"Successful" seems a rather generous description. If an apartment building is built on quicksand and collapses overnight, are the people who bought apartments the ones to blame?
Let's not pretend that people who put money into such crypto "investments" don't know exactly what is going on. The goal is always to pull money out before the inevitable collapse and leave some other sucker holding the bag. And if you get too greedy and don't manage to do it in time just cry fraud and turn to the government for help. After hundreds of such high profile incidents this is still regularly happening today (see the "Hawk Tuah coin" for example). I have no sympathy for anyone involved in these scams, whether perpetrator or victim.
There were plenty of unwitting, first-time crypto investors in the case of HAWK. The reason that influencers like Ms. Welsh are of such great value to crypto scammers is that they introduce or legitimize crypto investment to new unexperienced and unwitting investors.
These folks are scammers, the people who fall for the scams are victims.
I specifically remember that time and anyone that believed 20% APY could go on forever was either stupid or fooling themselves. And when you said this you were attacked so I’ve never had a bit of sympathy for them.
how is what do did different from what marketers did?
I think building something interesting, but not marketing it to investors, should be legal/ok, but the moment you start telling the story of this product being a safe 20% return investment is when you need to get in trouble.
It had a death loop which got triggered by market pressure on a stablecoin leading to a run on the native token which actually made it converge to zero: can't get much more unsuccessful than that.
One might, but that would be incorrect. Trump received ~77,000,000 votes[0], which was 49.9% of the votes cast. As such, plurality is the appropriate term in this case.
What's more, there were ~240,000,000 eligible voters and ~161,000,000 registered voters at the time of the 2024 election.[1]
So the winner received less than a majority of votes cast by a small margin, and less so among registered voters (~48%) and even less so among eligible voters (32%).
Google provided a useful lookup service at the expense of brainwashing society with consumerist propaganda and the complete destruction of personal privacy and the normalization of the surveillance state. It wasn't worth it.
Amazon inspired us to think we needed more cheap crap in order to inspire us to buy cheap crap that we didn't need. We aren't any happier than we were before we had the ability to buy cheap crap on a whim, but we sure do have a lot more cheap crap than before. That wasn't worth it.
Facebook is essentially as good at helping people keep in touch as any instant messenger that preceded it. But unlike those instant messengers, it's supported by invasive targeted ads, and consult the first paragraph for why this is a negative.
This has all been a waste. Society isn't any better as a result of these companies existing.
Google & Facebook push the advertising/attention economy business model, which rewards spreading misinformation & extreme viewpoints, leading to the rise in conspiracy theories and breakdown in discourse & trust in public institutions we see today. Amazon has killed a lot of local retail, removing OK jobs and replacing them with low-paying/low-skill warehouse labor.
I think there's arguments for both sides, but personally I land on the net-evil side for all 3 of the listed companies.
The .io domain was originally run by a guy who didn’t really have the UK’s official backing. He was basically just depositing money into the accounts of different overseas territories for the domains he was selling, and they seemed to be fine with it. Eventually, he sold it off, and now a hedge fund owns it.
The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) will eventually stop existing, which means its ISO country code would go away too. But domain names tied to countries have outlasted countries before—like .su from the old USSR. IANA would likely prioritize keeping all the existing .io domains working over worrying about whether the country behind it still exists.
Google already treats .io more like a generic top-level domain (gTLD), similar to .nu, .to, or .tv, since most of the sites using it have a global audience, not just people from the small island it’s technically tied to.
Terra was a successful blockchain.
Investors lost money and they had to blame the leader.