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The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme

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Re: The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme

#241

Post by arcticbull »

hansvm wrote: post #230
arcticbull wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stablecoins will turn into CBDCs and CBDCs will serve that purpose. Bitcoin is down from 68K to 48K in the last what 3 weeks? Stores of value don't flail wildly and incoherently at the whims of a few whales, and given it supports 2-3 tx/sec using the energy of an entire country, it's a crap medium of exchange too. The future of crypto for anyone other than an anacap libertarian is CBDCs.

Even with its downsides, crypto serves as a useful medium of exchange for fringe goods. Digital (gaming) goods, guns and accessories, adult materials, and all kinds of things are flat-out banned at many payment middlemen (PayPal, Stripe, ...), and it causes problems from time to time even for large players. CBDC's _might_ fill that void, but governments would need to treat it as infrastructure and not exercise some o…

> Even with its downsides, crypto serves as a useful medium of exchange for fringe goods.

Yep, I agree.

> CBDC's _might_ fill that void, but governments would need to treat it as infrastructure and not exercise some of the power that companies like Visa enjoy (blocking otherwise legal transactions).

I'll be the first to say that the current legacy financial system is no panacea. Visa and Mastercard should be infrastructure just as you say. In my opinion, they should be required by law not to discriminate against any legal transactions and have safe harbor.

That said ACH carries all legal transactions without discrimination. I don't know why CBDCs wouldn't do the same.

What we need isn't crypto, it's payment network neutrality. The legacy financial system needs a refactor, but crypto ain't it. It's strictly worse in every way.

Re: The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme

#242

Post by twox2 »

micromacrofoot wrote: post #212
initialized wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

composability, security, persistence, liquidity

if the company that serves the image your NFT links to goes away you can completely lose access to it

The NFT is the token, not the metadata. Of course there are projects with on chain metadata, and projects with on chain art as well. Also, many folks use IPFS pinning, so that does add some level of resilience as well, but yes not all NFTs are created equal.

Re: The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme

#244

Post by hackingforfun »

notahacker wrote: post #218
pjc50 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> store of value is a strong use case The "change my mind" criterion for this would be actual price stability. That is, a significant market for goods and services which can be bought at a fixed crypto price over a period of a year or more with zero price variation. People getting paid salary in fixed crypto denominations. People taking out 10-year mortgages in fixed crypto denominations at interest rates comparable…

Yep. Stability is really the only gap in the market for a "store of value". Shares are fairly fungible and have a "number go up" tendency as well, but there's actual reason for their numbers to go up other than convincing more people to believe they're a share of value than believed last year.

I have heard Metcalfe's Law applied to crypto networks, and I think it actually does make sense. I.e. as the number of participants goes up, the value increases, similar to how as the number of users goes up on a social media or other technology platform, those networks are considered more valuable. Crypto is a technology so I think it makes some sense to apply the same framework.

Re: The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme

#245

Post by selestify »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #211
selestify wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is only true at a superficial level. In terms of high-quality art, the Picasso is artificially scarce in the sense that there are reproductions so high-quality that only experts can tell the original apart from the reproduction. Clearly it's no longer the quality of the art that matters, because the reproduction visually looks just as appealing as the originally, but the provenance. There are only so many "origi…

> In terms of high-quality art, the Picasso is artificially scarce in the sense that there are reproductions so high-quality that only experts can tell the original apart from the reproduction. Except that those are also scarce because they take the labor of expert hands to make too. People actually would pay money for known forgeries because of it. Absent copyright law and a desire to fund the artist, no one would p…

Sure, but we were talking about spending money on NFTs versus spend it on (original) Picassos. Now you're talking about spending money copying a Picasso versus (not) spending money copying the digital artwork that an NFT was minted for, which is distinct from the NFT itself and worth approximately zero, as you say.

Re: The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme

#246

Post by gonehome »

Aeolun wrote: post #164
gonehome wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep agreed, and other underlying applications (NFTs as evidence of group membership or ownership that can be easily owned and transferred, an auditable historical record) have a lot of value. The ability to hold decentralized state is a resilient way is pretty cool and a lot of the finance applications are better than legacy stuff - try sending large amounts of money around in the legacy system, expect to wait severa…

> try sending large amounts of money around in the legacy system, expect to wait several days for every action The legacy system (e.g. banks) aren’t sitting still either. In many parts of the world (Europe) a transaction is pretty much instant.

Maybe it’s better outside of America.

I still see the crypto tech being more capable long term, but the ux is still in its infancy.

Re: The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme

#247

Post by Applejinx »

vadansky wrote: post #51
gentleman11 wrote: post #10

We keep expecting crypto to die but then again, we still have antivirus software that is spyware (avast), a scammy vpn industry, and a thriving anti vax movement. No matter how absurd it is, it might stick around for a long time now

That's the takeaway from "Betting on Zero". I kept watching to see the moment when the Ponzi scheme falls apart and Bill Ackman comes out vindicated, and it never came. It really is the case that "The market can stay irrational longer then you can stay solvent". There might be an escape velocity of irrationality where a Ponzi schemes can become legitimate.

No… the statements 'the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent' is not at all the same as 'the market can stay irrational longer than IT can stay solvent'.

There are structural problems at play. It's completely impossible for there to be an escape velocity of irrationality where Ponzi schemes can become legitimate. All you're able to observe is that people with more money than YOU are still playing. That's not the same as escape velocity: the real money is still waiting for its cue to throw the Ponzi scheme under the buss, and you will not get warning of this.

Re: The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme

#248

Post by ajross »

DeathArrow wrote: post #233

If people are curious about the pornstar who headed institutional lending at Celsius, her name is Jessica Khater.

Honestly, this point was just dumb. Even skipping the whole "pornstar!" angle, the core point was that the CEO put some rando acquaintance in a position of power who has no relevant experience.

I mean, duh? This is the crypto world, it's not exactly staffed by former Lehman traders. Everyone's an amateur. That's not to say she was good at her job, but she's no less "qualified" than 90% of the other big movers in the market.

Re: The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme

#249

Post by therealmarv »

spottybanana wrote: post #231
therealmarv wrote: post #156

A lot of fundamentals to fully understand any problems are not covered here. It can be the article is right or wrong but it's nevertheless inflammatory. Just to prove my point: Look at the P2P micro credit market (which works in the similar direction and out of the scope of fed regulated money market) where it is no big problem to get 12% APY on established P2P institutions.

Those P2P loans get also lost quite often. If you have transaction logs that show you making consistent 12% for years that would be quite interesting to many. Due to the nature of p2p lending sites the sites often have incentive to make it look good for the investor, as for them any activity on the platform brings fees in. I think it is pretty logical that if some place makes consistent 12% to have that lowered along…

Loans fail sometimes. But many p2p companies have that calculated in and give you an insurance for failing credits (including interest). This works as long as the p2p companies have put enough aside and work in profit (there are some where this works for years).

Re: The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme

#250

Post by twox2 »

ericd wrote: post #237
twox2 wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, let's talk shit about a new system that's largely censorship resistant (or trying to be) and call it the biggest scam in history (without any evidence) while praising the world's most authoritarian government. Hard to take you seriously.

They forgot to mention the widespread vested interest by the large number of speculators to deny/downplay the issues in every discussion ;-)

Indeed, I'm one of those folks to some extent. I've made good money from crypto. I'm not here to downplay the issues, in fact I admit there are MANY issues. That doesn't mean I brush off the whole thing as a scam or a ponzi.

EDIT: PS. I don't know much about celsius, and it might in fact be a ponzi. I'm referring to brushing off crypto as ponzi.

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