Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They've raised about a billion dollars of VC - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/blockfi-inc/investor ... > 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 was SBF (MIT) and raised from Sequoia and Blackrok and his GF was a Stanford'ite with a Math degree and is responsible for the largest loss of funds f…
SBF and his girlfriend Caroline Ellison were also both traders at Jane Street after graduating. Being hired as a trader at Jane Street is no easy feat and more impressive than attending MIT/Stanford I would say.
BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads
531–540 of 544 posts
Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads
#532Earlier quoted context omitted.
> They've raised about a billion dollars of VC - https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/blockfi-inc/investor ... > 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 was SBF (MIT) and raised from Sequoia and Blackrok and his GF was a Stanford'ite with a Math degree and is responsible for the largest loss of funds f…
SBF and his girlfriend Caroline Ellison were also both traders at Jane Street after graduating. Being hired as a trader at Jane Street is no easy feat and more impressive than attending MIT/Stanford I would say.
I guess I have to quote myself here, and re-emphasize that they are all part of the same group of insiders:
>>Can we finally admit the biggest scammers in this space are those from Ivy League, and connections with SV insiders traditional VC/Banking/Finance without out a clue of what they are doing or how this tech actually works
I worked at a megacorp pushing 'blockchian not bitcoin' BS and it was only because they realized they couldn't co-op it and instead ran with alts that ended up getting investigated by the SEC.
Let me makes this very clear: I've been on both sides of this equation and I can assure you even though we didn't have much if any money on the BTC side until very recently (most traditional and VC money went to these insiders) those of us that built companies had to knew how this tech worked and often had to built the infrastructure from the ground up.
I personally couldn't even code until I got into BTC despite having several opportunities to do so, because this space demands that you do since it moves so fast and the pace of innovation requires you to know how it all works otherwise you get left behind. And because of this it becomes very clear who knows what they're talking about and who doesn't when you start to hear the merits of a 'private blockchain' and realize what they're describing is essentially just a SQL database with different branding but totally not that bitcoin thing or why the Byzantine General's problem was thought to be unsolvable by Computer Science prior to Bitcoin, let alone how the mempool works or what a UTXO is.
Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads
#533Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly the answer. I've worked on one very old codebase in my career. I was paid well for doing so. The graph of investment in software starts high with greenfield projects, drops over time to an all-time low as optimizations take hold, and as the software continues existing will rise to the greenfield (or more) levels of cost. The interesting thing to me is what substantiates the rises; for instance, in gre…
You won’t get a million per year from my revenue since I’ve built it and I’ll still be there come hell or fire; but you can get 10% at the beginning and I don’t hesitate to increase employees as they maintain the existing one or contribute to increasing the revenue. In fact I generally give them more than they contribute, and I’ve increased my employees 30% this year in average, unprompted. But there is always this H…
Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads
#534Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is exactly the answer. I've worked on one very old codebase in my career. I was paid well for doing so. The graph of investment in software starts high with greenfield projects, drops over time to an all-time low as optimizations take hold, and as the software continues existing will rise to the greenfield (or more) levels of cost. The interesting thing to me is what substantiates the rises; for instance, in gre…
You won’t get a million per year from my revenue since I’ve built it and I’ll still be there come hell or fire; but you can get 10% at the beginning and I don’t hesitate to increase employees as they maintain the existing one or contribute to increasing the revenue. In fact I generally give them more than they contribute, and I’ve increased my employees 30% this year in average, unprompted. But there is always this H…
Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads
#535Earlier quoted context omitted.
Only 1 of the BlockFi founders (Flori) has an ivy league degree (from Cornell). Zac is a moron who made his wealth playing poker and through a scam loans startup (Zibby).
>Only 1 of the BlockFi founders (Flori) has an ivy league degree (from Cornell). Zac is a moron who made his wealth playing poker and through a scam loans startup (Zibby). It's much, much harder to make millions at the poker table than it is to get a degree from an Ivy. There have been 141 people that have made over a million in 2022 from poker ( https://pokerdb.thehendonmob.com/ranking/7339/2 ) and that doesn't coun…
Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads
#536Another "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…
That's what we call the No True Scotsman Fallacy. BlockFi was a crypto bank that promised unlimited returns by investing in crypto. Unregulated, untaxed, unmonitored, secret and opaque. An onramp to a federated market where deposits are tied to the value of the overall market for crypto holders. And it failed because it has no safety net by design. That's like saying Robinhood isn't the stock market.
I feel like you're arguing against your own thesis here. If it had turned out that the CEO of Robinhood had YOLO'ed all the customer deposits on GameStop options, would we ask "is this the end of the stock market"?
Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think there was an implication that the wealth belonged to the investors in BlockFi. Their wealth was destroyed in a very real way.
"Wealth" is getting a double use here, to mean both "the fact that they are wealthy" and "the assets they have that make them wealthy". The fact was destroyed. The assets were not destroyed; they went to other people. Capital doesn't have a double meaning like that. Capital is the latter. Capital was not destroyed here.
