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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

#401

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

berberous wrote: post #272
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Picasso is truly scarce. The NFT is artificially scarce.

My friend has a real Picasso. It’s a lithograph print, one of maybe 30+ of that image. It’s worth maybe $5k only. How is that scarcity any truer than an NFT? Picasso could have printed as many as he wanted, and indeed, printed so many that the value today is not very high. In both cases, an artist merely places their “this is official” stamp on something that is effectively a copy, and limits the number of copies ava…

Your critique of lithographs is valid.

And that's the reason you don't see many lithographs selling for millions of dollars.

Still, the combined "wealth" of lithographs may very well be in the 10s if not 100s of billions.

Re: The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme

#402

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #188
tiborsaas wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But Picasso made his paintings artificially scarce too :) He even made two versions with the same title: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Musicians

Artists regularly paint similar pieces. And it's not clear if one of these was a draft. Although, from what I know of Picasso - I don't think one of these would've been a draft. It was probably just a similar piece. You can probably find a lot of pieces close to this similar that Picasso did.

For example - just Google "Picasso The Kiss"

Re: The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme

#403

Post by throwaway405769 »

NelsonMinar wrote: post #361
throwaway405769 wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DeFi is much more transparent than traditional finance.

Trenchant comment, throwaway405769. It's true there are many more transparent frauds in the DeFi world.

Ah yes, transparency. The root of all evil.

Re: The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme

#404

Post by codebolt »

stickfigure wrote: post #390
codebolt wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, and wiring money overseas has also never been easier. I regularly send money from Norway to family in Africa using online remittance services (there's quite a few to pick from) and it usually takes less than 15 minutes for the money to go through (and they get a pick up notice from their bank). Because of competition, the FX rates are very good. No crypto involved.

I'm guessing this is pretty dependent on which country in Africa you're sending to. Probably not Zimbabwe?

You'd be surprised: https://www.worldremit.com/en/zimbabwe/faq/cash-pickup

Re: The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme

#405

Post by tim333 »

Celsius probably isn't a ponzi scheme. There have been quite a lot of opportunities to make high interest returns in crypto by doing things like buying bitcoins and selling the matching futures. The institutions borrowing from Celsius are probably doing that kind of thing. The fact that "Celsius has never revealed the name of a single of these institutions nor their creditworthiness." doesn't really prove anything. Also Celsius doesn't need to know their creditworthiness - it's lending is all backed by crypto deposits. Margin lending as done by most US stockbrokers basically.

Re: The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme

#406

Post by tim333 »

remram wrote: post #18
exportedm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also in a legal sense. The Celsius user agreement explicitly states that you are giving your coins to Celsius: you have no legal claim to them, you’re relying on the goodwill of Celsius to return them… meaning if Celsius goes under, your collateral is gone.

So you're selling your coins for half the USD value, but you have to return the USD at some point anyway? Why wouldn't you just sell your coins at full value instead of using this "loan"?

No you are not selling your coins. You are depositing them with Celsius and then borrowing against them.

Re: The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme

#407

Post by selestify »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #400
selestify wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When did I say the rich don't have taste in art? I said the rich won't know whether they bought an original or a fake, because the fakes are high quality enough to pass as the real thing to the untrained eye. The art is worth that much not because of the aesthetics qualities, but because of the provenance and the high-status signaling and bragging rights that come with said provenance. > Look - MBS bought that fake D…

No - it's worth that much because of who painted it. There are shitty drafts of Guernica that Picasso did that sell for hundreds of thousands. There are infinitely better drawings that one could not sell for a single penny. The artist is what gives it value. It's truly scarce because only so much work came from that artist - who people are obsessed with. I will 100% grant that it's mostly about signaling and bragging…

It's most definitely not worth as much as MBS paid for it now that it's known to be a reproduction.

> But NFTs are artificially scarce.

We're just going in circles now. Reread my previous response to why they're no more artificially scarce than Picassos.

