I think he felt obligated to use Voyager since he was endorsing it on the show and also Voyager is a sponsor It would have been better if he did not have millions, even a few hundred thousand $ would have been good enough and the rest of his crypto assets on local wallets Metamask or hardware wallets and Bitcoin on local wallets I'm seeing some Twitter posts about Eurodollar futures are suggesting the Fed pivot and cutting rates by next year and quite possibly changes in Fed statements by end of this year It's all too complicated for me to understand so I'm relying on Q&A comments and replies but it's some possible good news for risk assets like Bitcoin and cryptos and the stock market
Yes, he was very transparent about this and I highly respect this. He said if he gonna shill something, he felt he should have skin in the game as well. Yup, that is almost too much money in one place. But it is all hindsight afterall. You would think all the crap exchanges were long gone at this level of crypto maturity. Its kind of shocking to think that your coins are actually lent out or doing something else and hence you can't get them back. Traditional banks are of course not any different, but its easy for the government to backstop a bank run since they can always just print the money as a last resort. I can see why stablecoins need to invest the money, since they need a revenue stream, so that 1:1 backing to me is always suspect, but an exchange is making plenty of profits from trading commissions. So why take such risks with customer deposits? Yup, I follow traditional macro themes as well. It sounds silly to say inflation has peaked, but its very possible. With a recession comes a huge slowdown in spending, and this is one way to control inflation. The FED is raising interest rates, but that is very painful for everyone who is addicted to cheap debt. So if you destroy demand, that will bring down inflation rather nicely as well. Of course a recession can be just as bad, but the high inflation is perhaps the worst path to go down. So yes, I agree that going forward, rates are probably going to stabilize if not drop and we are back to money printing. Should be really good for crypto at that point.
Ok, got through the video. Great to kind of have people on both sides of the debate, even if they are all pro bitcoin. What I found interesting was that Scott and Simon both have millions of dollars now in limbo. So here you have 2 supposed experts in this space who got screwed. I even watched a video from Scott just three weeks about where he interviewed the CEO of Ledger, and right in the middle of the video was a promo for Vauld. Now in all fairness, I don't think anyone truly knew where the money was. I honestly assumed that much of the crypto an exchange has from customer deposits is kept in their storage. But now I see a crypto exchange is no different than a bank. They probably have less than 10% of deposits in a liquid form, and hope the rest of it that is lent out comes back to them. A bank at least has the full backing of the FED, and they can just print up any shortfall, but in the crypto world, well we know there is no backing. Caitlin addresses this very well when she discusses lending out to the max ratio of 1:1, but above this, you are not solvent. As the guests discuss, full disclosure would have been very helpful in this scenario. I spent so many hours watching the videos from Invest_Answers on YouTube. I think the guy comes from the corporate world, has decades of trading experience, and always had nothing but praise for Mashinsky from Celsius. Now it sounds like it was nothing more than a ponzi scheme, and if this professional can be fooled as well, what chance was there for most other people? I haven't watched his videos for months now so I'm not sure what his personal exposure was, but I at least hope he is being transparent. I'm also really excited to read about what news things are coming this year according to Jeff who said they made big investments into upcoming projects. Also, in the interview with the Ledger CEO, he said a new product is coming out that gives you the ability to own your own crypto without being worried about the 24 word seed phrase. Sounds like they are really trying to make this all more user friendly.
I don't think there's concrete evidence that pure exchanges like Coinbase, Kraken, Binance lend out most of the user coin deposits But for the longest time, Bitcoiners have suspected that major exchanges are selling more bitcoins than they actually hold, like fractional banking The purpose was to naked short Bitcoin like what happened with GME and AMC where over 100% of the float are shorted To try to make these exchanges honest, there's a yearly Bitcoin ritual called proof-of-keys on January 3 where every Bitcoiner is encouraged to withdraw their bitcoins from exchanges Back to Celsius, Voyager, BlockFi and others, they are crypto banks and that's how they earn their yields by lending out the cryptos to traders (rehypothetication) To focus on Celsius with the recent law suit and from statements from insiders and long term investors Plan C and Simon Dixon, it seems at some point they lost on some trades or investments and in trying to make the losses back, Celsius became a Ponzi, taking in deposits to pay off user withdrawals, with case in point on Eth I really like BlockFi and really like the ability to use Bitcoin and crypto assets as collateral for $ loans but the whole crypto assets borrow/lend industry is very scary right now. Most if not all are insolvent. Nexo for some reason is doing well, but there are suspicions going around Anyway, I think the crypto assets banks like Celsius, BlockFi, Voyager are not pure exchanges, but they do offer buying and selling of cryptos but it's not their main business and more on the borrowing and lending of crypto assets One final note is how the pure DeFi borrowing/lending platforms did not have any problems during the crypto crash periods. AAVE and Maker did not have insolvency issues as the smart contract were not affected by human emotions and lent to 3AC under collateralized or even un-collateralized AAVE and Maker liquidated in accordance to the smart contracts and worked as designed
*** Post is for entertainment purposes only *** Bitcoin should be going up in price but the "contagion" with Luna, 3AC, Celsius, Voyager, etc are causing BTC to go down I think soon, something will happen and BTC will spike up in price like in the good ole' days of Cyprus ------------- Sri Lanka bankrupt. Shanghai in lockdown again. Chinese bank runs. Argentina? Euro about to get flipped by USD and how about that Yen.. https://twitter.com/hosekiapp/status/1546312756277743616
I couldn't agree more. It's amazing to me how many people are waiting for some magical level before they buy whether it's 12K or 10K or whatever. What will it look like when we reach this level and the buying starts? Will exchanges even have enough coins when people start withdrawing? Other than @deaddog who is hopelessly lost, most here want to buy some at a certain price. But if that price isn't reached and the chasing begins, it will get very interesting for an asset that cannot be faked. @deaddog has trouble figuring out the value of Bitcoin and how to price it. I leave it up to governments and central banks to show everyone what the value truly is. The more they manipulate, the more reason they give for owning Bitcoin. And with the recent collapse of DeFi, it provides the self custody lesson quite well. Just like these platforms couldn't honor withdrawals I wonder what will happen to the exchanges when people try and self-custody their Bitcoin. I imagine it will be the exchanges that will have to chase the price of Bitcoin higher.