Genesis Filed for Bankruptcy

Yes - cryptocurrency ideology has always been heavily skewed by right-wing ideology but that was also reinforced over the years as many of the people who were extreme enough to get kicked off of platforms like Patreon found alternative funding mechanisms. That of course doesn’t mean the average cryptocurrency person is embittered but the ones who are tend to be extremely vocal.

I only use Twitter when I see links from HN, and have never seen anything like this before. I actually found it very confronting and upsetting.

I looked again after a while and it was back to what I would consider normal. Maybe just some glitch in the matrix.

Honestly, I see all these people screaming with unkindness and I just think, WTF happened to the world where this is OK?

I don’t really use Twitter but never seen stuff like this before. Definitely not my vibe at all. No space, no aviation, no lolcats.

I think a big factor is what tweet's page you are looking at.

When I went to a Paul Graham tweet a couple days ago, what their algorithm gave me was full of right wing conspiracy theories, climate change denial, anti-vaccine stuff, one about Bill Gates' plan to depopulate the world, Jewish bankers control the world, and that kind of stuff.

The next tweet I went too was a John Carmack tweet. The algorithm recommended a tweet from Joe Biden, a Greta Thunberg tweet, a tweet about the Formosan clouded leopard being declared extinct in 2014 after no sightings for 40 years but then was spotted in 2019, an Edward Snowdon tweet, a tweet from the National Park Service, various humor tweets, a tweet about a lecture on how to build GPT from scratch, and a couple about business acquisition. There were right wing tweets from Glenn Beck and Scott Adams included, but they were not really political. There was also an Andrew Tate tweet that was just an inspirational statement (something along the lines of the man without a vision for the future will be stuck in the past).

It actually has a nice use case as a breach canary. Have an unprotected wallet stored on your machine with some btc on it (like 200-500 USD worth), and if you notice a transfer out from there, you can be sure your machine is compromised. This method was recently posted by a fellow HN member, unfortunately I forgot where.

This article isn't even evidence of that.

I've been waiting patiently for Bitcoin to collapse after watching what I assumed was the all time high in 2018. We've nearly dropped back to that now, still persistently above that price. I think I've made a profit in Monero.

In a jaw dropping set of peg defences, Tether still exists. You can buy and sell it for about $1 USD. The ecosystem has proven much more resilient against major players going bankrupt than the traditional financial system. Nobody has been bailed out by a government as far as I know.

I suspect the crypto market is less volatile than has historically been the case.

It might happen, but so far there are no signs that the crypto market is going to collapse. If anything, it looks quite healthy to me. I wish traditional stock markets were allowed to fall like this without the authorities stepping in to prop things up. Genesis going bankrupt is a non event until a good reason is found to believe otherwise.

1. Genesis was not a yield-farming company, but a centralized lender. "Yield farming" refers the use of smartcontracts that generate yield [A].

Furthermore, yield farming is not inherently Ponzi. For example, there are overcollateralized lending protocols like Compound and Aave that allow you to put crypto in a smartcontract in return for a yield, usually < 3%. The returns come from a cut of the loan interest, where the loans are liquidated if the collateralization ratio gets too high.

I know, everyone rolls their eyes about the distinction, since they're all "Ponzis" (a term itself used imprecisely), but if you're going to make a comment specifically intended to fill in vital context, you should be more careful with the facts than a general opinion post.

[A] https://decrypt.co/resources/what-is-yield-farming-beginners...

This link will make you less informed, because it is adding narrative (crypto firms teetering!) to a bland story (the economic damage from the COVID response is serious). I think someone needs to be proactive and point out that this is useless. If this was Crypto News then sure.

This may as well be a Tweet telling us that Powered Brands went bankrupt. Whoever they are, I just searched for "bankruptcies 2023". If this one matters, then someone will have to write a blog post explaining why and we can all read that instead and learn something.

GP is not unhappy about topics appearing on hn that he knows little about, it's specifically about using Twitter for something like that.

Conventional media would usually come with a short introduction for those completely new to the topic. The kind that tends to lead to considerable hilarity in those who don't need it. More traditional publications sometimes even seem to aim that short introduction at a knowledge level so low that it could only make sense to future generations finding a centuries old document or to some time traveler who skipped the last decades.

Hn, with its original source policy, will tend to avoid those without even trying. Even if I think that guideline is more about avoiding derivative journalistism than about avoiding journalism. At some point going deeper to some original source becomes a trade-off and Twitter links make that conveniently graspable.

> the degree of rot and malfeasance in systemically important institutions

These "systemically important institutions", as you label them, are peopled by feckless children. My small-town sanitation department presents itself with greater systemic institutional integrity.

"systemically important institutions" is an oxymoron that should be eliminated from quality crypto dialogue and associated with scams.

HN doesn't take too kindly to jokes.

HN is a fickle beast - sometimes jokes are well-received and upvoted, sometimes they’re misunderstood and downvoted, and sometimes they’re understood and downvoted out of spite. It’s hard to read the room sometimes, especially in a text-only medium where despite commenting and interacting a lot, many of us don’t actually really know each other

You cannot offer 10% APY on a stablecoin like USDC that by definition does not increase in value or pay dividends without getting that 10% from somewhere else, namely other customers' funds.

That's why i called it a "multi party ponzi". They had to know their largest borrowers were not above board. FTX promised large no risk returns for deposits in turn. Except FTX didn't even have the plausible excuse of lending money. One of the stablecoins promised an infinite money making circle of lending->profit. 3AC's trading model was to borrow at these high IRs and gamble it (i don't for a second believe they had a risk based trading strat) and hope it paid off and skim off the top. See my 3 possibilities above.

The company founders even had a flight plan to non extradition treaty countries. Where they now reside

At this point neither the "investors" nor the people builing those systems can claim plausible deniability.

Nothing good has ever come out of crypto/blockchain, it's all just scams left an right.

Potayto, potahto.

Thanks, I had missed at first. After I realised it also made me think about a famous movie scene [1] involving a financial guy and the Genesis lead singer. Wonder if the founders of this company had that in mind when they set it up.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_yM7Xe3HrT8

No, it was the American name for the Megadrive.