[Matt Levine at Bloomberg]

"Here’s a thing. It costs $1. If you buy one, the next one will cost $2. If someone buys it, the next one will cost $4. Et cetera. The price of the thing always goes up, leaving every buyer (except the most recent one) with a large guaranteed profit. Of course they can’t sell the thing to realize the profit, but that too is a benefit: If they can’t sell, the price can’t go down.

"Man, 2019 was just amazing. That was an economic model that you could advertise."

It genuinely is incredible. Matt Levine is incredulous that anyone could think that they could avoid SEC regulation because something was "decentralized" - but even then, BitCloud wasn't really decentralized.

In a way, I'm a little envious: it seems like one could have raised millions and millions of dollars for some crypto venture and actually, with complete impunity, openly spent it on something else that really had nothing to do with a token scheme. Imagine what could have been funded that way!

As Matt points out:

"And then you could just take the money! And be like “what, I told you I wouldn’t spend it on developing the protocol, and I didn’t.”"

What a time. Anyway, I'm sure nothing like it is happening in the tech industry right now.

#Crypto

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