How much people lost with Celsius Network | Hacker News Reader

How much people lost with Celsius Network

celsiusnetworth.com

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https://twitter.com/bitcoinfool/status/1579479999333076992

So - do we just report this as cap gains loss? How does this work in the States? As far as I can tell, my investment in this went to $0.

Edit: Apparently in the US, any capital loss due to loss or theft is not considered taxable capital loss, so I guess I'm just SOL.

I'm glad I had diversified and my Celsius losses were only 25% of my crypto (of which, at the time, was only 3% of my total investments overall). I've completely exited crypto since this debacle and sticking with boring VTSAX and VTIAX entirely.

I got burned during the Mt Gox era and I feel like a crazy person for asking all my friends to get out of crypto. I've been a boring ETF guy since.

The funny thing is that when the trustee pays out the remaining BTC from Mt. Gox back to creditors, you're going to have some massive gains.

I completely forgot about that and just read that they have 192,000 bitcoins in the trustee. Wow

I occasionally kick myself for buying weed using bitcoin like it's intended purpose in those days. I had quite a bit. lol.

I got a really sweet carbon fiber bicycle from the coins I mined. Figured there was no way they'd ever go higher than 20$ and it was basically free money. Looking back, sure, I could have retired on that sum if I'd held it, but at the time, I had no reasonable expectation that it would be anything but a fad.

Won a few races on that bike, and met my wife on the race team. Net win.

"Sometimes, not often, but sometimes I wish my wife was still Bitcoin."

Gives a new meaning to "wife changing gains".

The trump tax cuts removed loss from theft and third-party business failure as permissible write-offs.

You just gotta eat it.

This is a positive tax reform. Why should taxpayers cover losses from people doing little due diligence or placing reckless bets with shady companies?

Well, for one, the thieves have to claim it as income.

For two, I made no judgment, just stated facts.

It’s not a loss if it was never realized; if he never converted coins to fiat at a loss from the purchase, there is no loss except on paper (and that is not tax deductible).

>It’s not a loss if it was never realized

If I hold stock in a company that goes bankrupt, I can write-off those losses, even though they never get converted to fiat.

Doesn’t this support the opposite?

Ever dollar I pay anyone for services must be claimed as income, yet none of those are capital losses for me. Conversely, none of my capital losses can be claimed as anyone’s income.

>I pay anyone for services

What service exactly am I getting for being robbed?

Conversely, in the correct metaphor, if I buy a fraudulently priced stock for $100 and sell for $0.01, I get to write off the $99.99.

Seems kind of arbitrary that 'a buyer' is the difference between a write-off and not.

You aren't covering losses, you're failing to tax gains that didn't materialize. If I fail to get a job, you don't tax me for the income from a job I might have had. This is true even if my reason for not getting the job is really stupid.

This isnt right because capital losses count against capital gains. So, taking a loss allows you to not pay taxes on an equal amount of gains that you would've been taxed on otherwise.

Overall you gained nothing though.

If I give you a million dollar and then steal it back a day later, I feel like you should not pay taxes on it.

Same thing if I give you a million dollar, you buy expensive X thing but the seller goes bankrupt and never delivers anything.

> If I fail to get a job, you don't tax me for the income from a job I might have had.

Yet.

Everyone here is confused.

You only ever got to write off you cost basis but you cannot if the cost is stolen.

Not a lawyer, but my understanding is you can take a theft loss deduction. https://news.bloombergtax.com/tax-insights-and-commentary/vi... (Sorry for your loss.)

You can likely take a casualty loss deduction, but there are some requirements to meet.

It looks like it's pretty much completely inaccurate? https://twitter.com/bitcoinfool/status/1579479999333076992

It accurately shows how much money I lost in Celsius.

Me as well.

It depends on your definition of accurate. The site seems to have gotten the data by OCRing pdfs, which caused issues in certain cases. The majority is probably parsed correctly, but even if a few records got parsed incorrect (eg. the "E-06" got truncated) the aggregate amount and/or leaderboards might be totally off.

Sadly it is accurate. I made it pretty far converting the data to CSV with tabula-java and importing with sqlite.

Documents in question are from https://cases.stretto.com/celsius/court-docket/:

- #973 "Statement of Financial Affairs" 14532 pages. Contains list of transfers in the months leading up to freeze. This is the document in @bitcoinfool's tweet. It also looks to me that this may have been updated to remove the personal data (280MB to 2MB). Haven't looked into it much.

- #974 on page 92 has links to PDFS of "Retail Customers who have Non-Priority Unsecured Claims by First Name". Contains balances after freeze.

The 2084 BTC is in the document that contains balances.

Celsius seemed to be a classic Ponzi scheme wrapped in a cloak of crypto. The founder was a smooth-talking pitch man who claimed to have “discovered” a risk-free way to earn outsized returns by arbitraging some flaw in the centralized finance system. Madoff’s scheme was similar, but with capital markets rather than crypto. What these schemes have in common is that, once the market takes a dip, it becomes impossible to cover redemptions and the whole thing collapses.

