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Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

babel.finance

161–170 of 188 posts

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#161
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

> Banks are backed by the fed so runs don't happen. They did that after the great depression, along with a lot of those pesky regulations, when people were sick to hell of bank runs happening every few years. Bank runs definitely still happen. Maybe not in the US, but in other countries they do. Latest example was in Russia when the announcement of the removal of Russian banks from SWIFT. Bank runs also happened in G…

I can't speak to the other countries, but I have no recollection of a bank run here in Canada in my lifetime. Do you have a link?

And the scope of my comment is clearly limited to the USA. We don't have a "fed".

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#162
post #73
post #7

Not all of these crypto projects will survive. When the tide lowers, we will be seeing who is swimming naked and it looks like these DeFi projects have been caught after the hype has died with the market sentiment turning bearish for crypto in general. The ones that will survive this crypto crash are probably going to be around for much longer, especially most cryptocurrency coins and blockchains (and not the ERC-20…

DeFi projects are doing just fine and work as expected. All these news are about centralized finance companies being irresponsible if not outright malevolent

What's one "defi" project that is both doing fine and providing consumers any type of actual value?

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#163
post #71
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do have a great analysis framework for crypto projects: "is crypto project?" -> "stay away"

Sure I get that, but I'm old enough to remember the .com crash carnage and people saying that the web was a total waste of time etc and look how wrong they were. I think that the future is a probability distribution, and there is a non-zero probability that crypto doesn't die but keeps growing. Therefore, I'm not all in, but I'm not all out.

I was there too and clearly remember two things:

First. "Web dev" positions evaporated & I actually took a "stable" job at a university vs. staying at the failing internet investment firm I was working for as a developer. For a while tech was definitely "uncool", especially to those who were in it for the get-rich-quick angle. I hope the same will happen to crypto: an exodus of the scamsters.

Second. I remember thinking "so much potential destroyed by those damn suits" ... micropayments, banner ads, Ecommerce, online auctions, peer-to-peer file sharing' encrypted email, shopping bots ... we had all this wonderful tech but none of it came to fruition because of the inflated expectations / greed.

The greed of the dot-com bubble set tech back for about a decade & I expect something similar will happen now with crypto. Maybe we will finally have the breathing room to do something cool with the tech?

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#164

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.

Someone gave you one. Here's another: Software patents were judicially created in the US by a single fed circuit opinion. The field wildly expanded to many many many billions of dollars until a single supreme court opinion.

While still kind of alive (mostly legacy lawsuits), the vast majority of the value was rapidly killed off post supreme court decisions (and AIA)

This kind of thing happens all the time - in software, in pharma, in ...

As I said, value helps in some sense, but just because there is a lot of money in a thing simply does not mean it will remain.

FWIW - your comment very much comes off as the typical "crypto folks ignore roughly all history" stereotype that it gets painted with -

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#165
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but de-fi had already been done successfully in the early 2000's well before Bitcoin and still didn't pan out in the end.

Done successfully and didn't pan out?!

Exactly!

The infrastructure worked. The concept did exactly what it was supposed to. 100% successful.

.. and yet lending to unreliable borrowers that no-one else wanted was still a stupid idea.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, but de-fi had already been done successfully in the early 2000's well before Bitcoin and still didn't pan out in the end.

What are you referring to?

P2P lending.

Or “De-Fi” as the children call it.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#167
post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Banks are backed by the fed so runs don't happen. They did that after the great depression, along with a lot of those pesky regulations, when people were sick to hell of bank runs happening every few years. Bank runs definitely still happen. Maybe not in the US, but in other countries they do. Latest example was in Russia when the announcement of the removal of Russian banks from SWIFT. Bank runs also happened in G…

I can't speak to the other countries, but I have no recollection of a bank run here in Canada in my lifetime. Do you have a link? And the scope of my comment is clearly limited to the USA. We don't have a "fed".

> Starting on 19 April 2017, Home Capital Group in Canada started to suffer a bank-run on its deposits after an Ontario Securities Commission report was filed that had accused the subprime lender of deceiving its investors in 2015 with its lending practices

There is a list of bank runs on Wikipedia for more information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bank_runs

Comment threads frequently switching (without notice) between US-only topics and worldwide topics, so sometimes it's hard to know which is which. In this case, I thought the topic was international and didn't grasp your comment was talking US-only.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> 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.

I own zero cryptocurrencies and would rather see the entire ecosystem crash down just to bring the people behind it back to reality. I'm just writing about my experience from the perspective of someone who experienced the "beginning of the internet as mainstream media" for the ones who didn't.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#169
post #39
post #33

My biggest takeaway right now is to study the crypto firms and projects that are having trouble as a way to abstract what red flags to look for. For example, with Terra the abstraction was that pegs don't work as we've seen many a time, especially when Soros broke the BoE. I took a small bath with my Terra holding and life goes on. I can do that because I didn't use leverage, I can lose everything I put into crypto,…

I do have a great analysis framework for crypto projects: "is crypto project?" -> "stay away"

The thing is that those are not crypto projects.

They are just traditional wall street finance pretending to be crypto, just by saying they make money in crypto space.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> 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. I own zero cryptocurrencies and would rather see the entire ecosystem crash down just to bring the people behind it back to reality. I'm just writing about my experience from the perspective of someone who experienced the "beginning of the internet as mainstream media" for t…

I was definitely there, as were a bunch of the rest of us. Your experiences are not universal.
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