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Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

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Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

#31
post #18
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> To the author that talked about writing yourself a bunch of IOUs and claiming it gives you wealth, that's essentially what the US Government does, but at a different scale. They write debt denominated in their own currency. This is such a bad take. Government-issued money in itself is not equivalent to private debt, and has never been. It is an academically heterodox and often politically charged view of what money…

Where do promissory notes issued by individual private savings-and-loan banks (as most paper money was in the 1800s) fall on that spectrum?

They weren’t “legal tender”

Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

#32
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would have been really interesting if any of these crypto companies bought a bunch of tanks when times were good. That sounds like a good sci-fi novel and an interesting ending.

Maybe they can pay the stamp fees under the NFA for the tank ammo with crypto

For SOTs the NFA fee is just $5!

Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still waiting to see even one single useful use case for cryptocurrency and block-chain storage. It's all a grift to take money away from stupid retail investors trying to get rich quick.

Interbank nightly balance settlements between large institutions. A distributed cryptographic ledger would be great for this kind of thing. A private “coin” between mostly trusted partners with provisions for reversing transactions as needed. Useful because it would have lower administration overhead than one bank maintaining a service for exchanging funds, no concerns about downtime, and all sorts of guarantees abou…

> Interbank nightly balance settlements between large institutions. A distributed cryptographic ledger would be great for this kind of thing. A private “coin” between mostly trusted partners with provisions for reversing transactions as needed.

But they’re already trusted partners who already have a functioning settlement mechanism that already has provisions for reversing transactions. Jamming a blockchain on top of this solves nothing not already solved.

The claim that this would reduce maintenance overhead is hogwash – we’ve seen an unending litany of unexpected bugs in blockchain protocols and smart contracts, while the existing transfer mechanisms are already debugged. Trustless mechanisms are harder to get right than trust-based ones, not easier.

Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

#34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They weren't really scamming, but got scammed along with several other companies that were trying to be legit. They made large loans to three arrows capital because on the surface it seemed like a legit serious business hedge fund, but it turned out it making tons of high risk bets in the crypto scene that fell apart when the market crashed.

By this logic banks putting garbage mortgages in their CDOs and having them AAA rated wasn’t scamming either. It’s just that they also got scammed when the market crashed! Oh, wait, they got bailed out.

I can see hashtags like this start circulating shortly.

#NoBailoutsForCrypto

Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

#35
post #30
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why did you leave off the clear reason that easily refutes the misconception? Were you just depending on the status signals to carry your refutation? Seriously, I don’t get why people proclaim such confident views and then neglect to share their knowledge and insights. “Fake it till you make it”?

the government backs its currency by having _different rights_ than private companies. E.g. the ability to levy taxes and field an army. We the citizens have given them those rights specifically so that they are the highest authority. This is why a currency that derives from them is better than a currency that derives from anonymous scammers on the internet.

Did you mean to reply to the grandparent of my comment, to which that would be responsive? I was asking why the parent of my comment “contributed” with an argument from “that’s a low status belief” rather than a comment more like yours.

Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

#36
post #13

If I read it correctly it's more like a 1.8 bn hole. They are counting 600m of their own token, which already had only 170m or whatever of market cap, which presumably now is absolutely worthless. I don't mean worthless in a conceptual sense like all crypto, but this specific brand of made up money is based on the trust of a bankrupt lender. Nobody is buying that and counting it as 600m of asset is absurd. It's like…

For reasons I don’t claim to understand, their token is still trading at about a third of where it was three months ago: https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/celsius/

This happened with Hertz during bankruptcy. And apparently it wasn’t entirely nuts:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kevindowd/2021/11/07/how-hertz-...

Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

#37

Scam, after scam, after scam, after scam...

They weren't really scamming, but got scammed along with several other companies that were trying to be legit. They made large loans to three arrows capital because on the surface it seemed like a legit serious business hedge fund, but it turned out it making tons of high risk bets in the crypto scene that fell apart when the market crashed.

In what way did it seem like a "legit serious business hedge fund"? I'm unclear how Celsius got scammed making loans to a hedge fund that is on record as investing exclusively in crypto since 2018 [1] - did the hedge fund lie about their positions?

1. https://www.smh.com.au/business/markets/school-friends-start...

Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

#38
post #10
post #5

Quoted post unavailable.

> To the author that talked about writing yourself a bunch of IOUs and claiming it gives you wealth, that's essentially what the US Government does, but at a different scale. They write debt denominated in their own currency. This is such a bad take. Government-issued money in itself is not equivalent to private debt, and has never been. It is an academically heterodox and often politically charged view of what money…

Is the difference that you can use gov-issued money to pay taxes but not private debt? I.e. government money printing is different to crypto printing in that the gov IOUs are legally acceptable by the government.

If so, they seem similar enough for the parent take to be accurate. The gov Bond has to be paid back eventually, so it's exactly like an IOU, even if the Fed can print money and buy shitloads of these bonds.

Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Still waiting to see even one single useful use case for cryptocurrency and block-chain storage. It's all a grift to take money away from stupid retail investors trying to get rich quick.

Interbank nightly balance settlements between large institutions. A distributed cryptographic ledger would be great for this kind of thing. A private “coin” between mostly trusted partners with provisions for reversing transactions as needed. Useful because it would have lower administration overhead than one bank maintaining a service for exchanging funds, no concerns about downtime, and all sorts of guarantees abou…

If banks distrust each other enough to want a blockchain to handle nightly settlements, then they are massively exposed to transaction rollback shenanigans. Interbank settlements can be very, very large, and I have trouble imagining, even in the wildest cryptocurrency fantasy land, that banks could arrange for all their different types of settlements to be on the same blockchain.
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