Why My Faith in Terra Increased AFTER the Attack on Luna

[Hyperion]

@yd19

For over a year now, I posited that if there is actually an anti-establishment crypto project, it will come under attack by the establishment to destroy competition and make people beg for regulation. This was laughed off then but is exactly what occurred with Terra.

Nice theory. I thought somewhat similarly, in broad outlines. (I do not comment either way on the remainder of your post.) Now, I must ask: If you think that way, where were you during the crash?

This is where I was, when Terra was going down, down, down:

Terra is important. That’s why I just nearly spent my last dollar on LUNA

Hello, Lunatics! At a moment when I am personally in dire financial distress, I just bought some LUNA. It wasn’t much. A paltry handful. I am almost bled dry. But I had to buy some LUNA. Then, I spent a few hours searching for more money that I can afford to risk on a binary “great opportunity, or goes to zero—either/or” basis: You are now under severe attack, and you may not survive. Then, I realized that moral support is just as important, and I should stop by your forum. This isn’t a…

I was 1000% pro-Terra. When they were collapsing, I wanted to support what I perceived as “an anti-establishment crypto project… under attack by the establishment”. I put my money where my mouth is.

On May 11, I wrote:

@Hyperion

And this attack on you decisively confirms my instincts: Terra/Luna is important. If you are not being attacked on a grand scale, then you are not doing anything important—you are not doing anything that could make a real difference in the world. On the flipside, I will set this as a benchmark for myself: If I am ever attacked with the same resources as now being brought to bear against Terra, then I will declare my life a resounding success. It will have meant I did something truly important.

With my personal resources almost totally drained by the market crash, I rode LUNA down from around $8 all the way down to $0.000003. At a moment when I was financially desperate, I took on new debt that I could not afford—I borrowed money to throw it into LUNA, as almost everyone else was fleeing.

I knew full well that it could go to zero. I did it anyway. And I got my friends to invest, too—Bitcoin maximalists who despised Terra, I persuaded to buy LUNA! Because I put my money where my mouth is. (And theirs, unfortunately.)

Did you?

I have spoken here to some old LUNA holders, who DCAed down in the crash—pushing in more money, as the LUNA they already had was losing >99.9999% of its value. So, if you’ve been holding LUNA for a long time, the same question still applies as for you.

You talk big now. But if you had matched those words with your money during the worst of the crash, then you soon discovered that, among other things:

1. You are widely maligned here as a predatory opportunist gambler—because you paid good money for LUNA at fair market price in honest transactions, at a time when it looked like LUNA was going to [the word “zero” is CENSORED when it follows the words “going to”; see below].

2. Terra is a centralized project, which Do Kwon rules by fiat. You want to fight “the establishment”? The Terra establishment consists of DK, TFL, and corrupted stake operators.

3. The UST peg that you wanted to support with your money on the LUNA side can be merrily broken by the Terra establishment. UST holders get a handful of volatile altcoins as a booby prize—largely locked, as an extra slap in the face.

4. Stealing from new investors is acceptable, so that the Terra establishment can prioritize its and its insiders’ investments.

5. A disturbing proportion of the Terra community lacks the principles of blockchain immutability that guide Bitcoin, Ethereum, and every other major coin. Not all of them: The community is now split between the principled opponents of the hardfork, and the greed-blinded Twitter-buyers for whom “crypto” means “get rich quick”.

6. The Terra establishment believes that it can hide the nature of its project, by removing doubleplusungood crimethink words from its official edition of the Terra Forum Newspeak Dictionary.

(Among many others. Those are only three four choice examples. That last was added when trying to make this post! The moderation staff here are spoiled children playing a game, not adults moderating a rational discussion.)

That list could be continued. I believe it suffices to make my point.

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Now you, @yd19, signed up May 15—after May 13, when Do Kwon had first announced his initial plan to are-you-gee UST holders and new LUNA investors. You’re carrying water for Terra, painting some false heroic portrait of them when they are violating every blockchain principle to do a centralized money-grab.

Cui bono?

Not to spin a conspiracy theory here, but one might be reasonably suspicious of your motives.

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Coda:

For someone who talks the “anti-establishment” talk, you seem awfully focused on CEX KYC, CEX TOS, and what you think those who attacked the peg should not have been allowed to do. What would you say if they had done it all anonymously on DEXes?

Do you believe in permissionless money, or not? I came here for decentralized, permissionless money which, in principle, cannot be controlled by CEX nonsense.

(Yes, I bought all of my LUNA on DEXes—even though I was paying 50–70% above CoinGecko’s listed rate due to lack of LUNA liquidity.)