311–320 of 544 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Coinbase is an exchange Not in the conventional sense. It’s a broker with a prop desk.
Coinbase has a prop desk?
Maybe [1], possibly not anymore [2].
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/coinbase-tested-group-to-specul...
[2] https://news.yahoo.com/coinbase-never-trades-against-custome...
Another "crypto" company that was not actually crypto. These guys just held people's money custodially and promised some dumb overblown interest rate. Sure their theme was "crypto" and they have the bitcoin logo on their website, but the underlying mechanism of trusting someone who has a slick app with your money is the opposite of crypto. It seems like silicon valley VCs completely missed the boat on crypto by dumpi…
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…
Here is the model, as I currently understand it: 1) some people are rich and want to get richer 2) Ivy educated VCs invest money for group (1) in start-up companies, while paying themselves handsomely with that same pool of money 3) Ivy educated kids start companies using money from group (2), while paying themselves handsomely with that same pool of money 4) sometimes, through a combo of hard work, skill and luck, t…
As a naive and younger outsider I always thought these people were all very competent. Clearly there is something very different going on here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even with 10% losses he lost less than those storing equity in ultra boring indexes. Honestly anybody who only lost 10% in the last year looks like a genius (crypto included).
Your math assumes he lost 0% on the rest of his savings, while "those storing equity in ultra boring indexes" where storing 100% of their savings there. Is that really a fair accounting, in your opinion?
Prominent venture capital firms like A16Z, Sequoia, etc have discovered a new get rich quick scheme: they raise a fund and invest it in a some shitcoin like FTX, SOL, etc. the shitcoin founders use the cash to market and shill the coin, hiring public figures like famous NFL players. Retail investors FOMO into these tokens, boosting prices and attracting more retail investors. Once the market cap of the shitcoin exceeds the VC/investor cost basis, they cash out and let the rest ride. Eventually the shitcoin implodes, but by this time the firms are already onto their next fund and another token. A16Z is on their 4th fund now and it’s $4.5B[0]. There’s an entire political strategy at play as well, where shitcoins are employing folks in DC and lining pockets to further the scam.
All of this is possible because there is no regulation on crypto tokens. In reality these are unregulated securities and these large VC firms are exploiting a loop hole for profit. This goes for literally every token starting at ETH and below.
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.
The issue is that the problem cryptocurrencies solve is not a real problem. The blockchain, being a public ledger, ensures that transactions are accurately recorded and can be publicly verified as such. But it’s been centuries since the actual accurate recording of transactions has been an issue. The real problems are far removed from this. When was the last time you heard about people complaining that they paid off…
This problem is not trivial, and as far as I can see crypto is the only scalable solution to it outside of legislation that isn't ever going to happen.
What about the privacy implications of having nearly every payment on the planet go through 2 megacorporations?
And I can see the response now, while every crypto transaction is public, it's a lot harder to tie identities to wallet addresses than it is to tie a name to a credit card number.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even with 10% losses he lost less than those storing equity in ultra boring indexes. Honestly anybody who only lost 10% in the last year looks like a genius (crypto included).
Not really. There are good reasons to lose money and there are bad reasons to lose money. This was a bad one.
I can see where it might look tempting or even rational to see how long you can keep the hand on the oven without getting burned for some of the interest rates being offered on these "exchanges", especially in times of pretty desperately negative real interest rates on USD.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is value, in that a generation of moderately wealthy idiots got convinced that monkey pictures are worth something. Like a cult brainwashing, they have attached their identities to those worthless pictures and now are trapped in greedy stupidity.
NFTs are collectors items. It's as stupid as collecting anything, including fine art, photography, baseball cards, rocks. I'll admit it seems more strange because it's uninteresting, but claiming collecting is idiotic is pretty short-sighted. No, I don't collect that crap :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My hope is most of the crypto investing was isolated to crypto funds, though I still lost some respect for VCs for even playing the crypto game.
Even big institutional investors were swindled by FTX: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/18/pension-giant-o...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The same could be said for FTX. There just needs to be regulation about how sound the self-created coin backing your margin needs to be. Without regulation of the soundness of the economic value of your self-created coin you get a crypto crash. Am I crazy? Are we not describing 2 identical problems and classifying 1 of them as fraud? The soundness of loans in a deregulated environment is no better than the soundness…
Your original response was an insinuation that banking systems in general are based on fraud, and that gold should be the basis of monetary value. In fact, the case has been proven that gold is a poor basis of monetary value and that banking systems, when properly regulated, are not fraudulent, or are very rarely fraudulent. The reply to that was to explain that regulation was the key to maintaining a stable banking…
I understand that the level of fraud committed specifically by FTX goes far beyond simply misleading lenders and regulators about their collateral which consisted mostly of their own crypto. In general, however, this seems to be the root of the issue and the systemic problem across all centralized crypto exchanges.
From the start and well prior to this conversation I have had the belief that Crypto "scams" like this bear a striking resemblance to the world of traditional finance and specifically the securities market and MBS.
I'm not trying to argue in bad faith or use any kind of argumentative tactic or fallacy (at least not intentionally).