Bitcoin Addiction Hospital

https://castlecraig.co.uk/treatment/behavioral-addictions/bitcoin-addiction-treatment

by IndrekR • 5 years ago

126 183 5 years ago

castlecraig.co.uk

shapefrog• 5 years ago

Castle Craig Hospital provides treatment for people addicted to trading, spread betting and the trading of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple & Litecoin. We treat these as forms of gambling addiction.

Quite right too.

WJW• 5 years ago

Seems reasonable. A lot of people involved in cryptocurrency seem to be trading way more often than is advisable when looking at the spreads (and thus exchange rake) involved. The exchange platforms certainly don't discourage extremely risky trading either, both by their interface design and by the level of leverage they offer. Finally, by providing it under the guise of "investing", which has a much better public image than "gambling", they provide it with a veneer of respectability. An ideal breeding ground for addicted behavior.

anonymoushn• 5 years ago

Exchange fees are different from spreads (and, in US venues, much larger than spreads)

Do people really place 100% taker orders?

qeternity2• 5 years ago

Yes, most people aren’t even aware of maker/taker structures or bid/offer spreads. Most people don’t really understand how markets work, especially in crypto which has self selected a lot of people who happily jump with both feet into something they don’t understand.

headmelted3• 5 years ago

When people try to convert me to Bitcoinology now I just smile and in my head I replace [shill token of the day] with “the ponies” as it saves me debating with them and we both get to leave with a smile on our face.

“[The ponies] keep making stellar returns year after year. It’s still early to make money on [the ponies]. [The ponies] are the future of wealth.” etc.

“[The ponies] are going to the moon” is my personal favourite, because what a nice thought that is.

Anyway, next time someone asks about cryptocurrency just tell them you already know it’s all about spacefaring horses and wish them well while you walk safely away.

ZeroGravitas• 5 years ago

The ponies analogy also brings to mind an old bit of folk wisdom: "You'll never meet a poor bookmaker"

a2tech2• 5 years ago

I was just discussing Bitcoin 'investing' with a client last week and one of his engineers overheard us and told us a friend of his (another fresh Lebanese immigrant) maxes out his credit cards on the first of the month buying bitcoin, then sells it on the last day of the month and pays off the credit card and pockets the difference. I just...had no response to that. It seemed so obviously dangerous and irresponsible that I couldn't believe a grown adult would do that.

AND THEN he told me about another friend who does the same thing--but with the tuition/living money his family scrapes together and sends him from Lebanon. To me, that was not only stupid, it was a staggering betrayal in trust. Imagine your entire family scrimping and scraping to get money together to send you to college in the US and then you just casually betting it on Bitcoin.

smabie• 5 years ago

I mean sure, that's a bad idea if you're making directional bets (probably), but you could do the same with delta neutral yield/farming strategies and it wouldn't be a bad idea imo. When the APR on stablecoins is >30%, it definitely makes sense to borrow as much as you can.

adminscoffee• 5 years ago

do you have money issues? yeah, unchecked consumerism is an addiction as well. how many people take on more work than they should but don't even get to enjoy the things they are working for? that's extremely unhealthy

headmelted3• 5 years ago

I mean, OK?

What’s that got to do with a clinic for gambling addiction?

DonHopkins5• 5 years ago

Rationalization and excuse making and attempting to make false equivalencies and whataboutisms to divert the argument away from Bitcoin's problems is another sign of shilling and gambling addiction.

mateuszf4• 5 years ago

They're not healing bitcoin addiction but trading addiction. You can just buy bitcoin and hold it as store of value / investment.

That's a significant difference. And a misleading title IMO.

enlyth• 5 years ago

That is literally in the first sentence on the website: "Castle Craig Hospital provides treatment for people addicted to trading, spread betting and the trading of cryptocurrencies..."

mateuszf4• 5 years ago

I'm talking about HN title. The real problem here is trading addiction, not bitcoin itself.

headmelted3• 5 years ago

You mis-spelled speculative tokens.

DonHopkins5• 5 years ago

They're also treating Bitcoin Shilling and Hyping and Rationalization and Excuse Making Addiction.

xiphias23• 5 years ago

I agree, and I’m a long time HODLer, but most men friends of mine can’t handle the emotional roller coaster of just holding (I’m a guy as well). What’s interesting is that my female friends are perfectly capable of doing it…..they invested less money, but their patience easily makes up for investing less money originally.

Chris20488• 5 years ago

How do you know it's higher patience rather than the lower stakes (wrt initial investment)?

