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…
Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet
161–170 of 339 posts
Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet
#162Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet
#163Earlier 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?
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
#164One 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…
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
#165Earlier 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.
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
#166Earlier 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…
Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet
#167Earlier 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…
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
#168Re: Celsius acknowledges $1.2B hole in balance sheet
#169The 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).
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
#170Earlier 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.
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.