"Genesis is also embroiled in a high-profile dispute with Gemini, owned by the former Olympic rowers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, over the fate of $900m in assets that Gemini customers deposited with the lender."
I find it interesting that all the Twitter messages presented to me below this tweet are from accounts with names like “Pepe”, “End Wokeness” and Andrew Tate (how is he even posting?)
Anyway - I suppose they just group all the scumlords together to save disk or bandwidth or something idk.
Yes - cryptocurrency ideology has always been heavily skewed by right-wing ideology but that was also reinforced over the years as many of the people who were extreme enough to get kicked off of platforms like Patreon found alternative funding mechanisms. That of course doesn’t mean the average cryptocurrency person is embittered but the ones who are tend to be extremely vocal.
I only see some crypto and space/nature stuff. It usually has something to do with stuff you've previously viewed on twitter or whatever their algo thinks you do.
I think a big factor is what tweet's page you are looking at.
When I went to a Paul Graham tweet a couple days ago, what their algorithm gave me was full of right wing conspiracy theories, climate change denial, anti-vaccine stuff, one about Bill Gates' plan to depopulate the world, Jewish bankers control the world, and that kind of stuff.
The next tweet I went too was a John Carmack tweet. The algorithm recommended a tweet from Joe Biden, a Greta Thunberg tweet, a tweet about the Formosan clouded leopard being declared extinct in 2014 after no sightings for 40 years but then was spotted in 2019, an Edward Snowdon tweet, a tweet from the National Park Service, various humor tweets, a tweet about a lecture on how to build GPT from scratch, and a couple about business acquisition. There were right wing tweets from Glenn Beck and Scott Adams included, but they were not really political. There was also an Andrew Tate tweet that was just an inspirational statement (something along the lines of the man without a vision for the future will be stuck in the past).
I'm not in Twitter, but I clicked that link just to see what you're talking about. I must've scrolled 50 messages and saw a total of 2 pepes. That's it.
Maybe Twitter is showing you that based on your historical account behavior? :-)
Scammers going bankrupt is the absolute right thing to happen. As a whole, the crypto market emerges stronger, when the trash is taken out. It's also a learning experience for everyone to be skeptical about yield products. If you don't know where the yield comes from, you are the yield.
It actually has a nice use case as a breach canary. Have an unprotected wallet stored on your machine with some btc on it (like 200-500 USD worth), and if you notice a transfer out from there, you can be sure your machine is compromised. This method was recently posted by a fellow HN member, unfortunately I forgot where.
Ah, yes, $200-500 USD, an amount of money that surely no one will ever miss, and everyone would feel perfectly fine throwing away as a "breach canary".
Never mind that that's, what, about a week's wages for many people?
Right, because The Poors don't have lives to live that also care about things like privacy. They just exist in a horrifying life-or-death, dog-eat-dog scramble every day in their slums. (/s)
Seriously, can you be any more out of touch and dismissive of the concerns of people who haven't been making six figures ever since they left college?
The issue with linking to Twitter, is I have no idea:
1. What does Genesis do (a crypto exchange?)?
2. Is it in any way important?
3. Is this an unusual level level of bankruptcies happening in Crypto?
As far as I can tell this is just a crypto company going bankrupt. The US (the world!) is in an unprecedented post-COVID-shutdown amount of turmoil. The economy is roiling. NASDAQ is down 23% over 12 months. There is even war on the border of the world's largest nuclear power and everyone is still escalating it even after 12 months.
Unless we're drawing a pattern that bankruptcies in crypto are unusually high (which this twitter thread does not seem to be), it doesn't make sense to focus on Genesis. There are bigger issues out there.
I’ll probably write in more detail this coming week, but Genesis was the largest prime broker in crypto. It provided liquidity, credit, and important financial infrastructure to other members of the DGC group, including they Greyscale Bitcoin Trust. This made it one of the most systemically important institutions in crypto.
If you do not care about crypto, obviously, not terribly relevant. If one does, the degree of rot and malfeasance in systemically important institutions, and the many billions of dollars lost, and the likelihood that not mere fecklessness but actual crimes underlie many of the losses, are fairly important. (FTX was a large scale misappropriation of customer funds. Genesis, among many other crypto lenders, is currently under investigation for unregistered securities offerings, essentially on the theory that they sold a product which masqueraded as a bank deposit but was actually a structured product which blew up in a fairly predictable way. We have laws which prohibit doing that.)
