Three Arrows Capital reportedly facing insolvency
fxstreet.com
fxstreet.com
https://twitter.com/hodlKRYPTONITE/status/153690211554074214...
Basically, they're a large crypto fund that has borrowed from almost every major crypto lender, and if they can't cover their margin calls (which is expected if they're insolvent), the risk of the debt is then transferred to the lenders themselves.
Are the loans denominated in crypto or dollars? Does this mean the lenders will have to sell crypto when they realize the loss?
We’ve been here before, we’ll be here again, a bunch of people will lose money and the cycle will repeat. It’ll all work out.
It's fine for a bunch of pokemon card traders to get rekt - but by the time you get to 3AC scale, it's time for regulators to put the kibosh on the whole space. They're securities. They either get registered or you go to Club Fed.
With all due respect, fingers crossed, this time it does not work out.
[1] https://www.cdpq.com/en/news/pressreleases/celsius-network-a...
I don’t see where lack of regulation is a selling point—it greatly limits invested capital.
There's no technical merit in crypto that actually makes things fast, it's just a regulation dodge. It's necessarily slower and more expensive than TransferWise.
They have decided it's better to avoid their local businesses being beholden to foreign investors, which is a case that can be argued.
If you're being directed mostly by overseas investors who will never see your actual operation in person, that increases the pressure to cook the books, either on a direct accounting-level basis, or by cutting corners in operations, environmental or labour standards, or product quality.
Notice how some countries insist on joint ventures with a 51% local partner, which similarly ensures there's some local skin in the game.
- so there's somebody in France that can *make money* being the middle man
- so the French broker can be held to some standards reporting and what not. For example, the French broker at risk of criminal prosecution cannot sell shares to NK or Iran.
- so the rules around transfer of shares for payment and settlement are set so people can't be screwing each over or not completing settlement in a timely fashion
- because of scale: there are zillions of trades done every day. that's why netting-out is a real thing. settlement has to be fast, tight, nailed down. And regulation helps with that through known pre-approved brokers with set roles and responsibilities
Also consider that unlike crypto you gotta settle. Settlement is serious. And settle in a bonafide currency that everybody agrees is a currency: EUR, for example. And you have fixed time to do it in.
You can't be waving your hands with some stupid story about how your broker/holder of crypto,
- stopped you from withdrawing your stuff
- is down
- is in chapter 7 or 11
- that you forgot your crypto keys
- and the entity getting the cash for selling shares isn't gonna wait around for some miner to "approve" your transfer maybe in 10 mins ... or maybe tomorrow
I'm not sure what you mean by centrally registered clients. You can still use bitcoin peer to peer. Also the idea that banning peer to peer bitcoin would be what would make decentralization not worthwhile feels rather circular.
To trade you need to be registered by regulated entity, it’s already a centralised environment. You’re also purchasing shares issued by a centralised issuer, the corporation. Your suggestion that bitcoin offers any solution to settlement (much less a superior solution), just escapes me
No, that's your public institution making degenerate gambles on late-stage startups. The largest venture capital investor in Canada isn't some poor victim, they are the perpetrators, the owners. It's completely laughable to paint them as a victim of some crypto-ecosystem heist.
Neither should the fund be allowed to invest in Ponzi schemes, nor should the so-called investments be permitted to run them in the open.
[edit] I'd have the same criticism of both if they'd invested in Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC.
EDIT: nice to see all the luddites downvoting me. Guess the meme is true -- we still are early.
I recommend reading Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds published originally in 1841 [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company
[2] https://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Popular-Delusions-Madne...
There is something about a useless or immoral business that often excites greed beyond what anything beneficial to society can.
We are not currently in a recession.
If we get into a recession in the next quarter or two, there's no harm done to crypto. The market is headed into bear territory regardless of the macro economic climate.
I swear no one remembers 2017. Thousands of projects that raised billions of dollars died. No one cares. The market rebuilds itself every 3-5 years. This is absolutely no different.
This game of lending crypto assets for ridiculous interest rates wasn't nearly as popular last time, was it?
- ICOs - DAOs - NFTs - Yield - Earn - Farming
etc. All of these can be ephemeral concepts within a single crypto bull cycle. Regardless of whether or not you think crypto is valuable, there's no denying people love money. So long as crypto remains unregulated there will always be bull markets imo.