> wealth in the form of money or other assets owned by a person or organization or available or contributed for a particular purpose such as starting a company or investing.
There is even a bank called "Capital One." Originally, Capital One's only product was credit cards, i.e. providing monetary loans. It feels like this entire thread has been arguing about what people "feel" capital should be. In the case of BlockFi, capital has very much been destroyed. Company equity going to 0 is the ultimate capital destruction.
Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads
#538Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Wealth" is getting a double use here, to mean both "the fact that they are wealthy" and "the assets they have that make them wealthy". The fact was destroyed. The assets were not destroyed; they went to other people. Capital doesn't have a double meaning like that. Capital is the latter. Capital was not destroyed here.
Capital can mean money. It was mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but Google "capital definition" > wealth in the form of money or other assets owned by a person or organization or available or contributed for a particular purpose such as starting a company or investing. There is even a bank called "Capital One." Originally, Capital One's only product was credit cards, i.e. providing monetary loans. It feels like th…
The status was destroyed, the assets were not destroyed.
Take my last post and replace the word "capital" with "money", and I would say that version is just as true.
You can destroy money, but that's a totally different topic. The money that was invested in this exchange didn't get destroyed. It went to other people.
Remember that the original post wasn't talking about 'wealth'. You can't come in and say "capital=money=wealth, and investor wealth was destroyed, therefore investor capital was destroyed". That's like saying "nothing is better than happiness, and a sandwich is better than nothing, so a sandwich is better than happiness". The meaning of "nothing" changes halfway through, like the meaning of "wealth" changes halfway through.
Whether "capital" includes or excludes "money" is a distraction that doesn't really matter.
Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll try again. Company A (Shueisha) creates digital collectible cards. They store them in their private classic centralised DB (not related to blockchain in any way, because private blockchain is idiotic idea). They are not stored in the public blockchain because that is technically impossible both in current and future chains, due to constraints decided collectively (you can't have even barely working blockchain pr…
I wrote a fungible digital asset protocol called Open Publish that uses the Bitcoin protocol. You can see that here: https://github.com/williamcotton/openpublish So let's imagine that instead it is a non-fungible token. The only difference between a fungible asset and a non-fungible asset is that a fungible asset can be split up into parts and owned by multiple parties. A non-fungible digital asset has only one owner…
I see you are still making the same error as others - "These virtual cards are non-fungible tokens on a decentralized blockchain similar to Open Publish."
Cards are not tokens, and cards are not on the blockchain. Cards are digital assets, but they can't fit inside a token, they can't fit in the blockchain (for a reasonable price with a reasonable blockchain performance and decentralisation).
You have complicated my example, but it is essentially the same - your physical device is the centralised DB now (or you are using two centrlised DBs - device memory and some corporate cloud server together). Assets (cards) are stored inside it. To access them you need a key. In your example key is the token, but at this point - that's not really mandatory, we have many other ways to sell and store keys. But it's an option, yes.
What you have described is just another way to access assets stored in a centralised way and authenticate yourself as a person having access to them.
And you don't "own" your assets (cards), unless of course there is some agreement, likely on the web site or with purchase of that physical device saying that IP rights are transferred to you Name Surname. You are renting your cards based on the good will of Shueisha, and when you say sell cards - that just means Shueisha gratiously allows transferring of some record in their DB from one of their registered users to another. Just as an example - let's say Shueisha uses Tezos bc, user A is a registered customer of Shueicha and "owns" a digital card from them. Can he sell it to whatever random person with a Tezos wallet? Well, no. Unless Shueisha makes allowance for that, but that would be dumb because it will expose asset to everyone (same as today's NFT pictures work).
Everything is stored on Shueisha servers or DRM'ed devices from them. Everything is managed by Shueisha directly or indirectly via coding some physical device which will do it. Tokens are used to access stuff, but they either insecure, or you will need to have additional parallel authentication with card storage to access them.
NFTs are just layers of technical comlications not really adding anything of substance. They make look like it's easy to buy and sell digital stuff, so very popular for speculation, but in reality they are crippled by inability to actually store medium being sold and to transfer any IP rights by itself, without centralised services.
Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads
#540Earlier quoted context omitted.
Capital can mean money. It was mentioned elsewhere in this thread, but Google "capital definition" > wealth in the form of money or other assets owned by a person or organization or available or contributed for a particular purpose such as starting a company or investing. There is even a bank called "Capital One." Originally, Capital One's only product was credit cards, i.e. providing monetary loans. It feels like th…
I feel like you didn't follow my argument though. The status was destroyed, the assets were not destroyed. Take my last post and replace the word "capital" with "money", and I would say that version is just as true. You can destroy money, but that's a totally different topic. The money that was invested in this exchange didn't get destroyed. It went to other people. Remember that the original post wasn't talking abou…