> What was initially thought to be a market-triggered event turned out to be a clear case of fraud, with former CEO Kwon at the epicenter. According to on-chain data, In the 3 weeks leading up to the depeg of the TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin, one entity dumped over $450 million of UST on the open market. Four days after the last sale, UST started collapsing. The entity behind the massive dump was none other than Terraform Labs.
It is great then that in this case blockchain transactions are so transparent: it will take longer to research a fraud if involves standard banks around the world.
I assume that if Do Kwon was smarter he would perform transactions more difficult to trace. Not saying that he is not smart but it self-confidence kills many fraudsters.
Using privacy tools wouldn't necessarily be the smarter move as they could be taken as the smoking gun of someone trying to hide their tracks because they are aware of the problematic aspects.
And parent was saying that if done improperly the usage of such tools might be taken as a linguistic "smoking gun". So rather than risking that Kwon might have preferred doing it overtly, hoping for plausible deniablity in doing so.
Stronger that "plausibility deniability" is being no linked to the facts.
Do Kwon had virtually unlimited resources for a good plan. My observation from the field (not knowing Kwon but other fraudsters) is that there is an overconfidence based on power. It falls like a house of cards when official prosecutors are involved. It works when everything is handled privately.
Standard fraud at standard banks is about as easy to trace, or easier, and there is no underlying utility to these crypto scam protocols. So touting the traceability is a red herring.
I saw that as well and agree. This might be obvious to someone who's been following this more closely than I have, but why would Terraform Labs trigger their own collapse? Was it just an attempt to exfil the money and run?
Right. If there are a billion fauxllers worth half a billion dollars, you want the half a billion dollars attached to your own half a billion fauxllers, and not the other half.
So the saviors that would lead us to our shiny post-monetary future are ruthless conmen whose sole purpose is getting richer at the expense of everyone else.
Paint me surprised.
Only if you ever believed this guy to be your savior.
If anybody thinks that spending their money on a thing that will give them a "stable yearly APY of 100+" is an investment they are worth being scammed.
Not everyone can be above average intelligence, and investments can be complex. Some things just have to be illegal or so many will be exploited it will end in pitch forks.
Well, if you scam people on crypto you are committing as much the crime of scamming as you are when you scam people IRL so I fail to see a distinction here.
Rhetorical question - "honest people doing what?" I just don't see anyone in the crypto space doing anything other than speculation. Where's the safe, low cost banking, where's hedge against stock market risk?
There's all these new things in crypto but they still haven't delivered something safe, functional and more reliable than a checking account with an ATM card.
Most decentralized PoS chains (Cardano, Tezos, maybe Algorand) seem to fit the "safe + low cost banking" question. Well maintained Stables are your "safe hedges". Warning, most stablecoins one would think of are not well maintained, some are actually badly flawed by design.
Crypto has delivered quite a lot in these regards but one needs to get past the headlines and keep a clear head to get it.
In a world before intelligence, who is conning us in order to apply evolutionary pressure, and how are they doing so?
It seems to me like you need to be an intelligent creature among other intelligent creatures and to have a theory of mind in order to be a con artist, because cons work by turning someone's intelligence against them.
It's a form of trickery, exploiting your confidence that X is safe or that X is dangerous or that X is food. It's not the same as the form of fraud known as a confidence scheme, but it is a con. Nearby in the conceptual space if not exactly the same.
Yeah for sure, I don't mean to disagree in a petty way, you've raised a good point & I buy it. Whatever small disagreement about whether that's a con isn't substantial.
In that vein, I remember reading somewhere a proposal that the force driving the evolution of human intelligence was human-to-human competition, since humans don't need as much intelligence as they have to out-smart any other species.
Not my field of study but my initial reaction is skepticism since human communities have always been cooperative and humans have always been reliant on one another. I'd also think that you'd evolve complex displays like peacocks or powerful weapons like rams to compete with each other, intelligence seems more useful to cooperate with each other than to compete.