The 2020 Covid crash was a recession. A very short one, but also one of the most severe since the Great Depression. Bitcoin crashed from about $10,000 to $4,000 in the span of 3 weeks, before recovering and peaking at nearly $70,000.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/past-rece...
What might be correct to say is that bitcoin has never gone through stagflation, but that's a terrifying prospect for every person and asset class.
Every time I make a comment about this I get downvoted by the crypto gang.
What's happened now is that the Fed has suddenly withdrawn its cheap and easy money and these people are having a wile-e-coyote moment. Currently they're suspended in mid air with nothing below.
Crypto isn't to blame, neither is the Fed (maybe), it's just the hangover from covid and the war in Ukraine.
No way. COVID and the war are just the straws that broke the camel's back, they just helped bring down this house of cards that was the bubble economy the Fed created purely out of cheap money I'm the last decade, and overinflated in the last 2 years.
COVID and the supply chain disruptions it caused, was the perfect wake-up call to parachute the economy back down to earth, but instead they just kept the money printer running at full speed until the war came.
How is COVID and the war to blame that the Fed quadroupled the money supply in just 2 years? How was that house of cards ever going to be sustainable?
Of course the war brought it down. And if the war wouldn't have happened, something else would have brought it down instead. It was just not sustainable.
Basically, Wall Street created a "You're locked in here with me" scenario for the entire American public. Everyone has to throw their money at some speculative asset category, typically stocks, to have a meaningful chance of beating inflation. (Yeah, real estate, fine art, and Yu-gi-oh cards exist, but they're far less fungible and liquid at the scales required)
This creates a political feedback loop: the S&P 500 must keep going up in perpetuity because we're all afraid of being 82 years old and in failing health but having to still flip burgers to afford our medication. Ergo, policies like super-low interest rates that make alternatives like bonds ever less compelling and focus ever more interest in an asset bubble.
TBH, I feel like there's a real opportunity to ask "why are we investing."
For people forced into the market for things like retirement and educational savings, maybe we need some sort of contribution-based scheme, rather than a market-price-based one. Sign up now, contribute an agreed-upon sum for N years, and you get your retirement condo/kid's tuition at Harvard prepaid in 2044. Make the institutions-- the ones with teams of actuaries on staff and the financial backstop to handle it-- eat the inflation risk instead of the individual with a net worth of $650 on a good day.
That sort of program could remove a lot of the "mere mortals who stand to lose everything" from the market. The political benefit is then it returns Wall Street to being a casino for the rich and distasteful, and makes it much easier to propose regulation or managed-growth policies. When not everyone is chained to the market through a 401(k), the threats of a market tank don't bite quite as hard.
It isn't. The "crypto bubble" also includes an over-inflated sense of the significance of crypto-currencies.
As opposed to embedding that failure into the core of the system to protect a few interests so that the same issues are surfacing 20 years later.
That doesn't seem all that bad.
While I do not subscribe to the ideals of anarcho capitalism at all this is one feature of crypto culture that I think they got right.
Which ironically would be bullish for bitcoin . stocks rebounded huge after the 1998 crisis.
https://nitter.net/hodlKRYPTONITE/status/1536902115540742144
For instance, the stablecoins.
Bitcoin itself doesn't seem to be vulnerable, exactly because there's no particular objective value. If it goes down 90%, well, nobody promised it wouldn't.
Sounds as if that's somewhat related to J.K. Galbraith's variant of Gresham's Law, in which "bad assets drive out good", during a crash, as the need to cover obligations as bad assets tank leads to sale of quality assets / securities.
From The Great Crash: 1929. One of my favourite books.
> Safe assets are much riskier than risky ones. This is I think the deep lesson of the 2008 financial crisis, and crypto loves re-learning the lessons of traditional finance. Systemic risks live in safe assets. Equity-like assets — tech stocks, Luna, Bitcoin — are risky, and everyone knows they’re risky, and everyone accepts the risk. If your stocks or Bitcoin go down by 20% you are sad, but you are not that surprised. And so most people arrange their lives in such a way that, if their stocks or Bitcoin go down by 20%, they are not ruined.
