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Voyager suspends trading, deposits, withdrawals, and loyalty rewards

investvoyager.com

211–220 of 245 posts

Re: Voyager suspends trading, deposits, withdrawals, and loyalty rewards

#211
post #4

I sometimes wonder if I'm the only one who just wants a bank to be a bank. I've been with the same relatively small regional bank for 30 years. I have a checking account, savings account and that's it. They've been stable this entire time, and I've never worried my money was going to disappear. As another sign of being an old man, I'm old enough to remember the phrase "as safe as money in the bank". You see, when I w…

I hate to break it to you but vast majority of small regional banks are scams. I learned this hard way trying to support local bank instead of big ones. It turns out these banks are run by bunch of private equity firms for the sole purpose of lone manipulation. After they serve their purpose, they “almost” go out of business until another equity firm picks it up for cheap for another rinse repeat cycle. My local bank changes hands about every 2-3 years. As a bonus you get crappiest website with giant security issues. Your money is safe there only below federal limit. As long as banks are concerned, always chose too big to fail ones.

Re: Voyager suspends trading, deposits, withdrawals, and loyalty rewards

#212
post #103

There's a myth that Voyager is FDIC insured. It's pure marketing. Voyager has an omnibus account with the Metropolitan Commercial Bank where Voyager's customers deposit their money. Voyager acts as the money manager of the omnibus account and has absolute control over the money. Metropolitan is a member of FDIC and is FDIC insured. In the case of the Metropolitan bank failing, the FDIC insurance kicks in to cover any…

I am pretty certain people there will end up in prison for making these kind of false claims.

Re: Voyager suspends trading, deposits, withdrawals, and loyalty rewards

#213

I guess everyone's strategy in the crypto space is put everything you have on bitcoin and hope it goes up. It's a really good strategy, when it works.

The people getting wiped out by the collapse of Voyager, Celsius, etc. were not putting their money on bitcoin. They were giving it to a custodian who thought they could beat bitcoin by investing in altcoins (or lending to those who do so). This is definitely not "everyone's strategy"; plenty of us bitcoiners have been warning against this sort of irresponsible activity for a long time.

I wonder,

Where there any crypto investment Funds that invested in actual companies (aka not coins or derivates)?

Re: Voyager suspends trading, deposits, withdrawals, and loyalty rewards

#214
post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

to be fair, all of this CeFi crap is against the core ethos of crypto. No serious crypto person will tell you to use CeFi. "Not your keys, not your coins" is the first rule of crypto.

> No serious crypto person will tell you to use CeFi. Nobody used the term CeFi before this crash. It’s just a No True Scotsman excuse for crypto scamming.

I don't understand what's the scam in this. You buy BTC because you either seek to profit from it, or you believe in the core philosophy behind it. Both of these are your own decisions.

A scam would be you buying a phone from Amazon and getting a brick. BTC is exactly what it describes, nothing more, nothing less.

If you got greedy enough to dump your BTC onto a centralized service for 3% yield, that's on you. As is the decision to buy BTC.

Re: Voyager suspends trading, deposits, withdrawals, and loyalty rewards

#215
post #4

I sometimes wonder if I'm the only one who just wants a bank to be a bank. I've been with the same relatively small regional bank for 30 years. I have a checking account, savings account and that's it. They've been stable this entire time, and I've never worried my money was going to disappear. As another sign of being an old man, I'm old enough to remember the phrase "as safe as money in the bank". You see, when I w…

> Bank local! If you want to speculatively invest, that's fine. But keep some money in a local bank so that you can pay your bills next month.

Hmm, shouldn't you also consider having accounts in multiple banks, even if they're relatively local ones? For example, in my country there's two banks that I guess are the most popular ones: SEB and Swedbank.

While they both have a history of being reliable, it's not unheard of that people's bank details might be compromised, breaches happen, or outages/cyber attacks that might disrupt/slow down service in whatever capacity.

While a part of these factors might not be applicable to people who practice good information security, it's not like you cannot write them off entirely. Furthermore, I do think that there was a bank that actually went bankrupt a number of years ago, people couldn't access all of their funds etc.

So treating banks like any other system - where avoiding a single point of failure might just be worth it in the face of significant consequences should anything bad happen, seems like the right thing to do.

Then again, one might also just buy gold and bury it in their back yard (provided that they own the land), depending on what their risk tolerance is towards certain events. Not even kidding about this. If you can diversify your investments, doing the same for where/how you store your money or other assets just seems smart, even if a bit cumbersome.

Re: Voyager suspends trading, deposits, withdrawals, and loyalty rewards

#216
post #4

I sometimes wonder if I'm the only one who just wants a bank to be a bank. I've been with the same relatively small regional bank for 30 years. I have a checking account, savings account and that's it. They've been stable this entire time, and I've never worried my money was going to disappear. As another sign of being an old man, I'm old enough to remember the phrase "as safe as money in the bank". You see, when I w…

I invite you to look at the list of failed banks provided by the FDIC: https://www.fdic.gov/resources/resolutions/bank-failures/fai... Notice that the vast majority of these are smaller, local or regional banks.

This is a complete misunderstanding of the problem.

I invite you to read Taleb (I'm not trying to sound like a fanboy; but his ideas are literally the utterly common-sense conclusions you'll reach if you study complexity science as applied to the financial system; i.e. they are objectively and necessarily true).

I'll try to present a very simplified but rigorous case:

1. There's commercial banks (that take consumer/corporate deposit & give out loans), and investment banks that arbitrage the markets. If you allow banks to fulfill both commercial and investment roles, consumer deposits are at risk from bad investment decisions. Note that Glass–Steagall is still repealed, and banks are still allowed today to put your money at risk.