I don’t see the collapse of Celsius so much as a cautionary tale against crypto (“not your keys…”), so much as a lesson against investing in Ponzi-like scams. If it sounds to good to be true…

I suppose it isn't exactly finance 101, but one of the more fundamental rules of markets is that if you discover an opportunity for arbitrage, you never tell anyone and you exploit it as fast and hard as possible, because once it's publicly discovered, it will quickly be exploited until it's gone.

Therefore, no one is going to pitch a legit arbitrage opportunity to you.

There’s probably something to be said for not buying a Ferrari first chance you get either. Smart thing to do is behave like you won the lottery. Lawyer up, spend your money on semi invisible things like paying down debt.

Once you’re successful everyone starts asking questions.

Apart from being financial advice, that has nothing to do.

> you never tell anyone and you exploit it as fast and hard as possible

How do you tell someone you found a get rich quick scheme without telling them you found a get rich quick scheme? Conspicuous consumption. I’m not talking about your neighbors wondering what’s up, I’m talking about your industrial peers connecting the dots and stalking you to figure out what’s up.

You are missing the point. The reason not to tell anyone is there is limited money to be made from arbitage. If someone else finds it they make the money instead of you.

Not telling people you struck gold might be great life advice, but other people knowing you are rich, in and of itself, wont affect the arbitarge opportunity.

> The reason not to tell anyone is there is limited money to be made from arbitage.

>> I’m talking about your industrial peers connecting the dots and stalking you to figure out what’s up.

I'm well aware. Perhaps you need to recalibrate your opinion of other people.

But I don't understand this:

> How do you tell someone you found a get rich quick scheme without telling them you found a get rich quick scheme?

Why even tell anyone at all? There's no need to buy anything physical, just save it up and spend it on a market ETF for example.

In this case, taking off a couple hundred grand and buying a Ferrari (rather than leaving in Celsius) would have been the smart move. At least you’d hold the keys to the Ferrari.

Heh, fair enough. There's a whole chess game with these sorts of things. I think it's probably very good advice to try to take a little money out of any investment before adding more to it, but it's also documented that con artists and pyramid schemes will sacrifice part of their take to maintain the illusion. Some investors get to take money out, so that the rest of the marks think they are going to get the same treatment. Or with a confidence scheme you might make a little money in step 1 and 2 and then in step 3 their phones are disconnected and they have skipped town.

[Edit] It does piss me off though how common the conceit is, "Well if I'd held my AAPL stock until last year I'd be a millionaire". That's not how investments work. You don't let the money ride forever on one bet. You sell it bit by bit to balance your portfolio. Nobody responsible in your life would let that go without energetic commentary about what a bad idea it is.

There are a lot of 'soft' arbitrage opportunities out there, such as risk arbitrage or merger arbitrage. You may not have 100% certainty of a deal closing, but can still profit over hundreds of events.

Most 'pure' arbs are exploited, but many still exist. They often require capital, expertise, and experience.

There are also sort of structural arbs, like for ETF funds (baskets in/out).

Precisely, which require significant upfront investment/expertise in a consolidated space

And the risk vs return is baked into the trade setup and fairly bounded.

> Most 'pure' arbs are exploited, but many still exist. They often require capital, expertise, and experience.

Not really.

Usually it is a higher tolerance for risk combined with not telling the customer how much risk they actually are taking.

It is all good until it is not, and by then it is too late

Alameda Research made billions arbitraging wide spreads in Asian bitcoin exchanges relative to the rest of the world. Required working with local banks to solve logistics around wire transfers and such.

Obviously a run of the mill crypto ponzi offering 30% interest or something will eventually collapse.

Difficult to balance incentives when it comes to traditional finance offerings such as structured products or an actively managed investment vehicle.

As you point out, customers struggle in evaluating risk

What a fitting username!

; )

> They often require capital, expertise, and experience.

I would tend to classify that as someone offering you work/a partnership rather than an arbitrage.

>Therefore, no one is going to pitch a legit arbitrage opportunity to you.

I'm feeling parallels to "How to get rich quick" or "Make $5000 a week from your home" pay-per-click sites from 20 years ago.

I think the lesson here is always be wary of easy money. If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.

>Therefore, no one is going to pitch a legit arbitrage opportunity to you.

I once wrote a quick and dirty arbitrage tool for Magic: the Gathering cards (stores publish price lists they will both buy and sell at). It really did work but (of course) it quickly caused a lot of the best arbs available on the market to go away.

Eventually the store owners themselves paid me to tell them if they ever had arbitrage opportunities for their own stores (to avoid accidental mispricing versus competitors) and the whole thing sort of went away but we absolutely DID pitch a legit arbitrage opportunity to people that people paid us for (and, in fact, still pay for today).

A super old test version of the free version of the tool is here: https://mtgpricer-uat.appspot.com/arbitrageTool I doubt it actually works any more though.

