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Credit Suisse’s $17B of Risky Bonds Are Now Worthless

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Re: Credit Suisse’s $17B of Risky Bonds Are Now Worthless

#81

Post by csomar »

justinzollars wrote: post #5
codetrotter wrote: post #3

And they wonder why we want to replace the traditional banking system. Here’s a hint: it’s not got anything to do with either “metaverse” bs nor with silly “NFT” JPEGs. Read the original Bitcoin whitepaper. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf

The competing system is BRICS + Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan. They will probably transact in gold - certainly not bitcoin. In the West, if there is a collapse of our system, they will make bitcoin illegal. I just don't see it as anything other than a short term speculation.

They'll transact with Bitcoin given two conditions: 1. They know that resistance is futile. You can't stop it (or at least one party acting alone can't stop it) and 2. Crypto is liquid enough across many markets.

People (and government) will use the path of least resistance. Crypto is pretty liquid in many parts of the world now. You can P2P from crypto to your bank account and $10K is pretty feasible. However, $1Bn is not (outside the US and maybe EU). Once the liquidity is high enough, point 2 becomes possible. Point 1 always was.

Re: Credit Suisse’s $17B of Risky Bonds Are Now Worthless

#82

Post by greatwave1 »

notsosec wrote: post #75
KarlKemp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well don’t keep us guessing! What’s the secret cabal owning the financial system, according to your research, and how do they manage to own both the „serious“ business and the funny pages?

It's not secret and it's not a cabal. It's the group of people who benefit from a collusion with governments (by funding politicians campaigns) to get constant protection of their profits through systematic, de facto or explicit, bailouts by central banks, and more generally complacent regulations. Abolish central banking and have a gold-backed financial system and they mostly disappear. You can't cheat with gold. Pe…

> It's the group of people who benefit from a collusion with governments (by funding politicians campaigns) to get constant protection of their profits through systematic, de facto or explicit, bailouts by central banks, and more generally complacent regulations.

You'll have to be more specific. There are literally millions of people who 'fund politicians campaigns', and many of them have competing interests at stake. Is it your contention that all of these people are in on it, or only a subset?

> Abolish central banking and have a gold-backed financial system and they mostly disappear.

The U.S. was on the gold standard until 1971, do you have any evidence that there was no government corruption before we made that switch?

Re: Credit Suisse’s $17B of Risky Bonds Are Now Worthless

#83

Post by photochemsyn »

cpncrunch wrote: post #9

The Reuters article has more background information, and isn't behind a paywall: https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/credit-suisse-write...

This also, more explicit about the shareholders and bondholders, also not paywalled (Reuters doesn't even mention Saudi and Qatari losses):

https://www.afr.com/companies/financial-services/one-big-win...

Re: Credit Suisse’s $17B of Risky Bonds Are Now Worthless

#84

Post by weard_beard »

snapplebobapple wrote: post #73
pram wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are the Fraggles, common misconception.

Careful, this place can't take a joke, even when it is hilarious.

They’re supposed to come in threes so you know it’s a joke. Damn, I had something about Blackrock.

Re: Credit Suisse’s $17B of Risky Bonds Are Now Worthless

#85

Post by lowkey »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #41
pfannkuchen wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that a central authority doesn’t control the size of the bitcoin supply. It wouldn’t be a utopia, it would only fix a certain class of problems we have today.

> a central authority doesn’t control the size of the bitcoin supply What is the minimum number of natural persons required to fork Bitcoin to a larger supply? I’d wager it’s a number smaller than half of the Congress plus the President.

Well there are currently over 14k bitcoin nodes securing the network. Even if you deployed 20k new nodes, more than doubling the number of existing nodes, to run a fork that supports an increase in supply, it still wouldn’t work.

You would have to somehow take down the vast majority of nodes, many of which run on Tor.

Notably, neither miners alone nor the core Bitcoin devs could force an increase in supply without the support of the majority of nodes.

Note also, you can run a node on a Raspberry Pi so most node operators are regular folks securing the network for themselves. Bitcoin is run/secured by plebs, not whales.

In the Blockwars of 2017 many large miners and custodial exchanges tried to increase the block size but were thwarted because the majority of nodes didn’t agree with the change.

I think the 21 million cap is safe for the foreseeable future. If anything we may see a switch to Satoshis (Sats) as the default currency to replace Bitcoin. There are 1 Billion Sats per Bitcoin which should be more than enough for some time.

Re: Credit Suisse’s $17B of Risky Bonds Are Now Worthless

#86

Post by ChainOfFools »

ben_w wrote: post #55
sebzim4500 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Governments would have some control, much like large holders of an asset have a significant impact on its value by e.g. selling it all at once (see binance selling their FTT all at once). What they would not have is the ability to double the supply of the currency in 2 years for no apparent reason.

Sure they do, they can just make a new cryptocurrency, say BritCoin, and mandate it's use for paying taxes and getting paid and receiving pension. You know, like they already do with this whole "fiat money" thing.

This is one of the reasons for the schizophrenic posture of Bitcoin maxi's toward government adoption - thus Central Bank adoption - of Bitcoin as legal tender, a la El salvador. I mean apart from the fact that this happening on a global scale would make them stupendously wealthy. But from a pragmatic standpoint, they also know that one advantage Bitcoin does not have, that fiat does, is an armed gang with orders to enforce its use by all citizens. Yet.

Re: Credit Suisse’s $17B of Risky Bonds Are Now Worthless

#87

Post by lowkey »

lowkey wrote: post #85
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a central authority doesn’t control the size of the bitcoin supply What is the minimum number of natural persons required to fork Bitcoin to a larger supply? I’d wager it’s a number smaller than half of the Congress plus the President.