Re: The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme

#408

Post by selestify »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #254
selestify wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a distinction without a difference. I'm saying the forged art is valuable because there is a cost to produce it, and the JPG isn't because there effectively isn't a cost to produce it. The NFT took work to produce, sure, but it's just a number with some mathematical relationship to other numbers and means absolutely nothing without other systems agreeing that it means something. It creates work to be done wher…

> That's a distinction without a difference.

That's where you're mistaken. An NFT is distinct from the work that the NFT is tied to, which might not necessarily be digital.

You can copy a Picasso, but no matter how good your copy is, you can't copy the "original" quality of a Picasso. That's all an NFT is, representing the "originaL" quality of something.

The worth (or lack thereof) of copies is completely irrelevant.

Re: The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme

#409

Post by [deleted] »

TigeriusKirk wrote: post #375
gonehome wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really try to resist being drawn into flame bait. > "Remember the golden rule of blockchain: except in the case of regulatory arbitrage, grift and crime, if you think a blockchain is a better solution to a problem than any classical solution - you either don't know enough about crypto or you don't know enough about the problem." There's a real possibility here that you're way overconfident and wrong and this overco…

>There's a real possibility here that you're way overconfident and wrong and this overconfidence will blind you from a lot of interesting stuff that's going on. I'm tempted to start keeping track of how many hundreds of negative comments about crypto HN generates each day, every day. It doesn't really come across as confidence to me.

[deleted]

Re: The biggest crypto lending company is a ponzi scheme

#410

Post by selestify »

moron4hire wrote: post #259
selestify wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So what I hear you saying is that NFT concept only works if everything becomes an NFT, immediately upon creation. Any hold-outs or delays gives room for fraudulent minting, which means you don't have a trustless system. No, as long as it's known that the address that created the NFT is owned by whichever public figure created the artwork, you're good to go. > You can't say that NFTs are a trustless system when the…

Yes, PGP is not a trustless encryption scheme. What does that have to do with anything? I say, "2 + 2 does not equal 5" and you say, "yeah, well 3 + 3 does not equal 7, but that doesn't prove anything about what's in my pocket". Nobody--who is informed--has given me any coherent description of what value add NFTs provide, period. These ever shifting sands of never-enumerated benefits. What, exactly, did you mean when…

> Yes, PGP is not a trustless encryption scheme. What does that have to do with anything?

It means you're criticizing something for the wrong reason. Criticizing PGP for not doing something it ever claimed to do is akin to criticizing NFTs for not doing something it ever claimed to do.

> Nobody--who is informed--has given me any coherent description of what value add NFTs provide, period.

Since I assume you're intelligent enough to understand, I can only assume that means you don't want to understand.

> What, exactly, did you mean when you said "the value-add of NFTs... is namely that there's a trustless, verifiable record of transfer"?

Meaning that so long as you can verify that the NFT was minted by who you think it was minted by, you don't have to trust any of the intermediaries that it passed through. It's like buying something that comes with a physical certificate of authenticity. In real life, you have to trust that the certificate itself was not forged by any of the people in the supply chain before it got to you. That's the part that an NFT solves.

The trust issues that an NFT does not solve (that also exists in real life):

1. Some rando Bob prints out their own certificate of authenticity and calls it "Bob's Certificate of Authenticity that This Painting is a Picasso." It's up to you to verify that Bob is someone whose opinion is worth respecting and trusting.

2. The physical product (if there is one) that the certificate of authenticity comes with is in fact the same physical product it originally came with. Not so much a problem with digital goods.

> You responded to my assertion that NFT ownership is not trustless by saying that wasn't the value-add, the value-add was that they were trustless.

Yes, because there are obviously multiple dimensions to the concept of trust, and for some reason you're conflating all of them.

I mean, it's really not a hard concept to wrap your mind around. Unless, of course, you'd prefer to keep looking down on NFTs as a form of status signaling, in which case do keep on pretending not to understand.

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