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BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

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Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creditors in Voyager’s bankruptcy were looking at about a 60 cents on the dollar return without a buyout and about 75 cents on the dollar return if FTX could have followed through on their business and accounts buyout, IIRC. Voyager had only 3 creditors so they weren’t well diversified. When one of their creditors eventually went belly-up, they predictably lost about a third of their holdings.

Are Voyager's individual creditors getting 60% of their money back or does bankruptcy only pay out to the largest creditors?

They’re all account holders so everyone is entitled to a proportional slice of the remaining pie. 60% regardless for both the little man and the fat cat.

On the other hand, I don’t know if people who retain a class action lawyer specializing in this case get special treatment or not.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#512
post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe now the rest of you vocal sideliners can finally see that is the case and that most of you are part of the problem more than most of us who have built startuprs using this tech without any of those things and did it the hard way outside of the VC/SV Ivy League World. What? Why are we the problem?

> What? Why are we the problem? This may just be me because I from CA and was inspired to work in tech as kid in the 90s and saw the drastic and detrimental culture changes that have come over the years/decades: many of you keep attributing these scamming events to us when in reality you FAANG/SV/VC insider types likely went to school or worked with them and turned a blind eye to this very obvious behavior that bred…

May want to add Do Kwon (Stanford) and 3AC (Columbia) to further solidify your case.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#513
post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not directly, sure. The low interest rates, and the overall increase in money in the system, made VC investing less risky compared to other options. Now that changes.

Interest rates are for banks borrowing from the Fed, affecting interest rates on loans issued by banks, and the rate of bank lending. But I don’t think VCs fund themselves by taking bank loans. These crypto companies are primarily capitalized by VC and selling crypto.

It's more complicated than that though.

Alternative "assets" like crypto gained more credence when rates were low. Bond returns in such a regime were not attractive, equity markets rallied to elevated levels, and there was little incentive for debt issuers to use free cash to pay down debt that could be rolled out into perpetuity.

The Fed essentially held the cost of money near zero and that had far-reaching effects.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#514
post #409
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can, using stablecoins like USDC. These also involve counterparty risk, but they are extremely simple to audit and regulate.

Stablecoins are cryptofiat. There's no compelling reason to use a stablecoin over using USD.

But transferring to stablecoins means you don't have a taxable event and thus don't have to pay cap gains /s

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#515
post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the projection system in the game store requires NFTs that were issued by the creators of Yu-Gi-Oh then you would need these virtual cards to participate, just like how you need virtual Magic cards in MTGO in order to participate, the difference being that in the former it would be some open standard where people could trade, sell, and lend as they see fit.

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 at a time.

> 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 pretending to be decentralised and also be able to store megabytes of data on chain).

You don't need to store anything in the blockchain other than the cryptographic hash of the digital item in question. In fact, you can take the cryptographic hash of many different digital messages and then take the cryptographic hash of those combination of cryptographic hashes and store that data in the blockchain, along with data related to ownership.

> Then company A creates NFTs for these cards. Again, the digital cards are not in any way related or linked or paired with the NFTs. The system storing and managing cards doesn't know about NFTs. NFTs are weakly linked to somewhere on the web, supposedly to the cards, but there is really no requirement for that and what more amazing - no verification to where they are linking.

This is incorrect. Let's say I'm Shueisha. I create a physical device that I install in game stores that comes pre-installed with valid public keys for digital cards issued by Shueisha. Then I issue a number of non-fungible digital assets that are signed with one of the private keys paired with the public keys stored on the physical device in the game stores. This physical device will only work with digital assets that were originally issued by Shueisha, say a virtual pack of 15 virtual cards. These virtual cards are non-fungible tokens on a decentralized blockchain similar to Open Publish.

When someone purchases a pack of digital cards they provide their own public key and Shueisha publishes their own signed transaction that transfers ownership to this person. The physical device in the game store is connected to the internet and can see the valid and confirmed transactions. The physical device in the game store ignores all assets that did not originate from Shueisha but will honor ownership of all future transactions of digital cards that did originate from Shueisha. The physical device in the game store also connects to a database run by Shueisha that when given the cryptographic hash (or the hash-of-hash and the hash) of a digital card will return the details about the card... link to the URL for the digital art, the flavor text, card rules, etc.

> Now what happens when someone is selling or reselling cards. I will split this into MUST and OPTIONAL sections.

All that needs to be written to the blockchain is the cryptographic hash and the recipient signed by the original owner. So when you buy a pack of digital cards from Shueisha they write a transaction to the blockchain signed by one of their private keys that says they are transferring ownership to your public key. The public key pairs for Shueisha, again, are stored in the physical device in the game store. If you bring a device with your private key to the game store then the physical device will let you use any cards that are shown to be owned by your matching public key.

