Thanks for the clarification of your position. I agree that we're probably not as far apart in position as I initially assumed.

Still, I'll point out that while members of group B don't go out and say "dark pools are wonderful!", they often instead say "Look how awesome we are at improving price discovery! And the American stock market is a model for the world and totally transparent and you should totally invest in it! And a market maker and a hedge fund owned by the same people would totally not collude together for financial advantage! And in fact, here are a bunch of specific stocks that you specifically should invest in RIGHT NOW that are surely on an uphill trajectory (that we coincidentally happen to have invested in previously so that we can benefit from your bringing the price up)! And by all means, don't, under any circumstances, buy any of the stocks that we recommend against (and have sold short or have 'put' options on, and so would be hurt if the price went up instead of down)! You would for sure lose all your money and doom yourself to eternal torment if you did that! And DEFINITELY don't ask who pays the bills on this cable news station or newspaper or website, and what stocks they happen to be invested in! We are totally, for sure, interested in you making lots of money, and we have provided this free financial advice to you out of the goodness of our hearts."

It's not an accident that TV personalities like Jim Cramer keep recommending stocks that subsequently tank, yet they manage to keep their jobs. Even after having previously admitted to doing blatantly illegal things on behalf of former hedge fund employers. (Note that he has tried hard to scrub that video from the internet, or replace it with a more innocuous one while keeping the URL (and hence YouTube comments) from the old one, but the original video can still be found in a few places.)

The thing that's different about Crypto is not the existence of propaganda -- it's the distribution channel for that propaganda. Manipulation of mainstream stocks goes on over mainstream channels (cable news, financial sections in major newspapers, etc.). Manipulation of crypto goes on over "alternate" channels, like social media, since crypto investors consider themselves "alternate" and internet-based, and don't pay that much attention to mainstream channels.

I would point out, however, that in many cases group A and group B are the same people and companies. For instance, many members of group B which are underwater due to excessive short selling (e.g. of meme stocks that inconveniently rose instead of falling, leaving them no opportunity to close their positions (not just temporarily "cover" them with swaps)) are trying to make up the difference by loudly selling crypto get-rich-quick schemes to hapless investors and doing repeated pump-and-dump schemes in a less regulated environment, so that they can then use the proceeds to try to buy more time to delay the reckoning on their short positions in the normal stock market. They also fight the SEC and other government regulators when the government tries to regulate crypto as it does ordinary stocks, because the very fact that crypto is unregulated and hence easier to cheat people is part of what makes it so attractive to them.

They would probably prefer to be quieter about it, but they're in desperate straits, and they need as many people as possible to invest in crypto as soon as possible, so that they can survive a possible future margin call. So the massive advertising push to get new people invested in crypto continues.

According to current SEC Chairman Gary Gensler, approximately 90% of retail investor stock trades are currently being routed to dark pools. (Note: "Retail investors" is stock trading by individuals like you and me, as opposed to hedge funds and big institutions.)

Ninety.

Percent.

Do you suppose that brokers, market makers, etc. are doing this just because they are trying to get the very, very best prices for those retail investors, prices that they can't get on lit markets?

I don't think so.

Investors have been complaining to the SEC in large numbers on recent SEC proposals, to try to counterbalance the influence of hedge funds and other large companies on the SEC's rulemaking. For instance:

https://www.sec.gov/rules/peti...

In response, Gensler is trying to rein in the practice of using dark pools and some other practices like Payment for Order Flow.

That's part of why articles are now appearing in publications like Forbes calling for him to be replaced or fired.

(Coincidentally, most financial media (CNBC, Motley Fool, etc.) is now mostly owned by hedge funds. Do you suppose they invested in financial media because they want to be fully sure that financial media presents a "fair and balanced" portrayal of the market, including their own investments and quasi-legal or illegal strategies to warp things in their own favor? After all, hedge fund managers are known to be the most altruistic of people, right? (Just ask them!))