A hundred-dollar bill is lying on the ground. An economist walks past it. A friend asks: "Didn't you see the money there?" The economist replies: "I thought I saw something, but I must've imagined it. If there had been $100 on the ground, someone would've picked it up."

This analogy bothers me. It feels overly simplistic. To 'see' the bill--which the economist isn't even willing to believe can exist--in practice you need to observe and understand an increasingly convoluted financial world.

Said another way, to know whether someone is really pointing out a bill on the ground or just another scam you'd have to understand crypto and/or arbitrage to the same or better degree than them.

It's more like:

I know where you can find a $100 bill on the ground. I'm selling maps to it for $10.

Yeah, if someone is saying they are going to tell you where you can find a 100 dollar bill lying on the ground if you pay them $10s I would be suspicious.

My point is that humans are not wholly rational creatures. Due to that fact, there is always an opportunity for arbitrage. I never said it was easy though, it may well indeed require understanding of crypto and arbitrage, more than others.

Thanks for clarifying. IME the analogy comes out too often when someone is implying "stupid economists are overlooking obvious opportunity", yet their bill-on-the-ground is actually some convoluted, borderline scam.

To be honest aren't they all to some extent?

No, not all ponzi schemes are wrapped in a cloak of crypto.

All crypto is a Ponzi scheme, but not all Ponzi schemes are crypto.

>> Madoff’s scheme was similar, but with capital markets rather than crypto.

A lot of people have no idea the reason Bobby Bonilla still gets paid over a million dollars a year from the Mets was because of the Madoff scheme:

The Mets released Bonilla in January 2000 but were still on the hook for his $5.9 million salary that season. Believing they were poised to make a significant profit through their investments with Bernie Madoff, Mets ownership instead agreed to defer Bonilla's salary with 8 percent interest and spread it across 25 years from 2011-35.

Well, the Madoff ponzi scheme fell apart, and Bonilla's $5.9 million swelled to $29.8 million from 2000-11. That $29.8 million divided by 25 years equals the annual $1.19 million payment.

He'll be 72 when the last payment is made.

https://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/bobby-bonilla-day-why-met...

> a classic Ponzi scheme wrapped in a cloak of crypto.

That's just Ponzi wrapped in Ponzi, innit?

I'm just going to straight up call my crypto scam Pyramid^2.

"I mean what did you expect when you bought in, based on the name?!?"

Not when I steal all your customers and start a competing Pyramid^3 service!

So you're calling it a "Collateralized Ponzi Obligation"?

Have you heard of PonziCoin? Similar concept, except the creator stupidly made actual, functioning smart contracts for it which people bought.

Not by the common definition of a Ponzi scheme. This oversimplification of crypto as a whole on Hacker News is really disappointing each time I see it.

It's not an oversimplification if it is a common use case. Yes, the crypto purist will cringe at considering the entire system a ponzi but if you're that deep into crypto you probably can't see outside.

From the outside perspective, even among technically competent people, crypto has gone from a really cool "FOSS finance" type thing to basically exclusively being used to part morons from their money. That's not even to begin talking about the relative volatility in something that will allegedly replace cash.

While true that it is not crypto as a whole, by-and-large the nature of crypto has been reduced to a scam/crime currency. The community at large who loves crypto should really be doing more to stop every person with a modest twitter following from performing a successful rugpull since now the governments want to be involved.

There's a huge difference being "commonly used for" and "is a". The vast majority of emails and phone calls are spam. But it would be naive to call either of them - particularly email - fundamentally spam services.

Just because people leverage the hype & mostly unregulated nature of most crypto, doesn't make it innately a ponzi scheme. Yes it's a mess. Yes it needs better regulation. Yes, a large number of "use-cases" are better served by existing solutions.

But this is mostly because we're still very early in a slow-burning hype-cycle. There are some fundamentally unique services supplied by (some) currencies, like Ethereum smart contracts (e.g. de-centralized escrow), that enable fundamentally new and useful interactions. It is precisely these features which give (some) currencies innate value beyond speculation. I personally plan on waiting for the hype cycle to shake out a bit longer before I get too involved.

It has been 14 years since the bitcoin white paper, how long will we be in the early stages of crypto?

On unique use cases, maybe but I am convinced the vast majority of crypto usage today falls in 2 camps

1) those speculating to make a quick buck

2) believers who want crypto to work

Both of these camps are working against mass adoption.

1) because for a speculative investment to be successful it must go up, and who wants to spend a currency they think will go up? Remember that guy who bought pizza with his bitcoin? What an idiot right, he traded currency for food?!?

2) the believers hold decentralization as above all else and see crypto as much a political tool as a product, they will sacrifice efficiency and convenience for this, the majority of people in the world won’t.

I said the same thing in 1983: it's been 14 years since ARPANET, how long will we be in the early stages of the internet? It took 50 years of hard work before the day came when you could order a burrito from your couch. Sometimes change takes a generation or two. Be patient.

