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4) Now, LUNA/UST were bad, and ended badly! So did Theranos. But the core accusation against Holmes isn't that Theranos failed. Startups fail all the time. The accusation is that _she lied_.
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5) In particular, that she said that Theranos was doing specific things that it wasn't doing; the fraudulent behavior was her pretending to investors that one type of test was another. Luna is different.
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6) The LUNA/UST mechanism wasn't misrepresented--it was, in fact, very transparent. And, I think it was transparently going to falter at some point. Do Kwon obviously stood by it, morally and in terms of press, long after he should have backed off.
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7) But he didn't claim that UST was backed 1:1 by USD. He claimed, accurately, that it was backed by a bunch of volatile assets. It was very publicly clear that those assets might go down, and the rest followed. Again--I don't want to condone the behavior. But it's different.
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10) But most bad investments aren't ponzi schemes. Some are fraud, some are bad luck, and some are somewhere in between. Here are a set of investments that would have lost > 50% since the start of the year: 1) NFLX 2) LUNA 3) AMC 4) ARKK
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11) NFLX went up a lot and then down a lot, and is a real company. LUNA went up a lot and then down even more, and had a very transparent but also very bad problem. AMC went up a lot and then down a lot, because memes got more and less popular. ARKK is a combination of those.
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People are still shilling it. I think I must have blocked a good dozen today that weren't obvious scammers.
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That's pretty weak. I have no idea why you need to stress Do Kwon is not Theranos. It's completely beside the point. As you point out here, the marketing was misleading, and it caused great suffering. I went nowhere near it, but I worry that similar projects will kill crypto.
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Great point. Though it should be said that “In plain sight” bad is actually the more dangerous of the two esp if the delusion grows big enough.
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