Is Crypto dying or just dropping for the moment?

[Gospel]

I'm glad I listened to Steven Miller when I found my old bitcoin wallet. Hoo-hoo

 

[TSwizzle]

Tesla dumped a huge chunk of its Bitcoin;

Electric car maker Tesla (TSLA) sold $936 million worth of bitcoin during the second quarter, the company said Wednesday, citing uncertainties related to COVID-19 shutdowns in China. Tesla's remaining digital asset holdings total $218 million, a sharp drop from its previous stash of $1.2 billion, which had gone untouched over the previous three quarters. "As of the end of Q2, we have converted approximately 75% of our Bitcoin purchases into fiat currency. Conversions in Q2 added $936M of cash to our balance sheet," the company said in its earnings release.

Yahoo

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

How in the world is this even legal?

According to proceedings that have been made public in recent times, Celsius Network may not have the best interest of its users at heart. The bankruptcy lawyers hired by the lending firm have begun to argue that users had relinquished their legal right to their funds when they deposited them on the platform. This took place on Monday during the first bankruptcy hearing, and the lawyers referred to the Terms of Service of the Earn and Borrow accounts to back up their claim.

It is incredible that such an agreement can exist. The ToS stated that Earn and Borrow deposits were less deposits and more just giving Celsius Network your money with a loose promise to give it back, if they want to.

The more interesting thing is the nearly admitted pyramid scheme this is. According to this article:

In Celsius’s bankruptcy filing, which it made late Wednesday in a New York court, it claims to have US$167-million in cash on hand. The filing says the company has US$4.3-billion in assets and US$5.5-billion in liabilities.

Typically, 80% assets to liabilities isn't a terrible thing. Shouldn't be the end of the world. Of course, if they opened back up, deposits would be immediately withdrawn and then the assets would evaporate, and then that percentage is MUCH smaller.

And as of right now, they could technically be able to pay out 80% on "deposits", which right now, I'd say any and every rube that put money there would gladly take 80% on the dollar! But as shown above, they are claiming rights to all assets. Which shouldn't be remotely legal.

 

[Artemus]

How in the world is this even legal?

According to proceedings that have been made public in recent times, Celsius Network may not have the best interest of its users at heart. The bankruptcy lawyers hired by the lending firm have begun to argue that users had relinquished their legal right to their funds when they deposited them on the platform. This took place on Monday during the first bankruptcy hearing, and the lawyers referred to the Terms of Service of the Earn and Borrow accounts to back up their claim.

It is incredible that such an agreement can exist. The ToS stated that Earn and Borrow deposits were less deposits and more just giving Celsius Network your money with a loose promise to give it back, if they want to.

The more interesting thing is the nearly admitted pyramid scheme this is. According to this article:

In Celsius’s bankruptcy filing, which it made late Wednesday in a New York court, it claims to have US$167-million in cash on hand. The filing says the company has US$4.3-billion in assets and US$5.5-billion in liabilities.

Typically, 80% assets to liabilities isn't a terrible thing. Shouldn't be the end of the world. Of course, if they opened back up, deposits would be immediately withdrawn and then the assets would evaporate, and then that percentage is MUCH smaller.

And as of right now, they could technically be able to pay out 80% on "deposits", which right now, I'd say any and every rube that put money there would gladly take 80% on the dollar! But as shown above, they are claiming rights to all assets. Which shouldn't be remotely legal.

A lot of that 80% is their own "CEL" tokens that are now worthless and approximately 100,000 mining rigs that they valued at what they paid for them last year and not what they could sell them for this year. I think the real number will be around 50% when the lawyers are done.

 

[Harry Bosch]

How in the world is this even legal?

According to proceedings that have been made public in recent times, Celsius Network may not have the best interest of its users at heart. The bankruptcy lawyers hired by the lending firm have begun to argue that users had relinquished their legal right to their funds when they deposited them on the platform. This took place on Monday during the first bankruptcy hearing, and the lawyers referred to the Terms of Service of the Earn and Borrow accounts to back up their claim.