I wasn’t around then but my impression is that at that point in time basically no one saw the internet coming maybe aside from a few geeks. Utility came piecemeal and eventually the private sector took notice that there was money to be made and something big was here. Today everyone and their mother want to tell me how crypto will revolutionize everything and I just need to wait for it to actually be usable for anything that I care about. It seems very backwards to me. Why is there so much evangelizing and so little product I can actually use?

> It's not an oversimplification if it is a common use case.

If I listed scams successfully cashed out in USD over the last decade, roughly the time Bitcoin existed, and tell you that since this seems to be a very common use case for USD (most likely tens of billions worth world-wide in the last 10 years), all types of fiat money are basically scams now... Wouldn't you tell me I am oversimplifying the issue?

> While true that it is not crypto as a whole [...]

I assume this is you answering the above question, but I feel worth it to clarify, I use Bitcoin as a kind of measuring stick in this example because it is the largest cryptocurrency, it has over a decade track record of maintaining the principles it established without deviating from them and should be a representative project to consider when you pass generalized statements like "crypto = Ponzi".

> The community at large who loves crypto should really be doing more to stop every person with a modest twitter following from performing a successful rugpull since now the governments want to be involved.

Social media platforms can deal with this through moderation and reputation. They have to abide to both market laws (harboring too many scammers will lead to people fleeing away, so they have incentives to fight this) and legal codes.

Why should we limit the set of tools available to humanity to transfer value to stop a minority of scammers? We already "try" this with fiat and it just doesn't work, the current planned escalation to answer is more restriction (switching to CBDC with total control for Central Banks), more censorship.

Tools like Bitcoin want to provide an alternative to all of this, provide you with an option with wich even if you have more responsibilities/risks, you are in control. And the bonus is that all of these restrictions can become walled gardens on top of Bitcoin, for people who want/need the reversibility (use escrows, like they pretty much already do), but the basic right for you to transact with anyone else can't be removed by governments.

No. Someone holding bitcoin is not the same as someone convincing others to invest in a wholly controlled fund in which you pay for withdrawals with new investment money.

Of course not; the person holding the coin is a mark.

Can you explain in this thought-framework which asset markets are not ponzis?

Under the hood celsius was investing user funds in typical degen ways: liquidity pools and token farming operations. Many users were using Celsius to leverage their assets for the same reason. This recursive borrowing becomes ever more precarious, and then the dominos fall. So I think there were actually layers involved, where some of the deeper layers were more ponzi-esque than celsius itself, which was operating more like a hedge fund.

Even if cryptocurrency isn't a Ponzi itself, cryptobros and definitely responsible. The same bad economics promoted by crypto enthusiasts that made it so popular were the same arguments that Celsius used to get popular.

I am conflicted on the definition of a ponzi. It seems to me that there are ponzi dynamics at play but sometimes the intent that makes it a "scheme", ala Bernie Madoff, with ringleaders is not always there. In this case there is Maschinsky with a lucrative insider exit, but was that planned all along, and did he cause the collapse that influenced his exit? I think not.

He didn’t cause the collapse, but he failed to deliver on his promise to his customers that Celsius was structured to protect their savings from market volatility. In fact, the promise was fake — it was never possible to fulfill, from the outset.

> The details were made public on October 6 through a court filing that detailed the customers who fell victim.

https://criptokio.com/en/altcoins-en/celsius-net-worth/

A standout on that list is #7 https://celsiusnetworth.com/Zaryn-Dentzel.htm

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaryn_Dentzel "Dentzel was robbed of millions in Bitcoins in 2021" (https://www.newsweek.com/bitcoin-millionaire-zaryn-dentzel-b...) (https://english.elpais.com/usa/2021-11-03/criminal-gang-assa...)

Robbed twice now!

> Celsius's collapse exemplified what one commentator called a "pervasive problem in the crypto industry, where financial services that claim to be decentralized ... are actually centralized entities, with the power to control the flow of crypto assets."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celsius_Network

I would like people to keep this in mind when they somehow confuse Web3 (distribution via crypto ledger) and the term decentralization. Those concepts are not related in any way.

Though people will use these terms anyway however they want, also to promote their scam(mish) products/services. It doesn't help to know the definitions if people aren't honouring them anyway.

The real fact of the matter is that decentralization does not work in human society.

There are countless examples of decentralization working across human societies. Neighborhoods, cities, counties, states, countries. In America for example forks are individually managed and not shared, and we eat very well without a central utensil management agency.

It might surprise you to know that in fact kitchen utensils and what they're made out of is regulated in the USA - and I assume most other industrialized countries.

https://www.compliancegate.com/plastic-kitchen-products-regu...

The issue is decentralization != no regulation, and lots of crypto folks seem to think that they should build systems that cannot be regulated and expect that to be compatible with modern society.

In a way, crypto is a sophisticated way to enforce (self)regulation. Rules are set to enforce certain behavior (no token can be spent twice, tokens can only be minted in specific circumstances and amounts, etc.) and give everyone easy ways to validate that the rules are enforced.

