Bitcoin

[Dorvil Barranis]

I need someone to explain the Luna debacle and how 250M coins turned into 6T.

Ponzi schemes always run their course eventually, whoever is still in is left holding the bag.

That is my crypto-hater take.

[rufuske]

I found this:

https://www.todayintabs.com/p/unstable?s=r

What’s a stablecoin?

Say you have a lot of crypto beanies, and your job is to make more by shuffling them around between different immutable spreadsheets. The crypto beanie values go up and down wildly, and sometimes you just want to have a little nap without getting “rekt while you sleep” as Liz Lopatto put it. You could sell your beanies for U.S. government dollars, but crypto is a river full of piranhas where every little fishie takes a bite out of you on every transaction. Even worse, getting real cash out of the Scamazon River also involves “know your customer” laws, where you have to “prove” you “didn’t steal all these beanies” etc., so it can be some combination of expensive, slow, and illegal.

To solve this problem, and continue their speed-run of the history of financial fraud, crypto’s brilliant grift engineers invented the “stablecoin.“ In theory, this is a crypto coin whose value is equal (or “pegged”) to a government currency. That way instead of dragging your bloody skeleton out of the river through all the voracious crypto piranhas and regulators, you can just trade your volatile beanies for these happy stable beanies, where they sit being quietly equal to vile fiat dollars while you snooze.

Nice. So how do you make a coin that’s always worth a dollar?

The obvious way to make a stablecoin would be to get a whole lot of dollars in a pile, lock them up, and issue one stable beanie per dollar. So the tokens are just a database entry that says “this represents one dollar, which I definitely have.” That’s also what “actual U.S. dollars” are now, so this is pretty uncontroversial. The second biggest stablecoin is called USDC, and it claims to be “fully backed by cash and short-dated U.S. government obligations, so that it is always redeemable 1:1 for U.S. dollars.” I.e. more or less “a big pile of real money,” without getting into the hairy question of what even is money, anyway.

That seems expensive though

There’s about $50 billion worth of USDC out there, so backing it all with real money is expensive as heck.1 What if instead of “a big pile of money,” you could back a stablecoin with “a big pile of other stuff that’s kind of like money?” That’s the approach of Tether, which is the biggest stablecoin, with over $80 billion circulating. Tether is backed by real money in the sense that when you ask what it’s backed by they say “real money” and when you request that they show you the money they say “lol no.”

So a stablecoin is nothing else than a big bubble of some fiat currency but mostly other crypto beanies. In Jita any sane trader would call it a scam.

Hush, some of us paid real money for advertising on youtube, reddit, etc. But pretty much.

If you have a weekend to waste google tether (USDT) and how it went from being currency backed by solid asset over time through changes towards being bond based. As in acting as an another layer to dump subprimes with a low cost value. Imagine what could have ended there. Here's a sesame street hint: capital E. Among other things. Hell, here's a wikipedia article that doesn't go into specifics but you get the outlook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tether_(cryptocurrency).

Crypto is currently basically Ponzi's and Madoff's wet dream combined. All the possibilities, none of the oversight. And in effect it does a huge damage and disservice towards technology that is quite brilliant and has so many real use cases that would benefit everyone. Transparent, instantly visible contracts? fuck that, let's get some copy paste gangsta monkey faces going. Because having exchanges run on instant settlements breaks all the infinite money glitches abusing T+x via derivatives and using positions as collateral, to take another positions to use as collateral to take another positions to use as a collateral to take another positions to use as collateral to take another positions...etc And be Goldman, JP Morgan etc bundle previous into swaps, have Moody's, Ernst & Young, Fitch etc label them AAA+ and dump them onto unsuspecting bagholders. And then watch the fireworks. Because fuck Credit Suisse, noone like swiss and their cheeses smell.

[VARRAKK]

I need someone to explain the Luna debacle and how 250M coins turned into 6T.

[Overspark]

I need someone to explain the Luna debacle and how 250M coins turned into 6T.

Money laundering/tax evasion/cooking books by big banks. All the big players have their biggest profits from shifting cartel, oligarch etc money. All the 'scandals' and resulted fines etc are just a cost of doing bussiness. Give me a name of a big player and I will tell you who it launders money for. Or just google past cases.

Also wide coin/nft crash is happening because big players realized 'meme stonks' give them all the volatility they need and still won't be persecuted by taking competing positions, because official narrative is it's all caused by retail rushes to both sell and buy. And those still make for better collateral or swap ingredients.

You just witnessed how pump and dump looks like. Specifically Coinbase for example was never buying coins bought by retail traders. These were all for all intent and purposes glorified CFDs. So some time before crash Joe Average bought Luna on Coinbase but there was no transaction on block chain. Coinbase simple showed he has them because trust me bro. Then you dump the whole thing into the ground and count on panicked Joe Average closing his position at a loss, because what else he's going to do? It's purely speculative commodity, it's not like it's going to pick up value back again when sentiment changes. And then you pocket the difference. And that's how you drain 'poors, uneducated retail' from what they have.

It's kind of impressive how absolutely nothing in this post has anything to do with the actual Luna debacle.

Short version:
- someone or a group of someones with VERY deep pockets suddenly started selling off hundreds of millions of dollars worth of UST
- when the value of UST dropped and it lost it's 1:1 peg with US dollars people started panicking and a bank run started
- people swapping UST into LUNA automatically caused the LUNA chain to mint new LUNA because it was designed to work this way (algorithm tried to stabilise the value of UST but couldn't keep up)
- it all spiralled out of control leaving the whole LUNA chain and everything on it essentially worthless
- all other crypto got hit by knock-on effects and panic, but has mostly stabilised (at a lower price point) by now

Watch the video linked above, it goes into far more detail.

