At least Superman's dog is cute

The title is a Krypto joke.

Remember a few years back when there were a bunch of celebrities endorsing FTX? It was mainly athletes but Larry David did a Super Bowl ad. Then when it turned out to be fraud a lot of the endorsers were named in law suits but were mostly exonerated as they did not know about the fraud.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/tv/news/remember-that-larry-david-crypto-ad-court-rules-he-and-other-celebs-didnt-mean-to-dupe-ftx-users/ 

It stuck out to me at the time because it seemed like a terrible idea and I was surprised to see so many big names going for it. Of course, they were doing that because they were given incentives, not because of any real understanding, but I suppose it gave me some extra skepticism on famous people promoting new techno things.

Looking back at it, the thing that shocked me most was the amounts of money involved. Larry David was paid $10 million, though it is unclear how much of that was in cryptocurrency. He says he lost money.

Back to that thing about there not being any real understanding.

The thing is, even if every one of those celebrities has been paid $10 million in cash, the fraud amount was in the billions. Depending on your way of doing the fraud, if your heart is set on ill-gotten gains and you believe you can con enough people, putting up large amounts of actual cash could be reasonable.

I mean, you can use meme coins to launder bribes or potentially do these pump and dump schemes. It can be pretty effective and I can see where it might be easy to assuage any guilt by deciding that the buyers are so stupid that they are getting what they had coming.

I hope my disdain isn't too subtle.

There is a lot to criticize with the various cryptocurrencies and even non-crypto exchanges and hedge funds, if we wanted to go that way.

For now, I just want to put one thing out there:

https://unu.edu/press-release/un-study-reveals-hidden-environmental-impacts-bitcoin-carbon-not-only-harmful-product

There are people who do get rich, mostly by other people losing their shirts, so a less-regulated stock market. There is also a toll.

I have no interest in participating in these exchanges, but I reside on the same planet. Things that strip resources and pollute the water and air matter to all of us.

If that weren't causing enough damage on its own, well, there's something else that celebrities get excited about now, this time mostly for free.