Thread by @Pinboard

To be clear, I am 100% on board with the possibility that Tether is a massive fraud. But there's a broader context of shenanigans here that is underreported. For example, consider the way Chinese stocks are listed on US exchanges.

https://twitter.com/mathewi/status/1446468360745652226

When you buy a Chinese stock on a US exchange, you're not buying shares of that company, but a Variable Interest Entity incorporated in the Cayman Islands. This VIE is a smoke-and-mirrors entity that has no enforceable relationship with the Chinese giant, and is illegal in China.

But because it is convenient for everyone, this flimsy and very shady looking fiction has worked as a way to duct-tape Chinese companies to US capital markets. If you're a freshly arrived Martian just learning about money, it doesn't look much different from something like Tether

And shenanigans like this, which are rampant in finance, reinforce the cryptokids' assertion that the financial sector is *also* a scam, or at least just as much a scam, only that it enjoys the support of governments and the Reptilian Council and so on, and gets treated as legit

These scams/fictions/bubbles or whatever you want to call them function as long as enough people are willing to use them in good faith, and as long as they serve a convenient purpose. So that's why I think Tether is so resilient to all of the justified exposures of it as shady

Cryptocurrency exists and thrives not just because it's an unregulated casino, but because the deep rot in our hyperfinancialized economy has alienated a generation of people who rightly seek an alternative. This is the cultural motor behind crypto and we should not ignore it.

Cryptocurrency in 2021 is a mirror universe of Wall Street. Both run on lies, self-delusion, obfuscation, hidden risk, bankrupt premises, arrogance and waste. But crypto makes a different set of people rich, many of them outsiders, one of them a hamster. bbc.com/news/technolog…

This is not my defense of cryptocurrency, which I've called out a lot in the past. I continue to believe what I said in this thread. But I think we need to move past saying "bubble, bubble!" and realize this poisonous phenomenon has deep roots for a reason

https://twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1399066534769659906

This is an excellent point. Crypto is a lottery ticket for the hopeless, and right now it's not such a bad lottery ticket. If you dive into enthusiast communities, you find a lot of struggling people who have no prospect of advancement in the real economy

https://twitter.com/obelos/status/1446483485770739721

"We'll make our own financial system, with blackjack and HOOKERS" is not the craziest response to what happened in 2008. I'm sorry it's using more electricity than Finland, but we kind of brought it on ourselves.

If Trump was a raised middle finger to a bankrupt political system, then whoever the hell all these cryptocurrency moguls are is the same thing, raised to Wall Street. They're tacky, preposterous, mendacious, corrupt, and you should not underestimate their appeal.

This is what happens when you don't let people deposit stuff in a savings account that earns a reliable 1% over inflation. Shit gets weird.