Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Crypto CEO threatens customers after mistakenly sending them millions

mashable.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 127 posts

Re: Crypto CEO threatens customers after mistakenly sending them millions

#61

Post by Barrin92 »

Mengkudulangsat wrote: post #54
forty wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you can give away millions by mistake and do nothing about it then break the systems then do not much about it says a lot about crypto currency practicality ;) I wonder when this madness is going to stop.

Au contraire, this madness is going to become the norm for the next generation. Personally I think the more things break in the immediate future, the better. Hopefully we will reach some sort of steady state where users keep a baseline of trustworthiness / reliability for a portion of their wealth, yet willing to occasionally play around with another portion of their wealth trying out bug-infested moonshots.

>this madness is going to become the norm for the next generation

all the hype and the news and market valuations might create the illusion that there is a lot of crypto activity but compare the money moved through crypto to money moved across normal financial markets. SWIFT moves 5 trillion per day, Tenpay does 500 billion transactions per year. There is what, a few hundred thousand bitcoin transactions per day?

In its current state crypto does not and will not influence the lives of ordinary people who go shopping, pay their rent and whatnot.

Re: Crypto CEO threatens customers after mistakenly sending them millions

#62

Post by lowkey »

arcticbull wrote: post #49
lowkey wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US dollar is inflating at 40% year/year as measured by M2 money supply and there seems to be no end in sight. The US government is considering minting a $1 Trillion dollar coin to keep this debt-spiral going a little longer. The idea of using the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency is an insane 50 year old experiment that won’t end well.

Wow that would be amazing if it were true or sensical or really even grounded. Inflation in the real world isn't defined by supply but rather purchasing power as measured by CPI. Your definition is closer to the Austrian definition, long debunked because what people do with that supply is as important as its existence. The M2 supply increased 15X since the 70s but purchasing power only dropped by a factor of 7, meani…

You are confusing cause and effect. Prices go up over time as measured in fiat because of monetary inflation (i.e. money printing) by the Fed which dilutes the purchasing power of the dollar. M2 monetary supply inflation coupled with the velocity of money causes CPI to increase, not the other way around.

70% of all the dollars ever created were created since the invention of Bitcoin. Please substantiate your claim that Austrian economics has been debunked (in favor of modern monetary theory I suppose?) From my perspective, Austrian economics is proving itself more and more each day.

I would love to hear your explanation of how a nation can inflate it’s money supply by 40% in a year without affecting inflation.

Re: Crypto CEO threatens customers after mistakenly sending them millions

#63

Post by jazzyjackson »

Acrobatic_Road wrote: post #45
unanswered wrote: post #15

Obvious scam is obvious. Previous DeFi scams have seen founders just openly walking away with the money. This one involved some "random users" getting the money instead. Totally random, I'm sure. Totally unpredictable.

Doubt it. Compound is a very well-established and successful protocol.

s/is/was

Re: Crypto CEO threatens customers after mistakenly sending them millions

#64

Post by diatone »

lowkey wrote: post #62
arcticbull wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that would be amazing if it were true or sensical or really even grounded. Inflation in the real world isn't defined by supply but rather purchasing power as measured by CPI. Your definition is closer to the Austrian definition, long debunked because what people do with that supply is as important as its existence. The M2 supply increased 15X since the 70s but purchasing power only dropped by a factor of 7, meani…

You are confusing cause and effect. Prices go up over time as measured in fiat because of monetary inflation (i.e. money printing) by the Fed which dilutes the purchasing power of the dollar. M2 monetary supply inflation coupled with the velocity of money causes CPI to increase, not the other way around. 70% of all the dollars ever created were created since the invention of Bitcoin. Please substantiate your claim th…

GP wasn’t stating that a larger stock of cash is definitively not a parameter of inflation, but that it is not the only parameter.

As to your question about the other factors, here’s a thought experiment: if I printed cash daily but locked it up in a chest and sunk it to the bottom of the sea, will there be inflation? Going one step further: does inflation depend on the distribution of liquidity in the economy?

Re: Crypto CEO threatens customers after mistakenly sending them millions

#65

Post by bruce511 »

arcticbull wrote: post #49
lowkey wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US dollar is inflating at 40% year/year as measured by M2 money supply and there seems to be no end in sight. The US government is considering minting a $1 Trillion dollar coin to keep this debt-spiral going a little longer. The idea of using the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency is an insane 50 year old experiment that won’t end well.

Wow that would be amazing if it were true or sensical or really even grounded. Inflation in the real world isn't defined by supply but rather purchasing power as measured by CPI. Your definition is closer to the Austrian definition, long debunked because what people do with that supply is as important as its existence. The M2 supply increased 15X since the 70s but purchasing power only dropped by a factor of 7, meani…

Agreed. For starters population growth is part of the equation.

