Is Crypto dying or just dropping for the moment?

[steve_bank]

Crypto servr farms are energy hogs. A crpto company near Seneca NY is using a retired natural gas power plant.

From the link companies skim a percentage from transactions.

A bitcoin business is polluting Seneca Lake, say critics. Here's how.

"The lake is so warm you feel like you're in a hot tub," said a woman who lives near a gas-fired New York plant that powers 8,000 computers mining bitcoins.

www.nbcnews.com

 

[Artemus]

Looks like another crypto "bank" may be about to collapse. From their Terms of Use (emphasis mine):

When using your Finblox Account, you hereby agree and acknowledge that it is not a bank account, savings account, deposit account, checking account, or any other type of asset account characterized as a banking product or service. All Digital Assets transferred as part of the Services offered by Finblox are held by third-party custodians. We do not under any circumstances hold Digital Assets on your behalf as custody as part of any Services offered by the Company. All Digital Assets within your Account shall not suggest or establish any form of custody relation.


Finblox reserves the right to suspend, terminate, or limit your right to use your Account at any time at its sole discretion. You agree that the Company shall not be held liable to you for any loss or damages resulting from such suspension or limitation.

But their home page says Earn up to 90% APY on your crypto! so it must be a great place to put your "assets".

Stolen from another board: "The Celsius subreddit has been a great place to score free Schaden coins this week." Too funny.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

FDIC helped keep this from happening in 2008 to real banks with real money.

DeFi companies lacked any liquidity and are incapable of managing a run as people try to sell out their funny money as it collapses likely below where they initially bought it. People in long probably weren't panicking, but the anxiety probably steps up a bit when they start seeing the DeFi's collapsing now.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Except the funny money banks

I was under impression that crypto-crap was immune to that in principle.
I mean that was the whole idea behind it.

Well there was a scheme in the 1920s that was (in principle) immune to downturns in the market. That was the entire basis of Mr Ponzi’s investment program.

Not to be immune, but to give investors that impression.

Then in the 90s, the invention of the CDS would be made to help prevent major crashes.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

According to Forbes $43 billion is locked in DeFi's. Or around 5% the value of all of Bitcoin right now. And it looks like 10% of that is close to or completely doomed, with an unknown amount still at risk.

 

[barbos]

Umm... no. They were paying 15 to 20% interest for crypto deposits.

15% in crypto-crap?
You mean there were "banks" which were paying people for crypto-deposits?
But what they ("banks") were doing with it to get profit?
Using it to speculate on up/down swings?
I did not know that. I think crash was long time coming.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Bitcoin crashed a while ago, but DeFi (Funny Money "Bank") is a new thing, which is leading to an odd 'even though your Crypto hasn't lost enough value for you to lose money... we are insolvent and can't give you back your funny money'.

This can cascade to other DeFis as three notable DeFi's have paused or limited withdrawals. And then that can impact the value of Crypto, wash, shampoo, rinse, repeat.

 

[Jarhyn]

Bitcoin crashed a while ago, but DeFi (Funny Money "Bank") is a new thing, which is leading to an odd 'even though your Crypto hasn't lost enough value for you to lose money... we are insolvent and can't give you back your funny money'.

This can cascade to other DeFis as three notable DeFi's have paused or limited withdrawals. And then that can impact the value of Crypto, wash, shampoo, rinse, repeat.

And of course none of this nightmare would have happened if people had just kept to using their internet money for hookers and blow and pizza.

Speculators ruin everything.

 

[Artemus]

Three Arrows Capital hedge fund is collapsing (or already has). Apparently that is affecting everyone across the crypto industry. I can't keep track of all of it.

I can't help but wonder what kinds of games are being played to keep the Bitcoin price teetering around $21-22 K for the last couple days. Idle speculation: Are people/groups selling between different wallets that they own to keep it there? Worth long prison sentences if they were legitimate securities but can they get away with it since crypto is (big selling point follows) unregulated? Maybe we'll see some academic papers in the next year that tracked the blockchain to see what has been going on.

 

[steve_bank]

He who lives by Monopoly money dies by Monopoly money.

 

[Politesse]

No one could have predicted this.

