If I have this straight, Brock Pierce is one of the people running tether.
This means that potentially one of histories biggest ponzi schemes is being run by someone who has an entire documentary (An Open Secret) about them running a child prostitution ring and whose roommate was convicted of child prostitution and was also named in the related civil suit.
Pierce also has (had?) big ties with Steve Bannon, the dude who played World of Warcraft, came to the conclusion that there’s an absolutely excessive amount of angry lonely men in the world with absolutely nothing in their life but videogames & hate, & proceeded to get a little bag of $60,000,000 from Goldman Sachs(?) in an attempt to exploit these men via large scale real world trading of in-game currency. I believe he moved to Hong Kong to try to start a slave farm of ultra-poor Chinese to acquire said in-game currency to then sell it to aforementioned angry lonely men that had some trickle of $USD to be reaped.
It’s all kind of insane if you go down the entire rabbithole surrounding these people, though sadly, also a bit undeniably hilarious. A lot of money is to be made with sufficient hatred & absolute lack of morality.
You don’t find anything interesting about one of the main people behind tether, one of the shadiest enigmas in crypto, having formerly been one of the main people within a company founded around real world trading & exploitation of virtual in game currencies? Where they literally tried to create slave farms to obtain these in game currencies?
Reeks of a lifelong grifter. If you can’t put the 2+2 together of a lifelong grifter & immoral individual being at the top of tether…
Anyways, I patiently await the collapse of it all as somebody who’s been around since the near beginning of blockchain cryptocurrency.
> Where they literally tried to create slave farms to obtain these in game currencies?
None of this was convicted.
Lots of people are accused of all types of things. Some people get convicted of stuff they didn't do, but this happens much less often than wild accusations.
When things related to things are so easy to find with a pretty serious paper trail behind it, I can only imagine your saying this to try to defend the perpetrator in some way.
I don’t think that’s the case, so I digress.
Company IGE tried to make virtual in-game currency sweatshops. IGE was headed by Pierce & Bannon. This is something that happened and there is not much more to it.
If you’re simply unfamiliar with MMORPG & related videogames - I can perhaps understand. In short - I assure you, there is a near endless amount of people who shove very large amounts of $USD into virtual trinkets in these games. Always have been, hence their exploitation since the early 2000’s
Employing people at market rates is not remotely comparable to slavery, and it's pretty gross to equate them (indeed it likely does far more to help lift those people out of poverty than any number of more reputable charities). Pouring scorn on what sounds like normal legitimate business and equating it to fraud or child prostitution undermines the point you're trying to make.
Not to minimize the evils of child sex abuse at all, but I think many more rich and powerful people are involved with children than one might imagine. Just look at the number of people who were associated with Epstein, or the various scandals in the British government in the 1980s and 2010s.
This means that potentially one of histories biggest ponzi schemes is being run by someone who has an entire documentary (An Open Secret) about them running a child prostitution ring and whose roommate was convicted of child prostitution and was also named in the related civil suit.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3677412/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TAnAYa8gas