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Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

babel.finance

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Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#151

Post by anon291 »

kayamon wrote: post #135
gonzo41 wrote: post #127

If my bank withheld my withdrawals of my money, I'd not behave the most even tempered way. Whilst I DO think crypto is a scam, or at best a very terrible waste of time and effort from all involved. I will accept that I could be wrong. But, scam or not, this early turbulent history will cement a stigma of crypto being synonymous with grifters and scammers. I don't see a future in it. It'll be interesting to see if btc…

People mistake Bitcoin, which has no central custodian and will continue clearing transactions all day long, every ten minutes, immune to all interference, with the rest of 'crypto', which is a giant money-lending dumpster fire that isn't backed by anything. Once all the dust settles down Bitcoin will keep ticking along just like it's been doing for years.

For good reason... Bitcoin enabled this ecosystem, and a currency is ultimately only as good as its ecosystem. For example, Roman Denari are worth nothing as a currency [1]. No banking system accepts them.

[1] Used Denari because it's an old currency I know. Of course, there's collector value, but there are other useless currencies today I've never heard of worth nothing on the collector's market too. Unfortunately, I can't cite any, given how useless they are today.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#152

Post by danaris »

capableweb wrote: post #111
SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet had obvious and wide ranging use cases that were immediately apparent to everyone. Blockchain tech has at best a series of edge case applications for record keeping. I don't think they are comparable at all.

> The internet had obvious and wide ranging use cases that were immediately apparent to everyone In hindsight it might seem so, but it really wasn't. Most people who didn't already see these "wide ranging use cases" thought the internet was mostly about shady stuff.

You can keep telling yourself this to convince yourself that crypto will be as big as the Internet someday, but it is absolutely not the case.

Sure, there were some old fogies (actual advanced age not required, but common) who thought in ~2000 that the Internet was nothing but a passing fad, but anyone with actual sense—including many, many people who were not at all financially invested in tech companies—could see that there was plenty of real substance there, however overly-inflated some valuations were at the time.

By 2000, we already had, very firmly-established, companies like Amazon and eBay, that were clearly worthwhile Internet marketplaces making it vastly easier to buy & sell things.

In 2022, the most "firmly-established" things we have in the blockchain landscape are the cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, whose sole purpose is to be a different kind of money and/or speculative vehicle. Effectively the only people pushing these things are the ones who stand to lose lots of money when they finish crashing.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#153

Post by rvz »

highwaylights wrote: post #131
a2tech wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Or at least they're exploiting the situation.

This right here. They want that sweet Ponzi-adjacent money. All the receipts, none of the liability*. (*they hope).

oH nO. SoMEoNE pLEaSe SToP tHeM /s

That means Stripe, Checkout.com, etc are somehow now 'scammers' and by using crypto, they have found a legitimate use case for it. If they are scamming, Where is the scam?

So now people using Stripe's products and using their crypto offering are now facilitating in the so called 'scam'. Does that mean they should close down their Stripe or Checkout.com accounts to stop the so-called scam that Stripe and Checkout.com are involved in?

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#154

Post by skeeter2020 »

icu wrote: post #105
Tesl wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was there too and basically nobody said that. Crypto being "like the early internet" and "people said that the web was a waste of time too!" are the biggest crypto lies ever told and repeated. Absolute whoppers.

I exaggerate, but in the run up neighbours were telling everyone to just buy Microsoft, and everyone tech adjacent I knew was trying to make an e-commerce website. I was just graduating out of university and web dev jobs evaporated. Many e-commerce companies went bust, or were acquired (my gf at the time experienced layoff after layoff until she went). At that time everyone I knew was not thinking about doing anythin…

>> neighbours were telling everyone to just buy Microsoft

Healthy dividends and massive growth; you should have listened to them!

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#155

Post by mjthrowaway1 »

lifty wrote: post #45

Question for the crypto skeptics of HN. Do you think this cycle the whole crypto space goes down the drain never to be heard of again? Do you think the whole space is a fad or do you think there are patches of values underneath the froth? How do you see the space evolving? Thanks!

Depends entirely on the regulatory framework. Up until now crypto has been largely unregulated. With regulatory I don’t think it will be as volatile/attractive.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#156

Post by giaour »

O__________O wrote: post #130
DannyBee wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument is always very funny to me. History is rife with hundred-billion dollar industries destroyed in very short periods of time, across multitudes of field types. For example, i've watched fields created by single legal opinions, grow to many billions, and then get destroyed overnight by a different legal opinion. All in the course of 10-15 years. The amount of money in it is just not a sufficient condition…

Do you actually have specific notable (and comparable) examples of technology based industries that reached relatively the order of magnitude crypto has that were rapidly killed off? Otherwise, as is, your response to me is without merit.

There were billions of dollars funding work on paid network traffic prioritization in the 90s and early 2000s. Then the whole field was banned in 2005, and it evaporated. The ban was lifted in 2008, then reapplied, then lifted again in 2014, then reapplied in 2015, then lifted again. Vast amounts of money flowed into and out of the sector at each reversal.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#157

Post by airza »

cdiddy2 wrote: post #149
airza wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is celsius if not defi?

Its completely centralized. They take user funds and put them in defi products, but the funds are completely under Celsius control not the users control. Thats how they were able to turn off withdrawals. Its like if JPMorgan were putting client funds in AAVE, that doesn't suddenly make JPMorgan defi.

That makes sense... Is the alternative individual users using some type of smart contract to borrowers directly? It seems like in that case there would indeed be more transparency, but also that the end state of many, many leveraged positions being liquidated would be pretty similar, right?

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#158

Post by airza »

lifty wrote: post #45

Question for the crypto skeptics of HN. Do you think this cycle the whole crypto space goes down the drain never to be heard of again? Do you think the whole space is a fad or do you think there are patches of values underneath the froth? How do you see the space evolving? Thanks!

I think the killer app for crypto (money laundering/buying drugs online) will provide some kind of cushion against going straight to zero. But that is a much smaller cap.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#159

Post by orwin »

lifty wrote: post #45

Question for the crypto skeptics of HN. Do you think this cycle the whole crypto space goes down the drain never to be heard of again? Do you think the whole space is a fad or do you think there are patches of values underneath the froth? How do you see the space evolving? Thanks!

Until 99% of people understand that money is a mean of redistributing the production, it will come back. Id give cryptocurrencies 4 years after peak oil

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#160

Post by cdiddy2 »

airza wrote: post #157
cdiddy2 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its completely centralized. They take user funds and put them in defi products, but the funds are completely under Celsius control not the users control. Thats how they were able to turn off withdrawals. Its like if JPMorgan were putting client funds in AAVE, that doesn't suddenly make JPMorgan defi.

That makes sense... Is the alternative individual users using some type of smart contract to borrowers directly? It seems like in that case there would indeed be more transparency, but also that the end state of many, many leveraged positions being liquidated would be pretty similar, right?

Well in the case of Celsius they are putting use funds into things that the user might not know about. Such as stETH which provides yield but can't be withdrawn back to eth until months down the road so if stETH starts trading at a discount like it did recently then you can't actually get all the money out for redemptions. I believe they also put funds into Terra which they lost as well. So basically Celsius advertises a certain yield but is a black box after a user deposits funds and they might put the funds in things a normal user would never agree to if they were aware of it.
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