Agreed. “The government does it, why can’t we?” is just being deliberately naive. In the hands of the U.S. government it’s monetary policy - in mine it’s literally a scam.
There’s a fascinating lesson and wake-call in monetary theory and philosophy somewhere here for us, but I’m not sure anybody wants to learn it.
That's what I meant by different scale; not in terms of total valuation. Their celsius bucks clearly do not carry the backing of taxation, land, government, or military.
I believe Celsius was lending out staked crypto and paying in their Celsius tokens as a form of "interest" though its unclear what if anything was backing the Celsius token (or if new tokens were simply minted).
The leant stake crypto paid interest and they then used 20% of the returns to fund their R&D and 80% to pay back stake owners. It seems if you accepted Celsius tokens rather than other denominations the payout would be higher.
It's not clear what caused their bankruptcy though; I can only imagine that they had counterparty risk in the people they had leant their tokens to.
There’s a fascinating lesson and wake-call in monetary theory and philosophy somewhere here for us, but I’m not sure anybody wants to learn it.