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Comment by civilized | Hacker News Reader

Currently paused due to "extreme market conditions". What conditions exactly? BTC is down from all-time high, but still worth about twice as much as it was only two years ago. Ethereum is worth over 4x as much. Is a two-year average appreciation rate of 40-100% per year so witheringly horrible that the Celsius business model couldn't survive it? Did crypto have to basically 2x every year without fail for Celsius to survive?

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Celsius told their customers they were accruing Bitcoin and then Celsius didn’t buy the Bitcoin to deposit into their accounts, instead using the money to buy their CEL token that their ceo was dumping on exchange.

Their business model was fine. What wasn’t fine was not following it. Abra, Nexo, Gemini, and lots of other companies are business as usual with the same model right now.

This is informative, but I'm not sure how illuminating it is to say that a business's business model was great, except they didn't follow it, they followed a completely different business model that was terrible? Isn't the actual business model of a business... the business model that they actually followed?

If I build you a model of a building that's fine, and then I build a building that isn't like the model, I think it's reasonable to still say that the model was fine.

Point taken, but I'd say it gets a bit murky when I find out you built the building based on a different model you didn't show me.

A lot depends on whether the "business model" presented publicly was deceptive.

How in God's name are there so many of these crypto companies? This post has 3 that I've never heard of, and the rest of this thread probably has a dozen more. Is the startup cost of these things near zero or something?

Why are the people behind these companies not in jail?

When everybody piles in near the all-time high then wants to cash out at the bottom, the two-year return becomes irrelevant.

That depends on what you're doing. If I put my life's savings into the S&P 500 at 2x leverage in 2008, I'd be wiped out in 2009. But that would be an extremely dumb thing to do.

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