Consider the following scenario. There are 10 people in the world, and $100. So all being equal [1] each has $10 to spend. (Remember "money" is just a useful way of measuring accumulated social value.)

Fast forward a few years, now there are 100 people, all creating social value. To maintain the status quo the money supply must now be $1000. 0% inflation as the money supply per person is still $10.

[1] now imagine that all things are not equal. Some people add more social value than they consume. Ie their accumulated $ grows. In effect some number of $ are no longer in circulation. So more money has to be added to the supply to compensate.

Equally some company or individual may move money out of the economy and store it externally. Think cash under a matrass, or sitting in a Bahamas bank account. That money can (and must) be replaced in the system or the system will fail.

So the increase of money supply, taken as a measure by itself, is a meaningless number.

Re: Crypto CEO threatens customers after mistakenly sending them millions

#66

Post by forty »

sumedh wrote: post #51
forty wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you can give away millions by mistake and do nothing about it then break the systems then do not much about it says a lot about crypto currency practicality ;) I wonder when this madness is going to stop.

> it says a lot about crypto currency practicality Isnt that a feature not a bug? You dont want a central authority like a govt or a corporation messing with your money(tokens)

I'm pretty sure I do want people and banks to be able to get back millions they have given away because of a bug :)

Re: Crypto CEO threatens customers after mistakenly sending them millions

#67

Post by jjeaff »

lowkey wrote: post #62
arcticbull wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow that would be amazing if it were true or sensical or really even grounded. Inflation in the real world isn't defined by supply but rather purchasing power as measured by CPI. Your definition is closer to the Austrian definition, long debunked because what people do with that supply is as important as its existence. The M2 supply increased 15X since the 70s but purchasing power only dropped by a factor of 7, meani…

You are confusing cause and effect. Prices go up over time as measured in fiat because of monetary inflation (i.e. money printing) by the Fed which dilutes the purchasing power of the dollar. M2 monetary supply inflation coupled with the velocity of money causes CPI to increase, not the other way around. 70% of all the dollars ever created were created since the invention of Bitcoin. Please substantiate your claim th…

Not that it is definitive proof, but these same alarm bells were going off when we drastically increased the money supply to combat the financial crisis in 2008. And inflation never happened.

The reason we aren't, at least for now, likely to see serious inflation due to the recent increase in money supply is because most of it entered the economy through the Fed's bond buying program. So the bonds went on the Fed's balance sheet and most of the money used to purchase those bonds went back on deposit with the fed.

Those bonds will either reach maturity or the fed will sell them - at which point the fed can erase that from the money supply.

But, as the other poster said, the simplified version is that money supply doesn't matter if it's not actually in circulation and being used.

Re: Crypto CEO threatens customers after mistakenly sending them millions

#68

Post by sumedh »

forty wrote: post #66
sumedh wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it says a lot about crypto currency practicality Isnt that a feature not a bug? You dont want a central authority like a govt or a corporation messing with your money(tokens)

I'm pretty sure I do want people and banks to be able to get back millions they have given away because of a bug :)

yes that is a valid point but there are others who dont want that because then the central authority can take away your money or stop payments send to you just because they dont like you like what happened to Wikileaks.

Re: Crypto CEO threatens customers after mistakenly sending them millions

#69

Post by arcticbull »

tluyben2 wrote: post #60
arcticbull wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Each transaction is its own taxable event, with taxes due based on the difference between the cost basis and the disposition price.

Hmm interesting. But you cannot explain this as not a tax event to the irs if you send back 100%? Of course, the receivers might not live in the US. Sounds like lot of countries would be friendlier than what you say.

Re: (1) I'm genuinely not sure how that would work. I suspect if you claimed you received it in error and sent it back, that would probably not incur an actual tax obligation. Not sure though, that's the kind of thing I'd want to run by a tax attorney if it was a non trivial quantity.

Re: (2) definitely, which makes the threat a lot stranger.

Re: Crypto CEO threatens customers after mistakenly sending them millions

#70

Post by voldacar »

tigershark wrote: post #13
voldacar wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who interact with non-bitcoin crypto tend to be a lot more knowledgable about the tech and its implications than an average person. So I would say the answer is probably yes.

Ah yes. All the geniuses that are around the crypto subreddits for example. Definitely Turing award level.

I didn't say they were geniuses, just that they were more familiar with the tech and its implications than the average person. Smart contracts have been around for a while and we basically know the scope of the catastrophes that can result from bugs in smart contract code. The DAO hack was years ago. This is not a new problem space
Post reply on HN