tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post7889309422368162221..comments2024-03-28T07:23:23.408-07:00Comments on DSHR's Blog: Matt Levine's "The Crypto Story": Part 2David.http://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-56476402055745533442022-12-30T11:34:36.095-08:002022-12-30T11:34:36.095-08:00Matt Levine follows The Crypto Story with a post-F...Matt Levine follows <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-the-crypto-story/" rel="nofollow"><i>The Crypto Story</i></a> with a post-FTX postscript entitled <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2022-the-crypto-story-FTX-collapse-matt-levine/" rel="nofollow"><i>How Not to Play the Game</i></a>:<br /><br />"This game was played by young people who came from the world of traditional finance, from banks and hedge funds and quantitative proprietary trading firms, people who already liked finance and wanted to play with a toy version of it they could shape however they wanted. And—because it’s the game they knew—they ended up replicating much of the world that they came from, only with crypto as the subject matter. Margin lending and futures exchanges, hedge funds and proprietary trading firms, shadow banks and over-the-counter derivatives, just like the stuff they were used to, but for crypto. It was like a fantastical version of their old jobs, a new financial system with all the bits of the old system that they liked, none of the bits they disliked, and some new bits that they dreamed up because they thought they might be cool."<br /><br />There is a lot of good stuff in it, and some stuff that is just wrong. I need to post a postscript to my posts, too.David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4503292949532760618.post-60555877569432729252022-11-21T12:35:57.422-08:002022-11-21T12:35:57.422-08:00Sal Bayat's response to Matt Levine is worth r...Sal Bayat's <a href="https://salbayat.org/the-only-crypto-story-you-need/#" rel="nofollow">response to Matt Levine</a> is worth reading:<br /><br />"The thing that bothers me the most is that Matt gets it. He understands what the economy and financial system should be, he knows the difference between real wealth and simulated value, but there’s some invisible force stopping him from taking the final logical step.<br />...<br />But there’s no realization that crypto is a weaponization of the forces in our economy that extract value without providing meaningful utility. The truth is that society is impoverished when we allow monopoly rents to be extracted by the already fabulously wealthy. Rampant economic inequality destroys aggregate societal wealth."David.https://www.blogger.com/profile/14498131502038331594noreply@blogger.com