[Lilalaunebör]

So from the facts i have gathered so far: Luna/Terra guaranteed 20% returns via something called Anchor. They did this by covering the difference between market gains by injecting made up money from a made up reserve fund.

Terra also claimed to be pegged 1:1 to USD.

Thats all I needed to hear. How is that not an obvious classic Ponzi scheme: Offer high returns, enouraging buy-ins, cover your payouts with new deposits, siphon a little off the top. When enough people attempted to withdraw their deposits, the gaping hole became obvious and a classic bank run happened.

One can dress it in as much cryptobro algo-speak as one wishes, that is practically the oldest scam in the book.

[August]

The GOATs. Jita scammers have nothing on them.

Both South Korean. No racism pls.

[Lachesis VII]

So from the facts i have gathered so far: Luna/Terra guaranteed 20% returns via something called Anchor. They did this by covering the difference between market gains by injecting made up money from a made up reserve fund.

Terra also claimed to be pegged 1:1 to USD.

Thats all I needed to hear. How is that not an obvious classic Ponzi scheme: Offer high returns, enouraging buy-ins, cover your payouts with new deposits, siphon a little off the top. When enough people attempted to withdraw their deposits, the gaping hole became obvious and a classic bank run happened.

One can dress it in as much cryptobro algo-speak as one wishes, that is practically the oldest scam in the book.

That’s exactly what it is.

And it’s the oldest scam in the book because people keep falling for it.

[Nordstern]

Anything "pegged" to a currency and not simply using that currency is fraudulent, whether it's crypto or the Argentinian dollar.

[Lachesis VII]

Anything "pegged" to a currency and not simply using that currency is fraudulent, whether it's crypto or the Argentinian dollar.

I'm glad we can agree that the gold standard was a scam.

[Hel OWeen]

I need someone to explain the Luna debacle and how 250M coins turned into 6T.

[rufuske]

I need someone to explain the Luna debacle and how 250M coins turned into 6T.

Money laundering/tax evasion/cooking books by big banks. All the big players have their biggest profits from shifting cartel, oligarch etc money. All the 'scandals' and resulted fines etc are just a cost of doing bussiness. Give me a name of a big player and I will tell you who it launders money for. Or just google past cases.

Also wide coin/nft crash is happening because big players realized 'meme stonks' give them all the volatility they need and still won't be persecuted by taking competing positions, because official narrative is it's all caused by retail rushes to both sell and buy. And those still make for better collateral or swap ingredients.

You just witnessed how pump and dump looks like. Specifically Coinbase for example was never buying coins bought by retail traders. These were all for all intent and purposes glorified CFDs. So some time before crash Joe Average bought Luna on Coinbase but there was no transaction on block chain. Coinbase simple showed he has them because trust me bro. Then you dump the whole thing into the ground and count on panicked Joe Average closing his position at a loss, because what else he's going to do? It's purely speculative commodity, it's not like it's going to pick up value back again when sentiment changes. And then you pocket the difference. And that's how you drain 'poors, uneducated retail' from what they have.

It's kind of impressive how absolutely nothing in this post has anything to do with the actual Luna debacle. R

Short version:
- someone or a group of someones with VERY deep pockets suddenly started selling off hundreds of millions of dollars worth of UST

That's it. Rest is just reaction and consequences of aforementioned. Also expect more of similar occurrences happening in the coming months.

[rufuske]

So from the facts i have gathered so far: Luna/Terra guaranteed 20% returns via something called Anchor. They did this by covering the difference between market gains by injecting made up money from a made up reserve fund.

Terra also claimed to be pegged 1:1 to USD.

Thats all I needed to hear. How is that not an obvious classic Ponzi scheme: Offer high returns, enouraging buy-ins, cover your payouts with new deposits, siphon a little off the top. When enough people attempted to withdraw their deposits, the gaping hole became obvious and a classic bank run happened.

One can dress it in as much cryptobro algo-speak as one wishes, that is practically the oldest scam in the book.

That’s exactly what it is.

And it’s the oldest scam in the book because people keep falling for it.

Financial illiteracy is still rampant.

[Overspark]

Short version:
- someone or a group of someones with VERY deep pockets suddenly started selling off hundreds of millions of dollars worth of UST

That's it. Rest is just reaction and consequences of aforementioned. Also expect more of similar occurrences happening in the coming months.

Not like LUNA/UST though, that was the only wildly popular algorithmic stablecoin. Other stablecoins (regardless of how dependable they actually are) stood up well to the resulting selling panic. Will other shit happen? Of course, rugpulls and other scams are a constant occurrence once you verge into shitcoin territory. And there is definitely some doubt as to how dependable the big exchanges actually are, but that has little to do with the underlying crypto. Those are very different from the LUNA debacle though, that set of circumstances was quite unique.

[Nordstern]

Bitcoin down 16% in a day. DeFi enthusiasts wanting an FDIC. Exchanges halting withdrawals to preserve their future withdrawal obligations.

Cryptobros are learning about real finance, the hard way.

[Cosmin]

Bitcoin down 16% in a day.

[Hel OWeen]

This was posted last Friday.

[Overspark]

Bitcoin is on sale guys, get it while it's hot!

[August]

If only I could work at a crypto hedge fund. The volatility is like nothing else and the returns must be insane, mama mia.