from Hacker News

Yotta Bank and the Problem with Fintech (Patrick Boyle) [video]

by mxschumacher on 12/1/24, 1:52 PM with 61 comments

• by dylan604 on 12/1/24, 3:14 PM

  I've seen a few articles on the Yotta/Synapse situation that focus on the people that have lost money while completely ignoring any of the prize-linked type of setup. The people are quoted as being told it was FDIC insured, it was a normal bank, etc. Then the articles describing the prize drawings started to surface.

  Was the prize-linked stuff part of the fine text or are people twisting the story as an attempt to lessen their shame? I don't trust any of the fintech apps at all, but I've never looked at any of their sites to see how blatant or how hidden their "oh yeah, we're not a real bank" details are.

• by daft_pink on 12/1/24, 2:57 PM

  I don’t really understand how the company that’s supposed to be holding your money vaporized 99.8% of it. I watched that video, but I don’t really get it.

• by from-nibly on 12/1/24, 5:28 PM

  Weird that people are only focusing on whether or not the consumers justifiably lost their money.

  What about the blatant fraud? Yotta was being fradulent by saying their funds were FDIC insured, and I have a really hard time believing that synapse wasn't involved in fraud/embezzlement. Keeping records was their only job and they didn't do it at all.

  At the very minimum they told their customers (yotta ) they said they would keep track of the money and they didn't. That feels pretty clear to me.

  People don't "deserve" to be lied to. No one "deserves" to have their money stolen. That's the kind of thing rapists say about people they rape.

  Also

  Fraud is bad. Technically not fraud doesn't buy you any good boy points, it just keeps you from losing lawsuits.

  Whether or not the consumers "should have known" is pretty irrelevant to whether or not people got scammed. But if that makes everyone feel better about the high amount of scaming that goes on in SV, then do what you are going to do.

  /rant

• by pkkkzip on 12/1/24, 5:49 PM

  the difference between yotta and coinbase is the time it takes for users to lose their net worth. For Yotta it took over a year. For Coinbase, it will take over a decade.

• by TwoNineFive on 12/7/24, 7:34 AM

  Terrible video.

• by mxschumacher on 12/1/24, 3:10 PM

  pretty impressive how Marc Andreessen gets so many basic facts wrong and how Rogan's platform then blasts this misinformation out to its tens and millions of followers

• by iancmceachern on 12/1/24, 5:02 PM

  I didn't know rap channels were popular on HN

• by wqtz on 12/1/24, 2:47 PM

  23 minute video. If Patrick Boyle follows the hamburger rule of content, his video is mostly just bread.

  I will wait for the Plain Bagel video.