 

[steve_bank]

If you rember the Pet Rock would have been a better investment. If I had kept all my comics and baseball cards I'd be rich today. I knew a guy in the 80s who bought electric guitars and stored them in a climate controlled room as an investment.

Crypto was predictable and there were those who pointed out it had no intrinsic value other than what people imagined it was. The ultimate legal scam. Everybody involved made money except the people who invested thinking they'd make money.

I use a credit card and pay it off every month. A credit card affords me fraud protection. Crypto does not.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

If you rember the Pet Rock would have been a better investment. If I had kept all my comics and baseball cards I'd be rich today. I knew a guy in the 80s who bought electric guitars and stored them in a climate controlled room as an investment.

Crypto was predictable and there were those who pointed out it had no intrinsic value other than what people imagined it was.

I don't think much of Crypto was predictable. Bitcoin got up to $3 trillion! That is insane. Yes, the deregulated part of crypto is predictably falling apart, but Crypto is like Trump, it just doesn't go away, even when it crashes.

The ultimate legal scam. Everybody involved made money except the people who invested thinking they'd make money.

Suzie Orman said that when the average joe starts talking about a particular investment, that is the time to get out, not in.

 

[Jarhyn]

If you rember the Pet Rock would have been a better investment. If I had kept all my comics and baseball cards I'd be rich today. I knew a guy in the 80s who bought electric guitars and stored them in a climate controlled room as an investment.

Crypto was predictable and there were those who pointed out it had no intrinsic value other than what people imagined it was. The ultimate legal scam. Everybody involved made money except the people who invested thinking they'd make money.

I use a credit card and pay it off every month. A credit card affords me fraud protection. Crypto does not.

The issue is "investment" rather than "adoption".

Speculators ruin everything.

Crypto does in fact provide fraud protection in particular cases: it allows escrowed third party "multisig" arbitration powers, and particular forms of trustless exchange on those same lines, particularly for large transactions.

Someone can list an exchange rate for a virtual currency, and you can arrange a swap strategy and order of operations by which neither party has to trust the other to make the exchange.

The algorithmic atomic swap is truly a thing of beauty.

It would be really cool to have a payment system wherein you sign on a transaction to purchase and the delivery company has to sign a transaction to release funds to the seller, while the seller knows the buyer can't revoke payment.

There is a particular form of security built into currencies that operate by cryptographic principle and it would really be cool if we could have nice things like that available.

Then, when you've adopted a currency rather than speculate on it, it's really only the people holding the big stakes,bthe speculators on the market that get slammed when the speculation goes tits.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Another company pauses withdrawals It is a "smaller" one with only 500 clienteles, allegedly valued at $2 billion back in May.

Bitcoin keeps trying to recover the last few days, but it is trending downward and is fishing dangerously close to a notable psychological point of $20,000.

 

[steve_bank]

If you want to invest in something as a thing of beauty that is up to yiu and how much yiu are willing to loose.

As art moved from the physical to digital assets you can ow have ownrship of a unique disgtal asset and charge whatever the market will bear.

What is non-fungible technology?




A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unique digital asset that represents ownership of real-world items like art, video clips, music, and more. NFTs use the same blockchain technology that powers cryptocurrencies, but they're not a currency.Feb 17, 2022

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

 

[Jarhyn]

Steve, NFTs are at best unenforceable ledgers on asset ownership, mere imaginary declaration of deed, given that there is no regulation on their creation.

One cannot trust the NFT declarations of deed except that they were made, at a time, by "someone controlling a signing certificate".

At least with the currency, the deed is meaningful: "They remitted an asset with shared acknowledged value".

This is just "they remitted an asset they invented on the spot". It's a fucking digitally verifiable post-it note.

 

[Artemus]

Another company pauses withdrawals It is a "smaller" one with only 500 clienteles, allegedly valued at $2 billion back in May.

Bitcoin keeps trying to recover the last few days, but it is trending downward and is fishing dangerously close to a notable psychological point of $20,000.

With all these failures, does anyone believe that someone out there is legitimately buying at slightly over $20K? I still suspect that there is some kind of artificial prop-up going on.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Who knows. I'd say that the trouble the DeFis are having is that they lack real liquidity. Funny money investments to loan out or self-invest in funny money. So, it works until funny money drops in value.