2. Many investment banks used mathematically-flawed risk models, that underestimate fat-tail risk, and therefore lead to inevitable collapse. Read Jim Rickards's testimony to the House of Representatives on this; he was LTCM's general counsel, and LTCM (a who's who of finance PhD's and Nobel Prize winners) blew up due to overconfidence in these flawed models (https://moam.info/house-testimony-rickards-committee-on-scie...).

3. The problem here is systemic risk: banks only get rescued because they're systemically important. "Systemic-ness" is mainly a function of interconnectedness of markets, i.e. systemic banks cannot fail without destroying the markets and economies. Hence banks have an incentive to become systemically important, so they'll get bailed out if they make mistakes. Risk of catastrophic system failure is incentivized.

4. Small banks failing is normal. FDIC insures deposits to a certain amount; no Average Joe gets wiped out, bank investors do. The key point (covered in Taleb's Antifragile book) is that individual survival (agent) and ecosystem survival (system) are often at odds. Animal evolution requires death, since that's the filtering process; if everyone survived, no natural selection occurs, no evolution, and pathological mutations would eventually accumulate and wipe the species out. A healthy banking industry is one in which banks fail regularly, without impacting consumers (thanks to FDIC), and where bankers who worked at those banks get wiped out financially too, and don't just walk away with bonuses. Then, they'd have an incentives to stop using known-defective quant risk models. Contrary to popular opinion skin in the game isn't about incentives but about filtering (if you fail at the game, you personally suffer the consequences and cannot continue playing).

Many problems in the world stem from misunderstandings of either complex systems theory (an actual scientific discipline that should be taught in high school), math (mostly dimensionality and fat-tailedness) and probability theory. Without a basic understanding of these, people simply don't have the tools to understand or discuss much of the modern world.

The consequences can be seen in systemic financial failures; in ineffective pandemic responses; and in much of social science. See for example:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.16096.pdf

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.04722.pdf

Re: Voyager suspends trading, deposits, withdrawals, and loyalty rewards

#217
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even better strategy imo is considering market caps alone. Dump money into the top x coins by market cap and the intertia will carry you. Whenever crypto dumps people say its the end, but get real. This is more speculative than the lottery for a lot of people. It will always have its lemmings and grifters pumping it back up after a dump. Just ride the tide. Buy low, wait, sell high, wait, buy low. Don't put all your…

> It will always have its lemmings and grifters pumping it back up after a dump. Just ride the tide. I think the shoeshine boy moment might be here with bitcoin and crypto, thanks to things like the Super Bowl ads, so that strategy you stated is much riskier than it was in the past, and potential returns lower. Pumping doesn't work well when the flow of new investors ebbs. Eventually a lot of the "investors" may need…

If anything the fact that you have things like the crypto.com arena taking over the staples center ossifies it. People are now making automatic contributions to both a 401k and a crypto portfolio. There is an entire fintech side of this too. That last line in your post made more sense when bitcoin popped at 17k years ago. Its a fundamentally different animal now that you have goldman sachs boys buying crypto with their models, and I don't think the global world of finance is going to let go of this new plaything anytime soon after they have spent so much effort on regulatory process.

I'm not putting much skin in this game, but I'd be a fool not to hedge my bets and stake some versus blind myself on principle and sit on the sidelines. Betting what you don't mind losing is always a winning strategy; things can only go up with that outlook.

Re: Voyager suspends trading, deposits, withdrawals, and loyalty rewards

#218
post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even better strategy imo is considering market caps alone. Dump money into the top x coins by market cap and the intertia will carry you. Whenever crypto dumps people say its the end, but get real. This is more speculative than the lottery for a lot of people. It will always have its lemmings and grifters pumping it back up after a dump. Just ride the tide. Buy low, wait, sell high, wait, buy low. Don't put all your…

> Just ride the tide. Buy low, wait, sell high, wait, buy low. I think you're underselling the difficulty of this problem by the adverbial just .

Its easy if you only bet amounts that you won't miss. I'm not saying move your entire portfolio for crypto, I'm saying its probably wise to hedge your bets and ignore your principles sometimes.

Re: Voyager suspends trading, deposits, withdrawals, and loyalty rewards

#219
post #4

I sometimes wonder if I'm the only one who just wants a bank to be a bank. I've been with the same relatively small regional bank for 30 years. I have a checking account, savings account and that's it. They've been stable this entire time, and I've never worried my money was going to disappear. As another sign of being an old man, I'm old enough to remember the phrase "as safe as money in the bank". You see, when I w…

Voyager was never a bank, LLCs can't be 'banks'.

Re: Voyager suspends trading, deposits, withdrawals, and loyalty rewards

#220
post #190
post #103

There's a myth that Voyager is FDIC insured. It's pure marketing. Voyager has an omnibus account with the Metropolitan Commercial Bank where Voyager's customers deposit their money. Voyager acts as the money manager of the omnibus account and has absolute control over the money. Metropolitan is a member of FDIC and is FDIC insured. In the case of the Metropolitan bank failing, the FDIC insurance kicks in to cover any…

Just two weeks ago they had the following in a blog post: > This is also a good time to remind everyone that USD is held by our banking partner, Metropolitan Commercial Bank, which is FDIC insured. The cash you hold with Voyager is protected up to $250,000–which means it’s as safe with us as at a bank. They also said: > Through our strategic relationships with our banking partners, all customers’ USD held with Voyage…

That's misleading marketing, and might even be a federal crime.

Their terms of service say clearly:

>FDIC insurance does not protect against the failure of Voyager

https://www.investvoyager.com/useragreement/

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