Dark pool trading is now routinely being used to manipulate stock prices for reasons that have nothing to do with price discovery based on fundamentals. Other shady or illegal market practices (e.g. strategic fail-to-delivers on stock trades, naked shorting, brokers using their customers' shares without permission as collateral for loans, broker internalization of share purchases, bribing congresspeople to promote regulations that favor big businesses over individual traders, etc.) are also occurring on a regular basis. Congresspeople who start to investigate these issues tend to find themselves suddenly short on campaign funds, while their primary opponents are suddenly flush with cash. Some congresspeople are so heavily funded by hedge funds that they are actively campaigning for Wall Street to be LESS transparent.

If you are not aware this is happening, I urge you to educate yourself.

Watching this movie and this movie would be a good place to start.

Some of Jon Stewart's recent work, like the show discussed by this article are also quite informative.

I think this article is a good read. It's a bit old, but it describes a lot of what has been going on:

https://upsidechronicles.com/2...

The TLDR is that a lot of short sellers are still very much on the hook for the shares that they eventually owe to Gamestop retail investors (they "covered" but didn't "close" their short positions and instead hid them in swaps and other financial instruments so they wouldn't appear in reports), and those short sellers are very, very eager to pretend that this is not the case. The shorting hedge funds are also, in many cases, owners or major contributors to financial media (Marketwatch, Motley Fool, CNBC, Seeking Alpha, Bloomberg, etc.) and have been actively using those platforms to disparage and discourage any and all investment in Gamestop. They have also inundated various social media platforms (Reddit, etc., even very likely Slashdot) with bots and bought accounts who are paid (presumably by PR companies) to disparage Gamestop at every opportunity, and/or constantly promote AMC as an supposedly preferable "alternative" to GME despite the fact that the short squeeze potential is very, very different between the two stocks, and company management behavior is even more different. (Evidence suggests that many of the hedge funds that sold Gamestop short are also long on AMC.) Some estimates suggest that over half of the accounts in the Gamestop-related subreddits (r/superstonk, r/GME) are bots or shills (purchased accounts).

The situation is bad enough that the r/superstonk moderators have had to use a Machine Learning AI, plus other techniques (minimum account age, karma, etc.) to try to filter out the noise from the bots and paid shills to even allow conversation about the stock. Most Gamestop investors on r/superstonk now regard the original sub, r/wallstreetbets, as having "fallen" to the invasion of fakes, so that honest conversation about Gamestop is now essentially impossible there due to compromised moderators who disallow pro-GME discussion regardless of its merits (while facilitating various other pump-and-dump schemes), and an army of bots who will downvote any discussion that paints Gamestop in a positive light and will upvote any that does not. Bringing up Gamestop on most other social media almost always immediately draws people who seem to have nothing better to do than to disparage the company, or use whatever power they have (moderator points, etc.) to push down any positive mentions of the stock, without directly addressing any of the main theses that the Gamestop investors use to justify their continuing interest in the stock (such as evidence of naked shorting, evidence of price manipulation, rampant fail-to-delivers on stock shares that never seem to get explained, manipulation of statistics by supposedly neutral entities like S3, clearly biased reporting, etc.).

Some of it is rather funny, actually. Try googling "forget gamestop" sometime and see just how many articles have been posted about the various reasons that everyone should invest in literally anything, anything, other than Gamestop, because the article authors are so desperately afraid for your sake that you might invest in Gamestop and lose money (but strangely unafraid that you might invest in anything else and lose money). Posting on Reddit about Gamestop often draws random direct messages from new accounts that either disparage Gamestop or offer to pay you to do so. And so forth.

Anyway, I think that most of what the parent poster wrote is spot on, and agrees with my own research. One thing I disagree with, however, is the statement that "The NFT marketplace idea was just hype, honestly". I don't think Gamestop has any intention of limiting their NFT marketplace to just trading easily-duplicated JPGs. That's just "proof of concept": a toy application that proves the technology works. There are a lot of other potential applications for NFTs that are considerably more serious, including using them to represent everything from concert tickets to stock shares, prevent counterfeiting of goods (e.g. Gucci bags or Nike shoes on Amazon), trade used video games or items within video games, etc. It is also clear that Gamestop has made some powerful partnerships in their effort, only some of which have been officially announced yet.