It is incredible that such an agreement can exist. The ToS stated that Earn and Borrow deposits were less deposits and more just giving Celsius Network your money with a loose promise to give it back, if they want to.

The more interesting thing is the nearly admitted pyramid scheme this is. According to this article:

In Celsius’s bankruptcy filing, which it made late Wednesday in a New York court, it claims to have US$167-million in cash on hand. The filing says the company has US$4.3-billion in assets and US$5.5-billion in liabilities.

Typically, 80% assets to liabilities isn't a terrible thing. Shouldn't be the end of the world. Of course, if they opened back up, deposits would be immediately withdrawn and then the assets would evaporate, and then that percentage is MUCH smaller.

And as of right now, they could technically be able to pay out 80% on "deposits", which right now, I'd say any and every rube that put money there would gladly take 80% on the dollar! But as shown above, they are claiming rights to all assets. Which shouldn't be remotely legal.

NM.

 

[Swammerdami]

My autistic flights of fancy sometimes pay off. In another thread I introduced a new unit of energy:

But I am curious about your insistence on SI units. Do you think anyone in the thread is unaware that Energy has dimension md²t^-2 ?

Instead of joules or ergs, could we not use shekel-acres per squared-fortnight as our energy unit if we so chose?
For definiteness we'll use the traditional definition of a shekel mass: 180 grains of barley. As far as I know, actually calibrating weights with barleycorns has fallen into disuse; that measure is now standardized at about 64.79891 milligrams.

The new energy unit is about 201 Mev (million electron-volts) if my arithmetic is correct. Naturally I Googled "Mev."
But the top Google hits directed me to something I'd never heard of:

• MEV stands for "Miner Extractable Value" or "Maximal Extractable Value."
• It refers to the extraction of value from Ethereum users by reordering, inserting, and censoring transactions within blocks.
• MEV is one of Ethereum's biggest issues, with more than $689 million extracted from users of the network year-to-date.

Does "$689 million extracted from users of the network year-to-date" seem significant? For me this reinforces the idea that cryptocoins are just another reminder we live in the Age of Stupidity.

The technical weakness was identified before Ethereum was launched, but ... Who cares?

(See this pdf paper for technical details.)

 

[Jarhyn]

My autistic flights of fancy sometimes pay off. In another thread I introduced a new unit of enrgey

But I am curious about your insistence on SI units. Do you think anyone in the thread is unaware that Energy has dimension md²t^-2 ?

Instead of joules or ergs, could we not use shekel-acres per squared-fortnight as our energy unit if we so chose?
For definiteness we'll use the traditional definition of a shekel mass: 180 grains of barley. As far as I know, actually calibrating weights with barleycorns has fallen into disuse; that measure is now standardized at about 64.79891 milligrams.

The new energy unit is about 201 Mev (million electron-volts) if my arithmetic is correct. Naturally I Googled "Mev."
But the top Google hits directed me to something I'd never heard of:

• MEV stands for "Miner Extractable Value" or "Maximal Extractable Value."
• It refers to the extraction of value from Ethereum users by reordering, inserting, and censoring transactions within blocks.
• MEV is one of Ethereum's biggest issues, with more than $689 million extracted from users of the network year-to-date.

Does "$689 million extracted from users of the network year-to-date" seem significant? For me this reinforces the idea that cryptocoins are just another reminder we live in the Age of Stupidity.

The technical weakness was identified before Ethereum was launched, but ... Who cares?

(See this pdf paper for technical details.)

Yeah, so, the idea here is to maximize "miner fees" through clever organization of block structure and selection of transactions for processing.

It essentially is looking at the "slop" in a complex aggregate equation and figuring out how to arrange it to fully consume the "margin" which is provided "in case of the need" of slop.

"The temperature may be 25°C +/- .5 degree, so please have available some additional joules of electromotive force in case the system needs it", and then the system is actually set up to consume the margin every time entirely.

Here it's "this may cost a couple cents more than you expected" and the 'may' is 'definitely will' because fuck you, they want your money.

 

[Swammerdami]

Jarhyn's remark reminds me of a controversy in California several decades ago. Producers were required to state net contents of a package and were permitted 6% "slop" or such. So a "5 ounce" bag of potato chips might legally contain anywhere from 4.7 ounces to 5.3 ounces.

