Celsius Was Lying | Hacker News Reader

Celsius Was Lying

bloomberg.com

55 pointsmfiguiere42 comments

Related ongoing thread:

Founder of crypto lender Celsius Network arrested, charged with fraud - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36710558 - July 2023 (230 comments)

When you read crypto-related indictments, it shows how little is novel about crypto scams. They're almost all scams that were known in the 19th century, or earlier. There are Ponzi schemes. There are pumps and dumps. There are fake assets. There are bucket shops. The classic fraud of just stealing the assets in the customer accounts remains popular.

Bloomberg points out that the SEC, the CFTC, the FTC, and the Justice Department seem to have arrived at a common position that it's just good old-fashioned crime. It can be dealt with by following the money and putting people in jail.

Hands up if you were also expecting something about Anders Celsius having lied about the freezing or boiling points of water

that was my first thought too

>“Somebody is lying,” said Mashinsky: “Either the bank is lying or Celsius is lying.”

Truly incredible statement to make when your own compliance department is sending you memos asking you to stop lying.

I quit crypto in 2018 after 5 years. It had become clear to me that there were no safeguards in the industry to prevent scams like Celsius, and that the scams would quickly out-compete the quality companies. There's just no way to compete with someone who can make up fake returns to raise billions of dollars, if you're not willing to do the same.

It did occur to me to just play that game and make off with some cash at least. After all, I might not have another opportunity like that in my lifetime. But I don't think it would have worked. I'm just not that good a liar.

Can someone explain why this keeps happening? I'm a bit out of the loop.

It has been expressed as: "There's a sucker born every minute, and two to take his money."

We have the best financial regulators money can buy. Perhaps we should try finding some folks who understand accounting and integrity, instead.

There is a giant pension fund in Canada which had $150M locked up in Celsius earn. We're talking actual professional fund managers who thought it was a good opportunity. The grift was good and it was probably more massive than FTX.

That's exactly it...this is base human nature.

Very difficult to fix.

How these people self-defend themselves internally? Usually the answer is simple, along the lines of "oh, just sociopaths"... I mean you have to go to conferences, tweet, interact with people, get articles written about you, basically become famous, even build tech or at least organize that, they often have families, and basically ALL burn at the end, like lose everything.

Particularly in finance, I think a lot of these people convince themselves of an overly cynical view of the world: "They all do this - I'm just playing the game like everybody else."

When risk is involved, there's also often some hubris in the assessment. These crypto orgs obviously never intended to go broke. They probably honestly thought they'd likely have so much money that they'd cover their customer commitments without any issue. And if they did, they frankly probably wouldn't have ended up exposed and in legal trouble.

Which comes back to the first point: people cynically thinking all the orgs who made it big also did all this shady stuff but got away with it.

>Particularly in finance

Politicians are way worse. They're supposed to be acting in the best interests of the population. Meanwhile, they're eg accepting duffel bags of money to look away from human rights abuses[0] and...a million other things. At least those in the finance world admit they're about the money.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-63952993

I don’t understand your point. Eva Kaili is in custody.

It's the Fed's fault. Everything would have been fine if ZIRP kept going forever.

Clicked to find out about how we're all measuring temperature wrong.

Clicked to find out how Anders Celsius was a con man, and, as a Swede, was relieved.

I was thinking that surely someone boiled some water and confirmed this at some point.

Clicked to find out what toxic chemicals I've been drinking.

More proof that Fahrenheit is superior.

I’d argue Kelvin is absolutely better.

it's exactly 273.15 better.

but I like to measure temperature in eV.

No, real scientists use plank temperature ;)

yeah, I'm an experimentalist :)

https://xkcd.com/378/

Planck

It's real pirates who use planks to measure tempargture

Are those the ones who're always going on about "shiver me timbers"?

Yes, they are referring to the temperature of the planks.

There are old planks, there are bold planks, and there are cold planks.

But there are no old, bold, cold planks.

https://blockworks.co/news/celsius-banks-on-future-with-new-...

I'm partial to rankine myself.

I worked in a factory that didn't have decimal points on the thermostat for the ovens.

It was sooo much harder to make foam in Canada than in the US as a result.

I know that is an ancient problem, but this was only a decade ago....

Kind of blows my mind the rest of the world doesnt use decimals when talking about the weather.

The problem with Celsius is that nice weather in Fahrenheit is 70 to 80, but in Celsius it's only 20 to 25. 5 degrees is too narrow to talk about the difference between a little too cool and a little too hot!

For cooking in ovens or whatever, it's fine because you're up at 350/175 or 500/250. Once you're up that high, precision doesn't matter.

Réaumur gets very little mention these days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9aumur_scale

(I'd like to know what these guys were thinking when it came to deciding on the number associated with the boiling point of water, though. 60 and 80?)

60 is a pretty useful base with many factors. Not sure if that is a very useful property for expressing temperature, but it's not a completely random number either.

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