More information here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Super...

It has also long been suspected, for instance, that Gamestop might issue an "NFT dividend" and provide NFTs to individual shareholders (similar to what Overstock.com did when it found itself in a similar situation with short sellers), which might immediately trigger a very severe short squeeze on the stock as short sellers who have borrowed and resold shares many times over (google 'rehypothecation') are suddenly forced to actually buy shares in order to provide those NFTs to shareholders they borrowed shares from.

Anyway, as the parent poster said, you should do your own due diligence before investing in this or any other stock. But one thing you should not do is blindly trust either mainstream financial media or random accounts on the internet to give you accurate information. Both can be bought and paid for by people that are not working in your best interest. If you want to know why Gamestop investors are investing in the stock, it would be better to read the things that they actually wrote rather than relying on third parties with unclear motives to helpfully "summarize" it for you ("Gamestop retail investors are just a cult! They don't know what they are doing! They are all stupid and haven't done any research at all!") or tell you that you shouldn't bother to read it.

Here's are some good places to start:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Super...
https://www.gmedd.com/
https://www.gmedd.com/report-m...

Full disclosure: Yes, as you can probably tell, I have an investment in Gamestop. Beyond that, I have been absolutely appalled at how much dirty dealing and illegal behavior has been exposed in the stock market by the research of the Gamestop investors in their various "due diligence" (DD) reports, as well as by Wall Street's blatant attempts to suppress this information, and the US Government's apparent willingness to let them do so (and in some cases help them). Originally, I just wanted to make some money. Now I'm really, really pissed off at the insane level of corruption that's come to light.

In any discussion of Project Veritas, it should be noted that they have been repeatedly been caught lying and doctoring videos, to further their very clear right-wing agenda. Project Veritas is by no means an unbiased observer of events, and when someone quotes them as a supposed standard of truth, it should raise immediate red flags.

I agree with most of what you are saying, but your last sentence, "Any bug that can survive proper OOP use in C++ will also escape in Rust" is simply incorrect. Rust provides compile-time-checking features that C++ simply does not, and a Rust compiler can reliably catch certain kinds of bugs that a C++ compiler cannot.

For example, suppose you are trying to use strong typing and OOP principles to make sure that you can only write to an open file:

class File {
public:
        File(const std::string& name) { _name = name; }
        OpenFile open() { return OpenFile(_name); }
private:
        std::string _name;
}

class OpenFile {
friend class File;
private: // so only File can call constructor
        OpenFile(const std::string& name) : _out(name) {}
public:
        void write(int x) { _out x " "; }
        void close() { _out.close(); }
private:
        ofstream _out;
}

So far, so good. You can do essentially the same thing in Rust.

But what if you want to prevent writing to a closed file? Here, C++ can't help you. Once you have an OpenFile object, you can (from a compile-time-checking perspective) call write(42) on it even if someone has called close() on it. There's nothing you can do to cause the compiler to be able to prevent this at compile time.

In Rust, on the other hand, you can arrange things so that once someone calls close() on the OpenFile, the sole writable reference to it becomes compile-time invalid in such a way that it will be a compile-time error to try to call write(42) on it later. The Rust compiler's mutable borrowing tracking won't let you make the call on a file that has been closed.

Rust simply offers stronger compile-time guarantees than C++ does.

Also, from a practical perspective, it would be really nice if all C++ developers understood RAII and wrote their classes to clean up properly after themselves (e.g. having a destructor that reliably performs cleanup no matter what the state of the object is), but in my experience, a lot of developers simply do not know how to do this, and even those who do can still make mistakes. In Rust, the compiler catches these "failing to dispose of memory you allocated" mistakes and won't let you build (unless you opt out via 'unsafe' in which case all bets are off). In C++, you have to hope that such errors are caught by your regression test suite at runtime.

Please keep in mind that just because something isn't what you're used to does not mean that it's "poorly chosen". The developers of Rust had good reasons for the decision they made. It appears that you do not understand what those reasons were, but that does not mean that they were bad decisions.

