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Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

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161–170 of 339 posts

Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

#161

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

I am not sympathetic to teachers or pension funds whatsoever. Teachers should take control of their investments like everyone else: either invest it yourself or make your pension managers invest it properly. Pension funds do all sorts of stupid things: they played a role in 2008, they invest in big oil and other anti-ESG stocks, and now this. They're huge pools of poorly governed funds, it's inevitable that they get…

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Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

#162
post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused what the alternative is. If it’s valuable and people lose value somewhere in their life, they will exchange their valuable thing to make up for it.

Quoted post unavailable.

I’m not sure why you’re being so abrasive.

Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need BTC to do any of that?

I don’t need to do that. But it’s an accepted currency, so why shouldn’t I use it when it’s offered?

Well, purportedly BTC is a high-yield investment asset, so paying for things in it instead of regular money, which is purportedly a negative yield (e.g inflation) asset, makes way less financial sense.

Though this does highlight one of the things that's never made sense to me about this entire ecosystem. Something that's a high-yield asset is a terrible currency because you're basically punishing your future self for spending it on mundane stuff.

Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

#164
post #132

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…

Celsius seems to have been either a ponzi scheme, or a group of morons doing dumb speculative investment on margin, or (most likely) both, but I'd like to point out that MakerDAO is down 70% YTD, Aave is down 60%, Uniswap is down 60%, etc, etc. 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 thes…

> but I'd like to point out that MakerDAO is down 70% YTD, Aave is down 60%, Uniswap is down 60%, etc, etc.

The health of the protocols is only very marginally connected to the value of the tokens that govern them. Even if the $UNI token went to zero, the liquidity pools and swap contracts would still work fine. $MKR and $AAVE are a little more complicated because if the governance tokens got too cheap, the protocols could be hijacked and some of the lending parameters could be set to 'broken' values, resulting in liquidations that didn't need to happen. But as of now, the protocols are still working as designed.

Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Monetary policy” is backed up by the military. What are Celsius’ tokens backed up by?

Monetary policy is based on fiat money which is backed by faith. The military doesn't back the money supply. No military can prevent hyperinflation.

Literally all forms of money ever invented are based on faith. Even the importance of debt (which existed before money) is based on faith.

You can't eat gold, you can't grow food with the wasted energy underlying Bitcoin. You need faith that in the long term people will give you something you want in exchange for your monetary tokens, and that the prices of goods will not grow or shrink too quickly so as to make those transactions untenable.

Sovereign nations have several levers to ensure their national currency continues to fulfil these requirements so as to encourage faith in their currency. Magic internet money does not.

Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

#166
post #136
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think they are claiming they can mine something like 10k bitcoin/year ( https://twitter.com/ThePrivatier/status/1547613977231798272 ) going forward but I have no idea what the COGS/cost between labor/maintenance and electricity is to mine that. If it's say 50%, then those "mining assets" will pay back in 7 years. Seems like people are going to take a large haircut on whatever they deposited and then maybe get back…

You think there’s a 50% gross margin on mining Bitcoin, after the price has fallen heavily, and we’ve entered a global energy crisis?

Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t need to do that. But it’s an accepted currency, so why shouldn’t I use it when it’s offered?

Well, purportedly BTC is a high-yield investment asset, so paying for things in it instead of regular money, which is purportedly a negative yield (e.g inflation) asset, makes way less financial sense. Though this does highlight one of the things that's never made sense to me about this entire ecosystem. Something that's a high-yield asset is a terrible currency because you're basically punishing your future self for…

While other treat bitcoin as an investment, I treat it as a way to send money without getting censored and without supporting PayPal and VISA/MasterCard. It’s an idealistic thing (which is probably the reason why I only pay products worth 100-200$/month in BTC. I obviously don’t pay my rent, my car etc in BTC). For me it’s just an alternative to cash, which I also use for smaller purchases — cash is „gelebte Freiheit“.

Honestly, I’d also prefer to use GNU Taler instead of bitcoin, but unfortunately GNU Taler never gained any traction.

Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you buy drugs on the darknet with USD you're playing a dangerous game

This is equally true of buying drugs on the darknet using BTC.

If you understand how bitcoin works, you shouldn’t really worry. You can easily get rid of tainted coins.

Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

#169

The fact that the entire crypto market simply followed the public markets in the downturn, rather than being a haven for wealth that people flocked to for safety, means that "Crypto" is unambiguously just another speculative asset like Art (but worse).

Show me the IRL crypto party that rivals Art Basel.

Speculation is one part of the art market, but at this point I really don’t think it’s as important as status. Plus, some of the art is really good as, you know, Art.

Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet

#170
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pay my servers at vultr.com, my domains on porkbun.com and my drugs on $market with bitcoin :)

But all three of them also accept USD or your local currency. So the use case remains... evading the authorities? That's not a compelling use case for the general population.

Is everyone who is using cash also evading authorities? Unfortunately most internet companies don’t accept cash, therefore I’m trying to use something which gets as close as possible to cash in regard to its privacy aspects. I just don’t want to use shitty paypal which locks money of vendors for 180 days, or mastercard who randomly allege companies of child porn without providing any evidence (see pornhub).

I don’t like these companies and will try to not use them at all. Yes, I’m paying a price for it, but imo it’s worth it.

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