Celcius crypto ponzi falling apart (crypto network)

[1FinickyOne]

1 hour ago, peter zwart said:

will talk again when btc is up again and your inflated fiat money is good enough to wipe your.......

up to you Harpo.

[dj230]

3 hours ago, lkn said:

I am not aware of any blockchain products from Apple or Google. Facebook did try with their Libra thing, but this was not about blockchain, this was about issuing their own currency, which is why regulators shut it down!

 

That they have a class about blockchain does not mean they think it is a disruptive technology.

 

Musk, Zuckerberg, and Thiel are definitely not people which I would look to for moral guidance. Wozniak is a little weird, and you know he actually got scammed out of hit bitcoins, right? I am not too familiar with Levchin. But anyway, what have these people said about the usefulness of blockchain? To me, those who have spoken about crypto has just been trying to hype it up, but never given us any idea about why it is good.

 

Actually, SBF described how yield farming worked, and seemed to unknowingly describe a ponzi scheme. Though I am confused, above you said that everyone you know in Silicon Valley are looking into blockchain, now you admit that these people are fully aware that it’s a con and ponzi schemes?

 

Do you know that these people (like SBF) subscribe to the Effective altruism philosophy? This basically means that SBF is happy to e.g. allow Luna/UST to be traded on his exchange (FTX) even though he said before, that it was destined to collapse, because it makes SBF richer, and then, at some unknown time in the future, he will use his accumulated wealth for charity, so it doesn’t matter where the money is from, as long as he does more good with them, than the harm caused by earning them.

I never said they have blockchain products, I said "Everyone I know of in Silicon Valley, engineers, CEOs and tech companies themselves are looking into blockchain technology", Tim Cook has said in interviews he was looking into blockchain technology with Apple. Google is a data company, of course they use blockchain technology. Here's a quote from Google "Just days before Alphabet's Q4 2021 earnings call, Google Cloud announced a dedicated team for blockchain development."

 

So you think MIT would create multiple classes about blockchain technology if it wasn't useful? It's one of the highest ranked colleges in all of USA for technology. The class actually says its disruptive, they were talking about bitcoin years ago and even gave out bitcoin to students.  I think they might have a clue about what they're doing. 

 

You tend to keep mixing up blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, saying that since cryptocurrencies are a ponzi/con then blockchain technology is not useful. It's like saying there are scams sent via email out there, therefore emails are not useful. 

 

3 hours ago, lkn said:

I understand the difference, I could implement it from scratch if you wanted me to. That is how I know that there is nothing innovative or useful about “blockchain technology”, which is what you said, and where I begged to differ, and then you started to talk about removing intermediary in transactions, supply chains, etc.

 

Please give a single example of a problem being solved by blockchain, which previously was either unsolved, or solved in a less efficient way!

 

Don’t give me hand-wavy stuff or say “it’s still early” but people are working on it, or soon we’ll get something, or some big tech company is looking into blockchain, MIT is teaching a class, etc.

 

An actual use-case that works right now, and which works better than existing solutions!

I just sent you one above, IBM making a blockchain solution to solve delays in container shipments.

 

 

Edited June 14, 2022 by dj230

[PJ71]

On 6/13/2022 at 3:18 AM, 1FinickyOne said:

whoever invented bitcoin must be laughing like crazy that people bought into this stuff...

There is many people who have already made many millions from BC.

 

However i'm also sure there's many more greedy people who've bought in at the wrong time that are now wetting their pants.

[lkn]

58 minutes ago, dj230 said:

Tim Cook has said in interviews he was looking into blockchain technology with Apple

Wrong, he said that he personally had invested in cryptocurrencies.

1 hour ago, dj230 said:

Just days before Alphabet's Q4 2021 earnings call, Google Cloud announced a dedicated team for blockchain development

Here’s what was actually said: “Just one example, our Cloud team is looking at how they can support our customers' needs in building, transacting, storing value and deploying new products on blockchain-based platforms. So we'll definitely be watching the space closely and supporting it where we can”.

 

IOW Google is looking at how they can make money from selling their services to people who think products with blockchain in the name are the new hotness.