Eg, organizing to take down a mammoth by forcing it over a cliff isn't so much about outsmarting the mammoth as much as understanding the situation your team is in and what you should be doing. Building traps capable of trapping entire herds[1] involves outsmarting them in a sense, sure, but it also involves coordinating a large construction project.
I've heard the hypothesis that creatures with a highly varied diet need more intelligence to distinguish between poisonous and nonpoisonous food.
If I had to guess, for whatever my speculation is worth, intelligence evolved because we had to be highly cooperative in a rapidly changing environment as the glaciers retreated. And also that animals are much more intelligent than we often credit them for, so it was probably a smaller leap then we might imagine.
I dunno about that. Contemporary neighboring communities seem to be largely in cooperation. Depending on what time in history we're talking about, as hominids began to leave Africa, they spread rapidly, so I don't think there would've been much reason to compete (as the resources available in a given area weren't limiting).
I think the role of competition in evolution is often overstated. I don't exactly understand the premise here. The advantage of intelligence was that neighboring communities could swindle each other? Think of it as an iterated prisoner's dilemma, does that strategy make sense?
Granted[1], but that doesn't really suggest that we evolved intelligence in order to compete as either individuals as tribes, or address what I'm saying about how intelligence is more useful for cooperation than competition.
[1] I think my wording was confusing, reading my comment I do seem to imply that such competition doesn't exist rather than that I thought it was being overstated, but that was sloppy writing on my part.
Sure, cooperation would be helped by intelligence. However, evolution only occurs under selective pressure, and would cooperation (which reduces pressure) require great intelligence? Cooperation exists widely in the animal kingdom.
The question arises in the framework of an evolutionary "arms race", and what feature of the human environment challenges specifically their intelligence, except other humans?
Their ability to survive in a rapidly changing climate, where they may have to assess whether plants they have limited experience with are edible, or work together to take down bigger game, or generally exercise creativity in the face of novel challenges; additionally, the resources unlocked by intelligence can be their own pressure.
Evolution isn't strictly driven by competition. It isn't reducible to an arms race. If the niche of "intelligent hominid" is a blue ocean, then the evolution can be driven by the vacuum the species is expanding into rather than being pushed by competitive forces. The species does better not because another species does worse, but because they're able to make better use of resources or access resources not previously available.
Competition comes into play more when there is a limiting resource, and the result is generally segmentation, where both species (or presumably hominid communities) adapt in such a way that the resources are divided in a way that meets everyone's needs. When the resource stops being limiting, the competition stops exerting significant pressure.
If evolution was strictly driven by competition, you'd expect instead that species would reliably compete to extinction. But that's actually rare.
Evolution is frequently driven by competition between members of the same species, independent of resources available. Witness the elaborate feathers of many birds of paradise which evolved to secure mating partners, or the antlers of deer which serve during ruts to compete for harems of does.
I feel as if I'm repeating myself but that doesn't address whether or not that's true in this case or address the reasons I've provided for why I don't think so. Afterall I mentioned peacock feathers in one of my first comments, I'm aware of intraspecific competition.
Since we've made two laps around this point I suspect we'll have to agree to disagree.
Cooperation per se doesn't result in pressure to evolve, unless it is cooperation against an outside competitor, see for example herd animals or the care of offspring.
Hence the reasoning above that the human intelligence evolved in competition with something that required increased intelligence to overcome; the only such thing on the planet throughout human evolution is other hominids.
Evidently, this is simply a hypothesis, and doesn't exclude other evolutionary pressures.
It's not enough just to be smarter than other species. Humans sacrificed physical abilities in order to obtain intellectual abilities. So they need to be smart enough to He's planning and tools to obtain resources that their bodies cannot directly obtain.
> What was initially thought to be a market-triggered event turned out to be a clear case of fraud, with former CEO Kwon at the epicenter. According to on-chain data, In the 3 weeks leading up to the depeg of the TerraUSD (UST) stablecoin, one entity dumped over $450 million of UST on the open market. Four days after the last sale, UST started collapsing. The entity behind the massive dump was none other than Terraform Labs.