Also, I'm not sure I agree with the "HODL" philosophy. btc has fallen a lot too, and the assumption "it'll all work out in the end (long term)" is exactly what can't ever be demonstrated (tomorrow never comes) until it all crashes, after which it's too late.

pjc509• 5 years ago

Gambling addiction does seem to be a modern problem; not just unregulated forex and options trading, and not just in bitcoin, but also gatcha games and good old fashioned sports betting.

Perhaps this is why Netflix Korean lethal gambling TV series Squid Game is so resonant in the West.

Reason077• 5 years ago

It's always been a problem. Religions and governments have historically banned or heavily regulated gambling, going back at least as far as Ancient Rome, Ancient China, and Ancient Egypt.

The modern problem, perhaps, is that now we have new forms of gambling (crypto! day trading! spread betting apps!) which are perhaps not as obvious, are not as visible in society, and fall outside of existing regulations?

vanderZwan• 5 years ago

The growing wealth inequality probably also produces more desperate people willing to risk it

lm28469• 5 years ago

We now have forms of gambling in videos games for the last 5-10 years, a good way to teach kids from the beginning, that probably doesn't help either

qeternity2• 5 years ago

I think the devastating problem today is that because investing and trading can be done responsibly, that all forms of investing and trading are ok even if it’s nothing more than gambling. People see a few success stories like DFV and it becomes a new American dream: get rich quick by shrewdly allocating a bit of capital.

But most people are just being fooled by randomness.

lotsofpulp2• 5 years ago

What is DFV?

bko2• 5 years ago

I can't find a meaningful distinction between gambling and investing.

It's not about knowledge / skill (picking index funds blindly is actually recommended form of investing these days)

It's not about odds (lottery with positive return is gambling, and insurance with negative return is not)

It's not about frequency (we're encouraged to contribute to 401k on every paycheck but not to play the lottery every week)

And to top it off, if you have a positive expected return on gambling (pro poker player, hedge fund manager), it stops being gambling either.

https://mleverything.substack.com/p/gambling-versus-investin...

danjac• 5 years ago

It comes with the adrenalin rush. Similar addiction some have to extreme sports, or people who shoplift even when they have plenty of money.

I heard that in Iceland after the 2008 financial crash wiped out the banks traffic accidents went way down, as there were fewer traders speeding when driving home from work, as they were still buzzing with the adrenaline rush while trading (could just be of course their cars were all impounded to pay off debts...)

tromp• 5 years ago

Their cryptocurrency FAQ is comical at times:

How do cryptocurrencies work?

All transactions are done on the internet. Each unit of cryptocurrency is made up of a unique computer codes that can be bought and sold.

Who runs cryptocurrencies?

Instead of a central (or national) bank there are thousands of IT experts, known as ‘miners’, whose job is to verify transactions and release more crypto-coins into the market. The Bitcoin miners use a system called blockchain.

They are sustained by their users, who believe the value of their digital currencies will increase (or at least remain the same).

elliekelly3• 5 years ago

“IT experts” is a pretty generous description.

artfulhippo• 5 years ago

Seems like a good ELI5 (or 75) to me.

LightG• 5 years ago

Good. Makes sense. Much of the speculative narrative around bitcoin has been pure gambling and it resembles a cultish sickness.

qwerty4561273• 5 years ago

I once tried some binary options just for fun. Crypto were the worst tickers to bet on. At the same time crypto seems among the best assets for the classic "buy on lows, hold forever" strategy. Why does anybody bother betting/scalping on crypto?

xiphias23• 5 years ago

I did it as well, but it was really a bad decision…..they are calling me from UK number with an Indian accent with ,,great investment possibilities’’ all the time and I can’t unsubscribe from their list.

qwerty4561273• 5 years ago

I just change my phone number every couple of years and never answer unexpected calls. I've also done some research before choosing the platform and chose what was supposed to be the best. They never called me, they just email me regularly begging me to withdraw the funds I have left (but I just hate KYC passionately and don't want to bother uploading the documents they require). I wish there were a simple buttons to donate everything to charities.

qwerty4561273• 5 years ago

By the way, didn't the UK come up with their analogue to the GDPR after leaving the EU?

shimonabi2• 5 years ago

This needs to be in every hospital. I know so many potential patients. Just last week a coworker told me he considers people who don't believe in the future of crypto dumb. It's almost unimaginable to him that a smart person would refuse to buy into crypto.

It's the same type of people that would be hawking pyramid schemes two decades ago.

pjc509• 5 years ago

I do worry that the Great Filter for current Western society will be "too much of the country gets involved in pyramid-ish schemes" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_Civil_War

(the 2008 mortgage crisis almost reached that level and has actually done long term damage to the political system!)

palijer• 5 years ago

Yeah, the whole thing just has me thinking of the South Sea Bubble.

