• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

      This goes all the way back to '98, when the original slew of start-ups gobbled up investments only to flop a few years later. Web2.0 had its own bubble burst starting in 2008, taking down a host of the early social media ecosystems (MySpace, Yahoo, and Geocities, most famously). Huge upfront investments with the promise of explosive ROI that took far longer to materialize (or simply never did).

      A great deal of the valuation in these firms was built on lies and bullshit - misreported user activity, overly optimistic monetization estimates, and outright accounting fraud.

      2020 gave us what looked like was going to be a third Crypto bust wave (FTX being the big industry leader leading the charge). But the pivot to AI appears to have bailed a lot of the bigger investors out. We’ll see how long that lasts.

      • josefo@leminal.space
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        2 days ago

        Oh, I think I understand your point, but we do have different definitions of what a scam is.

        For me, if the guys getting fucked are capitalists or huge investing firms that were trying to leverage their money to make more money just from speculation and not being actually involved, that’s not a scam, that justice. Economic bubbles happen because big money guys are trying to gamble the system to start with, so karma.

        In the other hand, crypto scams are more close to a conman selling snake oil to the uneducated masses, that for me is a full fledged scam.