Recently mentioned:
Defi is a wilderness—just like early Bitcoin was a wilderness of scams, Ponzis, and children’s games, but with added VC corruption. Early Bitcoin was an obscene shitshow from pirateat40 to Gox, to name only a few of the most notorious early-Bitcoinland embarrassments that remind me of defi today. If you venture out into defi today, put on your waders and prepare to get knee-deep in bull-excrement.
I disagree, at least regarding Pirate@40, it was market manipulation which worked (for a while); pool a lot of BTC to one guy who makes whale splashes at the biggest exchange (at the time), at the expense of everyone else trading. When he went insolvent due to taking on more than he could chew (in profit payouts) his former backers cried ponzi.