131–140 of 339 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So exactly like the federal reserve or the social security administration buying US bonds then?
It doesn't work quite as well if you're not a sovereign government.
One thing to note is that while Celsius, a centralized and opaque yield platform, collapsed, not a single major DeFi protocol failed during a period of enormous stress. MakerDAO, Aave, Uniswap, Curve, Lido and Compound all had perfect 24/7 uptime with zero losses due to unrecoverable debt. This pretty clearly strengthens the case for pure and transparent DeFi, where anybody can inspect the health of the protocol or t…
You'd have been better off just buying bitcoin on margin (Since BTC is only down 53% YTD).
The point of this post is that you can't make something out of nothing. None of these tokens/firms/etc have any idea of how they can make money in the crypto space, because there is no way to make money in the crypto space - because it doesn't produce anything. It's all just negative-sum speculation, and shitcoins investing into other shitcoins, and it all evaporates as soon as the Fed tightens its purse-strings.
Miners make money, people selling shovels make money, everyone else is just trading baseball cards around.
And yet the site apparently continues to accept deposits: https://celsius.network Business as usual. Oh yeah, check out our hello bar for that minor detail that withdrawal, swap, and transfers are "currently paused." These guys are going to prison.
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.
Was three arrows a scam or just acting like a hedgefund? It’s well known hedgefunds can go bust like LTCM. Especially if you’re doing arbitrage and your thesis is two disparate assets are price linked.
So, a scam.
What's sad is that some pension funds have exposure to Celcius. Imagine teaching for decades only to find your retirement pension is reduced because the manager thought it was a good idea to put your money into a ponzi scheme
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…
Don't forget about the $720M in "Mining Assets". I wouldn't be surprised if the true value were much lower than this, now that crypto prices have crashed.
Seems like people are going to take a large haircut on whatever they deposited and then maybe get back some incremental cash over time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People significantly underestimate how much cost there is at certain points in the chain. Interbank transfers are very cheap. A lot of central banks have invested heavily in payments systems too (the BoE is one, Faster is very good). But at certain other points, this technology could be very valuable. Two examples that occur to me immediately are pensions and fund administration. Obviously, Ethereum goes beyond that…
> I remember vividly opening the door to the pig pen, and it was just a sea of people, 95% just responding to very basic customer queries/doing incredibly basic computation work and costing huge amounts of money...because, of course, there is no cost pressure from "customers"...a parallel that more people understand is US healthcare admin, huge inefficiencies, pension admin is like that How does blockchain solve this…
Scam, after scam, after scam, after scam...
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.
Sending funds to people outside of the country without being reliant on gatekeepers is extremely useful. This is especially true if you want to send funds to people and/or organizations being blackballed by the US financial establishment (either because of their function, such as Wikileaks, or their location, for living in a frowned upon country).
I still find it somewhat astounding that people, especially techies, can't see the extreme utility in this function. But, unfortunately, ideology often trumps logic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do banks not presently trust each other? edit: Suggesting that the interbank system move to crypto on a thread about a massive failed crypto project is a huge failure on reading the room. It's like trying to convince people to buy Titanic II tickets at the funeral for the Titanic I victims or trying to sell a Model 38 to Jacqueline Kennedy on November 23, 1963.
There are levels of trust between treating the other party as hostile by default and being sure that there will never be a disputed issue.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We've had two crypto threads in the past two days. They both had a real world use case in the top comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32080174 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32094142 Or do those not count?
You hold up 1. Paying content creators for content and 2. Transferring money internationally as groundbreaking uses for crypto? Seriously?
You are confusing, "groundbreaking" with, "useful and convenient". It is much cheaper, faster and easier to send small international payments via crypto than it is via any legacy financial service - this is beyond dispute.