 

1 hour ago, dj230 said:

So you think MIT would create multiple classes about blockchain technology if it wasn't useful?

MIT is in the business of selling classes, right? So they wouldn’t care how useful the content is, they care about how many would attend the class.

 

1 hour ago, dj230 said:

You tend to keep mixing up blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies

No, I keep saying: Give me an actual example of where blockchain solves a problem, and you keep replying with, but this guy talks a lot about blockchain, or that company says they are looking at it, so clearly, it must be useful…

 

Do you understand what a blockchain is? If you did, I think you would actually be able to understand that it has absolutely on competitive advantages over a regular database.

1 hour ago, dj230 said:

I just sent you one above, IBM making a blockchain solution to solve delays in container shipments.

You gave me the marketing departments spin on the hosted hyperledger software that IBM hosts for clients.

 

Blockchain is extremely simple, if it was actually solving a problem for someone, it should be trivial to explain, yet it is always this vague BS, and the “technology” is a decade old, yet you quote yourself that it’s Q4 2021 that Google is saying that they are looking at it! It was btw said on an earnings call, you will often hear that on earning calls the CEO is always looking at whatever is the latest buzzword, I’ve heard dozen of companies say they are looking at blockchain and crypto currencies, including many banks, yet nothing has come of it, because it is absolutely useless technology for a business that operates within the law. But it is probably great for their various marketing departments! ????

[1FinickyOne]

9 hours ago, PJ71 said:

There is many people who have already made many millions from BC.

 

However i'm also sure there's many more greedy people who've bought in at the wrong time that are now wetting their pants.

Timing is everything... the more emails I got from friends who were not knowledgable investors, who had just proudly bought in - the more convinced I was that a fall was coming... 

[placeholder]

12 hours ago, peter zwart said:

will talk again when btc is up again and your inflated fiat money is good enough to wipe your.......

This nonsense about inflated fiat money comes from a basic misunderstanding of what currency is. Dollar bills are not like stock. They are not shares of something. The question isn't how much each dollar can buy now  compared to say, 20 years ago, but how many total dollars on average one has compared to 20 years ago. If your purchasing power is greater now than it was 20 years ago, then you're ahead. If less, then you're not.  In the wake of the stock market crash and the ensuing Great Depression, the purchasing power of the dollar actually rose. Does that mean Americans were more prosperous? Deflation is a symptom of an economy in trouble.

[peter zwart]

1 hour ago, placeholder said:

This nonsense about inflated fiat money comes from a basic misunderstanding of what currency is. Dollar bills are not like stock. They are not shares of something. The question isn't how much each dollar can buy now  compared to say, 20 years ago, but how many total dollars on average one has compared to 20 years ago. If your purchasing power is greater now than it was 20 years ago, then you're ahead. If less, then you're not.  In the wake of the stock market crash and the ensuing Great Depression, the purchasing power of the dollar actually rose. Does that mean Americans were more prosperous? Deflation is a symptom of an economy in trouble.

No matter what your approach is, in the end its when inflation is higher then the raise of income your fiat money gets more and more worthless. And this is going on for many years already. 

[placeholder]

1 hour ago, peter zwart said:

No matter what your approach is, in the end its when inflation is higher then the raise of income your fiat money gets more and more worthless. And this is going on for many years already. 

Not true. Inflation has been extraordinarily low for many years. The real GDP was growing nicely until covid came along But GDP growth has recovered. 

[Walker88]

1 hour ago, peter zwart said:

No matter what your approach is, in the end its when inflation is higher then the raise of income your fiat money gets more and more worthless. And this is going on for many years already. 

Take a look at history. Nixon went off the anachronistic gold standard. Since then, world GDP has soared and billions of human beings have been lifted from poverty. It seems that dastardly fiat has done some pretty spectacular things.

 

crypto, on the other hand, is a massive waste of energy and offers virtually nothing to society. Higher gas prices today are due to three things: coming out of the Covid situation, the invasion of Ukraine, and crypto mining. The cost to society for something that offers next to nothing is huge.

