reply
But when you introduce a delivery system that short circuits your brain's reward circuitry, it's incredibly dangerous and destructive.
Ponzi tokenomics are the crack rocks of blockchain technology, which is itself really nifty. The only thing that can and will stop the tokenomics craze is a popular backslash, which is building.
And as with cocaine, blockchain will be forever slimed by association with this ponzi scheme fad and its devastating impact on millions and millions of families and fortunes.
Only privacy coins which deliver on the original cypherpunk goals of blockchain will survive. And smart contracts won't find any general utility unless and until one arrives that offers reliable homomorphically encrypted private smart contract resolution.
[+] [-] hailwren|3 years ago|reply
> And as with cocaine, blockchain will be forever slimed by association with this ponzi scheme fad and its devastating impact on millions and millions of families and fortunes.
Maybe you missed the irony of using a term that was coined and invented in traditional markets, but they seem to be fine and not very "slimed".
Crypto is certainly going through pre/early regulation gesticulation but ... most of the crypto scams were already done in traditional financial markets in their early days.
[+] [-] cwkoss|3 years ago|reply
If it wasn't for the pesky reward-system hijacking, cocaine would probably be in everyone's emergency first aid kit.
[+] [-] rvz|3 years ago|reply
No.
That ship has already sailed and it is not early days anymore; just like the failure of the free software movement or the privacy movement who have both failed to stop spyware and privacy invasive technology from proliferating and proxied / developed by the majority of big tech.
Why is it that regulators are chasing after privacy tools / coins, like Tornado.cash, Monero, etc and not attempting to ban the others? The regulators have made it totally clear that they don't want these certain coins / tools to be around or used as a side benefit by scammers, criminals, etc.
I would say only the compliant few coins, crypto projects, etc that comply with regulations will survive and it will allow companies to accept crypto and use it safely.
[+] [-] twic|3 years ago|reply
That will help many of us escape, but for normal people, it will just be part of the path.
[+] [-] tromp|3 years ago|reply
They don't deliver on one aspect, which is full auditability. I think all existing privacy chains are completely broken by knowledge of the discrete log of one particular curve point.
[+] [-] pdntspa|3 years ago|reply
I don't think very highly of crypto but if the stocks can shrug that off, so it can too.
[+] [-] dougk16|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] rvz|3 years ago|reply
The SEC seems to be still enforcing and investigating many projects this for some time [0], which tells us that crypto will most definitely be regulated rather than a total full scale and complete ban which opponents have been screaming about are have been dreaming for years.
Due to the transparency and traceability of the majority of blockchains, it makes it possible to trace up all of this activity easily. Thus, is it not a surprise to see regulators banning blockchain privacy tools / coins off of exchanges and allowing the others or a compliant few. This is why they won't be a. complete ban and I would expect stricter regulations for the exchanges to reduce these problems.
But as always, anything critical of cryptocurrencies or crypto projects in general here is quickly raced to the top of HN, despite regulators still actively investigating the mentioned projects and many others from time to time. [1]
[0] https://www.sec.gov/spotlight/cybersecurity-enforcement-acti...
[1] https://www.sec.gov/litigation/complaints/2022/comp-pr2022-1...
[+] [-] codetrotter|3 years ago|reply
It has placeholder text in it like "[Insert Figure 1 Here]" and "[Insert Table 2 Here]".
Is this a draft?
[+] [-] _delirium|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stevebmark|3 years ago|reply
I love seeing financial minded folks talk about how the price of cryptocurrencies will go up and that they're good investments. They're gambling entirely on the fraud working, and most of them don't know it's fraud all the way down.
[+] [-] upupandup|3 years ago|reply
A) how Coinbase got past YC vetting process
B) continue to engage in serious violation of US security and trading laws
C) a large portion of HN seems to downvote, flag, critical comments towards Brian Armstrong and coinbase
[+] [-] selectodude|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grudg3|3 years ago|reply
Just one of the many cancers affecting our current society.
[+] [-] dang|3 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
p.s. For clarity: I'm not making an argument about cryptocurrency here. Just about HN threads.
[+] [-] cwkoss|3 years ago|reply
There's a lot of scammy stuff in the cryptocurrency world, but why do so many people feel the need to pompously proclaim the whole thing is a scam when they clearly only have a shallow familiarity with the space? Is it sour grapes or jealousy?
[+] [-] curiousgal|3 years ago|reply
Well that's the thing though, shocking as it may be, there are other societies out there.
Living in a Third World country with a controlled currency, Bitcoin was the only way I could actually buy things online.
So yeah, to me, it does have an actual value. Disregarding something completely just because you don't think is useful is very shortsighted. It's akin to people thinking x programming language is complete trash.
[+] [-] gjs278|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] senttoschool|3 years ago|reply
You can work in crypto as long as you have no morals.
[+] [-] prvit|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] stjohnswarts|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edgyquant|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tppiotrowski|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexb_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vkou|3 years ago|reply
But it's certainly not for the other participants who are getting rolled over by insiders. Why play a rigged game?
And it's definitely not beneficial when the insider has the active ability to influence the price of the asset. If an executive could make money by shorting his firm's stock, the optimal strategy for every executive would be to sabotage their firm, while shorting its stock.
The latter two reasons are why it's illegal, by the way. It undermines confidence in markets, and it creates perverse, value-destroying incentives.
[+] [-] arberx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]