Manufacturers claimed they needed the tolerance for manufacturing efficiency. But instead it was found that they were able to consistently fill the bags with almost exactly 4.75 ounces of product!

 

[Jarhyn]

Jarhyn's remark reminds me of a controversy in California several decades ago. Producers were required to state net contents of a package and were permitted 6% "slop" or such. So a "5 ounce" bag of potato chips might legally contain anywhere from 4.7 ounces to 5.3 ounces.

Manufacturers claimed they needed the tolerance for manufacturing efficiency. But instead it was found that they were able to consistently fill the bags with almost exactly 4.75 ounces of product!

It is for manufacturing efficiency: they are manufacturing an efficient way to bilk customers.

The temp control example was in fact one from my work.

Really such regulations should be 5.0 +/-.05 ounces per standard deviation.

Gig them for excessive variance and mean drift, not per bag.

 

[bilby]

Jarhyn's remark reminds me of a controversy in California several decades ago. Producers were required to state net contents of a package and were permitted 6% "slop" or such. So a "5 ounce" bag of potato chips might legally contain anywhere from 4.7 ounces to 5.3 ounces.

Manufacturers claimed they needed the tolerance for manufacturing efficiency. But instead it was found that they were able to consistently fill the bags with almost exactly 4.75 ounces of product!

It is for manufacturing efficiency: they are manufacturing an efficient way to bilk customers.

The temp control example was in fact one from my work.

Really such regulations should be 5.0 +/-.05 ounces per standard deviation.

Gig them for excessive variance and mean drift, not per bag.

Holy overcomplication, Batman!

The regulation should be 'not less than the stated contents'. It's then up to the manufacturer to decide how much more than that target they aim for, in order to not be caught breaking the rule.

 

[Jarhyn]

Jarhyn's remark reminds me of a controversy in California several decades ago. Producers were required to state net contents of a package and were permitted 6% "slop" or such. So a "5 ounce" bag of potato chips might legally contain anywhere from 4.7 ounces to 5.3 ounces.

Manufacturers claimed they needed the tolerance for manufacturing efficiency. But instead it was found that they were able to consistently fill the bags with almost exactly 4.75 ounces of product!

It is for manufacturing efficiency: they are manufacturing an efficient way to bilk customers.

The temp control example was in fact one from my work.

Really such regulations should be 5.0 +/-.05 ounces per standard deviation.

Gig them for excessive variance and mean drift, not per bag.

Holy overcomplication, Batman!

The regulation should be 'not less than the stated contents'. It's then up to the manufacturer to decide how much more than that target they aim for, in order to not be caught breaking the rule.

From years of working with systems: there MUST be a tolerance that allows the occasional shortage, but to be properly bounded this must be in terms of the sum total of allowable variance.

Of course, since even among researchers and scientists such messiness is common, I don't see rigor encroaching on packaging and label regulations and time soon.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

From years of working with systems: there MUST be a tolerance that allows the occasional shortage, but to be properly bounded this must be in terms of the sum total of allowable variance.

Of course, since even among researchers and scientists such messiness is common, I don't see rigor encroaching on packaging and label regulations and time soon.

Definitely. What I think we should do is not only have an indication of the quantity but also the reliability of that number.

 

[Jarhyn]

From years of working with systems: there MUST be a tolerance that allows the occasional shortage, but to be properly bounded this must be in terms of the sum total of allowable variance.

Of course, since even among researchers and scientists such messiness is common, I don't see rigor encroaching on packaging and label regulations and time soon.

Definitely. What I think we should do is not only have an indication of the quantity but also the reliability of that number.

Make the standard deviation size be listed, and the problem goes away.

For those unfamiliar with standard deviation units, a standard deviation is a measure of deviation from the mean within a population.

This means that for a distribution like 1 2 3 4 5, you get something like 1.4142135623731, which says the numbes vary fairly widely (it's almost half the mean!)

Where with a number population like 3 3 3 3 3 you get zero.