Chris20488• 5 years ago

crypto-currencies in general, or blockchain/PoW implementations specifically?

shimonabi2• 5 years ago

That week he was hawking the Helium blockchain. Supposedly his nephew buys some expensive LoRa nodes so he will reap future rewards when more people will have such hardware. Now that's a pyramid scheme if I ever heard of one.

mihaic8• 5 years ago

I feel more strongly than ever that trading should be strictly regulated and not permitted to the general population. It's framed as an equalizer, but it ends up moving more money from the middle to the upper class.

I don't think anybody wants to return to haggling for piece of fruit they buy from the supermarket, yet somehow many of my friends are regular office worker that feel they have an edge over the highest paying industry in the world.

samhw8• 5 years ago

This is one of the truest things I've read in this thread. Many people would feel differently if it were easy to visualise and see how much money is siphoned off from Main St to Wall St. Dumb money flows up to smart money. I've seen it from all angles while working in fintech.

I can count the number of people I've met who genuinely beat the smart money, with no formal training, on the fingers of one foot. (The one guy who would maybe fit into that category was a physicist who was formerly a professor at Harvard, so still hardly the kind of person you were talking about.)

throwdecro3• 5 years ago

The only "smart money" is "other people's money".

The problem is that ordinary people are replicating the strategies that professional traders use, without realizing professional traders bet other people's money, keep the profits, let their customers eat the losses, and reboot at-will with fresh "other people's money" when they go bust.

iSnow3• 5 years ago

Very true.

People used to see working as a normal part of life, and used to invest part of their salary in solid funds to retire on those investments later. Those in well-paying jobs expected to retire on a bigger amount than those in less well paid jobs.

Nowadays, people seem to view the idea of working as an insult and want to retire in their 30's on some insane gambling profits, both in the /r/wsb community, in the FI/RE community and the bitcoinists.

I do wonder what caused this attitude change over the last 10y or so.

mihaic8• 5 years ago

Agree, this shift in attitude might be a response to how poorly paid regular jobs are and how unfair the system is -- in practice and in perception. It's hard to keep focused when all you see on social media is superficiality being rewarded.

For the system to be rigged in favor of the ultra-rich, you'll need a army of enforcers, the influencers, the lawyers, even the developers that are "just doing tech".

throwdecro3• 5 years ago

It's possible that gambling for profits or having a soul-crushing workaday job are both undesirable ways to live.

BeFlatXIII• 5 years ago

People have lost the optimism that working hard will get you ahead. The FI/RE community still has a modicum of that ethos, but they view hard work as a necessary nuisance that should be finished ASAP.

bondarchuk2• 5 years ago

As long as a poor person can buy a 60k car on finance with 10k down, it would be hard to justify limiting that poor person from trading stocks with 5k and driving a 5k beater. And it would be even harder to justify this as something for their own good.

mihaic8• 5 years ago

Maybe they shouldn't be able to buy that 60k car with credit card debt? If you're also proposing that the entire financial system needs to be redesigned to minimize leveraging and stop the insane focus on growth, I agree.

renewiltord4• 5 years ago

Always fascinating to me that people want to take away people’s liberties for their own good. Somehow, this authoritarian streak persists despite being the source of constant human suffering.

mihaic8• 5 years ago

Some liberties have always been taken away in any society: you cannot kill or steal as you please for instance. There is always a need to figure out a good balance between personal liberties and the greater common good.

Gambling with your savings might seem like a personal choice, but in the end there will be bailouts that I will have to pay for. You might not agree with where I draw the line, but ignoring that there has to be line is putting your head in the sand and ignoring reality.

Chris20488• 5 years ago

Somehow, this authoritarian streak persists despite being the source of constant human suffering

Do you have any examples? The classic "authoritarian" human suffering example is the Nazis, or communist Russia - and I don't think either of those claimed to take away liberties for the sake of "their own good".

bluecalm2• 5 years ago

You don't need an edge over the smartest people in the world to beat the market. Some opportunities are too small for big players. Some are too risky (if you manage a safe rich/old people fund your goals are different than someone who wants to maximize the EV). Yet there are opportunities which a lot of people miss because of the bubble they are in (some obvious ones from recent years are AMD and Cloudflare). One way or another why not let people invest in what they believe in. Banning people from purchasing or selling equity in a business sounds extreme.

throw1234651234• 5 years ago

Or, you know, ensure people get a proper education.

