I didn't know about Yotta, and looked it up …

Adam Moelis told CNBC in June 2024 that 85,000 Yotta customers, with a combined $112 million in deposits, could not access their funds.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yotta_Technologies

Eep!

YC is a scam mill, always has been. Every now and then one of those scams turns into a real business. It’s an effective model.

> despite misleading promises of FDIC insurance

I never really understood why people thought this was misleading. FDIC insurance would insure against the underlying bank failing, not Yotta or their fintech partners.

I never saw any marketing material claiming that Yotta (or their fintech partner: Synapse) was a licensed bank.

This is like a fractal scam, you've got gambling against the house (already a scam) with crypto (so there's no regulators to stop them rigging the games) and then instead of waiting for statistics to take their course they just run away with everyone's money.

Without regulation and enforcement many people will give the buyer less and less until they give the buyer nothing and it winds up a scam.

The optimal strategy in a resource acquisition game with no rules is usually just to kill all the other players. This results in really bad nash equilibria where everyone is dead.

I think about this as entropic decay - the lowest energy state of a social system (Hobbes' state of nature).

Lucky it is possible to create social and economic systems that use cooperation to produce better individual and group utility (dissipative structures). But there is a particular arm of politics that is currently dismantling these to feast on their cores.

Because on average individuals trust each other and a scam usually presents itself as a bit cheaper or a bit better enough that it acts as an attractor.

Scams definitely seem to be more entropic than honest enterprise.

Seems like a recent thing IMO. Social media has caused some people's perception of reality to get so far out of whack that they think being denied Ferrari and a beach house is an act of persecution, and they are willing to go to any lengths go right that wrong.

Point taken, but USPS asks for $2 for an address change for verification.

It would be very simple to build such a thing if you could analyze everyone's payments. With total surveillance, you can have total safety! Why would you want privacy when you could have safety instead?

The ironic part is that the government already tracks all payments everywhere in realtime and ingests them into a huge database. They could provide such a threat intelligence feed but that would tip their hand and remind the public that they have precisely zero financial privacy even if they're not suspected of a crime.

Hope that part of the collective action, is coming up with very robust hosting.

It’s likely that these MVMs would become a fairly significant target.

have you just described web3 / blockchain ...