Some think that all rules you ever need can be encoded in the network, removing the need for "external" regulation. Of course that's not entirely realistic.

The definition of a fork is centrally regulated, yes, but using forks is decentralized. There is no central authority saying "We will make N forks this month" or "You will use a fork at 2pm for exactly 10 bites".

Cash is similarly decentralized in that its definition and creation is centrally regulated, but nobody says (or even can say) how and when you can use it. Cash transactions between people happen without any central authority. There's not even a central authority definiting the price/value of goods! You can just agree on a number with some rando, exchange cash for things/services, and nobody will ever know it even happened, let alone be able to tell you how and when to do it.

> Neighborhoods, cities, counties, states, countries.

How are those examples decentralized? You just listed a literal hierarchy with oodles of centralized laws and regulations at every tier.

And mentioning forks doesn't make any sense. Decentralization refers to organizational entities, not objects.

> decentralization does not work in human society

The American payment system is decentralised. It’s just lazily evaluated, e.g. when a transaction occurs or audit is done. Crypto’s pitch is that it’s centralised on an eagerly-evaluated blockchain. Every account’s state is known by all, all the time, full stop.

Of course it doesn't, that's why I have to send a self-addressed stamped envelope to the Widget Commission to request the resources to have widgets manufactured.

Imagine the alternative!

We’re in agreement here that Celsius was never, nor had any business pretending to be, decentralized, correct?

Web3 is an imaginary place that you pitch to investors, who cares what people confuse it with.

We already had decentralization. It's called the BitTorrent protocol which is more decentralized than most Web 3 projects.

Google doesn't auto-compete for Bitchute.

Yes and no. BitTorrent uses two protocols. One of those protocols is highly centralized and advertises users and their requested data packets as well as their available data packets to a centralized registry. A second protocol is used to transfer available data packets between users.

The appeal of BitTorrent is not that it is decentralized but that it, in a narrow legal context, doesn’t violate the law as copy protected materials are passed between users on a secondary protocol without touching the centralized system advertising data availability.

>One of those protocols is highly centralized and advertises users and their requested data packets as well as their available data packets to a centralized registry.

This hasn't been true for almost two decades. DHT exists so trackers are not required [0]. So now both protocols are decentralized.

[0] https://github.com/webtorrent/bittorrent-dht

DHT is distributed hash table. Distributed is not decentralized. This is the same mistake as the subject matter with crypto.

It seems the inability to differentiate those two words is a scam worth more than 4 billion.

>Distributed is not decentralized.

No one said otherwise.

>This is the same mistake as the subject matter with crypto.

This is where you're wrong. You misunderstood these concepts as if they were mutually exclusive. Torrent DHT is absolutely distributed and decentralized [0]. QED.

>It seems the inability to differentiate those two words is a scam worth more than 4 billion.

The scams in crypto are older than modern computers themselves. Ponzi schemes and straight up securities fraud, just wrapped in NewHotThingTM. Has nothing to do with decentralization or distributed systems.

[0] https://torrentfreak.com/bittorrents-dht-turns-10-years-old-...

Three clear and obvious outcomes of this unwinding:

1. The crypto mantra "not your keys, not your coins" rings true.

2. Entrusting your personal financial data with a private company is sure to end in disaster, either by hack or court order. Privacy should be a basic and legally protected feature of blockchains.

3. Centralized Finance or CeFi is mostly a sham and deserves to be heavily regulated. Not to be confused with on-chain and transparent Decentralized Finance or DeFi platforms like Aave that have behaved predictably through this downturn, and have never required KYC.

> 1. The crypto mantra "not your keys, not your coins" rings true.

I confess that I don't follow this.

I only have assets on Coinbase and generally assume they're reliable enough (from a technical/security stand-point and legal) that I don't bother jumping through hoops to do a wallet on my own device or hardware wallet.

Is it stupid? Maybe, but I think I'd be more likely to screw up somehow with the other approaches.

Maybe they are. But in the advent of a hack. Even then they might have there arses covered with insurance and what not.

But who can tell how long until you get your coins in such a situation.

I have a similar approach, and with evidence to back it up. All my coinbase coins are still in coinbase. The coins in the wallet on my old desktop that I have somehow misplaced the tower for several years ago on the other hand...

What you need to be concerned about is if coinbase fails for totally normal business reasons and they halt all transactions, what rights do you have?

With real banks, there are pretty clear pecking orders for creditors vs depositors and depositors have FDIC to cover at least some in the worst disasters.

Would you have higher priority in getting your own coins back over senior debt holders?

“Not your keys, not your coins” is exactly what it sounds like. You really have no say at all in how the above scenario plays out.

There have been a hundred+ years of laws to figure out how to give rights to cash, bonds, equities to people who have them held by an institution. That hasn’t happened with crypto.