I'm also coming from a C/C++ background, although I was exposed to Pascal first because C++ didn't exist yet (yes, I'm that old), and I disagree completely about having the return types put first being a good thing. I think that doing so is strictly worse than the Rust/Pascal/Kotlin/etc. way, and really has no clear advantages other than a lot of people learned that way first and are used to it. The fact that it is familiar does not mean that it is better.

One problem is that once templates get involved, the return type can be dependent on the arguments to the function,which can make for some strange results, such as having something that comes *first* be dependent on something that comes *later* in the source file.

        template <class T>
        decltype(arg) foo(const T& arg) { return arg; }

Putting return types first can also result in some strange scoping issues:

        class Foo {
                private:
                          using APrivateTypedef = int;
                          APrivateTypedef foo();
        }

        APrivateTypedef Foo::foo() { return 42; } // Oops! Can't reference APrivateTypedef here! It's internal to Foo!

        Foo::APrivateTypedef Foo::foo() { return 42; } // This doesn't work either! APrivateTypedef is private to Foo, and can't be accessed in global file scope!

        auto Foo::foo() -> APrivateTypedef { return 42; } // This works fine: By the time we parse the return type, we know we are in the scope of Foo.

This became enough of a problem that the C++ committee eventually added support in C++ for making the return type come later also, as shown in the third example above. Because of this, the following is valid (but relatively unknown) C++ as per the "Alternative Function Syntax" that was added in C++11:

        auto func(int x) -> int { return x+1; }

You can read up on the reason this feature was added for more details. Anyway, I think C++ would have been a better language if it had been designed this way in the beginning (and hence not need the 'auto' in the above, since *all* functions would have postfix return types) and have all return types come last. However, it's too late now, since the vast majority of existing C++ code doesn't put the return type last.

Another problem is that C (and therefore C++)'s decision to put 'types first" in declarations meant that it is impossible for the parser to know, when parsing something that *might* be a declaration or might not, whether or not it is expecting to parse a type without having a set of "known types" ahead of time available during the parsing phase to help it disambiguate. This means, for instance, that it is impossible for a tool (say an IDE) to parse a single source file in isolation without having first parsed all header files it includes first, since types defined in those header files might change how to parse the source file, and what constitutes valid syntax in it! (Not just valid semantics, but valid syntax!)

Languages like Rust (and Pascal, for that matter, which did it first!) avoid both of these problems by putting the type last, not first, and putting a colon in front of the type so that once the parser sees the colon, it knows that the next thing that follows it should be parsed as a type and not some other type of language construct. This means that the parser can parse even the names of types it has never seen before, since it knows ahead of time that what it is parsing HAS to be a type. This also means that in an IDE, for instance, if you invoke completion (Ctrl-space, etc.) right after a colon, the IDE can know that it should only show you types as candidates for completion.

Additionally, putting the type later provides the opportunity to have it be omitted completely in cases where it can be inferred, should a user want to do so:
          x : int = 42; // OK
          x := 42; // shorter, using inferred type.

Yet another example is that putting the function name first makes it very easy to visually scan down a list of functions for the one you care about, whereas C++'s approach puts the function name in various positions depending on how long the return types are, making you have to hunt for it on each line.

Some more reading on this issue:
      https://stackoverflow.com/ques...
      https://medium.com/@elizarov/t...
      https://news.ycombinator.com/i...

As for 'int' vs. 'i32', I would point out that your 'int' is not necessarily my 'int', and that means that code that you wrote that runs fine on your machine might do very strange things when run on mine, with a potentially different architecture and hence a different size of int. So if you intend to write portable C++ code, you really should be using int32_t or int64_t or whatever to be specific about how big of an int you really need in order for your program to work correctly. Rust mandates this to ensure that code is portable, and also makes the type names shorter ('i32' is shorter than 'int32_t') to make doing so more pleasant.

I'm not as fond of the whole 'implicitly returning the last expression' thing, but it does make for some wonderfully concise code when lambdas get involved. The 'return' in C++ lambdas makes them rather large and unwieldy compared to those in other languages.