181–190 of 339 posts
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I doubt you could invent a better way to launder all that ransomware cyrpto than inventing NFTs.
How does that work? Does I transfer a bunch of "ill gotten" ethereum to someone who agreed to buy my 5k goofy ape NFT for 1 million bucks and now I've made 995k that I can pay taxes on and use as laundered money? There's still a transaction chain of eth so it wouldn't be impossible to figure out what I just tried to do.
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).
For every seller there is a buyer, and many are buying stocks and crypto right now at low prices. And why wouldn't they? The fed is manipulating the market with interest rates, just as they did during Corona. History proves in the long run holding dollars is good for short term stability, but it's a long term loser.
1929-1932, the Dow drops 90%. "For every seller there is a buyer, and many are buying stocks [...] right now at low prices." Some people eventually did great, so it's all wonderful, so long as you ignore the staggering pain of the Great Depression.
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> I’m confused what the alternative is. For years it has been claimed that cryptocurrency represented a great hedge against traditional assets and investments in the case of a downturn. Like many other claims made about the utility of cryptocurrency, this too has been shown not to be the case.
Like stocks, don't confuse short term volatility with long term performance. The fed is expert at manipulating short term valuations, but their manipulations only hold for so long before they have to lower or raise rates again.
Cryptocurrency has explicitly and repeatedly been touted as un or anti-correlated to the wider financial ecosystem, fiat currencies and the stock market, and has been loudly, noisily and never-endingly sold as a great hedge against these things, absent any evidence.
The evidence is in now, and those theories are a bust.
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> not a single major DeFi protocol failed during a period of enormous stress Was Terra/Luna/Anchor/Whatever not a DeFi protocol?
They were a DeFi ponzi chain which was obviously going to fail to anyone who spent time looking into it. They were printing a stablecoin backed by nothing. Far different from the blue chip DeFi apps on Ethereum that the OP listed, which process billions of dollars per day without issue. DeFi makes things more transparent, but it doesn't make them risk free. I personally profited off the collapse because of the transp…
OK great. That's what I was trying to establish.
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The site is not actively accepting deposits. Did you assume that it was, based on something you saw there? Read this passage from Alex Mashinsky's bankruptcy affidavit: > Importantly, however, shortly after the Pause Date, on June 18, 2022, Celsius made the necessary changes to the Celsius App to prevent any new users from generating a deposit address and thus being able to deposit cryptocurrency on the Celsius platf…
If Celsius is accepting deposits on existing addresses, they are continuing to accept deposits that they know their customers can't access. Celsius designed the system without an off switch because DeFi systems generally view that as an anti-feature, but that means that they probably aren't able to be compliant with the bankruptcy affidavit. You yourself wrote that they "can't prevent" deposits for existing accounts.…
Did you read the affidavit? Your argument is specifically pre-empted and refuted:
> It is important to understand that users transfer their digital assets from external “wallets” to the Celsius platform by recording such transactions on the blockchain. These transfers are entirely user driven with no ability for Celsius to “approve” or “deny” a transfer to its platform. This is a feature of the underlying blockchain infrastructure and cannot be technically changed or otherwise prevented.
It is impossible to create, for example, a Bitcoin address that has an "off switch" that will prevent people from sending additional bitcoins to it. It's a feature that most blockchains simply do not support.
In other words, Celsius did not "design the system without an off switch." Satoshi Nakamoto designed Bitcoin without an off switch.
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> 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…
Blockchain solves it by making it so that all that goes away. In return if something fucks it up...well look at every crypto project that has ever crashed. I'm not being glib. That's the solution.
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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.
No problem having dozens of specific purpose blockchains. It’s just a ledger, it doesn’t matter at all how big the numbers are. It’s not real money just a record of balances. I’m not talking about a cryptocurrency, just a blockchain as a replacement for a database table, essentially a different api that ran distributed instead of on some ancient mainframe.
Suppose you and I are large institutions. I owe you $10bn today. You owe me 10bn EUR today. I owe you some currencies tomorrow, and you owe me some tomorrow, etc. (I may also owe you a bunch of future corn, you may owe me some shares of Coinbase, etc.).
The practicalities we need to attend to include, at least:
I actually owe you those dollars, and a business decision was made to keep that debt payable today. So I have to convey the dollars to you. Similarly, you need to convey those Euros to me. We can do this by actually transferring them via central bank mechanisms, or I suppose we could have a custodian that operates a blockchain and use that blockchain. I’m unclear how that helps. But keep reading…
There is a risk that one of us will default. If I default before any transactions take place, it’s not a huge deal — I still have my Euros, you still have your dollars, no one is out a huge amount of money, and the lawyers and courts can pick up the pieces later.
But there is also a risk that only one transaction goes through. (Look up Herstatt Bank.) If this happens, then one of us is out $10bn until the law does its thing. That is a big deal. This can be mitigated by atomic multi-currency transactions or maybe by a hypothetical blockchain handling USD and EUR (and Coinbase shares and everything else), but that seems every bit as hard as getting the central banks to use the same database, if not harder. [0]. Or they can use an escrow service like CLS, which works without a blockchain.
[0] Blockchains perform spectacularly poorly in the event of a network partition. Does anyone really think it would be wise for, say, the central banks of the US and Russia to allow currency to move in the same blockchain or, for that matter, on a POW or PoS blockchain?
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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?
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For every seller there is a buyer, and many are buying stocks and crypto right now at low prices. And why wouldn't they? The fed is manipulating the market with interest rates, just as they did during Corona. History proves in the long run holding dollars is good for short term stability, but it's a long term loser.
"For every seller there is a buyer" is the kind of meaningless statement one can make any time there is a major downturn or collapse in a market. 1929-1932, the Dow drops 90%. "For every seller there is a buyer, and many are buying stocks [...] right now at low prices." Some people eventually did great, so it's all wonderful, so long as you ignore the staggering pain of the Great Depression.