 

Now consider the obvious, at least obvious to those not ensconced in the crypto cult: all existing coins have problems, so when will someone come along with a better coin that corrects those problems? Believers act as if btc is the final solution, when it is little more than what Betamax was to home entertainment. Just as Betamax has a limited life, so will btc, replaced by better technology. btc will likely go to zero long before any existing fiat goes to zero.

 

Folks who think it has to rise because it used to be higher forget about things like Betamax, Lycos, Netscape, Sony Walkman, etc. What makes it even more dangerous to forget history is that building a better crypto is a heck of a lot easier than what obviated Betamax, plus the quants working on it right now have an incredible incentive to come up with something better, because as originators they stand to make $billions.

[Sqoop]

On 6/14/2022 at 2:38 AM, lkn said:

Sorry, but I call BS. A distributed database (like the blockchain) will always be less efficient than a centralized one.

Surely you joke ? Distributed systems offer parallel processing, redundancy and resilience as well as potentially being open source. The move to distributed systems in general was because monolithic systems like centralised databases could not handle modern data streaming volumes. 

[FritsSikkink]

17 hours ago, peter zwart said:

will talk again when btc is up again and your inflated fiat money is good enough to wipe your.......

Here a nice article about the guy who says Bitcoin will go to 1 million USD and is 1.2 billion down with his Bitcoin:

The biggest corporate holder of bitcoin is facing a reckoning (msn.com)

 

Michael Saylor (MicroStrategy) Portfolio Tracker (saylortracker.com)   He needs you to buy more bitcoin.

[FritsSikkink]

14 hours ago, dj230 said:

I never said they have blockchain products, I said "Everyone I know of in Silicon Valley, engineers, CEOs and tech companies themselves are looking into blockchain technology", Tim Cook has said in interviews he was looking into blockchain technology with Apple. Google is a data company, of course they use blockchain technology. Here's a quote from Google "Just days before Alphabet's Q4 2021 earnings call, Google Cloud announced a dedicated team for blockchain development."

 

So you think MIT would create multiple classes about blockchain technology if it wasn't useful? It's one of the highest ranked colleges in all of USA for technology. The class actually says its disruptive, they were talking about bitcoin years ago and even gave out bitcoin to students.  I think they might have a clue about what they're doing. 

 

You tend to keep mixing up blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, saying that since cryptocurrencies are a ponzi/con then blockchain technology is not useful. It's like saying there are scams sent via email out there, therefore emails are not useful. 

 

I just sent you one above, IBM making a blockchain solution to solve delays in container shipments.

 

 

You are the one who is mixing up blockchain and crypto.

[bkk6060]

Wouldn't be surprised if all Crypto goes to O.

[Mark Nothing]

I have been watching interviews about the Celsius platform operated by Alex Mashinsky and paying 18% interest with no underlying business activity of generating amounts to pay it.  Which of course means new investor cash is paying the interest.  Or maybe wild gambling.

 

As underlying collateral becomes insufficient, forced selling of coins will take place.  Shorting is not available to soften the downside.  Zero could occur overnight as illiquidity kicks in.

[peter zwart]

56 minutes ago, FritsSikkink said:

Here a nice article about the guy who says Bitcoin will go to 1 million USD and is 1.2 billion down with his Bitcoin:

The biggest corporate holder of bitcoin is facing a reckoning (msn.com)

 

Michael Saylor (MicroStrategy) Portfolio Tracker (saylortracker.com)   He needs you to buy more bitcoin.

paper loss. Will be all right. The value of fiat money will never recover again.

[peter zwart]

1 hour ago, Walker88 said:

Since then, world GDP has soared and billions of human beings have been lifted from poverty. It seems that dastardly fiat has done some pretty spectacular things.

Based on debt. poverty will grow till extreme hights. stay of execution

[peter zwart]

1 hour ago, placeholder said:

Not true. Inflation has been extraordinarily low for many years. The real GDP was growing nicely until covid came along But GDP growth has recovered. 

Kept low. GDP based on borrowed and free money. 