> On the other hand safe assets — AAA mortgage securities, bank deposits, stablecoins — are not supposed to be risky, and people rely on them being worth what they say they’re worth, and when people lose even a little bit of confidence in them they crack completely. Bitcoin is valuable at $50,000 and somewhat less valuable at $40,000. A stablecoin is valuable at $1.00 and worthless at $0.98. If it hits $0.98 it might as well go to zero. And now it might!
The passage I reference is toward the end of Chapter VI:
Never was there a time when more people wanted more money more urgently than in those days. The word that a man had "got caught" by the market was the signal for his creditors to descend on him like locusts. Many who were having trouble meeting their margin calls wanted to sell some stocks so they could hold the rest and thus salvage something from their misfortunes. But such people now found that their investment trust securities could not be sold for any appreciable sum and perhaps not at all. They were forced, as a result, to realize on their good securityies. Standard stocks like Steel, General Motors, Tel and Tel, were thus dumped on the market in abnormal volume, with the effect on prices that had already been fully revealed. The great investment trust boom had ended in a unique manifestation of Gresham's Law in which the bad stock were driving out the good.
-- John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash: 1929, chapter VI
NB: In re-typing the above passage, I managed to render "hold" as "hodl". I've fixed that, but note the fact here...
TL;DR - like Usher said, “let it buuuuurrn”
it also helps dampen inflation by strengthening the dollar, at whatever level that may be.
It a bad look, and I feel for everyone affected by the layoffs. But this isn’t a decision Coinbase made two weeks ago.
The decision makers at Coinbase might have thought so, but they were clearly wrong. A massive crypto collapse is probably the most predictable financial crash in decades.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-05-19/terra-...
That would have been funny.
Crypto was never intended to be used (and abused) in such a way, and is a considerable deviation from Satoshi's original vision regarding Bitcoin. Perhaps it's time to get back to basics.
Could wind up with major governmental oversight moving forward, basically making damn sure it's barely ever adopted. Everyone always talks about "satoshi's vision" and what not, but crypto isn't going to be worth shit if you are forced to make trades in black market scenarios because it shit the bed so bad it took down serious stuff with it.
Granted this is probably worst case which i'd put at very low odds.
I'm basically of two minds about this.
One is that as long as people understand they're buying nothing of real value, it's fine if they want to "gamble". It's like a lottery ticket in this regard.
The other is if or perhaps when taxpayers will need to bail out crypto companies. At this point, I'll be extremely angry, and want the strictest government regulation possible.
I would be fine with regulation that just bans those sorts of vehicles from investing in crypto. That way individuals can speculate with their money, while being guarded against more systemic and indirect risks.
If pensions were involved the people who decided that pensions should be invested in crypto should be prosecuted.
> I would be fine with regulation that just bans those sorts of vehicles from investing in crypto.
I would be fine with regulation that banned people from investing in something that has no value.
If it ever got to that point I think we'd more likely see prudential authorities restrict traditional finance actors from investing in crypto rather than governments banning crypto outright.
I think Bitcoin was a really interesting idea in the pre-iPhone era, but for a variety of reasons it just didn't pan out. Which is why the space was so readily colonized by scammers, grifters, criminals, fraudsters, speculators, and loons.
While convenience remains the core point under contention, the secondary point of debate with crypto is the one you raise here: why is this a good thing?
Why would I want an unregulated currency, free of consumer protections or government oversight? If someone steals my credit card I call the bank and reverse the charges. When a bank gets robbed or collapses, the FDIC ensures consumers are unaffected.
Governments aren't a power independent of their communities, they're not aliens from outer space interfering with natural human ways of life. Government is how we the community organize ourselves to ensure our collective protection. They're, obviously, deeply imperfect, but a system completely severing itself from those organizing principles is fated to replicate them with even greater imperfection.
And why would I believe that it has value compared to gold, or a cow? And while the value of a dollar is an abstract of those physical trades, at least it has the backing of the nation’s resources, its people, and its military ability to plunder. Bitcoin has all the backing of …
It’s panning out just fine. Everyone who thinks Bitcoin is old news presupposes that you can do something like Bitcoin, but better. There’s no evidence of this in any non-Bitcoin cryptocurrency.