Of course these are well known processes that are easy to calculate against. Any firmware, production system, or QC is already collecting these numbers and is reporting them to the inventory system, so it should be trivial to adjust the system to produce a tight mean and given a std dev unit target, fulfill the provision of a mean output that is on target with a low STD dev unit.

 

[bilby]

Make the standard deviation size be listed, and the problem...

...becomes that almost none of the general public knows what a standard deviation is. You might as well have them print the labels in Chinese, which would be just as informative and useful to the typical consumer.

 

[Jarhyn]

Make the standard deviation size be listed, and the problem...

...becomes that almost none of the general public knows what a standard deviation is. You might as well have them print the labels in Chinese, which would be just as informative and useful to the typical consumer.

Or, people would actually have a reason to understand it, or a reason to look it up, or a reason to figure out intuitive ways to discuss it, or they would start to get an idea of how systems vary on standard deviation.

It's also kind of like learning to look at the unit price on a label at the store: it's not something everyone will be interested in doing but enough will do it and understand what it is that it would be very hard to pull a bad without consequences.

 

[bilby]

Or, people would actually have a reason to understand it, or a reason to look it up, or a reason to figure out intuitive ways to discuss it, or they would start to get an idea of how systems vary on standard deviation.

I have met people. They really wouldn't.

 

[Jarhyn]

Or, people would actually have a reason to understand it, or a reason to look it up, or a reason to figure out intuitive ways to discuss it, or they would start to get an idea of how systems vary on standard deviation.

I have met people. They really wouldn't.

Some people wouldn't. Perhaps most. But someone would post a TikTok explaining it well, and then enough would that we would stop seeing shit like this.

 

[bilby]

Or, people would actually have a reason to understand it, or a reason to look it up, or a reason to figure out intuitive ways to discuss it, or they would start to get an idea of how systems vary on standard deviation.

I have met people. They really wouldn't.

Some people wouldn't. Perhaps most. But someone would post a TikTok explaining it well, and then enough would that we would stop seeing shit like this.

And there will be leprechauns, and little bunny rabbits, and everyone will be happy and smiling, and it will be summer all year long...

 

[Jarhyn]

Or, people would actually have a reason to understand it, or a reason to look it up, or a reason to figure out intuitive ways to discuss it, or they would start to get an idea of how systems vary on standard deviation.

I have met people. They really wouldn't.

Some people wouldn't. Perhaps most. But someone would post a TikTok explaining it well, and then enough would that we would stop seeing shit like this.

And there will be leprechauns, and little bunny rabbits, and everyone will be happy and smiling, and it will be summer all year long...

That's a fairly sunny disposition. That's not really how the world works.

You know, when we started listing ingredients enough actually looked at them that we stopped seeing a wide variety of fuckery. Few care, vanishingly few, in fact... But it still led to improvements in consumer safety because  enough care.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

From years of working with systems: there MUST be a tolerance that allows the occasional shortage, but to be properly bounded this must be in terms of the sum total of allowable variance.

Of course, since even among researchers and scientists such messiness is common, I don't see rigor encroaching on packaging and label regulations and time soon.

Definitely. What I think we should do is not only have an indication of the quantity but also the reliability of that number.

Make the standard deviation size be listed, and the problem goes away.

For those unfamiliar with standard deviation units, a standard deviation is a measure of deviation from the mean within a population.

This means that for a distribution like 1 2 3 4 5, you get something like 1.4142135623731, which says the numbes vary fairly widely (it's almost half the mean!)

Where with a number population like 3 3 3 3 3 you get zero.

Of course these are well known processes that are easy to calculate against. Any firmware, production system, or QC is already collecting these numbers and is reporting them to the inventory system, so it should be trivial to adjust the system to produce a tight mean and given a std dev unit target, fulfill the provision of a mean output that is on target with a low STD dev unit.

The distribution may not be normal. The underfilled bottle doesn't get noticed but the overfilled one spills and gets noticed. Furthermore, standard deviation is more complex than it needs to be for the consumer. List them in the fine print, but the size label should be say "99.9% chance of at least 16oz of product" (or probably a standardized short form of this. Say perhaps "16oz/99.9%".)