[Walker88]

20 minutes ago, peter zwart said:

Based on debt. poverty will grow till extreme hights. stay of execution

No doubt those billions of people feel really bad about their rise from poverty because of 'debt', and wish they bought btc a few weeks ago, even if they would have a 'paper loss' now.

 

"A paper gain is a paper gain, but a paper loss is real money"

 

The market doesn't care where anyone bought, and is under no obligation to ever go up again.

[lkn]

1 hour ago, Sqoop said:

Surely you joke ? Distributed systems offer parallel processing, redundancy and resilience as well as potentially being open source. The move to distributed systems in general was because monolithic systems like centralised databases could not handle modern data streaming volumes. 

You are somewhat right that a distributed system can handle a higher volume, but there is overhead, i.e. ten machines that each do 10,000 tasks/second will never be faster than a single machine that can do 100,000 tasks/second, because you don’t have the communication overhead with the single machine, so in general, it will be faster (and never slower).

 

The only reason you move to a distributed system if you cannot get a  single machine/connection fast enough to handle the required load, but you do pay an overhead for this.

 

However, with a blockchain you are not taking advantage of parallel processing, all the machines solve the same problem and has to constantly agree on the same single truth.

 

As said earlier, the bitcoin blockchain processes around 3 transactions per second, obviously this could be trivially done by a single machine.

 

And you cannot use something like sharding because then you get the double-spend problem. Already it is recommended to wait around one hour to be reasonable sure that your BTC transaction is immutable, i.e. that the entire network of machines has now agreed on the state of the blockchain that includes your transaction.

[Walker88]

34 minutes ago, peter zwart said:

Kept low. GDP based on borrowed and free money. 

Human civilization is based on two major things: debt and suspension of disbelief.

 

It works. We all collectively pretend to believe debts will at least be serviced. We know debt will continue to grow, and we accept pieces of paper with pretty pictures on them as a store of value/means of exchange so that we don't have to slaughter each other to get a meal. We get industrious in the hope of getting more fiat, and by doing that, we create companies, hire people, pay salaries, produce goods and services. More people win under that system than any other. crypto offers nothing to society that society doesn't already do much better, and besides that, crypto wastes the most finite of necessary resources: fossil fuels.

 

If any major fiat collapses, all hell breaks lose and even if the internet and grid survives (unlikely) btc will be worth zero.

 

Civilization works because the majority agree to pretend debts will be repaid and fiat is a viable means of exchange. If you don't like that, then you are asking for a Mad Max world.

 

That is reality. btc is a dream with fantasy as collateral. It is ironic you speak of debt, when one of the things helping to hammer btc now is the Nick Leeson of crypto, aka Michael Saylor. He borrowed (debt) to buy up other 'finite' cryptos and pledged his btc as collateral. He is now getting margin calls. SIlvergate Bank doesn't want btc, it wants fiat, so he will have to dump btc to get fiat to repay his loans. He produced absolutely nothing for all his borrowing. Even Pets.com provided a service before it went bust.

Edited June 15, 2022 by Walker88

[lkn]

5 hours ago, placeholder said:

This nonsense about inflated fiat money comes from a basic misunderstanding of what currency is […] Deflation is a symptom of an economy in trouble

The way I often explain it is like this:

 

Imagine you have a town with 10 people who have $120 each. They only trade among themselves, and they have agreed that one hour of labour is $10.

 

So each person can buy 12 hours of labour, and then they have to work themselves to get money back. This could be cutting hair, baking bread, etc., i.e. small town stuff, no import/export with neighbouring towns.

 

Perfect balance, but Imagine these 10 people get five kids in total, and 20 years have passed, so you now have 15 people working in this small town economy, but you still only have $1,200 in total, so each person now only holds $80.

 

See the problem? If one hour of work is still $10, the 10 original people have become poorer.

[FritsSikkink]

1 hour ago, peter zwart said:

paper loss. Will be all right. The value of fiat money will never recover again.

He borrowed 250 million money from the banks, they want some money back soon. 

"The value of fiat money will never recover again." I pay food and drinks with that, you try to do that with <deleted>coin. His loss is $1 366 797 444 now.