“Not your keys, not your coins” has a doomsday prepper tinge to it. (Not quite as much as someone dismissing centralized emergency management with “not your bunker, not your rations,” but in the same spirit.) Maybe it’s the right attitude for some people, but it’s highly exclusionary as a general rule.

I mean if centralized EMS had failed as often as crypto-currency exchanges, then "not your bunker, not your rations" might be a good saying...

To keep the analogy fair, people would need to regularly get botulism from eating their bunker rations (or some other consequence on par with getting permanently locked out of a crypto wallet).

The thing is, "not your keys, not your coins" is not just true technically, but true legally. If Coinbase were to become insolvent and decide to use your coins to repay their creditors, you might say, "Hey, you can't do that, that's my money!", and they would-- correctly-- respond, "No, it isn't. Read that user agreement again." They really are not your coins: Coinbase is extending you a temporary permission to access them which they can revoke at any time (and would, if they were in trouble).

By contrast, as another commenter alluded to, fiat banking has an extensive system of laws and precedents that decides what happens in cases like this, which crypto lacks.

I don’t understand #2. What’s the point of bothering at all if we ultimately need a government to impose their centralized power of enforcing laws on the usage of blockchain?

It feels like yet another “crypto people discover organically why centralized banking is the way it is.”

I don't think the GP is saying the government needs to enforce laws on the usage of the blockchain, in general. Rather, one use of the blockchain is to run a centralized investment bank. In such cases, the government should regulate them just as they would any other investment bank, on or off the blockchain.

>1. The crypto mantra "not your keys, not your coins" rings true.

How do you do the "Fi" bit of "DeFi" if all you do is HODL?

"Not your keys, not your coins" still applies for decentralised platforms.

With Celsius, the contract doesn't maintain this because the contract owner can freeze funds at any time. Because of this, your keys are no longer enough to access your funds. You also need "consent" from Celsius to withdrawal.

Compare this to a smart contract where the contract owner can't arbitrarily freeze or seize funds, alter state, or upgrade/modify the contract (or at least require some level of community consensus to do so). These platforms can still largely do what Celsius did but with the caveat that everything needs to be done on chain or through some auditable/provable off-chain method. Likewise changes to parameters or code would need to be done using either some consensus method (higher centralisation risk) or manually by users migrating to a new contract (lower risk).

Unfortunately the "your keys" part isn't terribly clear in the account model since contracts largely all have global state. The UTxO model on the other hand allows you to more easily analyse state changes and conditions under which you could lose control (if at all) however the tooling on that side is significantly less developed.

Ultimately, anything sent to a smart contract is not "yours" any more though; under the "not your keys, not your coins" premise though - right? As you point out, you are depending on the strength of the technical, social and security controls on the contract.

You don’t need to hodl. You can spend, invest, trade, all self custodially by just interacting with the chain.

> The crypto mantra "not your keys, not your coins" rings true.

Which just highlights why "crypto" is largely useless. The vast majority of people are incapable of operating sufficiently secure infrastructure. And even for people who can, it doesn't offer any meaningful advantages that would justify the enormous effort required.

> Privacy should be a basic and legally protected feature of blockchains.

This is impossible when you are using blockchains, because all data is, by design, public, and there is no way of preventing anyone from data mining it.

You should read up on Zcash, because it seems like you have a very limited understanding of what is actually possible with this kind of technology :(. Hell: TornadoCash--which is based on similar mechanisms--apparently worked so well, despite being fully decentralized software running on an existing blockchain (Ethereum), that it is now sanctioned (which is honestly a bit strange as it isn't even a group of people: it is software) by the legacy system that refuses to allow people to have financial privacy (which is a travesty) :(. Also, as much as I despise MobileCoin for various reasons (and thereby haven't used either it or Signal), as far as I understand, not only do you "own your keys", but the UI is almost as easy to use as Apple Cash (or whatever the name is for the specific payment feature Apple provides where you have an account filled with money that you can send to people using iMessage).

Impossible? No it's not.

Monero does it and to an extent shielded transactions in zcash too.

>>it doesn't offer any meaningful advantages that would justify the enormous effort required<<

I'm blown away by the complete disregard most of this community has for crypto. Yes, it is currently full of scams and charlatans. But you honestly believe there are no meaningful advantages to decentralized currency?

Is anti-censorship not an advantage? I'm not a huge fan of the government's ability to seize assets without any due process (See, e.g. Canada https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60383385), which corporations are starting to get interested in (see, e.g. Paypal https://fortune.com/2022/10/10/paypal-users-fine-misinformat...). Bitcoin and other coins go a long way to solving these issues.

How about effectively free, instant transfers at any time of day or night? Traditionally if I wanted to wire money oversees, it's a full-day affair. I can transfer any amount of crypto I want in seconds to minutes, for far less than a wire fee.

How about the ability to instantly settle debts and contracts? This was literally impossible just a few years ago.

I know it's easy to shit on crypto (and there are many legitimate reasons for doing so), but you guys need to dream bigger.