inkblotuniverse• 5 years ago

Restricting shareholding to the upper class? Based

mihaic8• 5 years ago

No, I meant banning speculating the stock market. Limiting the number of investments the average guy can make at 2 or 3 per year for instance, so they put into index funds or if they really care one special stock. If there were a will to stop the gambling I think ways could be found. The saddest thing is that the vocal majority is the middle class that is seeing good returns now, while never considering how the massive wealth transfer is affecting our society.

lottin2• 5 years ago

People should definitely be required to pass an investor knowledge test before they're allowed to invest. This is simple common sense.

padolsey• 5 years ago

It's been interesting to see bitcoin and blockchain migrate from tech infrastructure to the mainstream. I had a chat to an electrician recently who lost an apprentice because they wanted to go 'all in' on trading crypto. Electricians and other tradespeople are in short supply here in the UK and he just couldn't understand why someone would forgo a solid career for something so flakey. He felt he'd lost this apprentice to a cult. Just one anecdote but it's interesting how similar the furor of crypto is to that of religious dogma, with many people claiming prophetic foresight, and going all in on the dogma both to self-rationalize their risk-taking and for FOMO. There is, as well, a lot of economical turbulence in peoples' lives at the moment, meaning they're more likely to turn to gambling and risk-taking.

samhw8• 5 years ago

He felt he'd lost this apprentice to a cult.

I think he was right. My criterion for whether someone's in a cult is that eerie feeling talking to them, where they get angry at any challenge, they can never quite seem to explain why they're as invested (metaphorically and literally) as they are, and so forth. It's that sense that they themselves don't know why they do it, and there's a lot of emotional pathology that goes into shutting off from the outside world and protecting their obsession from reality. That absolutely typifies Bitcoin/crypto obsessives I've met.

0x0000000016• 5 years ago

My best friend was in a famous cult half his life. That's nothing like a cult.

He had unlimited money ($25k a month was nothing) and freedom to do anything he wanted for 15 years. He was never harmed. The organization collapsed as the elders passed away partially due to the rule of no proselytizing so no new members.

edit: they had about $50M split between 6 people near the end. I don't really know why more people don't do this: register a religious organization, require all members to assign all assets and money to the organization, work together for the rest of your life building your wealth tax free and watch how quick your wealth amplifies as you acquire properties and make investments.

acdha3• 5 years ago

I think it also highlights the damage of a trend we’ve seen since the 1980s where even normal people see it as something of a failure if you’re not fabulously rich. That’s certainly not novel, of course, but I think it’s accelerated with widespread media representation of wealthy lifestyles as the goal and especially breezing past things like where people started from or whether they flamed out a few years later. There were a lot of different forms (“Bill Gates was a college dropout” fluff or the dotcom millionaires day-traders in the 90s - usually ignoring how many of these guys started wealthy, real estate speculation in the 2000s, the un-Christian beyond parody Prosperity Gospel, ongoing reduction of job security for many industries, etc.) but I think they’ve resulted in an unusually high percentage of people who have both a high expectation of what “normal” looks like and no realistic path to get there.

That’s a ripe field for recruitment into risky gambles like cryptocurrency and the slow burn aspect means it’ll be reinforced by the first rounds who do in fact get wealthy, at least on paper.

agumonkey• 5 years ago

Religion and superstition are terms that came to mind when I started walking there.

It's actually fascinating, neurologically, even if a bit morbidly so.

chemmail• 5 years ago

I think this shows how bad society is nowdays. Instead of looking at jobs as a career, it now feels like being a slave to the job.

I am lucky enough to do what I love, and have a cache of coins so i don't really need to work anymore. But what would I do all day?

iSnow3• 5 years ago

Does anyone else see those excessive "crypto dudes" around in their social circle? They seem to eat, breath and excrete Bitcoins day in, day out.

I can't understand why otherwise intelligent people are sucked into some cult-like gambling, wasting their lives away and talking about the upcoming disruption of the financial system in much the same way as QAnon idiot talk about the "Great awakening".

During my lifetime, some cultish obsessions made the round, but seems to me that "always on" social media has poured a lot of gas on the fire.

sseagull• 5 years ago

I do. Some anyway.

I have seen some very smart acquaintances start talking about how bitcoin will replace the dollar or become the reserve currency of the world in just a few years.

It really does feel like a cult or something. It’s so far removed from reality I don’t know where to even begin.

brianwawok2• 5 years ago

* that's nice *

Goes back to holding index funds for 30 years.

Time will tell who was smart and who is crazy I suppose.

GVIrish• 5 years ago

When you think about it, the behavior isn't all that different from the way MLM converts act. MLM true believers would tell you it's the future of commerce or something and that it'll provide them financial independence or early retirement.

Bitcoin and Ethereum are actually making people money so it's different than the average MLM experience, but that makes the fervor all the more intense. Then there's all the shitcoins out there that people have lost money on.