> the degree of rot and malfeasance in systemically important institutions
These "systemically important institutions", as you label them, are peopled by feckless children. My small-town sanitation department presents itself with greater systemic institutional integrity.
The older I get, the more I respect sanitation departments, local DOTs, sewer/water authorities, and generally the quiet people who make modern life possible. They deserve a LOT more than these crypto scammers.
You could use that argument to dismiss about 99% of the stories that are submitted to HN. It’s fine if that’s what you want, but HN doesn’t claim to have only the biggest, most important news items at any given moment. It is just for reading interesting stuff that may or may not be tech related and may or may not be recent.
In the case of Gemini this is one of the latest big dominos to fall in the crypto industry, and since there are a few other entities linked to it one way or another it could signal a new set of bankruptcies are coming, if not a collapse in crypto altogether.
1. Genesis is/was one of the bigger "yield farming" (read: unsustainable Ponzi) companies out there. They're also one of the larger units of DCG, a crypto conglomerate with its fingers in all sorts of pies, so Genesis collapsing does not bode well for the rest of that group.
2. They're primarily notable for running the Earn program for Gemini, one of the larger and (by crypto standards) more reputable exchanges out there, run by the Winklevoss twins of Facebook fame. Lawsuits and regulatory investigations are already coming in thick.
3. 2022 saw the crypto boom rapidly turn to bust and the dust has nowhere near settled yet.
1. Genesis was not a yield-farming company, but a centralized lender. "Yield farming" refers the use of smartcontracts that generate yield [A].
Furthermore, yield farming is not inherently Ponzi. For example, there are overcollateralized lending protocols like Compound and Aave that allow you to put crypto in a smartcontract in return for a yield, usually < 3%. The returns come from a cut of the loan interest, where the loans are liquidated if the collateralization ratio gets too high.
I know, everyone rolls their eyes about the distinction, since they're all "Ponzis" (a term itself used imprecisely), but if you're going to make a comment specifically intended to fill in vital context, you should be more careful with the facts than a general opinion post.
GP is not unhappy about topics appearing on hn that he knows little about, it's specifically about using Twitter for something like that.
Conventional media would usually come with a short introduction for those completely new to the topic. The kind that tends to lead to considerable hilarity in those who don't need it. More traditional publications sometimes even seem to aim that short introduction at a knowledge level so low that it could only make sense to future generations finding a centuries old document or to some time traveler who skipped the last decades.
Hn, with its original source policy, will tend to avoid those without even trying. Even if I think that guideline is more about avoiding derivative journalistism than about avoiding journalism. At some point going deeper to some original source becomes a trade-off and Twitter links make that conveniently graspable.
This link will make you less informed, because it is adding narrative (crypto firms teetering!) to a bland story (the economic damage from the COVID response is serious). I think someone needs to be proactive and point out that this is useless. If this was Crypto News then sure.
This may as well be a Tweet telling us that Powered Brands went bankrupt. Whoever they are, I just searched for "bankruptcies 2023". If this one matters, then someone will have to write a blog post explaining why and we can all read that instead and learn something.
There's an upvote feature on HN exactly for burying stories that are irrelevant. If enough people have voted this to the front page, it simply means that enough people find it relevant. If it's not relevant to you, you can just ignore it.
2) I refuse to downvote anything except comments that include "I'm going to get downvoted for this...". The signal is too noisy to figure out what a downvote means.
Mostly schadenfreude; people are enjoying the widespread fraud in crypto and its promise of absurd returns from simply emitting vast quantities of CO2 gradually collapsing.
I've been waiting patiently for Bitcoin to collapse after watching what I assumed was the all time high in 2018. We've nearly dropped back to that now, still persistently above that price. I think I've made a profit in Monero.
In a jaw dropping set of peg defences, Tether still exists. You can buy and sell it for about $1 USD. The ecosystem has proven much more resilient against major players going bankrupt than the traditional financial system. Nobody has been bailed out by a government as far as I know.
I suspect the crypto market is less volatile than has historically been the case.