The vast majority of Aave users still have their funds, compared to Celsius users. The effort required to hold keys is not really that significant.

Privacy in blockchains is certainly possible. Tornado cash, Monero, zcash, Aztec.

> 1. The crypto mantra "not your keys, not your coins" rings true.

The alternative being you hold your keys.

This is another area where I swear it's almost as though the entire crypto space is run by aliens or a poorly trained AI.

Interview 100 people and ask them two questions:

1) Have you ever had to reverse or dispute an electronic (credit card) transaction?

2) Have you ever forgotten a password?

The answer for 100 or 100 million people to both of these questions is "YES". 100% of them. Yet the main foundational principles of crypto operate directly against both of these universal human truths.

It's utterly bizarre.

Interview 100 people and ask them if they've ever used cash. There is no "universal human truth" that you should be able to regret a transaction months later.

Crypto works the same way, except it's new and people aren't educated about it, so the space is filled with grifters and con artists.

Cash transactions are reversible in developed countries. In the US, there are federal laws that make them reversible with very little room for a merchant to wiggle free.

If you asked those cash users if they had a transaction they wanted to reverse they'd all say yes. The non reversibility of cash is a downside to most users, not a feature.

It is a feature for the people who were paid in cash. Not being stripped away from soemthing you have earned is important. Ask merchants their feelings about chargebacks.

Furthermore nothing prevents you from using an escrow/third party for transactions in crypto that you hope to be able to reverse under a certain time.

But obviously you lose some of the main advantages of crypto. It provides this optionality, soon, with the accelerated dispariton of cash money this choice will not exist with fiat money... even less with CBDCs in my estimation.

1) There will always be fraud, bad actors, scams, theft, etc. Shit happens.

2) People forget stuff and lose things. Shit happens.

Not to be snarky but if we can't agree these are universal human truths I'll assume you're a chat bot run by the crypto AI I've been talking about...

Also, please stop saying it's new. Bitcoin came out in 2009 - the same year as Android, Venmo, Uber, Square, and countless other companies, platforms, and concepts overwhelmingly positively and safely used by millions if not billions of people every day.

"Mobile works the same way, except it's new and people aren't educated about it, so the space is filled with grifters and con artists."

"Ride sharing works the same way, except it's new and people aren't educated about it, so the space is filled with grifters and con artists."

The "it's new" excuse ran out at least half a decade ago.

>There will always be fraud, bad actors, scams, theft, etc. Shit happens.

And we have the courts to solve any disputes. What jurisdiction does bitcoin reside in?

> Interview 100 people and ask them if they've ever used cash.

All people I know IRL only ever carry small amounts of cash at a given point in time. The bulk of their liquidity is held at a financial institution.

While I appreciate the tremendous risk they run of having that institution go bust, the significant improvements in regulatory oversight of the past centuries have made it, in my mind, an acceptable compromise.

Meanwhile, the risk of getting cash stolen or lost remains uncomfortable.

Unfortunately, that risk is also present for people that manage their own keys. Either the private key is on a physical device which can be lost or pickpocketed, or they memorized a random sequence which they input in a hackable device every time they pay, to get a key they enter in various software at risk of vulnerabilities.

Ask the Celsius investors whether they, in hindsight, would have preferred custody over their investment in the way that Aave users have come to have. Most would say yes.

If you are just storing a moderate amount of USD in an account with no interest, the safest option is a bank with FDIC insurance. If you don’t happen to live in a country with this kind of banking and insurance, or if you are investing higher than FDIC limits, or you are seeking higher yield, this is where people begin to look at options like Celsius and Aave.

4. use regulated bank

Not if you want a return higher than 0.2%. People investing in Celsius and Aave are not using it as a low risk savings account.

https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/1906156/cryptomonnaies-...

This canadian fund lost 200$ M dollars.

I wish they'd publish their due diligence report for this investment.

Could be highly entertaining reading.

“Everyone else was making lots of money and it seemed like a good idea”

DD: "Fortune favors the brave"

Looks like the site has a bug where it parses numbers incorrectly from the source PDF. The actual numbers are much lower in many cases.

That’s pretty rough, first you get goxed, then you get doxed.

Next step will be $87B worth of new IRS agents working backwards through chain data to find the source of these funds.

I lost a 4 figure amount and it was a good lesson thank God it wasn't more. Yes I'm young and very dumb if anyone is wondering

you surely were not dumb and are quite the opposite now

Can some one point me to a good (written, not video) explanation of what Celsius was, claimed to be, and what happened at the end?

so glad i didn't use this, was very close but then read, or should i say saw, some things about a certain executive that put me right off.

The astronomical yield didn’t tip you off?? The yield they were paying implied excessive risk taking.

So many people never asked where all this yield was coming from.

In the era of record low interest rates, who is paying record high interest rates? It never added up.

Figures on that site are wrong, for example-- a user with a balance like "5.8e-6 BTC" is represented as 5.8 BTC.

