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BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

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Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#81

Post by SilverBirch »

redwood wrote: post #23
paulgb wrote: post #2

> At the start of the year, there were three big North American retail crypto lenders. Now all three are bankrupt. https://twitter.com/kadhim/status/1597250428378705921

To confirm, what makes Coinbase different is that it's not a lender?

It looks like everyone in crypto has been doing wild and shady stuff, whilst Coinbase has built a respectable business in an industry that doesn't exist. Coinbase was being looked at as a shrinking fish in a growing pond, moving slowly whilst places like FTX ran rings around them, now it turns out FTX was just a straight up scam and loads of the money was actually wash trading, so Coinbase now looks like an expensive and slow business in an industry that doesn't actually exist.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#82

Post by moneywoes »

seydor wrote: post #55
fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I talked to an employee that left last spring. She said they had literally no idea what they were doing. The founders are just ivy educated 30 year olds. So they decided to just start hiring everyone they could from paypal, to move into "blockchain payments". They paid huge sums. The directors there had no experience ever managing huge teams of people. It was a giant mess of unqualified people funded by cheap capital…

VC wealth redistribution

Don’t they get their money from pension funds?

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#83

Post by itake »

skrebbel wrote: post #27
propter_hoc wrote: post #16

Somehow these guys peaked at about 900 employees, according to linkedin ( https://www.linkedin.com/company/blockfi ) They've raised about a billion dollars of VC - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/blockfi-inc/investor... (note, CB lists $1.4b, of which 400M is debt from FTX, which I imagine they never got) Unbelievable the amount of destruction of value here... it's just total carnage.

I’m not convinced there’s any destruction of value when the entire value proposition is a lie. When I tell you my lemonade stand is worth a billion, and you believe it for a while, and then you realize it isn’t really, no value was destroyed.

The real losses are the VC capital (that could have been deployed to more meaningful businesses) and the loss of client capital. Many people put their life savings that may or may not evaporate.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#84

Post by cge »

orangepurple wrote: post #11
postalrat wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the cryptocurrency endgame? Everyone has keys in cold storage waiting for the day we have the mathematics that destroys them?

There is no end game. You use it in your daily life to obtain or achieve things then you die.

On the one hand, I can understand this. On the other: as a US citizen, I use it in my daily life, then I file an 8949 every year listing every single purchase I made that year, along with tracking of cost bases? I realize that this is a legal, rather than fundamental, aspect of cryptocurrency, but it does make the idea of using cryptocurrency as a quotidian currency rather frustrating compared to essentially any other method, like cash or a credit card.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#85

Post by orangepurple »

anon291 wrote: post #40
orangepurple wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no end game. You use it in your daily life to obtain or achieve things then you die.

Why crypto v dollars or another existing currency?

There is no real benefit besides instant* cross border settlement.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#86

Post by woodruffw »

propter_hoc wrote: post #16

Somehow these guys peaked at about 900 employees, according to linkedin ( https://www.linkedin.com/company/blockfi ) They've raised about a billion dollars of VC - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/blockfi-inc/investor... (note, CB lists $1.4b, of which 400M is debt from FTX, which I imagine they never got) Unbelievable the amount of destruction of value here... it's just total carnage.

Given the amount of handwringing we've seen over the past couple of weeks in re: Twitter's headcount, it astonishes me that we haven't seen anything close to that for these cryptocurrency firms.

Twitter ran one of the world's largest social media networks with around 7000 people; what in the world is Kraken doing with ~3400[1]?

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/company/krakenfx

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#87

Post by orangepurple »

cge wrote: post #84
orangepurple wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no end game. You use it in your daily life to obtain or achieve things then you die.

On the one hand, I can understand this. On the other: as a US citizen, I use it in my daily life, then I file an 8949 every year listing every single purchase I made that year, along with tracking of cost bases? I realize that this is a legal, rather than fundamental, aspect of cryptocurrency, but it does make the idea of using cryptocurrency as a quotidian currency rather frustrating compared to essentially any othe…

Hold my beer I'll build a tool to track that

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#88

Post by MrMan »

Nursie wrote: post #32
traveler01 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the thing, you only depend on centralized actors if you want to. The entire point of cryptocurrencies are to not depend on centralized institutions that can screw you over.

Without a centralized actor of some sort, most 'investors' are not going to be able to get into or out of a crypto position. Vanishingly few people care about using the tokens themselves for anything but gambling. These institutions can also screw you over by massively inflating the crypto bubble and then crashing spectacularly, tanking your value and poisoning the public perception of cryptocurrency. The 'point' of…

yeah if only a few thousand crypto fanatics trade all these coins there is effectively no ecosystem and thus no upward price pressure to make the nerds rich.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#89

Post by capableweb »

jb12 wrote: post #72
redwood wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To confirm, what makes Coinbase different is that it's not a lender?

It's not domiciled in North America. In fact, they refuse to tell anyone where their HQ is. EDIT: sorry, got confused. Ignore me.

Coinbase is probably the most American of all the "American" cryptocurrency exchanges. It's also a publicly traded company on NASDAQ. Not sure where you get the picture that they refuse to tell anyone where the HQ is, it's famously a remote-first company but used to have their HQ in SF.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#90

Post by foobarian »

skrebbel wrote: post #27
propter_hoc wrote: post #16

Somehow these guys peaked at about 900 employees, according to linkedin ( https://www.linkedin.com/company/blockfi ) They've raised about a billion dollars of VC - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/blockfi-inc/investor... (note, CB lists $1.4b, of which 400M is debt from FTX, which I imagine they never got) Unbelievable the amount of destruction of value here... it's just total carnage.

I’m not convinced there’s any destruction of value when the entire value proposition is a lie. When I tell you my lemonade stand is worth a billion, and you believe it for a while, and then you realize it isn’t really, no value was destroyed.

The problem happens when someone lets you leverage the $1B lemonade stand. Though not necessarily your problem :-)
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