Fun fact, I used to work across from their office for Winklevoss Capital Management in manhattan circa 2016, roughly at floor parity down on 24th, so I'd see a couple Winklevi running around from time to time over there.
Totally not relevant to anything here so I understand if this gets downvoted, but fun anecdote.
An update every Friday about the Gemini + Genesis + DCG legal proceedings can be followed here https://www.gemini.com/earn . TLDR: everything gets punted to the next month, although October 2023 might be when the action heats up.
Words of warning for anyone choosing to dabble in the cryptocurrency space - anything that you “have” on an exchange account is owned by the owner of the exchange, not you.
This is because whoever knows the private key to a crypto wallet is the owner of the funds. Usually, exchanges don’t give you access to the private key(s). And even if they did give you access, it’s still not safe because there’s nothing stopping them from moving the funds to a different account without your knowledge.
I wouldn’t recommend buying crypto unless you at least have a decent understanding of public/private key crypto
Another word of warning - don't take the advice of anyone who claims to know what they're talking about. I remember listening to a podcast where Kevin Rose said that people sitting with crypto in wallets were idiots when they can put it in BlockFi and earn interest at no risk. I was amazed. It seemed so obvious. I put my money in BlockFi and after a few weeks fortunately changed my mind. It seemed too easy. BlockFi are currently going through bankruptcy proceedings.
After dabbling in the technical side, I decided to wind down the wallet files that I probably wouldn't do a good job of securely storing and put everything in the biggest exchange instead.
10 years later, I'm still waiting on MtGox bankruptcy proceedings :o)
Everyone I know who had funds on MtGox at the time of bankruptcy, ended up selling their claim (most to Fortress), for a pretty good amount, in fact more in USD than what their BTCs were worth at the time of bankruptcy
Who ended up better off? The claim seller or claim buyer?
(Obviously there’s an element of risk and discounting of future returns, but I’m sure the claims buyers know what they’re doing. They’re not in the business of taking Ls)
If the people that sold needed the money, they are for sure better off, even if they got less money than waiting
Additionally, it’s impossible to know if they invested it in something that gave them better returns than waiting
Fortress might know what they are doing, but for sure they can’t exactly predict the price of BTC or that there would be a pandemic and the behavior of the markets during the pandemic
Potentially someone that sold in late 2019 and put their money into TSLA, NVIDIA or even Moderna, might have made more money than and unknown figure they could get when the bankruptcy proceedings finally pay out. If they exit(ed) the market at the right time
I think it’s a good trade for both sides, no need to have a winner and a loser
Sure, but you're assuming that the claim seller knew more about future average returns than the buyer. Chances are they didn't, or even if they did, took too little after the buyer's commission and still lost out.
But hey, sometimes the hedge fund has a better job acquiring "dumb" money and pays more than claims are worth just so they can get their cut.
I don't really understand Japanese bankruptcy law, but the final notice I saw was that the amount of funds missing is insignificant. My guess is that something about the legal system there is allowing them to delay paying out the funds more or less indefinitely.
Naw, kinda the opposite. They “found” a significant amount of missing bitcoin. Then bitcoin skyrocketed in value.
Technically the creditors losses are “crystallized” at the time of bankruptcy and if the organization wanted to push it, could make the creditors whole and end up with the remaining value.
Sometimes this happens in real life where equity holders end up getting some payments post-bankruptcy liquidation.
As I understand it, mtgox is going to go through a procedure to pay out the excess to the creditors anyway, which probably further delayed things.
Many bankruptcies take a significant period of time. Even Bernie Madoff creditors continue to receive distributions from the estate.
Crypto remains utter gibberish. There are no fundamentals. Supply and demand are both pure imagination. It exists in a market of pure herd mentality. It was created as currency and never as an investment asset. Any gains or losses in value are purely coincidental.
Yup. If you read Bitcoins white paper again, you realize that it proposes a micro transaction system for the web. And it has failed absolutely as that.
And without a natural demand for it, the speculation around it is gibberish. It is waiting for a future that nobody, not even the people that have bought in, is working for. Since how can people HODL a "currency", and at the same time that currency attain status as a common mean of exchange? And it's usage as a hedge or value conservation is even more laughable. During an economic crisis, people are looking for work, for ways of putting food on the table. Assets like gold maintain their value due to the natural demand from jewelry and industry. Nobody is looking for internet funny money during a crisis. If you look at it's price history graph, it basically follows the stock market hype and fear periods, without any of the fundamentals of companies actually producing value that sustains stocks in the long run.
If you look at criticism from the early days of bitcoin, the economic perspective was their model would instantly breed deflation. That's essentially what's happened. A currency that massively increases in value is the exact opposite of what you ever want to happen to a currency.
It has not failed for web microtransactions -- goin just fine for darkweb hosting, drugs, and other shadyness. admittedly its mostly Monero at this point...
Surely you see /some/ non-epsilon value to /someone/ in non-interdictable transactions and an "asset" that you actually have to put me through thermo-rectal cryptanalysis to get your hands on.
You may not think particularly highly of ISIL or North Korea, but they still bid in the global marketplace! North Korean counterfeit 100's are of /very/ high quality and accepted globally.
Alls I'm saying is that Markowitz' portfolio diversification strategy is still viable.
