Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

babel.finance

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 188 posts

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#81

Post by h2odragon »

MauranKilom wrote: post #63
h2odragon wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Icarus Investments High efficiency, high energy solar solutions using phase change in solid hydrocarbons for energy capture.

Until I learned about the mechanics of it, I thought it would be a glorious idea to have e.g. metal rods placed in the Sahara that would contract at night and expand at day (due to the high temperature differences) and extract energy from the movement. Counter to young me's expectations, thermal expansion is not some infinite force, and if you run the real physics, the low frequency makes it not worth the material in…

Just because an idea is unsound, impractical, and useless is no reason not to fund raise on it. See also SpinLaunch and quantum computing companies.

And the wax thing can work, you just need wax that's energetic enough to count as an explosive. I haven't worked out the recovery phase yet, granted; but with a few billion dollars I'm sure it can be made to work.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#82

Post by tenpies »

icu wrote: 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,…

Another fantastic metric: compare the returns for storing or staking your crypto with them to the current sovereign interest rates.

Is it offering Argentina/Turkey returns? Then they're probably the Argentina and Turkey of crypto.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#83

Post by k__ »

highwaylights wrote: post #56
k__ wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How come? There are many people in crypto who aren't fond of companies like Coinbase or OpenSea. The helped to make things a bit more mainstream, but they aren't paragons of decentralization.

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?!

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#84

Post by Tesl »

icu wrote: post #71
shafyy wrote: 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 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.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#85

Post by icu »

bhaak wrote: post #53
icu wrote: 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,…

Terra was no stable coin. It was pointed out constantly that it can't work as an algorithmic stable coin. But the shill army was strong. There's an even easier metric for measuring crypto project. The bigger and dumber the shill army the more shady the project.

Thanks for your comment. Any chance you could please point me to the sources that constantly pointed out it wouldn't work?

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#87

Post by rvz »

icu wrote: 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,…

> Moving forward I'm staying away from projects with a "stable coin" component as I don't think the fundamentals work.

Not all stable-coins are the same. Out of all of them USDC seems to be the strongest out of the rest of them and is more likely to survive in the long term out of the others.

That does not mean you should put your whole savings into it. It is still very early for stable-coins. I would rather wait for regulatory clarity to define a set of rules that will wipe all the meme-coins, tokens, copy-paste projects and any crypto project that doesn't fit the incoming regulatory framework for crypto and only then will stable-coins like USDC will improve.

Regulations for crypto is inevitable and is only going to make some coins that are compliant stay for much longer and separate the non-compliant ones into obscurity or non-existence.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#88

Post by whywhywhywhy »

highwaylights wrote: post #41
ryanSrich wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like it has for every previous crypto bull market. The casinos will be back in another 3 years.

Exactly, there's a whole generation of people too young to get ripped off yet that will be around in 3 years to throw their student loans in the toilet.

> to throw their student loans in the toilet

If it's a student loan its already in the toilet.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#89

Post by bell-cot »

yessirwhatever wrote: post #25
fakedang wrote: post #18

Remember when crypto was supposed to be the "holy grail" against the current economic situation? Edit:- the cycle of upvotes and down votes on this comment hahaha....

The concept is sound, implementation is what matters. Blockchain and crypto got hijacked is all.

+1...though Edison's old quote about genius being 1% inspiration (concept), 99% perspiration (implementation) immediately comes to mind.

From a longer-term point of view...the ways in which blockchains & crypto are going wrong look amazingly similar to things which kinda regularly went wrong, ~1.5 centuries ago, with under-regulated brick & mortar banks, securities, & such. "Backed by real gold in the vaults!" didn't mean much, when there were few checks that said gold was really there (some groups of banks had only enough gold - collectively - to pass an inspection at one of them), paper "gold-backed" notes & securities could be printed with only the backing of other such pieces of paper "backed by someone's gold, somewhere, supposedly...", etc., etc.

Re: Crypto lending company Babel Finance halts redemptions and withdrawals

#90

Post by redox99 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #57
redox99 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why sarcasm? Centralized crypto "banking" institutions are the worst of both worlds. You are giving away your money to someone else, and there are no regulations to protect you from being screwed over by them. With DeFi (decentralized finance) you have transparency over what the smart contract does. (Of course you have to be careful because a lot of things claim to be decentralized but are actually centralized)

> With DeFi (decentralized finance) you have transparency over what the smart contract does. No, you don't. People find subtle bugs in open source code all the time, some of them disastrous. Unintentional bugs in smart contracts have lost tens of millions of dollars multiple times; imagine what you could accomplish with intentional holes. Parity lost $280M alone. https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/08/accidental-bug-may-hav…

Smart contracts for sure have their issues. But I would still choose a smart contract any time over these crypto companies which are completely opaque and unregulated, and basically "just trust me bro".
Post reply on HN