What I'd love to know is how much they put in, when their buys were, so we can see how much "profit" they would of otherwise had if they had sold.

It'd be interesting to see what their role, if any, in promoting all of these various crypto-"currencies."

A good overview for the uninitiated (in my thoroughly uninformed opinion)

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwTyvi-oDrlpFqqw3vj9e...

This is mean. I understand this is public information, but it's still mean to do this.

https://twitter.com/bitcoinfool/status/1579479999333076992

Seems like this site made some major mistakes

Why put people's names?

It's now public information from a court filing.

As a European, the extent of what is deemed acceptable in the US to publish as part of the "public record" is baffling.

Is this because previously analog processes (i.e. stuff that you could legally look up in a court's microfilm document archive in person and make photocopies of etc.) have been put on the internet indiscriminately? Or is this really generally seen as a desirable property of the legal system?

It's just one of those systems that has both good and bad. We can't seem to pull off a grey area decision where certain info is public and some is redacted for privacy so instead of making everything private, we go nuclear and make everything public. I guess it's better than nothing. lol.

It also very much depends on the state which everyone seems to forget. There are 50 different states that have different opinions of what is public information. There's a joke that Florida Man is the most devious person around but the reality is that Florida has more information made public which makes it appear that bad stuff is happening all the time there.

Well as a US citizen we are very skeptical of government power. Information is power. Anything the government knows that it doesn't tell its citizens has the potential for abuse of power. So on some level we like things to be as public as possible.

It goes back to the idea of open courts, open legislative sessions, etc where any citizen can attend and see everything that happened except for narrow provisions for controversially protected things likes military secrets.

We disagree on how much should be public and im certainly on the end of rhe spectrum that says make everything public (except for military secrets). But there are things that courts regularly make secret like names of minors, health information, social security numbers, etc.

How interesting, considering countries like Norway make tax return summaries public against one's name.

I find that very surprising too, but would consider it a (pretty extreme) outlier.

I find it baffling as an American, too. Stupid laws regarding public disclosure of campaign contributions has prevented me from donating anything at all, until I can find a candidate as uncontroversial as the Tooth Fairy. Great job, public guardians. Meanwhile, there are so many impediments against access of my medical data, God forbid hackers discover my blood pressure.

Disclosing a list of creditors and amount owed is important in bankruptcy cases because the data the debtor has may be incorrect or incomplete. Without a published list, creditors might have no practical way to dispute the records before funds are distributed.

Because it's a legal requirement when filing for bankruptcy protection to name the entities who have a claim on your assets (i.e. your creditors).

https://twitter.com/bitcoinfool/status/1579479999333076992

Not your keys, not your cheese.

Never, ever, ever forget this.

How did these people lose so much? I'm checking CEL.X and it's gone from about $6 to $1 in about a year.

Because Celsius collapsed and froze customer accounts. So people lost 100% of what they had in there.

Because they didn't -> https://twitter.com/bitcoinfool/status/1579479999333076992

Someone should do this for UST. Market went from $18ish billion to a few hundred million in less than a month.

Important lesson to learn. Not your keys. Not your crypto.

This really isn't the lesson. The lesson is that crypto is a scam and grift-ridden space.

Agree. Crypto is a total bullsh!t, and just waste of energy.

How do they have people's legal names?

I think it became public in one of the court filings

It is pretty straightforward to add it into your person constructor:

  Person.prototype.legalName = function () {
    return this.fullName.toUpperCase();
  }

javascript :(

Don't hate the player, hate the game: Atwood's Law: any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-principle-of-least-power/

Thankfully only $100 or so.

This is a prime example of why the Fahrenheit Scale is always the correct choice.

Eh, Kelvin is better.

Kelvin is just Celsius with an offset. Rankine FTW.

Edit: Background research for this snarky remark led me to this table. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversion_of_scales_of_temp...

A little OCD corner of my brain is very disappointed that there is no scale where absolute zero and the boiling and freezing point of water are all whole numbers. Or maybe that just means the universe is built in base 15 numbers.

I'm sure you could find some pressure where that is true for Kelvin.

Mad scientist: And that's why I siphoned off 10% of the earth's atmosphere in order to make a temperature scale where water still boils at 100°

The guy on the top was a BTC maxi from his holdings. Still didn’t get the no keys, no cheese idea.

No one can make a better case for why we need nanny states to protect people from their own folly than this list.

You can not outlaw greed.

So this list is a good case for holding your own Keys. Not your keys, not your coins.

What is a btc maxi?

A btc maxi or 'bitcoin maximalist' is a person who believes that Bitcoin is the only legitimate cryptocurrency worth holding.

https://vitalik.ca/general/2022/04/01/maximalist.html

I thought Vitalin Buterin had a really nice steelman of Bitcoin maximalism.

correction. only legitimate currency ;)

Sounds like some kind of feminine product.

If there were a programmed/finite amount of feminine products in the world they would be worth a lot more than BTC. You can't even use BTC for hygiene.

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