For The Guardian, Sirin Kale writes about the amateur investors financially ruined by the crypto crash: 'They couldn't even scream any more. They were just sobbing'
They gather on Telegram to let out howls of grief and short, sharp shrieks of pain. "Eeeeeeee!"yowls a young woman. "Waahahahah," roars a man in a deep baritone. A third person wails like a baby. These are victims of the cryptocurrency bloodbath, 3,315 of whom have assembled in a "Bear Market Screaming Therapy Group" group to vent their anguish. "I had a few people lamenting and crying," says the group's founder, a 30-year-old cryptocurrency investor who gives only his first name, Giulio. "I decided not to ban them. I felt bad. They weren't even able to scream any more. They were just sobbing.
I always think of the Super Bowl ads. Those ads cost $7m for thirty seconds and the new investors got thoroughly hosed after buying in. The only real question is whether the VCs consciously used crypto and its evangelical culture as devices to structure a legal pyramid scheme (like multi-level marketing, with cryptoassets attached to the pyramid instead of spandex leggings) or just sort of reinvented pyramid schemes out of crypto's functional principles in the same way that they naively "invent" juicers or mass transit.
