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Three Arrows Capital has defaulted on a loan worth more than $670M

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Re: Three Arrows Capital has defaulted on a loan worth more than $670M

#121

Post by _jal »

zeven7 wrote: post #96
cjbgkagh wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s essentially it, a small town where everyone knew each other and all hung out in the same bars. I didn’t pay attention to which one it was, I do remember hearing crazy interest, like >40%. I think you also got a cut from new entrants as well, so it reeked of pyramid + ponzi.

I'm fascinated that some kind of place like this existed. I've only lived in large cities and the picture I've gotten of small towns from trips and media hasn't prepared me for the idea of a whole community that collectively buys into a get rich quick scheme.

It happens a lot, and isolation can help keep scams going.

In case anyone has any illusions about how bad financial scamming can get, pyramid schemes famously led to civil war in Albania not that long ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_schemes_in_Albania

Re: Three Arrows Capital has defaulted on a loan worth more than $670M

#122

Post by danans »

xwdv wrote: post #64

Without crypto what will be the next delusional get rich quick scheme people will cling to?

What if crypto (in whatever form) is the ultimate get rich quick scam/scheme and there is always a baseline number of people willing to dump their money into it? Can an asset class be built on top of a seemingly endless hope of people hoping to get rich quick?

Take out the asset class part, and it sounds a lot like a lottery, which is just a regulated get rich scheme (where most participants lose monetarily, but get "entertainment") that turns a reliable human fallibility into a social funding mechanism.

Take out the social funding, and you have casinos, which also provide entertainment in exchange for the feeling you might get rich quick. Casino companies are publicly traded securities: https://www.cga.ct.gov/PS95/rpt/olr/htm/95-R-0426.htm

Is there a form of crypto that could provide the same?

Re: Three Arrows Capital has defaulted on a loan worth more than $670M

#123

Post by mlcrypto »

jjoonathan wrote: post #90
cjbgkagh wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fool and their money are soon parted. The real problem is that swindlers have made a huge amount of money and can use that money to corrupt politicians so it affects the rest of us. It’s not just the extra tax of having to care for the newly impoverished. My former local community went all in on a bitcoin scam, they made commissions on new entrants so I never heard the end of it. I only talked about it when asked b…

> The real problem is that swindlers have made a huge amount of money and can use that money to corrupt politicians Yes! It's not just crypto, either, this problem seems to be endemic in our political and economic power structures.

Yea who do you think benefits most from the Fed's printing press?

Re: Three Arrows Capital has defaulted on a loan worth more than $670M

#124

Post by woodruffw »

happyopossum wrote: post #108
midislack wrote: post #79

Imagine giving your money to anarchists and then you get scammed. They have a hate symbol on their site, LOL.

> They have a hate symbol on their site, LOL. Care to elaborate? I see one graphic on the 3ac website, and it's not one I'm familiar with so I assume it's a corp logo?

I think the GP is claiming that the 3AC logo is a reference to the Three Arrows[1] logo, which was used by the SPD in Weimar Germany and by some flavors of contemporary anarchists. But I can't find any evidence that it's an intended reference, and they look pretty different to me (different colors and directions; the only similarity is that they both happen to have arrows).

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

Re: Three Arrows Capital has defaulted on a loan worth more than $670M

#125

Post by DaveExeter »

Tao3300 wrote: post #69
toomuchtodo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot take: It’s fine when it happens to extreme hubris with paper wealth. It is not fine when it was someone unsophisticated chasing the herd who lost a meager sum that was meaningful to them. Comedy vs tragedy. Same thing with Archegos (Bill Hwang) and their rapid failure. It’s the hubris that makes it fun to poke fun, the sun blastin’ Icarus’ wings clean off. (no crypto exposure)

One of the things I noticed in the whole Terra/Luna drama is that there were lots of people on Twitter who seemed downright confused. People who didn't know where their money went or why. People who had complicated arrangements where their holdings were in the wrong kind of thing to get the 2.0 airdrop who hardly seemed to understand what they were talking about well enough to ask coherent questions. Those people mak…

HFSP = Have fun staying poor

Re: Three Arrows Capital has defaulted on a loan worth more than $670M

#126

Post by mywittyname »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #12
CoastalCoder wrote: post #8