> User MUST create an account on the completely proprietary and centralised server of company A, because system storing and managing cards MUST update who owns what in its centralised DB. And technically that's all, nothing else is needed.

The only need for a centralized database is for all of the meta information about the card... the art, the name, game details, etc. The only need for a decentralized database is in determining the cards owned by the gamer as proven by their private key on some device they bring to the game store.

The physical device at the game store then makes sure that the players own the virtual cards that they say make up their deck by checking the decentralized data stored on the blockchain. The physical device then gets all of the meta data about those cards from the centralized server.

> What it OPTIONAL is that user can also buy NFT which was initially generated by company A, and which stores an URL pointing to the card hosted on the private company A server. But until company A does the MUST step above, NFTs sale is pointless. Centralised DB does not in any way interact with blockchain with NFTs, and it technically can't.

This is incorrect. In the system I am describing the decentralized data stored on the blockchain is only the cryptographic hash of the digital asset. The meta data is stored on a centralized DB owned and operated by Shueisha. This is just like how I can't scribble on a Yu-Gi-Oh card to make it say whatever I want (at least for tournament play) but I can indeed buy and sell and trade Yu-Gi-Oh cards without the involvement of anyone else.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you smash your machines, you destroy real capital. If you burn your money, the financial capital doesn't just go away. It's effectively reallocated to everyone else via deflation. That's why "destroying capital" isn't a good way to describe it. If you destroy half the machines in the world, evenly distributed, the economy crumbles. If you destroy half the dollars in the world, evenly distributed, nothing really ha…

You’re conflating the money supply with money. The inherent value of the money supply is constant. That’s why you could halve it uniformly without impacting much. But that also necessarily means that each unit of currency does in fact have value. So if you invest it in scams, you can call that destroying wealth. Also worth nothing that we’re not really talking about money. We’re talking about equity in companies with…

> But that also necessarily means that each unit of currency does in fact have value.

I don't dispute that. But the value of each unit can be complicated.

> So if you invest it in scams, you can call that destroying wealth.

Colloquially I might say that, but the wealth isn't actually destroyed, it went to the scammers.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#517
post #193

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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.

BCH is just kicking the can down the road a bit further. If it were to gain massive adoption rapidly, the only way it could scale if they follow their current ideology is by hosting the nodes on bigger and bigger server racks, eventually reaching the point where there is only one or two real nodes hosted in a cloud provider datacenter somewhere. I don't know what the perfect block size is, but quadrupling down on on…

Hopefully we won't end up on the slippery slope of centralization.

But even if there were a reduction in the amount of nodes, and in security vs. 51% attacks (looking at miners' profitability), BCH has shown its willingness to consider tradeoffs and changes.

There will be opportunity to backpedal if the community considers centralization is a bigger risk than adoption difficulty.

I fear BTC's downfall will be caused by its brittleness resulting from the fixed rules.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#518
post #267

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Moderation, customer support, sales, and then everyone to support all those people. You don't think that matters, but it has a real impact on your bottom line. Companies are stopping advertising now, not because Musk took over, but because they can't support for advertising (probably because they were sacked). It was one of the worlds largest social media platforms! Couple that with the reality that Twitter needs at…

> You don't think that matters, I didn’t express an opinion on that, and actually believe the opposite of what you just hastily attributed to me. My point is that, when gauging whether 7000 is a reasonable figure, it’s not enough to vomit a laundry list of work that the company needs to do — because that kind of argument would apply equally well to justifying 3500, 7000, 14000, or a million. To justify a specific fig…

> I didn’t express an opinion on that,

Don't be pedantic. It's worthless.

> My point is that, when gauging whether 7000 is a reasonable figure

Evidence shows you need 7324 people, exactly.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the crypto community delusion about how fractional reserve banking works. The way fractional reserve banking actually works is that banks lend out money, and the loans are their major assets. This only works if there's heavy regulation on how sound the loans have to be. Without regulation of loan quality, there's a banking panic every few years. All the US banking crises since the 1920s have involved some form…

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…

An exchange and a bank are in two completely different businesses. An exchange isn’t supposed to be lending money at all.

Re: BlockFi files for bankruptcy as FTX fallout spreads

#520
post #222

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…

So, Theranos for the blockchain, roughly?

Theranos was exceptional in its industry, where most actors sell valuable products, have existed for decades if not centuries and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

BlockFi is just your typical blockchain company, a complete waste of money if not a scam, see FTX, Terra, BitConnect, MtGox and so on. An exception to the rule would be a company that's not a complete disaster run by ignorant, arrogant scammers.

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