This also ignores that Bitcoin is improving every year. Tools like Liquid and Lightning are incredibly sophisticated, first principles based approaches to real problems in finance, banking, and fungibility. That fly by night securities called "cryptocurrencies" with shallow liquidity claim that they can do better, but always fail to deliver, hasn't undermined anything about Bitcoin.
I agree with the parent post. This is great for crypto. Maybe all the web developers who think they can do cryptography better than cryptographers can go do something else now.
For most people's everyday purposes, all those things the parent mentioned are doing something like Bitcoin, but better.
The one technical problem that cryptocurrency unquestionably handles better than any other technology is solve a problem that is only experienced by people who choose to use cryptocurrency.
It hasn't managed to do much more than be fancy digital gold. I don't find gold very interesting. It isn't a productive asset. It's just a shiny rock that people lock up in a vault. It doesn't benefit society.
And as financial instruments, both bitcoin and gold are deflationary, which seems quite bad.
I still have a bit of hope for some actually useful stuff to come out of the defi / smart-contract space. But I'm still fairly skeptical. There is a lot of noise and little signal.
The iPhone era describes mobile computing, touchscreens, app stores, etc.
My point is that conceptually, the peer-to-peer, proof-of-work thing was much more suited to the desktop era, a sort of SETI@Home for money. It wasn't until a few years later that we truly began to see what the mobile era would look like (e.g., Venmo was August 2009, Uber was May 2010). The peer-to-peer aspect is basically a failure, as the rise of mining pools and centralized exchanges demonstrate. As do the relatively small transaction volumes for Bitcoin compared to things that are actual modern cash substitutes. If somebody were inventing cryptocurrency today, it would not look like Bitcoin.
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/10/02/04/idc_apple_iphone_...
So those people are probably going to rely upon taxpayers for help. And so when homeless hodlers appear on the streets looking for the government handout, that's gonna piss off liberals and conservatives alike.
If broad adoption was an actual goal, cryptocurrencies wouldn't be fundamentally structured like ponzi schemes.
It's impossible to have a currency without speculation and financial markets on top of it.
There are going to be some great discounts when correlated assets bid down during these liquidations, and some nice block space available
Just pick the right asset if you want to speculate, there is always some that move
pre-2017 crypto was not a beneficiary of quantitative easing, the hedge funds didnt exist (barring like 3 with low AUM) and the LPs had no vehicle to purchase crypto
its more closely a return to that environment, except with waaaay better infrastructure
There is still over $200bn in stablecoins ready to move into any crypto asset at any moment 24/7, the redemptions to fiat aren’t really happening
This is way better than how it works in conventional finance.
How on earth do you think this is possible?
Wall Street is bad enough. This is insanity.
Can anyone recommend a paper or post that explains how it is linked?
Within just a few years there were large-scale "gold mining" operations set up in China, wholesalers, retailers, "forex" markets, etc... Nearly the entire modern economic ecosystem was set up around a game.
At some point, if WoW was treated as a country, its "currency" would have ranked above quite a few real countries in terms of forex trading. If I remember correctly, it was bigger than 70 real nations.
Crypto is the same, except times a thousand.
https://www.polygon.com/features/2020/5/27/21265613/runescap...
> it seemed like its ended entirely
not quite: relative volume actually increased as a function of growing game popularity around the time of the introduction of bonds (http://crystalmathlabs.com/tracker/players.php - amusingly enough, this is currently serving me a first-party ad for goldbuying) but that obviously represented a slice of a previously-undivided pie.
It's like legal weed: black markets still exist for those willing to forgo security and convenience for a deal. IIRC, black-market gold was 40-60% of the face price of a bond for the period I was active as a reasonably high volume swapper/seller. That kind of discount isn't worth it if you're buying 10m or a single prerolled joint or whatever, but generally makes sense in any kind of volume / if you've got the connections to mitigate the risk.
But the analogy continues: if the black market is relegated to a fairly small proportion of the total pool of individuals who buy (weed|gp), even if a lot of the volume transactions aren't captured, many of its harms are mitigated as you don't have unsophisticated consumers smoking rat poison / getting their mom's credit card stolen / etc.