It might happen, but so far there are no signs that the crypto market is going to collapse. If anything, it looks quite healthy to me. I wish traditional stock markets were allowed to fall like this without the authorities stepping in to prop things up. Genesis going bankrupt is a non event until a good reason is found to believe otherwise.
> "The ecosystem has proven much more resilient against major players going bankrupt than the traditional financial system. Nobody has been bailed out by a government as far as I know."
That's because crypto, unlike the traditional financial system, doesn't interact at all with the real world of companies, cash flows, employees, their mortgages, etc.
There's no need for the government to step in to save a bunch of crypto traders who got into trouble for inventing tokens that leverage tokens that represent tokens, and so on.
This also explains why the crypto system looks resilient at this point. Retail crypto investors have mostly taken their losses and gone home. The remaining players can manipulate the market to make it look like what they want; it's a shadow play with very little real money left.
Even Peter Thiel sold all his Bitcoin in March 2022 while at the same time making conference appearances where he claimed its price is going to increase by 100x:
Again, pointing at one person doing something is profoundly weak evidence. Even a big player. The UK sold most of its gold reserves in 2000 and in hindsight looks rather silly.
One person is not the market, is certainly not a signal that the market is doing anything in particular. Figuring out the big picture by examining random stories is emotionally satisfying and not very clever. This is a good topic to argue about using aggregates and statistics. Not Twitter threads about ... things that really are predictable from the macroeconomic state of things. There are going to be bankruptcies or spectacles this year based on interest rates alone.
> I wish traditional stock markets were allowed to fall like this
The 3AC failure is basically showing us how contagion would have worked had the bailouts not happened. There were a bunch of outfits offering magic "X% return!" by taking your money and investing all of it in an even riskier outfit offering X+1% return, until the final one turned out to be a ponzi scheme.
I agree with not bailing out investment banking, but retail investors need to be covered and have a functional system. Which is why people like FTX need to be prosecuted for offering them fraudulent products.
> There is even war on the border of the world's largest nuclear power and everyone is still escalating it even after 12 months.
Wow this is some next level Russian propaganda.
Maybe you meant to say "The world's (supposedly) largest nuclear power invaded their neighbour in an all out war and are continuing to attempt to destroy them 12 months later".
The only one who escalated anything was Russia when they crossed that border. And they can deescalate by simply going back to their own country.
> HN is neither a place for your virtue signaling nor for pushing your political agenda.
The parent is the one who made a (misleading) political statement disguised as an innocuous comment, not I.
And what a political agenda, not wanting a democratic country to be destroyed by a dictatorship, especially when I'm currently less than 1000km from Ukraine...
Edit - also their comment is about world instability and very incorrectly attempts to identify the cause of the instability...
That's a joke BTW. It's the song "Jesus He Knows Me" by Genesis, about amassing large amounts of money by misleading honest people. At 2:59 in the official video is the quote "You can call my toll free number, 1-555-GEN-ESIS" which I find, as the overall lyrics, great.
Well, what has Hacker News become that one has to explain even the jokes..
HN is a fickle beast - sometimes jokes are well-received and upvoted, sometimes they’re misunderstood and downvoted, and sometimes they’re understood and downvoted out of spite. It’s hard to read the room sometimes, especially in a text-only medium where despite commenting and interacting a lot, many of us don’t actually really know each other
This whole thing reeks of a Ponzi Scheme to me. 10% APY and your deposit is safe? Yeah, no. Same think SBF did but he promised 8% a month, which is even more blatantly a Ponzi.
Now, did Cameron and Tyler explicitly know that this was a Ponzi Scheme? Honestly (and as much as I like to knock them) I don't think so....they have been on-board with crypto for a decade if not longer, so they were probably buying into their own hype a bit too much.
In short it's "because its new and cool and different".
If it were true the yield would be constantly variable, not fixed for a start. Lending rates would surely be more volatile than extant money markets given the risk. A component in a ponzi is rationalisation to the client regarding the magical money making sources.
They might have had a lot of loans out there, but the fact is they were lending to con men who were giving their clients similar yields in a game of musical chairs that left a lot of people with no place to sit when the music stopped.
