I've been rooting for them to fail ever since the first crypto meltdown in 2013 when they went dark for a week or two and didn't answer to anybody or anything.
And then you mentioned it here and got shouted down. Even had a topic changed by the mods because I dare mentioned it was a YC startup at the time.
Generally, this has been a pretty terrible year across the board for Fintech.
A number of stocks are down by over 80%, when the S&P 500 was down about 22%.
The standout fintech stock is DAVE, which is down an amazing 97%!
A common argument for why it is happening is that investors are moving to safer stocks, as interest rates rise. But this is only partially true: a bunch of the businesses are genuinely doing worse. Eg, Coinbase's revenue is down 27% QoQ, Upstart revenue is down 30% QoQ, Affirm revenue is flat and no longer growing.
And most of the sector is super unprofitable, burning a ton of money. Lemonade's margins are -120%.
A lot of spending in fintech was fueled by low interest rates. So there is kind of a trifecta forming to lower crypto equity prices caused by higher interest rates:
1. The risk-free return is higher, which lowers the value of risky assets broadly.
2. The increased cost of borrowing money makes it more expensive to run a cash-flow negative business.
3. Part of the spending in crypto was driven by speculation, which was a side-effect of free money.
Unpopular opinion: An "alternative" currency backed by nothing of value whose only value is determined by expending great amounts of electricity is immoral and should be illegal (as they harm the planet and divert resources away from productive uses). NFTs are equally worthless virtual pointers.
Since they're not accepted ubiquitously at points-of-sale, their de-facto uses are money laundering and pure speculation.
Coinbase’s failure would be an unmitigated good for the goals of cryptocurrency. Hopefully after the FTX fiasco, USG will follow PRC with new bans every few months. This will force US consumers to learn how to trade p2p similar to their compatriots in the other global power instead of relying on centralized exchanges that are violating the principle not self custody.
Google it. There’s lots of sites and Reddit has guides. You can use cash in person, bank transfers, Zelle, PayPal, money orders, gift cards and more.
>guarantees
Just like any normal market. The counter parties have an incentive to be honest to maintain reputation and repeat business. Avoid counter parties that don’t have this incentive
>day traders
Dex are decent and fast with deep liquidity on both eth and bsc. For lower cost trades, zk proofs. Currently the deepest is dydx.
There are p2p exchanges where the role the exchange plays is simply to connect two traders (potentially with an escrow). The exchange itself holds no money. This Does hurt daytraders, who must now wait for transaction verification blocks and such, plus chain transaction costs, plus escrow fees
Cold storage/cold wallet, which stores your crypto offline. Through this way the digital wallet is stored on a platform not connected to the internet, thereby protecting the wallet from unauthorized access, cyber hacks, and other vulnerabilities that a system connected to the internet is susceptible to.
One way to do cold storage is through a hardware wallet like Ledger or TREZOR. This is probably the best option in terms of convenience and ease of use.
A hardware wallet uses an offline device or smartcard to generate private keys offline. The Ledger USB Wallet is an example of a hardware wallet that uses a smartcard to secure private keys. The device looks and functions like a USB drive; a computer and a Chrome-based app are required to store the private keys offline. You can use anything from a standard USB storage drive to an advanced device with a battery, Bluetooth, software, and other features.
Other methods are sound wallets, paper wallets, offline software wallets, or deep cold storage.
There's this trick that gives you guaranteed protection against institutional loss of up to USD 250,000. There are number of startups and also established orgs that provide this service. You'll probably find a brick & mortar storefront right in your neighbourhood where you can deposit your crypto in their wallet in-person! You'll find that they're sometimes called accounts instead wallets, and they may require you to first convert your coins to this funny system called fiat, but that's just a small technical hurdle.
And then you mentioned it here and got shouted down. Even had a topic changed by the mods because I dare mentioned it was a YC startup at the time.
Never went back to crypto after that.