Most of the regulations have come from centuries of banking history, which the crypto world seems to be speed-running through right now, learning the hard way.
There is plenty to criticize about the banking world, but crypto is indefensible at this point.
This is an exciting time for that field.
The next generation will have fond memories at that stadium and won’t think about the name either
But in crypto land, it's a pure cargo cult - a facade of finance and analysis, with nothing behind it.
We need look no further than the 2008 financial crash for evidence of that; The Economist was reporting for years that there was clearly a lot of risk being shuffled around such that nobody was quite sure where it was. We all found out, but not until after a lot of the shufflers made their money and got out.
Ironic how similar the crypto and traditional world is.
Assets that generate value (cash flow) will fluctuate in value per the moods of Mr. Market, but over their long run will hew to the present value of their future earnings power.
There's no similar number for crypto. Might as well be tulips. In that case, perhaps it is true that history will rhyme.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Semper_Augustus_Tuli...
Next you're going to say that gold has some magical property called "intrinsic value" which Bitcoin doesn't have.
Well, Bitcoin has absolute scarcity and a global permissionless and trustless payments network. Despite the protestations of many, it's a form of money and useful to many people.
Easy to hide a billion dollars of bitcoin on a USB stick for 10 years. Good luck storing a billion dollars of gold, you couldn't even physically move it by yourself.
Wampum didn't do so well either
Beyond that, the less rational reasons people value gold as if it had intrinsic value are at least deeply rooted in our history & culture.
Gold is gold because it is useless and also rare. And can't be produced. And spread widely. All these little features are its value because they are what you want in a currency. And the good currencies try to replicate that. It its perfect in this regard, but closer than any other phsyical item.
BTC has some of these and its properties are still in flux. And BTC is only part of the cryptofx world might wind up being the same thing financially.
> At minimum, it's a heavy physical object, and heavy objects also have a variety of uses.
Quite possibly the dumbest explanation of gold I've ever read.
Though I admit that a large portion of it's price is due to people valuing for it's properties as a financial instrument. The fact that the price would be lower if it did not have that purpose is irrelevant to valuing it at that price for other purposes. Otherwise you might say then precise thing about any other object with multiple purposes: "if not for oil being useful as fuels and instead only plastics and other pretro chemicals it's price would not be so high."
Further, I don't deny the potential for BTC or other cryptocurrencies to be used for similar financial purposes as gold, only that such uses remain theoretical, and it is uncertain whether-- given it's track record & the potential for governments to regulate it into something indistinguishable from traditional financial tools-- that it could ever achieve those uses on a wide scale. Certainly to date it has been completely useless for the financial purposes that gold currently fills. And, as this conversation started, unlike other traditional financial instruments it has absolutely no underlying asset for which it is an abstraction & which, no asset that, absent any specific financial instrument would still be utilized for its value.
It's current price is a function of two variables: 1) speculation that it's price will increase. 2) it's expected future value for the theoretical purposes already mentioned. These are abstract reasons in which it differs significantly from the concrete underlying value of traditional finance. I don't mean this as an insult. Playing video games for fun or reading books for pleasure doesn't have a separate value apart from the abstract reasons reasons for doing so either. But unlike legions of crypto advocates I don't insist on it.
Maybe Doge because it's the original meme coin, but everything else will die. Just like the billions of random tokens I hold from 100s of ICOS from 2017. They're all worthless.
The casino will be back in another 3 years.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-06-15/crypto...
I just want to block quote the second paragraph, but instead, just the first sentence.
“The deeper problem, always, is when you add leverage. Someone who gambled $40,000 on Bitcoin now has $20,000, fine. But someone who bought a Bitcoin with $20,000 of their own money and $20,000 borrowed from someone else now has roughly nothing, which is worse.”
Just the five US big tech companies (AAPL, MSFT, META, AMZN, GOOGL) are down a combined ~$3.4 trillion so far from the highs.
https://money.cnn.com/2000/11/09/technology/overview/
In the grand scheme of things crypto is still relatively small, another dot-com bubble or not even that. It's going to be a sideshow for the bloodbath that happens in the public equity and corporate debt markets (and eventually, the housing market), which is just getting started.
… in 2000. That would be $2.85T today, going by the official CPI inflation calculator.[0]
[0] https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=1.7&year1=2000...
