Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 295 posts

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

#151

Post by masswerk »

woodruffw wrote: post #124
happyopossum wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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_Ar…

I don't get the hate part. There was about a single competing party who would have used that attribute, and this one proceeded to ban the associated party and to open the very first concentration camps for social democrats. We probably all know how things went from there.

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

#152

Post by doopy1 »

spamizbad wrote: post #48
55555 wrote: post #23

I really don’t understand the business model of making massive fiat loans to “firms” to buy bitcoin. If crypto goes up, you get a small amount of interest. If crypto goes down, you lose everything. What? Lol. Just spend a fraction of the sum on bitcoin and do something safe with the rest. What was the plan? Edit: I guess when someone has “20 billion dollars” a 700mm loan doesn’t seem like a big risk.

I think a lot of these projects are less rational and more ideological. People are desperate for applications of crypto, because the survival of the ecosystem depends on it, so they’re willing to chase down high risk / low reward ventures to keep the music going.

Firms like 3AC exist only to funnel as much money as possible into the crypto economy, most of it raised from ultra-high net worth individuals that won't miss this money at all. They place huge bets, because it's a land grab and the folks that work there got paid already.

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

#153

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

cjbgkagh wrote: post #33
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…

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 problem is the fintech industry - both crypto and mainstream - exists to swindle.

The biggest rewards come from crossing the line and avoiding regulation/enforcement, either by legitimate or illegitimate means (including bribing enforcement officials).

Next biggest are rewards for crossing the line and delaying enforcement until you can launder your rewards to a safe haven.

If you're arrested and jailed - only likely in cases where you inconvenience certain very rich and powerful people, not ordinary folk - it isn't usually for long. And you can afford the best representation to minimise the risk.

So the risk profile is very much slanted towards rewarding the unscrupulous.

Example: Even after all the confusion around the $400m or so "missing" from Mt Gox, Mark Karpelès only received suspended sentences and spent no time in jail. Even after the recent crash, that's still more $1.5bn at 2022 values.

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

#154

Post by woodruffw »

masswerk wrote: post #151
woodruffw wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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_Ar…

I don't get the hate part. There was about a single competing party who would have used that attribute, and this one proceeded to ban the associated party and to open the very first concentration camps for social democrats. We probably all know how things went from there.

Correct. They weren't a hate group, and the groups that currently use their symbology also aren't hate groups. I think the GP is probably misinformed.

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

#156

Post by datavirtue »

arcticbull wrote: post #10
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…

All that 'ngmi' culture is coming home to roost. This isn't a bunch of kind old grandmothers getting suckered in by Madoff.

I'm seriously waiting for my grandmother to tell me about how her broker just got her into crypto.

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

#157

Post by danans »

mherdeg wrote: post #134
danans wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The downside with the lottery is that it's state controlled; if a group of talented engineers finds a way to play to extract positive expected value from other bettors, stakeholders in the government will call this outcome unfair and shut it down ( https://www.mass.gov/doc/letter-to-state-treasurer-steven-gr... ). Even if, on average, money goes from gamblers to social good, people will complain that sophisticated be…

> As long as a fair chunk of the profits are channeled to effective altruism causes (which I think is the status quo?)

That's one heck of a qualification without a citation. The "altruism causes" channeled to would need to somehow outweigh the massive costs in terms of CO2 footprint and the loss of savings/security of an untold number of regular people (your "low-information gamblers") who bought into a big ponzi scheme.

They can't be made whole (though society will definitionally pay for the subset who lost a significant portion of their life savings), but seems pretty legit to point a finger at those who scammed them.

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

#158

Post by yieldcrv »

badcppdev wrote: post #32
yieldcrv wrote: post #11

This has been a slow motion trainwreck across crypto twitter (echoed sometimes in financial publications) and this is the first mainstream source out there. Finally. I definitely would like to see more things about specific organizations. Indictments about crypto as a whole just allows poorly run organizations to avoid scrutiny. Now if only there were mainstream news articles about all the things that go right in cry…

> Now if only there were mainstream news articles about all the things that go right in crypto. Legitimate question. What things have gone right in Crypto? I'm excluding individuals getting rich as that can happen due to gambling, etc.

> I'm excluding individuals getting rich as that can happen due to gambling, etc.

The tools that allow that stuff to occur onchain are pretty phenomenal. Bridges, farms, yield aggregators, yield optimizers, AMMs, the rapid evolution of standardized classes in the codebases (really was a mess before OpenZeppelin). It is capital formation and that is valuable for many people, a lot of capital formation improvements in tradfi never caught on for failing to address more important pain points people encountered.

For the aforementioned tooling, many of these services get hacked and take a lot of the capital inside of them, and many of them function really well and still are to this day. The velocity of permissionless deployment lets the market/conscious quickly see which ideas work well, and become a building block to try something else with. (I say "conscious" because the developers often aren't the market).

The best example of a recent reporting asymmetry would be all the stablecoins that aren't failing, functioning seamlessly, and what can be done to improve even them for a model stablecoin. Reporting about active proposals and the progress being done. This stuff is reported, just not in mainstream news sources and it would be an okay fit as some of them also have dedicated crypto sections already.

Another example would be the function of the insurance pools, or loss mitigation measures that work well preventing or during or after an attack.

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

#160

Post by oldgradstudent »

xwdv wrote: post #64

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

Could be anything.

Real estate is a sensible investment, but a housing bubble makes it a delusional get rich scheme.

Combine the most reasonable investment with a lot of easy leverage and you get a delusional get rich scheme.

Post reply on HN