Well there are currently over 14k bitcoin nodes securing the network. Even if you deployed 20k new nodes, more than doubling the number of existing nodes, to run a fork that supports an increase in supply, it still wouldn’t work. You would have to somehow take down the vast majority of nodes, many of which run on Tor. Notably, neither miners alone nor the core Bitcoin devs could force an increase in supply without th…

Re-reading your comment with a different lens, the minimum number of natural persons required to fork Bitcoin to a larger supply is actually 1.

That said, it would be a fork, responsible for producing its own hash power, and would not be recognized as Bitcoin since it wouldn’t be following the Bitcoin protocol.

If you wanted to modify the Bitcoin protocol to support a larger supply, see my previous comment.

Re: Credit Suisse’s $17B of Risky Bonds Are Now Worthless

#88

Post by yazaddaruvala »

ChainOfFools wrote: post #86
ben_w wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure they do, they can just make a new cryptocurrency, say BritCoin, and mandate it's use for paying taxes and getting paid and receiving pension. You know, like they already do with this whole "fiat money" thing.

This is one of the reasons for the schizophrenic posture of Bitcoin maxi's toward government adoption - thus Central Bank adoption - of Bitcoin as legal tender, a la El salvador. I mean apart from the fact that this happening on a global scale would make them stupendously wealthy. But from a pragmatic standpoint, they also know that one advantage Bitcoin does not have, that fiat does, is an armed gang with orders to…

> one advantage Bitcoin does not have, that fiat does, is an armed gang with orders to enforce its use by all citizens.

Nail on the head!

The only difference between "tokens" and "currency" is an army and taxes!

Re: Credit Suisse’s $17B of Risky Bonds Are Now Worthless

#89

Post by qwytw »

hbrn wrote: post #74
qwytw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using an ultra deflationary token like bitcoin as a global currency would literally be the most stupid thing that ever happened in human history. Basically people who held significant amounts of bitcoin from early on would become billionaires (if not trillionaires...) by having provided zero value to the economy. As awful and unfair what we have currently is it's still several magnitudes superior in almost any concei…

I never really understood this reasoning, is it just simple envy? Ok, so a few folks will amass a lot of wealth based on luck and not merit. Those already exist in current financial system, both locally and globally. Plenty of dictators have control over natural resources worth trillions. There are numerous issues with bitcoin replacing USD, I'm just surprised why you think that few nerds becoming billionaires is a m…

I'm sorry but I really I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but I'll assume that you're not...

> so a few folks will amass a lot of wealth based on luck and not merit

You severely underestimate how concentrated bitcoin ownership is. A couple of hundred people would control a significant proportion of the global economy just because they were lucky. Why would you want some random people controlling the majority of the global economy? I mean things are very far from perfect now in my opinion but at least most billionaires have earned their wealth through actual work in one way or the other and can be generally expected to behave rationally.

The main issue in this case though is that bitcoin is deflationary. Obviously it's flawed but with Fiat money you're forced to either spend or invest your money returning it into the economy (also it's simply not physically feasible to hoard several billion (let alone trillion) of $ i a vault...).

If you don't utilize your money somehow it will lose value continuously due to inflation. Bitcoin on the other hand will increase in value when the economy is growing (which is why using a commodity like gold which is still a magnitude or so so superior to bitcoin in this regard is and was a bad idea unless there are no stable governments). So hoarding money will become the safest and relatively best investment This means that these few folks will remain billionaires for ever and their wealth will keep increasing without them actually doing anything...

There would be no or very few bank loans given out (imagine HUGE INTEREST RATES + HUGE DEFLATION, obviously not something that can exist now as long the people charger are not more than mildly insane...) venture capital, really any investment, which to be fair makes my last point moat cause there would be very little (or like negative) growth anyway in a such an economy.

> I'm just surprised why you think that few nerds becoming billionaires is a major one

So you want to take one of the biggest flaws of the current system and dial it up to 1000? Great idea...

Re: Credit Suisse’s $17B of Risky Bonds Are Now Worthless

#90

Post by qwytw »

HashBasher wrote: post #31
qwytw wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using an ultra deflationary token like bitcoin as a global currency would literally be the most stupid thing that ever happened in human history. Basically people who held significant amounts of bitcoin from early on would become billionaires (if not trillionaires...) by having provided zero value to the economy. As awful and unfair what we have currently is it's still several magnitudes superior in almost any concei…

Bitcoin is not deflationary. It just has a fixed supply. People who held bitcoin from early on supported the growth of bitcoin by holding up it's value through the wild gut-wrenching rollercoaster ride that it has gone through. They should be rewarded for the risk they're taking on, having invested significant amount of their net worth in the face of harsh criticism such as yours. Bitcoin and "crypto" are completely…

> Bitcoin is not deflationary. It just has a fixed supply.

Exactly. As the economy grows BitCoin will increase in value because its supply is fixed (not even gold or silver were even remotely as bad and when they were used as currencies).

Imagine a financial system with huge * huge interests rates * and and * huge deflation *. You can't because no central bank is run by people who are stupid and insane enough to try that? Well...

Something like that is 100% guarantee is btc becaomes a global currencies.

> They should be rewarded for the risk they're taking on, having invested significant amount of their net worth in the face of harsh criticism such as yours.

No they shouldn't. They contributed nothing to the society or economic growth. Even people investing in Credit Suisse should better rewarded than them from that perspective. Of course if there are other people willing to pay them huge amounts of money (yes money, not bitcoin) for their token well... it's their business).

> Bitcoin and "crypto" are completely different beasts. Cryptos are unregistered securities masquerading as Bitcoin 2.0.

Many other cryptos, well pretty much every one that doesen't have a fixed supply, like DogeCoin for instance would make much, much better global currencies than bitcoin.

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