Edited June 15, 2022 by FritsSikkink

[placeholder]

1 hour ago, peter zwart said:

Kept low. GDP based on borrowed and free money. 

As long as debts are paid back what's the problem? And most of the time they are. Occasionally they're not and them some people take a financial haircut. Occasionally there may even be a depression and millions, even billions of people may be affected. But even a depression does not mean the collapse of civilization or the currency. In fact, during depression, the purchasing power of the fiat dollar can even increase.

 

[peter zwart]

16 minutes ago, placeholder said:

As long as debts are paid back what's the problem? And most of the time they are. Occasionally they're not and them some people take a financial haircut. Occasionally there may even be a depression and millions, even billions of people may be affected. But even a depression does not mean the collapse of civilization or the currency. In fact, during depression, the purchasing power of the fiat dollar can even increase.

 

And that is why Central Banks are quiet busy with the CBDC? There will be a landslide with fiat money. The system is bankrupt and the debt will never paid back in full. If we lucky systems are not default on their interest obligations.

[peter zwart]

39 minutes ago, FritsSikkink said:

He borrowed 250 million money from the banks, they want some money back soon. 

"The value of fiat money will never recover again." I pay food and drinks with that, you try to do that with <deleted>coin. His loss is $1 366 797 444 now.

Ah in that case its time and borrowed money that is his enemy. That goes the same for all the borrowed fiat money. And btc is not a mean of payment. its an investment. Better to compare with gold which you also not use to pay your food/drinks. 

[placeholder]

4 minutes ago, peter zwart said:

And that is why Central Banks are quiet busy with the CBDC? There will be a landslide with fiat money. The system is bankrupt and the debt will never paid back in full. If we lucky systems are not default on their interest obligations.

Why do you think making predictions has value as evidence? We've been hearing about the collapse of fiat currency and the rise of gold ever since the US got off the gold standard. Which, while technically this occurred during the Nixon administration, it actually began with in the 1930's under FDR. At this point, this kind of fearmongering seems to differ little from that of certain zealots warning that the return of Jesus is just around the corner. And I don't understand what your suspicions are about CBDC. You think money has to be in the form of metal or paper?

[dj230]

23 hours ago, lkn said:

Wrong, he said that he personally had invested in cryptocurrencies.

Here’s what was actually said: “Just one example, our Cloud team is looking at how they can support our customers' needs in building, transacting, storing value and deploying new products on blockchain-based platforms. So we'll definitely be watching the space closely and supporting it where we can”.

 

IOW Google is looking at how they can make money from selling their services to people who think products with blockchain in the name are the new hotness.

 

MIT is in the business of selling classes, right? So they wouldn’t care how useful the content is, they care about how many would attend the class.

 

No, I keep saying: Give me an actual example of where blockchain solves a problem, and you keep replying with, but this guy talks a lot about blockchain, or that company says they are looking at it, so clearly, it must be useful…

 

Do you understand what a blockchain is? If you did, I think you would actually be able to understand that it has absolutely on competitive advantages over a regular database.

You gave me the marketing departments spin on the hosted hyperledger software that IBM hosts for clients.

 

Blockchain is extremely simple, if it was actually solving a problem for someone, it should be trivial to explain, yet it is always this vague BS, and the “technology” is a decade old, yet you quote yourself that it’s Q4 2021 that Google is saying that they are looking at it! It was btw said on an earnings call, you will often hear that on earning calls the CEO is always looking at whatever is the latest buzzword, I’ve heard dozen of companies say they are looking at blockchain and crypto currencies, including many banks, yet nothing has come of it, because it is absolutely useless technology for a business that operates within the law. But it is probably great for their various marketing departments! ????

.You haven't watched the interview have you? Direct quote from Tim Cook,

"Interviewer: Whats your thought on cryptocurrency right now? Accepting it through Apple Pay or otherwise?"

Tim Cook: It's something that we're looking at, it's not something we have immediate plans to do...but there are other things we are definitely looking at."

