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TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

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Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#161

Post by KMag »

hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #150
readthenotes1 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Less competitive? I know a doctor who got his MD in 1952 as a 21 year old (18 months college), another who got it in the 70s as a 24 year (3 years college), and 2 who just graduated this year at 26 and 29 (4 years college each). Listening to the stories, med school got progressively easier (1950: tons of WW2 vets on GI bill--older and deadly serious, only 1/3 made it through. 1970s: 2/3 made it through, most dropped…

Is ‘Hyper supportive’ a synonym for ‘universities realized they could make more money by making things easier’?

Isn't it still the case that nearly all med schools in the US are capacity constrained anyway? There's no sense in pandering for extra students you can't take on anyway, especially if it harms your program's reputation. More likely, they realized some aspects of med school nearly amounted to hazing, with little demonstrated educational benefit. (Again getting back to American culture's tendency to conflate difficult with beneficial.)

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#162

Post by alphabettsy »

dubswithus wrote: post #112
unmole wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that’s so easy to say after the fact. HN was almost always negative about the crypto currency hype. Even when shitcoins were at ATH. So, no. The criticism is not after the fact. > If these people really could foresee these events happening, then they could have made a lot of money by taking short positions. Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent has been a cliche for almost a century. That…

Y Combinator was an investor in Coinbase and other crypto startups. Sam Altman personally invested in Worldcoin. You are posting on a forum of an incubator that supports crypto. The irony.

> Y Combinator was an investor in Coinbase and other crypto startups.

This doesn’t necessarily indicate anything other than that they believed the business could make money.

They also invest in traditional banking startups. Even that isn’t necessarily a contradiction with crypto investments.

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#163

Post by SturgeonsLaw »

dalyons wrote: post #62
yunohn wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not that they want to get rich quick. They just want to make a lot of money really fast. In their defence, I feel like this is fuelled by media FUD as well as FOMO from the ever-widening wealth gap. A combination of inflation and unaffordable housing along with stagnant wages means that even with everyone in the family working jobs, you can’t even afford a yearly vacation. If the wealthy elites don’t realise t…

Exactly, people aren’t always stupid, they’re desperate. Investing in index funds at ~6% average return (or thereabouts) does nothing meaningful for people who are priced out by the 10-15% y/y gains on housing, or are living paycheck to paycheck due to inflation. Its not so hard to see why people feel their only option is riskier bets.

This is the key that is overlooked a lot. Taking /biz as an example, the sentiment is rife that crypto is their one and only shot to make it out of the hole. Couple that with the "how much do you make" threads that show a lot of them earn somewhere in the $15-$30 per hour range and you can see why these moonshots are (in their view) their only hope.

If the most they can scrape together is $5k of capital, then it needs to 10x to provide them with a meaningful change.

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#165

Post by ls15 »

nradov wrote: post #77

This is good. Hopefully all of those scammers and grifters who "invested" in cryptocurrency will end up bankrupt. I have zero empathy for their problems. Hopefully their misfortune will serve as an object lesson in the importance of making good choices.

I think I read this comment in 2018 already

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#166

Post by lmwnshn »

effingwewt wrote: post #144
charlie0 wrote: post #121

Coming from relative poverty, I can say that, counterintuitively, a lot of people way down on the socioeconomic ladder would rather gamble on a moonshot to riches rather than invest in an index fund. One large part of this is simply lack of education. The other part is the realization that if making close to minimum wage, investing in an index fund would still take quite a very long time to go up significantly. Give…

Too true. This is why lottery tickets are called 'poor people savings'. It's especially bad in Mexican communities. I've seen so many buy them, scratch them at the counter, and go back for more. Sometimes they don't even play the 'game' they just scratch the barcode and scan them. No method, just hope. You can see the fever in the eyes sometimes, no different than casino slot pullers, or a drug addict getting a fix.…

I think you're thinking of a ROSCA [0], e.g., from Poor Economics [1],

> In Africa, the most popular instruments are rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) - more commonly known as "merry-go-rounds" in English-speaking Africa and as tontines in Francophone countries. ROSCA members meet at regular intervals, and all deposit the same amount of money into a common pot at every meeting. Each time, on a rotating basis, one member gets the whole pot.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotating_savings_and_credit_as...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_Economics

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#167

Post by ls15 »

Tao3300 wrote: post #81
xyst wrote: post #71

Blockchain technology is heavily underrated. With this dip, it scared away all of the scammers, paper handers, and generally people that did not contribute to this space. This is the time where innovation will thrive rather than "get rich quick schemes".

As a rule of thumb, I distrust anyone who refers to blockchain as a "space".

I distrust anyone who lumps together all of crypto and blockchain and then bashes it based on the worst apples. If cryptopunks and the latest NFT scammers are treated like they were the same, then that is at best uninformed, more probably intellectually dishonest and at worst propaganda.

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#168

Post by SturgeonsLaw »

MBCook wrote: post #113
superb-owl wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stablecoins are useful, because they let you set prices on the blockchain that aren't denominated in BTC or ETH or another currency that fluctuates wildly. A good stablecoin is pretty boring in terms of gains/profits, but can generate a modest stream of fees. Terra had a sister coin called Luna which it planned to use to keep Terra stable. Luna had the price dynamics of ETH or BTC, where it's value depended solely on…

How is having a sister coin supposed to stop volatility in the stablecoin?

The mechanism was that 1 UST (the stablecoin) is redeemable for USD$1.00 worth of LUNA (the volatile coin), at whatever the LUNA/USD exchange rate is at that point in time, and vice versa. So in theory, if LUNA was trading for $10.00 then you could exchange 1 UST for 0.1 LUNA, then sell that 0.1 LUNA on an exchange to get USD$1.00. It works in the other direction too. Arbitrage maintains that peg.

Of course, the flaw in this whole arrangement, is that if LUNA is in a death spiral and money is only really flowing out of UST/LUNA, then the peg is not maintained.

Re: TerraUSD crash led to vanished savings, shattered dreams

#170

Post by effingwewt »

lmwnshn wrote: post #166
effingwewt wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too true. This is why lottery tickets are called 'poor people savings'. It's especially bad in Mexican communities. I've seen so many buy them, scratch them at the counter, and go back for more. Sometimes they don't even play the 'game' they just scratch the barcode and scan them. No method, just hope. You can see the fever in the eyes sometimes, no different than casino slot pullers, or a drug addict getting a fix.…

I think you're thinking of a ROSCA [0], e.g., from Poor Economics [1], > In Africa, the most popular instruments are rotating savings and credit associations (ROSCAs) - more commonly known as "merry-go-rounds" in English-speaking Africa and as tontines in Francophone countries. ROSCA members meet at regular intervals, and all deposit the same amount of money into a common pot at every meeting. Each time, on a rotatin…

Yes! I'm actually pretty stoked to find out it'd been done!

It mentions tons of users in Brazil but not really whether it's successful.

Maybe something like that truly could be tried here.

Of course it mentions trust and social connections being imperative and I feel we now have a glaring lack of those hwre in the US :(

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