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YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers
231–240 of 411 posts
Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
TIPS and I Bonds
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At this point in your hypothetical, if we're still talking about the US dollar, you'll have a lot more to worry about than generating a return on your investment.
If you think this is a serious potential outcome, then I suggest you forget about investing all together and instead start learning subsistence farming practices.
Or you could buy Swiss bonds?
Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was there a specific tweet you meant to link? That just goes to Galois’s profile page.
its months and months worth of tweets, and that's all they talked about during this year. first a cryptic puzzle as a recruiting tool for analysts: https://twitter.com/Galois_Capital/status/148693793605468979... followed by months of warnings like this: https://twitter.com/Galois_Capital/status/151217543903232819... and threads pushing the systemic risk angle: https://twitter.com/Galois_Capital/status/150461116699529…
That chain in the first tweet should be enough to frighten anyone.
Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers
#234The last few weeks (months, really) has highlighted an incredible lack of discernment in the VC-verse wrt the thing we call web3. Now. I have no experience doing what YC does and don’t claim to, but the jig here was so transparent that the smallest drop of “street smart” should’ve been enough to set off some alarms. We’re approaching a point where being passed over for “culture fit” is a compliment. Hopefully the emb…
The participation of big-name Silicon Valley VC in some obvious financial frauds is really disappointing to me.
Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers
#235Earlier quoted context omitted.
josu didn’t say it wasn’t fraudulent, just that it wasn’t a Ponzi scheme, which is a particular type of fraud. (I agree)
So how is the 20% interest created? Excuse my ignorance on crypto. I don’t understand how UST can drop 90% when I assume it required some sort payment of some other currency/coins to get mint them. I heard it was tens billions of UST was minted. So what happened to these coins? Were they used to pay out the interest?
> So how is the 20% interest created?
I'd treat the offer of earning 20% interest on a risk-free investment with the same scepticism I'd treat the offer of buying a perpetual motion machine.
You can have abnormally high interest, or your capital can be risk-free. I simply don't believe it's possible to have both, at least not over the long term.
Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers
#236The last few weeks (months, really) has highlighted an incredible lack of discernment in the VC-verse wrt the thing we call web3. Now. I have no experience doing what YC does and don’t claim to, but the jig here was so transparent that the smallest drop of “street smart” should’ve been enough to set off some alarms. We’re approaching a point where being passed over for “culture fit” is a compliment. Hopefully the emb…
Probably not much else to invest on right at this moment, at least not at this level ("small" start-ups wanting to "change the world"). I was honestly believing that the web3 bullsh.t were just some young people who didn't know any better or some scam-artists (or both), I didn't actually think for a second that a "serious" VC like YC would put money into something like that. Looks like I was wrong.
Huh, my take all along was that web3 terminology was specifically designed to “pretty up” blockchain related things to make it palatable to VCs, by implying that it was going to be the next internet and you need to get on now.
Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who went heavy into crypto/web3, it does pain me to admit that there really are no use cases besides making money. Which isn’t a bad use case by itself, but after using practically hundreds of protocols and projects, there’s not a single one I’d use if there was no prospect of making money off of it. My dApp usage has cooled off almost completely. And all data shows that this is true for most others as wel…
> As someone who went heavy into crypto/web3, it does pain me to admit that there really are no use cases besides making money. Which isn’t a bad use case by itself, but after using practically hundreds of protocols and projects, there’s not a single one I’d use if there was no prospect of making money off of it. My dApp usage has cooled off almost completely. And all data shows that this is true for most others as w…
Most (if not all) proof of stake systems can be replaced with a centralized database/authority run by the big stakers.
Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
The one thing that still makes me excited for this tech is web wallets and being able to pay/send money with them. If they are widely adopted, and a safe stablecoin (maybe even a CBDC) becomes the defacto transacting currency with quick on/off ramps, it would really change the way we pay for things online. Like buying a monthly subscription for a tool like, say, Icy.tools, is so much faster when you can pay directly…
Dumb question but what's the user experience difference between a browser wallet and saving a credit card in a password manager?
Crypto wallets double as a kid of single sign-on identity. If you have a crypto wallet in a browser add-on, you already have a paudonymous account usable on tens of thousands of crypto enabled web apps. All you have to do is one-click sign-in.
No sign-up flow, no emails, no commitment. You just tap login and you have an account. One more tap and you've paid.
Plus other benefits like effectively free micro-transactions as small as thousands of a penny at a transaction rate in tens of milliseconds, for some chains (e.g. Solana w/Phantom or SolFlare browser extension).
All this adds up to being able to try, pay, assess, and "logout" of any completely novel (to you) service/site faster than a WSJ article page can load.
The effortless of the user experience doesn't translate well to words. Getting use to this frictionless use of compatable web apps is an experience qualitatively similar to browsing the web with an ad blocker. You can't go back. Going back feels broken, messy, slow, and outright aggravating.
Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers
#239Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the most you can say is that they were front ends for a ponzi. It would be like setting up a front-end to receive investments, and then depositing the money with Madoff. This was absolutely a thing; most large Ponzi schemes have feeder funds. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-pwc-madoff-settlement-idU...
Indirection seems to be very valuable with scams. The 2008 housing crash had a lot of layers: 1. Loan Application (Borrower Lying about income) 2. Mortgage Originator ( Not validating loan application ) 3. Mortgage Back Security Creators ( Obfuscate what is in the security ) 4. Ratings Agencies ( Not being honest that step 3 happened ) 5. Sellers of MBS ( Not being honest that steps 1-4 exist ) I don't know enough ab…
It's a psychological concept that maybe up to 15% of a deviation from cold hard truth is normal embelishment or puffing. When you line up 5 actors each puffing in the same direction it's easy to get a material total effect, e.g., 75% in the example above, while each actor can maybe feel comfortable themselves with their role in it. This unfortunately is not terribly unusual.
Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
Believe it or not… it’s on bitcoin. It’s fascinating watching a largely un-steared bitcoin attempt to scale.
Any examples? This like lightning seen to have under delivered and sharding/rollups/etc seem to be still research grade. Scaling also doesn’t seem to be in the interest of miners who essentially provide the network security…
Bitcoin has scaled by the exchanges - most “Bitcoin” transactions now happen off-chain in an exchange.
What this says about the original purpose of Bitcoin is left to the reader.