Tether's $70B market cap is currently over 50% of ETH's and nearly 20% of BTC's. The whole thing looks like an incredible shitshow.
I don't think that's obvious at all when you have entities like Tether with unclear off-chain financials. Only the on-chain stuff is transparent and works as you explained.
Meaning that crypto is very corellated with the stock market index, and if big selling happens on crypto, the statistical arbitrage algos will sell the stock market to exploit the correlation.
E.g. there's a big correlation between tech stocks and cryptocurrencies, but it could just be that investors consider them both in a single category (risky assets) and thus buy / sell at the same time.
Does this actually happen?
This (GBTC) is a closed-ended fund that institutional investors have been picking up because it's the only way to get 100% bitcoin exposure from something that trades on major stock exchanges. It's not an ETF, although many treat it as such. In the past, its net asset value has traded at a premium to the underlying bitcoin. But in the last couple of years, that's changed. The NAV is now well below the value of the underlying bitcoin.
Unlike an ETF, there is no mechanism to keep GBTC's value equal to the underlying bitcoin.
The knock-on effects could be surprising. According to this filing:
> Grayscale Bitcoin Trust (Btc) (US:GBTC) has 87 institutional owners and shareholders that have filed 13D/G or 13F forms with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC). These institutions hold a total of 32,132,151 shares. ...
That 32 million share number translates into about 400 million dollars at the current price/share.
Which would be fine if it produced useful products where dumb investments get burned, but the industry doesn't produce anything useful. It's just money flowing from suckers to grifters.
In other words, the same way people have dodged currency controls and sanctions since time immemorial.
"The sender gives money to an...agent and his/her counterpart in the receiver region/country acts as deliverer of this money. The sender calls or faxes instructions to his counterpart and the money gets delivered in a matter of few hours. In the past, the message could be delivered using couriers, with men or even animals (such as pigeons). Settlements are made either with a private delivery service or wire transfer in the opposite direction. Another method of balancing the books is to under-invoice goods shipped abroad, so that the receiver can resell the products at a higher market price"
Ukraine? Use a bank. Or maybe PayPal? My parents are also still sending remittances to Ukraine.
Lebanon, Iran, Venezuela? Probably Hawala, or maybe through China or India, but you'll probably get a more detailed answer from an ex-pat.
I will also point out that shitcoins and NFTs and the various pyramid schemes that are currently unraveling aren't a solution to this problem.
In fact, they only solve the problem of transferring money from the pockets of the greedy and financially illiterate to the pockets of the greedy and financially literate.
Also any of these hypothetical people that put their money in crypto just lost a significant chunk of their life savings.
I'm so tired of these same low value takes year after year.
Despite very little knowledge about crypto or conventional finance, what I've read about USDT suggests it has to collapse sooner or later.
I get this sense that people assume if there is some questionable stuff reported, and nothing happens, it must have been FUD. Like fast decaying radioactive waste, it has a half-life.
But when an organization has always made excuses for why they can't be audited, and tried to confuse people about whether they have been, it never becomes ok.
There was a lot of fallout beyond Enron, either directly because of Enron's collapse or indirectly because all of a sudden people looked a little harder at corporate accounting in places where there had been strong scents of financial BS.
In short, if we're using Enron as a comparison point, we're talking about systemic shockwaves through two systems (power industry & corporate accounting)
We don’t know what would have happened, the entire futures and spot price divergence was 3 months
Its the worst example of a bubble
They picked the wrong stablecoins to have debt in.
Despite all this, we could trade US equities, if we wanted to trade in markets that are deeply unfair and have fixed costs for data feeds and colocation in the tens of millions of dollars.
(Edit: Hedge funds naturally lose money some of the time, and investors naturally get angry when that happens and look for someone to blame, and hiring someone who has good credentials lets you pass the blame, instead of having to explain to your investors that hedge funds just sometimes lose money. I’m not trying to tie this to the discussion about whether hedge funds work or not, just talking about how they operate.)
The idea that observations “contain evidence” is an idea that I’m unfamiliar with. I’m not sure what point you’re making about observations or assertions, or how the distinction between the terms is germane (not talking about the distinction between the concepts).
