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Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

Can I ask why? If you wanted to put money into crypto, why didn't you use a blockchain where you could verify your holdings and nobody could take them from you? BlockFi was just an incredibly shitty bank.

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Because they paid high interest rates! That's how all these scams work, one after the other. Pay high interest rates to attract customers (impossible to achieve rates), create tokens of your own, trade them to other places paying high interest rates. Take your bitcoin deposits, use them to make other bets, hope that it will go up somehow.

For sure. "Not your keys not your coins" and all that.

Here's my rationale: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33779052

Even with 10% losses he lost less than those storing equity in ultra boring indexes.

Honestly anybody who only lost 10% in the last year looks like a genius (crypto included).

Your math assumes he lost 0% on the rest of his savings, while "those storing equity in ultra boring indexes" where storing 100% of their savings there. Is that really a fair accounting, in your opinion?

If you assume I assumed the things you assumed then I assume we can assume that would be a fair question.

Generally people don't lose all their investments in a stock or index fund. They might go down in price 10% on fund xyz but won't lose all their value. Do you not get that difference with this, this would not happen if he bought stocks with 10% of his money.

If I buy a fund that holds 90% cash and 10% of a BlockFi farming contract, then I only lost 10%. OP said only 10% was in blockfi, so he did not lose all his value.

100% loss > 25% equity drawdown

Obviously you know that, just somewhat of a silly observation to make that he "lost less" when he actually lost 100% of his investment (barring recovery in bankruptcy court)

A self selected fund that risks 10% of the wealth on BlockFi cannot and did not lose 100%.

The position was a 100% loss, yes. The returns of the other positions are irrelevant to that fact

Not really. There are good reasons to lose money and there are bad reasons to lose money. This was a bad one.

I think it looks less bad in the weird context of 2020-2022, when breaking even with inflation meant moving money into riskier and riskier investments just to keep up with the money printer. I wouldn't have chosen something like BlockFi, but then again I'm one of the idiots that lost via a mix of inflation and various ultra boring indexes.

I can see where it might look tempting or even rational to see how long you can keep the hand on the oven without getting burned for some of the interest rates being offered on these "exchanges", especially in times of pretty desperately negative real interest rates on USD.

I think the lesson is that you can't hide your money from what is going on in the world.

No matter what you invest in war, plague and inflation will get you.

I am up YTD and YOY

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