This is Financial Advice (2023) is also excellent - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pYeoZaoWrA

Its about the fallout of the memestock craze and where the community ends up.

So I thought I had known most of that material, but I had somehow missed the entire thing about the mother-of-all-short-squeezes being a global financial apocalypse that brings down the entire system...

Which actually raises the interesting question: just how can you even entertain a belief that you'd somehow leverage billion-dollar profits in such a situation? I mean, I know it's completely divorced from reality. I can understand the appeal of the conspiracy theory, I can understand how they think they've found the one loophole that makes infinite money, I can understand the proof-by-contortionist-decoding-of-secret-messages. But not how you can even seriously think, in a world where you found the thread that will let you pull one over the big guys in a serious way, that the government--the people whom you believe to be colluding with the Big Them™ to screw you over--will willingly be held hostage by you in the grand climax and let you extort great gains rather than changing the rules of the game (which is literally their job). I mean, in standard apocalyptic literature, it's the role of God--a higher power not subject to the observable rules of the game--who plays the role of wreaking the final vengeance and rewarding the pious faithful; but here, in this theory, it's the bad guys who are supposed to wreak vengeance against themselves and reward their enemies for being faithful to the higher script.

The other thing is I think the video is still a bit premature; it was written soon after the bankruptcy of Bed, Bath & Beyond, so it doesn't have much to go on for how the movement evolved afterwards, and I would have liked to learn more about that.

I know what you mean, but we both know the how. The "I will be rich by the end of it" square is fixed, the route taken to that square will go by any path just barely plausible. If you point out one is impossible - that the Big Them will screw them over - well, the Bigger They In The Shadows will force them to follow The Secret Rules. Yeah, you and I wouldn't entertain this, but if one fixes the desired ending, then the contortions in the middle don't matter as much. "if not like this, then it will be that".

> "how can you even entertain a belief"

groupthink and in-group morality. The HODLers have a feeling of righteousness when they think about brining down the system

`Line Goes Up` was jaw-droppingly awesome, about the Venn diagram of crypto and scammers being (maybe) a circle :)

Another great resource for crypto news is Molly White's website:

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/

What's amazing to me is reading about what the crypto thieves and smart contract exploiters do with the funds they've taken. It seems common for a person who's managed to acquire $100K USD worth of ETH or Solana to then turn around and buy some NFTs with it.

I'm like: "Dude, you just had a great payday, now you get to ride off into the sunset with your ill-gotten gains." But either they are crazy, the world is crazy, or I'm going crazy. I don't understand it all.