I always have mixed feelings when someone is warned about the riskiness / foolishness / stupidity of a course of action, and then suffers for it. On the one hand, there's a certain satisfaction or Schadenfreude in the sense of vindication. And it's pleasant to feel like my own wisdom or self-control has been validated. OTOH, I know that everyone has limited wisdom / self-control / intelligence, including me. So it se…

Hot take: It’s fine when it happens to extreme hubris with paper wealth. It is not fine when it was someone unsophisticated chasing the herd who lost a meager sum that was meaningful to them. Comedy vs tragedy. Same thing with Archegos (Bill Hwang) and their rapid failure. It’s the hubris that makes it fun to poke fun, the sun blastin’ Icarus’ wings clean off. (no crypto exposure)

These two things are related though.

The people with the hubris understand deep down that they are involved in a ponzi scheme, and the only way up and out is to herd the unsophisticated investor. Not that there's explicit malice here (though, sometimes it is), but there's the understanding that driving demand is what drives up the price.

There's a reason that so many fad "investments" follow this exact same path, time and time again.

Re: Three Arrows Capital has defaulted on a loan worth more than $670M

#127

Post by AlwaysRock »

bombcar wrote: post #101
zeven7 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fascinated that some kind of place like this existed. I've only lived in large cities and the picture I've gotten of small towns from trips and media hasn't prepared me for the idea of a whole community that collectively buys into a get rich quick scheme.

It happens all the time but often the community and the physical community don't overlap, but check out /r/MLM or other similar subreddits and there's whole groups of scammers who target particular groups (church, social, retired, veterans, etc) with particular pitches designed for that group. Because if some rando tells you to join Amway or invest in AmCOIN™ you will tell them to get bent, but if it's a trusted frie…

In the smallest version of this... My weekly poker group talks about stocks and crypto often. It's a mix of guys who work in tech and engineering and a handful who just want to get rich quick. We've all bought a few yolo stocks and coins together and 100% of the time the investments have gone to zero or close to it.

Thankfully no one in the group is dumb enough to go all in on this hyper risky investments but I can see how it would be easy to be talked into something if you're in an echo chamber.

Before anyone gets too worried I'm talking about spending a few hundred dollars each on stupid investsments over the course of a few years.

Re: Three Arrows Capital has defaulted on a loan worth more than $670M

#128

Post by dgudkov »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #8

I always have mixed feelings when someone is warned about the riskiness / foolishness / stupidity of a course of action, and then suffers for it. On the one hand, there's a certain satisfaction or Schadenfreude in the sense of vindication. And it's pleasant to feel like my own wisdom or self-control has been validated. OTOH, I know that everyone has limited wisdom / self-control / intelligence, including me. So it se…

People may not have a choice about being wise or not. But being greedy or not is definitely a choice. Let's not pretend that obscene ROI promised by the cryptoindustry didn't play a role in seducing so many "uneducated" people to put their money into coins. These people deliberately decided to suppress their gut feeling that told them "it's too good to be true" and you didn't.

Re: Three Arrows Capital has defaulted on a loan worth more than $670M

#129

Post by jpambrun »

idiotsecant wrote: post #66
jpambrun wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People with crypto coins needs other people to be willing to buy them at higher price just slightly later. They keep exploiting fomo for their own gain. I don't think this is moral and a bit of karma is always welcomed.

This isn't necessarily true. A lot of people have held crypto since you could purchase it for single digit American dollars because they believe in the fundamental tenants of crypto - permissionless world financial exchange where the levers and dials of the economic systems are not controlled by world governments.

It is probably true that 99.9% of people with crypto use it as a speculative investment. The remaining 0.1% true crypto idealist may exist, but I have never met one. So it makes the previous statement very much mostly true.

This type of disingenuous argument is why some of us rejoice at the crypto meltdown.

Re: Three Arrows Capital has defaulted on a loan worth more than $670M

#130

Post by woodruffw »

xwdv wrote: post #64

Without crypto what will be the next delusional get rich quick scheme people will cling to?

At least in the US, there are two sorts of schemes that people historically cling to: there's the goldbugs (who hoard precious metals because of the dollar's imminent collapse - any day now!) and the Amway types (who buy into pyramid cough multilevel schemes thinking that they'll ultimately profit off of their social circle).

Cryptocurrencies merge these two groups of chumps into one group of hyper-chumps. So it stands to reason that many will go back to the old schemes which, arguably, is an improvement in the state of affairs.

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