OhSoHumble• 5 years ago

I know a couple of dudes who are really into NFT. It really does come across as a cult-like culture with odd terminology and a half-baked understanding of the technology behind it.

EL_Loco• 5 years ago

I'd say over 90% of people who bought cryptocurrencies have at best a half-baked understanding of the technology behind it. OTOH, you could have no understanding of the tech inside microcomputers in the late 70's and still think it was a good investment, if you had an idea of its potential uses.

a2tech2• 5 years ago

It seems almost like its always guys, and the way they talk sounds exactly like the Amway/Avon ladies that my mom was always around when I was a kid.

geerlingguy• 5 years ago

Agreed; especially surrounding the current NFT craze, I notice a lot of people I wouldn't expect to fall into it suddenly have weird monkey profile pictures (or some other thing that is totally different than the pictures they've had for years), and they start posting only about their particular flavor of crypto incessantly.

Majromax2• 5 years ago

I can't understand why otherwise intelligent people

Intelligence isn't prophylactic against conspiracy theories, and crypto-cultism has all of the major features. It offers an alternative worldview where global elites are engaged in a massive conspiracy to keep the little people down, but with one weird trick the enlightened can stick it to the Man. Take fintech out of it and you're looking at a cyberpunk novel.

Crypto cults are technology based, so it strokes the ego of cultists already in technology fields: they're superior because of their existing skills and expertise.

Finally, crypto trading has indeed made some people quite rich, and they're happy to evangelize. Doing so works for Amway and other "don't call it a pyramid" schemes, and the mass delusion of cryptocurrency doesn't even have a living board of directors to point to as the ultimate extractors of value.

emerged• 5 years ago

People who set their primary goal to making money and being on the crest of a wave often just can’t resist. I was invited on a call for a new crypto related project and talking to these people is so freaking strange. So many red flags and irrational reasoning, clearly driven by this desperate greed and fear of missing out.

Lots of those people have absurd amounts of money now. But I simply couldn’t live in imaginary world every day just to make money. It repulses me.

nathias• 5 years ago

There is a small percent of people susceptible to gambling and instead of helping them you 'solve' this problem by making the profits go to the government. Every engineer should feel embarassed by supporting this.

greenail• 5 years ago

It strikes me that there is a link between mainstream popularity of crypto and the massive liquidity and artificially low interest rates. The smart players are using the transparency to do high frequency arbitrage. This is one of the rare instances where I think regulation is helpful.

betwixthewires• 5 years ago

One thing to keep in mind is that there's a fundamental difference between gambling and speculating on assets, cryptocurrency or otherwise. With gambling, the payout odds and real odds of a game are known, and you have to pay per play, which means a guaranteed loss rate. With speculation, no money is actually lost in the process, only when you've decided to end it, and "turns" do not have defined terms.

This might sound like a trivial difference but it is not. You actually can make money speculating.

Many of the behavioral patterns though are the same. People do get addicted to speculating and trading, and mostly with negative consequences, particularly if they do not learn as they go and rely on pseudo superstitious beliefs and truisms, which most traders do.

hirvi74• 5 years ago

I find it odd how so many of the comments here are attacking Bitcoin, other cryptocurrencies, day-trading, and other forms of gambling/speculation/investing.

It reminds me of a quote from some comedian I heard many moons backs that went something like:

It's funny when you quit drinking -- people always ask you, "Why did you quit drinking?" or "How come you do not drink anymore?" But why does no one ever ask why you drank in the first place?

That quote seems to lineup well with various discussions in this thread. What causing more and more people to go down this road? Personally, I think this is a subtle, yet massive, cry for help.

It seems like this is the only way out for so many people(or so they think), and that is what breeds the cult-like mentality. I wouldn't care about investing as much as I currently do, if my future did not literally rely on it. I do not make enough money that I can throw my money into a savings account, and it will be enough to retire on. I only have one choice if I want to retire one day, and that is to invest. I am mainly an index fund investor, and I still fear that even that is not enough.

When you are, more or less, forced to live in a rat-race, your only options are to traverse the maze and hope the cheese is still there if/when you make it to the end. And if that is case, I don't blame the other rats for trying to chew and naw their way attempting to escape/shortcut the maze.

Do I invest in cryptocurrencies? Yes. Do I believe in any of them have true utility or provide solutions for real problems? No. I invest in them because I find it a fun little game. I am not going to get rich on them or anything, but it gives me something to do when Fantasy Hockey / NHL is in its offseason. I can see why people get high on the 'hopium' though -- there isn't much to be hopeful for anymore.

Bitcoin Addiction Hospital

Related Stories