Asking for evidence is confrontational and a bit gauche. Better to ask someone to elaborate, or ask them what the reasoning is. That’s a good way to continue the discussion because it doesn’t frame the discussion as an argument.
It's germane because the OP (and you) seem to think it's inappropriate to ask if you have any examples (maybe "example" would have been less "gauche" than "evidence")
It's not really important, you've clarified, and even added in some advice on manners.
2. Look at what happens when a hedge fund fails. What kind of business decisions are scrutinized (and which are not)? How are decisions justified? Are those justifications founded? (Another long discussion which I’m omitting. The basic theory is that you need to CYA for the inevitable failures. If you CYA and then the fund fails, investors may give you another shot. If you don’t CYA, you get replaced.)
I only save citations about a subject if I’m writing an article. If I were writing an article, I would post from my other account.
I'm not sure I agree with 1, but appreciate the clarification regardless.
36% of Harvard students come from legacy admissions programs, their admission has less to do with their personal merit than their last name. Other Ivy leagues aren't far behind.
A non-zero part of the product these schools sell is the ability to make friends with rich and powerful people. It's not the whole story, I'm not saying they're not good schools, but your average student isn't going to be that much smarter than your average well regarded public school, just a lot more wealthy.
"Harvard’s Class of 2022 is made up of over 36% legacy students, according to The Harvard Crimson. The year before, the share of the freshman class was just over 29%. (CNBC Make It has reached out to both The Crimson and Harvard’s admissions office to confirm these figures.)
As of 2015, legacies were five times more likely to get into the world-famous university than applicants without relatives who went to Harvard.
Stanford University gives legacies a significant advantage as well. “It used to be that every application would be read twice. Now, only one reading is guaranteed, although — thanks, Mom and Dad — every legacy application still gets two sets of eyes,” a 2013 Stanford Magazine article about the school’s admissions process reported."
The issue is that with past Crypto runs, not everyone knew about BTC/ETH/ETC. This time around, literally the entire world has heard about crypto and has been pitched to buy, up to having Matt Damon calling you a coward for not buying during the Superbowl. So when the price of BTC finally stops at somewhere like $800 a coin, people aren't going to be buying anymore. There's no magic left in the system. The whole "it runs on vibes" thing is the only true statement that backs the price of BTC given that it's a negative-sum game.
When the vibes run out the miners leave the hotels fold the bars close and the whole circus leaves town. Coinbase will be a ghost town in a few years.
The effects of the famine are still visible in the generation which grew up during that period and those which came after [2].
Source: I'm Dutch, my parents lived in this region and had their share of tulip bulbs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_famine_of_1944%E2%80%931...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_famine_of_1944%E2%80%931...
1 BTC = 20k USD
When 1 BTC = 0.009 USD, go ahead.
Even as origami sculptures, like the Venezuelan bolivar:
https://www.vozdeamerica.com/a/figuras-de-origami-hechas-con...
That 4 meter long cobra origami figure looks so cool (check picture 4).
There are individuals who get some utility out of bitcoin (international money transfers etc.)
What do you mean with money transfers?
This switches if you need to transfer millions of dollars, or you're trying to pay for something illegal. Which is why one of Bitcoin's significant real-world uses is for ransomware. It does indeed make it easy to launder millions of dollars of money across national boundaries.
https://www.npr.org/2021/06/10/1004874311/how-bitcoin-has-fu...
Hmm - but actually can it? Isn't destruction of bills forbidden? It certainly is in my home country.
> Research into tulip mania since then, especially by proponents of the efficient-market hypothesis,[17] suggests that his story was incomplete and inaccurate. In her 2007 scholarly analysis Tulipmania, Anne Goldgar states that the phenomenon was limited to "a fairly small group", and that most accounts from the period "are based on one or two contemporary pieces of propaganda and a prodigious amount of plagiarism".[11] Peter Garber argues that the trade in common bulbs "was no more than a meaningless winter drinking game, played by a plague-ridden population that made use of the vibrant tulip market."
Source: Wikipedia - tulip mania
Exaggerated or not, I think we can still use this line!
It's global. There's always a new pool of money coming new.
