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YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

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Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

#391

Post by webmaven »

kgwgk wrote: post #201
IMTDb wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those 3 reasons can be summarised as : "We are a bunch of excited 20yo who think they know better than everyone else and we have received pinky swear promises from shady asian websites, so we are definitely going to be rich, trust us ! xoxo"

That guy is at least 35 but he surely compensates the old age with lots of enthusiasm. After all, you don’t get a chair of royal garments innovation by pointing out that the king is naked.

Just so you know, referring to 35 as "old age" isn't cool. At all.

Sincerely, an old fart who hasn't seen 35 in the rearview mirror for a while now.

Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

#392

Post by webmaven »

thawaya3113 wrote: post #211
pjc50 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, you can shout "this is a scam" from the hilltops and people won't listen.

There’s a great recent Bloomberg Podcast episode (Odd Lots?) where the CEO of FTX interactive is describing yield farming, and it dawns on everybody (Matt Levine states it explicitly) that what he is describing is a Ponzi scheme. And then the CEO guy basically says that their old school finance may consider it a Ponzi but it’s the future of finance and they’re just gonna end up suffering from FOMO.

Here you go: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31447159

Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

#393

Post by bombcar »

rchaud wrote: post #374
bombcar wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YC is just a VC firm. They avoid known risks and embrace unknown ones: that’s the whole point. They don’t “understand” Mexico and are scared that their investment will get Pemex’d or something - and since that’s a known financial risk their backers would be like “wtf you doing?” But “unknown” risks (even if actually quite easy to see) don’t have the same pushback from their investors. In fact, their investors may be…

> But “unknown” risks (even if actually quite easy to see) don’t have the same pushback from their investors. Malcolm Gladwell had a phrase for this in a 1996 article about a vacation town that favoured hiring temp workers from the Caribbean (Gladwell is part-Caribbean) instead of black Americans who lived in nearby towns. The employers made a decision on the basis known unknowns and unknown knowns. Gladwell describe…

Yeah, it really all boils down to "you should have known better" - which is a horrible thing to say in many cases. It's what causes so much friction around hiring ex-felons, etc.

Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

#394

Post by webmaven »

patrickaljord wrote: post #116
ALittleLight wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't that create an incentive for successful companies to be unethical?

I don't think YC would ever forfeit their shares from a successful company.

It would be an interesting side bet, wouldn't it?

Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

#395

Post by webmaven »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #217
okwubodu wrote: post #30

The 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…

Or, they knew all that but thought they would probably personally benefit anyway? You can get rich in a gold rush selling shovels. And it doesnt really matter if there's no gold, or not enough for all the miners to make a living. And why would a shovel salesman focus on the negative like that?

Frankly the shovel salesmen were relatively small time, since some miners brought their own, some quit and sold theirs (whether bought or brought), and some shovels were, um, just found lying around, "Goodness, whatever could have happened to that poor miner?"

The real money was in services (brothels, gambling, baths) and consumables (food, booze).

Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

#396

Post by webmaven »

hbbio wrote: post #221
whatever1 wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trustless computing might have a future, trustless money no.

Money is a use case that attracts scams indeed, and will be harder to get right. But we're building for a future where apps like Calendly can be smart contracts. With new blockchains* that have a very low tx fee (imagine $0.00001 / tx), I clearly see many services migrate to smart contracts. They won't require any subscription, existing data is never at risk of being wiped out, and hopefully we will keep optimizing a…

> But we're building for a future where apps like Calendly can be smart contracts.

[…]

> They won't require any subscription, existing data is never at risk of being wiped out, and hopefully we will […] get back to apps that just work, without the cruft or bad incentives. We're here to make that happen!

I fail to see what the advantages are of having a calendar app/service implemented as a DAO.

I can see the advantages of federation (ala email or the fediverse), and I can see the advantages of a "local first" approach, but what does a web3/DAO bring to the party?

The trustless use-cases I can imagine are quite sociopathic, like selling appointment slots with price discrimination, or reserving a slot for a smaller fee, or allowing resale of appointments or reservations, or remaking any and all of the above transactions into auctions.

Turning every little thing into a multi-sided market sounds exhausting and pathological.

You can apply this sort of thinking to other existing app/site categories, like wikis. No longer do you have to endure edit wars, you can just bid to finalize your preferred version! Unless 50% of the editors veto your edit, in which case you forfeit your bid. Oh joy, now a bad faith actor can't just pay one wiki editor under the table to slant the content your way, you have to bribe a whole bunch to prevail. Yes, that would be a huge improvement.

I don't know, perhaps I am lacking in imagination, but the negative social consequences of monetizing relationships and social transactions are pretty well known and I'm not really seeing a commensurate benefit:

https://rady.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/pub/docs/fine...

Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

#397

Post by kgwgk »

webmaven wrote: post #391
kgwgk wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That guy is at least 35 but he surely compensates the old age with lots of enthusiasm. After all, you don’t get a chair of royal garments innovation by pointing out that the king is naked.

Just so you know, referring to 35 as "old age" isn't cool. At all. Sincerely, an old fart who hasn't seen 35 in the rearview mirror for a while now.

I was replying to a comment about “a bunch of excited 20y”.

For what it’s worth, I was also 35 once.

Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

#398

Post by JoeAltmaier »

namdnay wrote: post #332
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then there's the bank owners etc. They got rich when banks were deregulated and then began skimming from every transaction. You do that for long enough, you have all the money.

which "bank owners"?

I'm confused. You don't think banks are owned?

Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

#399

Post by andirk »

spankalee wrote: post #327
daanlo wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By this definition most crypto wouldn‘t be a ponzi. E.g. bitcoin doesn‘t claim that funds are invested in productive entreprise. It is clear that it is only a value store (like gold). Whether it is any good at storing value long term, we will see.

Bitcoin proponents definitely (for a time) claimed that it was Bitcoin's utility as a currency that gave it value in the first place. That everyone would need some because everyone would use it to transact. That's a claim of an inherent investment value that didn't actually exist, making Bitcoin exactly like a distributed Ponzi scheme.

It was originally created to be a form of non-fiat democratized currency. It is exactly that even though it's not its most popular use which is as a store of value. I don't see how that makes it a Ponzi scheme. I buy things with it a few times per year and do my degenerate sports gambling with it all the time. It works within seconds for almost no cost.

Re: YC W22 Stablegains is being sued for losing $42M in funds from 4878 customers

#400

Post by webmaven »

kgwgk wrote: post #397
webmaven wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just so you know, referring to 35 as "old age" isn't cool. At all. Sincerely, an old fart who hasn't seen 35 in the rearview mirror for a while now.

I was replying to a comment about “a bunch of excited 20y”. For what it’s worth, I was also 35 once.

Duly noted.

Hopefully you're not referring to a past life.

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