791–800 of 1001 posts
This has been a wonderful social experiment, enabling people who didn’t live in the 19th century to see what happens when banking and investing is treated like the wild west. Maybe something could have been different this time? In the end it wasn’t, and it proves the necessity of regulation and institutions. There aren’t very many other aspects of our society where we get to have that kind of experiment and find out…
I'm not a luddite (on hacker news lol) and I can clearly see the revolutionary potential of blockchain. But, for the love of God, can we STOP the blind short-term speculation on the promise of extreme wealth. Moderate investment can support development without the kind of hype that ruins lives and sullies public perception of the technology.
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I don't see why crypto is incompatible with regulation and institutions. Crypto is a unit of account, not some magical lawless thing that's doomed to never have a regulation written about it. In fact, places like New York already have pretty strict regulations requiring specific licenses for crypto-related businesses. Crypto crises like these are in general due to regulation not having caught up yet, not because comp…
Once you accept the necessity of middlemen, known counterparties, and regulators; what's the point of Crypto?
Can anyone speculate what Bankman-Fried's exit plan was? Was this a fraud that got out of control, or premeditated? If it was premeditated, what was the exit plan? Did he expect to be able to gamble with customer funds indefinitely? Were the Effective Altruism intimations genuine? Why, if Alameda was a market maker, and they therefore presumably have some form of insight into the markets, did they then decide to take…
My thoughts are that FTX was maybe a legitimate business, but then Alameda was his trading baby that just happened to be run by kids, including himself, that have no idea what they're doing and was losing money left and right. Then using FTX customer funds was viewed as just a "let's move these funds over to get our trading back on track and when we do, we'll move them back". That's my honest guess if I'm being gener…
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> Coinbase doesn't offer the leverage that offshore exchanges do. FTX was popular originally because they offered 100x leverage Sounds like a red alarm for me. There's probably a good reason domestic exchanges don't let you extend out that far... particularly on extremely volatile securities.
Definitely alarming, but mostly for counterparty risk. If the exchange is just a middle man then they can't lose as long as they're able to liquidate toxic positions before they're negative. Turns out FTX was also the market maker through alameda and because of that was hesitant to liquidate toxic positions, leading to the embezzlement to try to save alameda and the current crisis.
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She was referring to the type of math that she did to earn a math degree, which I suppose could be true. My math degree did not require any of the kind of math I assume they do at these kinds of exchanges, although I also assume that the whole branch of math that starts getting into modeling and analysis would be very useful in these sorts of companies.
Didn't she literally say they use elementary school math right after that?
The comfort with risk part seems worse in hindsight. Obviously somewhat less comfort with risk would have been better.
Can anyone speculate what Bankman-Fried's exit plan was? Was this a fraud that got out of control, or premeditated? If it was premeditated, what was the exit plan? Did he expect to be able to gamble with customer funds indefinitely? Were the Effective Altruism intimations genuine? Why, if Alameda was a market maker, and they therefore presumably have some form of insight into the markets, did they then decide to take…
Presumably, SBF was hoping that the crypto winter would end soon, which would bring everything else massively profitable for them again, and then plug the holes he had.
This has been a wonderful social experiment, enabling people who didn’t live in the 19th century to see what happens when banking and investing is treated like the wild west. Maybe something could have been different this time? In the end it wasn’t, and it proves the necessity of regulation and institutions. There aren’t very many other aspects of our society where we get to have that kind of experiment and find out…
It is interesting that the waves that we are experiencing are nothing new, everything has been repeating every 20-40 years for the past three centuries or more.
Yeah, bitcoin is nothing new. It is the roughly similar thing happening all over again -- people buying something they absolutely do not understand just because they see the value is going up. Investing is hard and here is this golden opportunity -- just put your money in and see it multiply. And for a long time this works because more people are putting their money in and expecting returns. Then suddenly for whatever reason the positive returns dry up (at the very least you have to run out of new capital at some point) and those same people who were only in to speculate now want to get their money back. But as the first are able to do it, the price starts to fall.
Then you get companies or individuals swarming nearby the stream of money because, hey, for every greedy person with capital you will find a greedy person without it. And lots of these people also want to get rich quick.
It really is just another pyramid scheme that lures in people who do not understand finances but want to get rich quick (and some who do understand but are just too greedy to pass on the opportunity or play with somebody elses capital), the difference being it looks way more legit and legal because of the number of investors and amount of capital.
The cycle length has something to do with how long people remember the previous painful lesson before they forget and do it all over again. Remarkably stable over centuries...
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1. BTC has cratered 20% in the past couple days. I know, par for the course for crypto, but also a good example of why it doesn't share standard features of real currencies. 2. All the "not your keys, not your coins" mindless chanting misses the point. While true, a modern financial system depends on being able to have trust in financial institutions if you actually need to move money quickly. Years ago I went the "m…
> 1. BTC has cratered 20% in the past couple days. I know, par for the course for crypto, but also a good example of why it doesn't share standard features of real currencies. Currencies tanking is not uncommon either. I'm not sure what you think this proves exactly.