Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 544 posts

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#161

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

awhitby wrote: post #110
fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all of the capital they have, you would think they would hire competent people from big tech. Instead they just find some stanford grad with a few years of experience to manage 50 people. It doesnt even make sense

It does if you consider self-selection: the competent person from big tech (i) can see a disaster a mile off (ii) has more to risk

It's more (iii) the narrative.

Give us your money to invest in this new, fresh face that's going to change the world.

If you're an old face - why haven't you changed the world already?

The story isn't as catchy.

It has nothing to do with what makes sense. For a large subset of VC (obviously not all) - it's more about what you believe you can sell to others than what you believe is actually going to succeed.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#162

Post by lottin »

jrm4 wrote: post #64
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.

So I'm a nerd interested in this stuff and I have specific ideas -- but I just want to say that I appreciate simply seeing this idea in words in a forum. Lately it's just been positively weird how infrequently I see this very very obvious point of the whole thing.

What idea? The idea of "centralised actor" isn't even an idea, it's gibberish.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#163

Post by jdprgm »

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

It's kind of absurd the level of failure in crypto lending. Putting aside anyone with criticisms of all things crypto these should all be based on the very basic and long established business model of taking deposits, making loans, and paying interest. There shouldn't be anything inherently difficult or "scammy" in that and it should be a successful business pillar in the crypto space. Besides the basic business your two other main priorities should be risk mitigation and dealing with liquidity issues. Surely long term some well run company ought to be able to sort this out.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#164

Post by danuker »

Stranger43 wrote: post #95
PM_me_your_math wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it wrong to assume that this is because the industry is mostly built upon a house of cards or because of bad actors? Objectively asking.

Essentially yes. Bitcoins scalability issue should have killed off al notions that it could ever gain widespread usage as an alternative to traditional currency for regular payments and after that it became yet another speculative derivative without any real backing in real world assets. It was never actually going to replace fiat currencies for most people and the industry is absolutely dominated by exotic financial…

I agree that Bitcoin has chosen some trade-offs against mass adoption, like limiting block size. I think this is a bad move, since security is more than enough.

Lightning is not viable, because it requires "watchtowers" to check for early state commit attacks. Not everyone will be able to run such a server.

But, for instance, Bitcoin Cash has larger blocks (the reason for the first fork of Bitcoin). However, in spite of its technical advantages, adoption severely lagged compared to Bitcoin. I wonder why that is.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#165

Post by MrMan »

anonymousab wrote: post #69
solotronics wrote: post #47

Bitcoiners have been saying this whole time not to keep your crypto with a 3rd party and this is exactly why. Satoshis original message about Bitcoin mentions explicitly you don't need any trusted third party. A whole lot of people think they can make money outsmarting the original concepts of Bitcoin and they get scammed in new ways each cycle. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/trusted-third-parties/

At the same time, storage of value bitcoiners - the majority that titanically dwarfs medium-of-exchange/currency bitcoiners - have been trying to get the average layman to put money into the system as much as possible. More bag holders at any cost. And it turned out that that cost was something that would give the illusion of security, and hide away the technical minutiae that would prevent the system from sucking in…

thank you

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#166

Post by MrMan »

jb12 wrote: post #71
solotronics wrote: post #47

Bitcoiners have been saying this whole time not to keep your crypto with a 3rd party and this is exactly why. Satoshis original message about Bitcoin mentions explicitly you don't need any trusted third party. A whole lot of people think they can make money outsmarting the original concepts of Bitcoin and they get scammed in new ways each cycle. https://nakamotoinstitute.org/trusted-third-parties/

Do you think self-custody is simple enough for mass adoption by non-technical users?

forget simplicity - why is "self-custody" not a thing already with other currencies? let's start there.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#167

Post by Stranger43 »

iskander wrote: post #101
Stranger43 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially yes. Bitcoins scalability issue should have killed off al notions that it could ever gain widespread usage as an alternative to traditional currency for regular payments and after that it became yet another speculative derivative without any real backing in real world assets. It was never actually going to replace fiat currencies for most people and the industry is absolutely dominated by exotic financial…

On the other hand, people chasing the dream of crypto scalability have actually invented a remarkable amount of math and tooling around large scale proof construction, summarization and validation. The Zero Knowledge proof ecosystem (and its relatives in multi-party computation and fully homomorphic encryption) might be the only useful thing that is left after the current incarnation of crypto fully implodes.

And yet their fundamental lack of functional economic theory means that all of that is currently being completely wasted on crypto projects that's often little more then window dressing for what is basically very unimaginative financial scams.

There is probably scenario's where a temporary blockchain can solve some synchronization issues but the idea that a single static blockchain will replace traditional dynamic structures for organizing the economy is basically not viable.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#168

Post by irusensei »

xnorswap wrote: post #93
ceejayoz wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://learn.robosats.com/docs/trade-pipeline/ > On a private chat, Bob tells Alice how to send him fiat. https://learn.robosats.com/docs/payment-methods/ > You can pay with any method that both you and your peer agree on. This includes the higher risk method such as PayPal, Venmo, and Cash apps. C'mon, that's not trading fiat for crypto. That's "PayPal me some money".

I love crypto! It's Decentralised! It's Trustless! De-fi is the future! Then it turns out that the promised future involves trusting someone to honour a paypal and pray you're not being scammed.

Neither Robotsat or Bisq is that. The core functionality of these systems is to handle automated escrows.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#169

Post by danuker »

lawn wrote: post #99
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?

The endgame is a payments system as originally described in the Bitcoin whitepaper. 99.9% of all "advances" and developments in the space hasn't moved us towards the endgame, if anything it's taking us further away.

I agree. I held Bitcoin Cash since it forked, because it is superior technically. But I am disappointed with its limited adoption.

BCH allows more transactions. BTC would take 18 years for 4B people to perform a single transaction each. And it costs ridiculous amounts of resources for a ridiculous amount of constant security.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#170

Post by f1recat »

Mistletoe wrote: post #97
woodruffw wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Kraken actually handles money so it needs customer service and Twitter is just a bunch of already written code for posting stuff and sometimes (although much less now!) getting ad dollars. What do (did) 7000 people do at Twitter? I hate to ask the question because it aligns me with Elon whom I despise right now. But what do all the employees do at tech companies? I thought the beauty of tech and why the valuations we…

Uber eng count is about 3500 and given the scope this can be considered as very lean
Post reply on HN