And tulip bulbs are really only good for one thing. Extremely perishable, fungible, analog and centralized stores of value ;)
FTFY: There's always been a new pool of money coming in, so far.
A USD CBDC will kill it either way
It's just too easy to participate.
Also: are you interested in my brand new Krasnol-NFT?
Have you seen this new coin? Have you read the white paper? It's a completely new scam^Wthing!
There's definitely another fool born every day
Banks already have such an account at the Fed, and are getting realtime FedWire soon, and it doesn't really matter that the API involves SFTP'ing ACH files around.
IMO the past ~10 years of the VC industry has been one of the biggest collective wastes of time and resources in the history of computing. We came into this with the goal of creating the next Google or the next Apple, and we exited with... what exactly?
Investors of every stripe collectively lost their gourds and poured hundreds of billions into unsustainable companies that have never found their unit economics (and likely never will) like WeWork, Uber, and Lyft. After that whole scheme started unwinding they then collectively poured more hundreds of billions into something even worse - rather than simply losing money on useful products, they decided to simply lose money without even bothering with the product part of it. The result is years of tulip-mania that just set an unholy amount of money on fire and fleeced innumerable retail investors' savings.
What if we poured that collective funding into producing... well, actual businesses? Delivering products that actually improved people's lives? Delivering products that at least make money?
All I see from the past 10 years of the industry is the missed opportunity and what could have been. How many groundbreaking products would we have today if we put the money into... well, not this?
I suppose it's not all bad - there have been some promising companies that actually deliver products for profit that came out of this era (see: Shopify, Stripe) but I can't help but wonder where we'd be without this entire misadventure.
Turns out those companies weren’t wrong. They were just 20 years too early. And one or two of them even survived and thrived. (Amazon.) Also we got a lot of fiber laid that turned out to be useful.
I think it’s a similar situation here. If we knew a priori which uses cases and companies would work out we’d only fund those. But we don’t. So boom, bust, repeat. Humanity moves forward. Of course, as you said there is collateral damage. And externalities.
The free software activists would like to have a word with that and the VCs really don't care other than making money. So it is futile to believe that they would ever change or even when after 37 years the free software movement has been hijacked by 'open-source' which the same companies like Google and Apple getting away with that.
Generally they failed to stop closed-source software and systems from proliferating and existing and the fact that some of these engineers who were formerly part of this movement jumped ship to Google, Microsoft and Facebook tells us that it hasn't gone the way they envisioned.
Just like how the free software movement failed to stop closed-source software, the anti-crypto folks will also suffer the same fate and will realise that it's futile to try to 'destroy' all cryptocurrencies and their projects. That view to even think of trying to destroy all of it is just as delusional as the pro-crypto maxis thinking that it will take over the current system, even post regulations. Co-existence is most likely outcome from this.
> I suppose it's not all bad - there have been some promising companies that actually deliver products for profit that came out of this era (see: Shopify, Stripe) but I can't help but wonder where we'd be without this entire misadventure.
The fact that Stripe, Checkout.com, Shopify and MoneyGram are using cryptocurrencies not only have legitimised some of them of having a valid use-case, it says that they are going to be still around for a long time. Not all these crypto projects or companies will survive, but only a compliant few will still be around; almost the same outcome as the dotcom bubble with a wipeout of many frivolous companies and a remaining few surviving.
As a rule. Panics do not destroy Capital ; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works.
His full comments can be found at https://archive.org/stream/oncreditcyclesor00manc/oncreditcy....
I cannot think of anything as hopelessly unproductive as what has been spent on cryptocurrency. To name just one example, as https://www.nrdc.org/stories/crypto-has-climate-problem points out, the electricity used for mining bitcoin is on par with that used by Sweden. And all of this energy goes to produce...what?
you people will be remembered as the folks who installed a dozen shaddy tool bars on internet explorer in the 90s.
Just use Firefox and uBlockOrigin. jeez.
The some random fly-by-night chrome fork is the most sane option I know since the only option left is Brave
The thing with crypto is that there are so many scams and houses of cards that making an exhaustive list is difficult. People point to Tether because it's a house of cards that's #3 by market cap. Tether hasn't imploded yet but its market cap is dropping precipitously right now and if they're not properly backed they might run out of money to redeem USDT soon.