 

it's exactly what I said, "Tim Cook has said in interviews he was looking into blockchain technology with Apple"

 

Your quote from Google proves my point, it says "just one example". I guess you missed this part of his conference call 

"In its Q4 earnings call yesterday, CEO Sundar Pichai said that the company was "definitely looking at blockchain and such an interesting and powerful technology with broad applications... Overall, I think technology will continue to evolve and innovate, and we want to be pro-innovation and approach it that way."

 

Ok if you believe the highest rank most reputable colleges in USA for tech is making a class about a "useless" technology then so be it, I can't argue with that. Would be odd for a College solely trying to profit by selling classes about useless technology to then give out bitcoin to their students for free which ended up being worth tens of millions of dollars. Bad business model. 

 

You are still mixing up blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, saying that a legally ran company can't use blockchain. 

Edited June 15, 2022 by dj230

[Sqoop]

8 hours ago, lkn said:

You are somewhat right that a distributed system can handle a higher volume, but there is overhead, i.e. ten machines that each do 10,000 tasks/second will never be faster than a single machine that can do 100,000 tasks/second, because you don’t have the communication overhead with the single machine, so in general, it will be faster (and never slower).

 

The only reason you move to a distributed system if you cannot get a  single machine/connection fast enough to handle the required load, but you do pay an overhead for this.

 

However, with a blockchain you are not taking advantage of parallel processing, all the machines solve the same problem and has to constantly agree on the same single truth.

 

As said earlier, the bitcoin blockchain processes around 3 transactions per second, obviously this could be trivially done by a single machine.

 

And you cannot use something like sharding because then you get the double-spend problem. Already it is recommended to wait around one hour to be reasonable sure that your BTC transaction is immutable, i.e. that the entire network of machines has now agreed on the state of the blockchain that includes your transaction.

I was reacting to the statement 

 

Sorry, but I call BS. A distributed database (like the blockchain) will always be less efficient than a centralized one.

 

And thinking about high volume/ high storage distributed systems in the peta byte range. No single node would achieve this hence the network.  I understand that this discussion refers to the block chain so this is a bit off topic. 

 

[lkn]

1 hour ago, dj230 said:

You are still mixing up blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies, saying that a legally ran company can't use blockchain

I say they have no use for it, because a company operating legally has no benefit from running a censor resistant network, so what other advantage is there in it for them?

 

Give me that actual example of what blockchain can be used for that I have repeatedly asked for, don’t tell me about somebody who said they were looking at it, that means zero, especially since it is not exactly new technology, and I mean, even I myself have been looking at blockchain!

 

Where is that example? Put up or shut up!

[dj230]

4 hours ago, lkn said:

I say they have no use for it, because a company operating legally has no benefit from running a censor resistant network, so what other advantage is there in it for them?

 

Give me that actual example of what blockchain can be used for that I have repeatedly asked for, don’t tell me about somebody who said they were looking at it, that means zero, especially since it is not exactly new technology, and I mean, even I myself have been looking at blockchain!

 

Where is that example? Put up or shut up!

I already posted one example of IBM using it for shipping containers, logistics.

https://www.ibm.com/blockchain/container-logistics

"Royal Malaysian Customs Department adopts TradeLensThe RMCD has joined the blockchain-enabled TradeLens platform to modernize shipping processes, boost efficiency, and create greater transparency and collaboration across supply chains."

"Canadian Pacific improving information sharing with blockchainCP’s intermodal shippers can now use TradeLens — a blockchain-based platform — to rapidly and easily transfer container-shipping documents with added security and transparency."

 

• 
   

 

Then I said Silicon Valley engineers and tech companies are looking at Blockchain, you said they were grifters, meanwhile it's Apple, Google, Palantir, huge software companies. Then you denied they are looking at Blockchain and in both Apple and Google interviews and conference calls CEO's have talked about their companies looking at blockchain and also working on Blockchain. 

 

You sound like a conspiracy theorist who uses arguments that have no relevance to refute with, i.e "oh well they didn't say it exactly like the way I wanted them to, with this language and this word so it doesn't matter"

 

You think billion dollar companies have product pages for their blockchain technology products are all made up, absolute delusion. 

 

Just curious what school did you do your computer science degree at and how long ago was it?

Edited June 15, 2022 by dj230