Floyd Mayweather-endorsed cryptocoin startup knocked out by fraud allegations Two men have been arrested on suspicion of spinning a "web of lies" to sell unregistered crypto investments. The US Securities and Exchange Commission has alleged that Sohrab "Sam" Sharma and Robert Farkas, who co-founded "financial services startup" Centra Tech, made "ill-gotten" gains of $32m from thousands of investors …
'The US Securities and Exchange Commission has alleged that Sohrab "Sam" Sharma and Robert Farkas, who co-founded "financial services startup" Centra Tech, made "ill-gotten" gains of $32m" from thousands of suckers .. and doing exactly the same as the giant financial houses. Hello 'investors', cryptocurrencies are nothing more than snakeoil.
The article refers to investors, but in the context of them being victims. Yes, there was criminality behind this, but I can't help but think of the investors as 'victims' and 'greedy people out to make a quick buck without any real hard work' in equal measure.
The charges come amid growing concerns about fraudulent initial coin offerings and follows repeat advice from the SEC that investors should not trust celeb endorsements, pointing out that they may be part of a paid promotion.
<sarcasm> What? celebs get paid to endorse products they probably don't use, when did this happen? </sarcasm>
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I suppose you could say it has value to you because you came out ahead.
However it is not economically productive and on balance has no real value. Moving money from the pockets of newcomers to those of early adopters and miners* is at best a zero sum game.
Cryptocoins can't seriously be called currency because they're not in common use and aren't trivial to use.
* and through the miners, manufacturers of mining equipment and power utilities.
"I suppose you could say it has value to you because you came out ahead."
No suppose about it. It has value because someone else thought it had value, and exchanged it for that.
"However it is not economically productive and on balance has no real value. "
That's pretty much the definition of money. It's better if it doesn't have real value (like currancy) so you don't have awkward situations like a 2p coin being worth 4p in scrap value.
Money is an entirely fictional human creation, that is in no way connected to any real thing.
Now, you won't get taught that until you're about a year into economics at university, because people would get very upset with the realization that it's all monopoly money and is only worth what someone else will give you for it.
The best thing about crypto (IMHO) is it forces a bit of discussion as regards to what is money. Although there is a bit of the foamy mouthed "these magic beans are magic, those other beans aren't" rather than the more helpful observations. Like how there is considerably more money than stuff. You could buy *everything* in the world*, all the companies, all the land, all the land rights, all goods, everything that exists in the real world, for roughly one seventh of the money that currently exists. Exactly why this is the case is left up to the reader.
Oh, and if we re-distributed all the money equally, every person in the world would have roughly 750k USD each.
* in practise you couldn't, as prices would rise in response
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It is hard for me to have much sympathy here.
It seems to me that putting faith in the financial advice of a guy that has blown the vast majority of his earned wealth on supporting his posse, various poor investments, many many confidential payouts, fraudulent business managers, etc isn't the best idea. But at least he has the excuse of being repeatedly beat about the head for his miscues. What excuse do the bilked investors have?
Mayweather probably didn't have any involvement in this, one of his financial advisors cooked it up knowing that having a name people have heard of behind the ICO will help bring in the suckers. He probably didn't give any more thought to this than he would if his adviser told him "you're scheduled to do an ad for spaghetti sauce tomorrow morning"
I can sort of understand why people bought George Foreman grills: the man clearly thought a lot about food, and the technology was pretty well understood. This is not to say that Floyd Mayweather doesn't think a lot about money; but how well does he understand blockchain? (Nothing against boxers, by the way. I was astonished a couple of years ago to hear of people taking financial advice from the retired baseball player Lenny Dykstra.)
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