At some point there are 3 options
1. these people do not understand the (not very complex) flow of financial markets
2. They do understand the flow and know they are in a limited lifespan scam and hope to personally skim off the top before it crashes (as was the case with luna/terra). The operators have limited risk compared with clients
3. they have become so enamored of the unfounded pseudo-economics of the industry that they believe it will all work out fine somehow (delusion). Mechanism TBD
You cannot offer 10% APY on a stablecoin like USDC that by definition does not increase in value or pay dividends without getting that 10% from somewhere else, namely other customers' funds.
Couldn’t you make the same argument about fiat currency? Both in regular finance and in defi there exist funds that do high stakes gambles with other people’s money.
Right but in “regular finance” you generally have a regulator who will slap you around if you advertise a product which promises 10% per year guaranteed. There are unregulated (or less regulated) things like hedge funds, but at that point you’re clearly in a fairly small market that most people cannot or do not participate in.
So what is niche, risky behaviour in traditional finance, seems to be the norm in the Wild West that is crypto.
To be clear none of this is defi, its all just traditional borrowing and lending. Aave pays 3% on USDT right now and lenders there are doing fine in defi
That's why i called it a "multi party ponzi". They had to know their largest borrowers were not above board. FTX promised large no risk returns for deposits in turn. Except FTX didn't even have the plausible excuse of lending money. One of the stablecoins promised an infinite money making circle of lending->profit. 3AC's trading model was to borrow at these high IRs and gamble it (i don't for a second believe they had a risk based trading strat) and hope it paid off and skim off the top. See my 3 possibilities above.
The company founders even had a flight plan to non extradition treaty countries. Where they now reside
"...This evening, Genesis Global Capital, LLC (Genesis) filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. This is a crucial step towards us being able to recover your assets."
So Gemini is helping depositors of Genesis, or depositors of Gemini? If depositors of Gemini, did the depositors know that their monies were going to Genesis when they deposited them into Gemini?
If a Gemini user opted into Gemini's Earn product they were notified that any Earn deposits were going to Genesis.
You can argue those warnings weren't big enough or obvious enough, but it was spelled out in various places that Earn deposits were not held by Gemini, but sent to third parties (in this case Genesis being the only third party in the program).
The text of the first tweet reads:
"This evening, Genesis Global Capital, LLC (Genesis) filed for bankruptcy under Chapter 11. This is a crucial step towards us being able to recover your assets."
Hopefully that helps clear up which "Genesis" this concerns since the title was ambiguous or maybe save somebody a click to twitter
For those of you missing this, I'm assuming this is a reference to the song "Another Day in Paradise" by Phil Collins (who was the front-man in the band Genesis).
Thanks, I had missed at first. After I realised it also made me think about a famous movie scene [1] involving a financial guy and the Genesis lead singer. Wonder if the founders of this company had that in mind when they set it up.
As a "crypto skeptic", no it's not a paradise. People buying this were still fooled and lost money, people who built this are having their work erased. You can disapprove of a technological/social trend and still feel empathy for the people who are negatively affected.
I have no doubt they "knew" it was coming. It takes a combination of committed greed, delusion, gullibility, and short-sightedness to still keep going despite that. That these traits are common enough for this phenomenon to achieve such scale is what's worrying me.
Git is a blockchain in the same manner that a smoke detector (which utilises radioactive isotopes) is the bomb that dropped on Hiroshima. Except git (2005) -and Perforce (1995), which it was designed to replace - also happen to predate Bitcoin (2009) and Hashcash (2002).
“See? I’m vindicated! With this collapse, Bitcoin is all the way down to 100x what it was when I first heard about it and correctly predicted its imminent demise.”
As far as I'm aware, the service offered by Gemini that used Genesis was a difficult separate service to their exchange.
Gemini customers put their own money into the 'earn' program, and if it was anything like Celsius, there's a different set of Customer Agreements for different services.
Ie. Gemini didn't 'funnel' any funds, customers' choose whether their funds were put.
I doubt Gemini has anything at risk beyond reputational damage, but they have to make a fight on behalf of their customers to mitigate the reputational damage.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-64343377
And wrt the tweeter:
"Genesis is also embroiled in a high-profile dispute with Gemini, owned by the former Olympic rowers Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, over the fate of $900m in assets that Gemini customers deposited with the lender."