Agreed. I have now been asking this question for nearly a decade: what economic value does cryptocurrency deliver today? So far, I have found no good answer to that.
(Note that speculation does not create value; it at best transfers it from bet-winners to bet-losers. Crime seems to be the next-most-popular use case, and that is also generally net negative economically. And not also that the future isn't today. Which seems obvious, but every time I ask this I get a lot of fantasies about the future.)
That hasn't stopped an awful lot of people from raising money and launching ICOs for products that haven't worked and often couldn't possibly work. For example, see David Gerard's excellent ongoing dissection of Kodakcoin: https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/tag/kodakcoin/
No, its pretty predictable and preventable. People clamor over themselves to prove how "woke" they are when a woman CEO comes along and prove how totally not sexist they are.
When Theranos was first starting there was lots of solid critiques of why it was all a scam, and so much of that was deflected as "sexism" [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Theranos was bound to fail, and was bound to implode - not just because Holmes was a fraud, but because the wokeness of Silicon Valley was complicit in her fraud, but letting her deflect any and all criticism as sexism.
Criticising a fraud who happens to be a woman isn't sexist and we shouldn't let people get away with suggesting otherwise. Thats the only way to prevent this exact same scenario from happening again.
Was "wokeness" a factor in Juicero? Clinkle? There are dozens of these.
The common denominator is charisma and hubris on the part of the founder(s). Lots of investors go for that. I'd put the blame on the cult of the charismatic leader in business.
Juicero was an overpriced juicer. The people who bought it still got the machine and the juice - albeit DRM juice that could be squeezed by hand. There is zero fraud, just an overhyped product.
Theranos made fraudulent claims about their product, pressured themselves into the health care market, and violated hundreds of ethical guidelines. Not only were investors defrauded (oh well, its only money) - people used them in clinical scenarios and impacted actual healthcare patients. When people questioned these claims, the CEO publicly claimed criticism of her was sexist, and the media was complicit.
Sure Juicero was a fraud. The founder claimed (to the public, investors, employees, board members) that the pulp had to be cold pressed with thousands of pounds of pressure per square inch, so they developed a juicer to do that. Except it turned out you could "juice" the packets with your bare hands, and the results would not be that different. Why did he do that? Because if all users needed was a $20 manual roller press to juice the packets, there would be no specialized "DRM" juicer device, and no business model.
Yeah. I don't think it was as big a fraud as Theranos. But the amount of money spent, the level of self-promotion, the utter uselessness of their solution, and the suddenness of the collapse all make me think that they at best acted with utter disregard for the sort of concerns that keep sane entrepreneurs up at night. Did the CEO know it was a fraud? Hard to say. But that's not a question we ask of other frauds like anti-vaxxers, spirit mediums, and snake oil salesmen. Since we can't crack open people's minds and look, for me a standard of "knows or should have known" is generally good enough for me to call something a fraud.
It's not of the same magnitude of Theranos to be sure. And there is no consumer fraud now as they offered to fully refund all the juicers. I think the investors have a significant fraud claim against senior management who solicited them but:
a) Juicero is broke, and "piercing the corporate veil" is difficult and expensive.
b) It would show exactly how credulous the investors were, as well as their outstanding lack of initial and ongoing due diligence and oversight.
Definitely. I think B is why we don't see many fraud cases brought here. I doubt Theranos would have been exposed like this if they weren't working in a regulated space. Although doing big fraudulent deals with Walgreens and Safeway didn't help; as non-investors and publicly traded companies, they had less reason to just slink away quietly.
Theranos seems to have lasted quite a bit longer than Juicero, and I'm not aware of any criminal charges for Juciero's founders. (Never heard of Clinkle) So perhaps comparing the two isn't entirely fair.
Also, Juicero failed because of poor product/market fit and excessive price. Theranos had fantastic product market fit, it's just their product didn't function properly and relied on lying to their investors, their customers and the FDA.
UBeam is a really bad idea too. It "works" under controlled conditions, but it's horribly inefficient and would not be practical under regular conditions. It's more like Juicero than Theranos.
Juicero definitely didn't commit fraud or mislead their investors. I'm not familiar with Clinkle, but it doesn't sound like blatant fraud either. Theranos and UBeam are scams like BitConnect.
What? The first article is literally titled "Is Criticism Of Billionaire Elizabeth Holmes Sexist? Yes & No", implying at the least that some criticism is sexist.
The next article:
> While Holmes doesn’t go so far as to label it sexism, her message is clear: The story would have played out differently if she were a man.
The next article:
> "Elizabeth Holmes is a great example of maybe why the women are so frustrated. She is a woman entrepreneur who built a fabulous company, did great things for consumers and she got attacked,"
Every linked article says or implies that Holmes wouldn't have been criticised as harshly if she were a man. Which is pure whataboutism, especially given her fraud risked lived by being pushed into clinical settings when the she and the company knew that their claims were bunk.
> The first article is literally titled "Is Criticism Of Billionaire Elizabeth Holmes Sexist? Yes & No", implying at the least that some criticism is sexist
If you read the article, you would have seen that criticism of how she ran the company is not sexist. Criticism that incidentally says sexist things is.
> The story would have played out differently if she were a man.
Holmes isn't a journalist and has made many fraudulent claims. This doesn't support your claim.
> Elizabeth Holmes is a great example of maybe why the women are so frustrated. She is a woman entrepreneur who built a fabulous company, did great things for consumers and she got attacked,"
Again, this quote is from a Theranos investor, who has also made many fraudulent statements, not a journalist.
I note with interest how you don't justify your other links at all, which don't even obliquely support your claim.
implying at the least that some criticism is sexist.
And some has been, as the article pretty much demonstrates. That doesn't mean that any criticism of her as a fraud is sexist, as you implied people were saying in those articles.
The next article:
That's paraphrasing Holmes herself! Reporting on what she says does not mean the journalist agrees.
The next article:
He's a family friend of hers and an investor in the company; he has both a personal and a financial stake in it. That's not an example of "wokeness" from SV, but of someone trying to protect their investment.
Every linked article says or implies that Holmes wouldn't have been criticised as harshly if she were a man. Which is pure whataboutism
It's only whataboutism if used as a tactic to discredit all criticism, but from those articles, only Holmes herself and the investor/family friend seem to do that.
It's not whataboutism if pondered as issue in itself; Holmes is a fraud and deserving of criticism, and yet she can also be victim of sexism, and that can be worth talking about too.
It is, and I suspect the whole "let's help make her successful because she's a woman, that's a good rolemodel for STEM, etc." contributed to this mess.
As it turns out, in the real world your gender does not change your abilities to break the laws of physics.