It's not good at anything. As a currency it's completely broken, who wants a currency that fluctuates to this extent and which may fold overnight? Simultaneously, outside of a couple explosive events which I'd argue will never repeat, it's a terrible investment. That's not even touching the moral ambiguity of a "currency" being used largely by some of the worst state and private actors in the world.
What crypto people want to mean by "regulate it", and what everyone else means, are unrelated.
Crypto people want it to mean, "We continue to do what we want to do, but claim to follow regulations." Meanwhile everyone else means, "You follow KYC and AML regulations properly. So you shut down criminals. Can reverse transactions when ordered by a bank. And have sufficient knowledge of who you're dealing with to help law enforcement in a practical manner."
Crypto people respond, "But once it is cryptographically signed on the blockchain, it is final! And wallets are designed to be anonymous! We want to be regulated, with regulations that make sense for crypto!"
Sorry crypto. You can't have your cake and eat it too. Right now you're an attractive nuisance for criminal enterprises. There is no particular reason why society should want crypto to be part of the financial system. There are good reasons to shut down crimes like ransomware.
ah, so what we need are another self serving set of capitalists to convince Congress to create taxpayer funded insurance to cover mismanaged businesses, just like in 1933, to give LambdaComplex the assurance they need to move the goal post further
haven't seen that proposed yet, but stranger things have happened regarding what the FDIC covers
Maybe in the crypto sense but what about the legal sense? Are there regulations in this area? I know regulations are light in the crypto world so it's a genuine question.
Like my bank has my money as well. If possession is all that matters then they would own it too. But luckily there are laws that say that they don't and a bank CEO that withdraws customer funds before a bank collapse is going straight to prison.
Except bank have deposit protection scheme, so whatever happens you're covered thanks to the fact that they proved to respect a framework of regulations in order to make deposits covered
You are correct. I'd like to add, though--this is a soft cap. It's $250,000 per bank, per ownership category. You are insured up to $250,000 for each of the ownership categories at a single bank.
These are the ownership categories:
-Single accounts (owned by one person).
-Joint accounts (owned by more than one person).
-Certain retirement accounts, including IRAs.
-Revocable trust accounts.
-Irrevocable trust accounts.
-Corporation, partnership and unincorporated association accounts.
-Employee benefit plan accounts.
-Government accounts.
If you were to open a single account at Wells Fargo with 250k in it, you can also open a joint account with 250k and have it insured. Then, you can go to Bank of America and do that same thing.
Also, I'm not sure if America has ever enforced the cap, but it's safer to keep it under 250k per ownership category.
>This is because whoever knows the private key to a crypto wallet is the owner of the funds.
Even better, funds don't have to exist to show them on a screen. Numerous exchanges collapsed because the stated funds weren't in the exchange in the first place and what the traders actually traded was numbers in a MySQL database when the actual funds they sent to the exchanges were being bet on somewhere else.
The sad reality is, for most people in the trade crypto assets are whatever the screen says.
Are you thinking of Genesis? I was talking about Gemini, the exchange owned by the Winklevoss twins. It has not collapsed. (Disclosure: I am an active user.)
> We are disappointed that the @nypost has chosen to recklessly publish a completely misleading story about the Gemini Earn program. Everything the Post alleges in its story is the exact opposite. The $282 million that was withdrawn from Genesis in August 2022 was in fact Earn users’ money. It was not Gemini corporate funds and it was not the personal funds of our Founders @cameron and @tyler or their investment firm @winklevosscap.
Lots of bad information in this thread, let me help clear it up:
- Gemini is based in New York and is regulated by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Gemini was granted a charter to operate a trust under the NYSDFS.
- Gemini is still alive and operating, regular crypto and cash in the Gemini exchange can still be withdrawn by users. Users that were participating in Gemini's Earn program lent their money to Genesis, which went belly-up, and they are now creditors of Genesis.
Users opted-in to loan their money out. Sometimes you loan money and it doesn't get paid back, that's life. The real question of Gemini's legal trouble comes down to two things:
- Did Gemini make it clear to customers that money they put in Earn was lent to counterparties that may not pay them back?
- Did Gemini do proper due diligence on behalf of customers, and did they continue to allow deposits into Earn even if they had reason to believe Genesis was insolvent?
The reason the 280M withdrawal is news is that it may indicate they knew Genesis was insolvent before they closed the Earn program. However, the twins claim it was Earn customer money that they withdrew, in which case it may be a good thing (managing risk if they suspected Genesis insolvency). We don't know for certain whose money it was at this point, all we know is that 280M was withdrawn, everything else is speculation.
I'm from the same town as these guys and have known about them since the Facebook days. Their actions here seem quite par the course, and don't surprise me in the least.
you don't need a regulation to look around when you’re at an ATM, cover your PIN number, and double check that you’re logged out, and check your wallet’s presence over and over again, none of the many regulations helped here and there are many similarities: people learned the best practices with new technology and followed them
maybe one day you'll realize thats also why you "don't trust crypto people"
in the late 90s most broad media references to "computers" were about the viruses and things that went wrong, those newly introduced problems didn't go away and only have increased in frequency and amplitude, we just choose not to make international headlines about them anymore and talk more about what's being developed and working as intended
in my area and circles of luddites, most of the skepticism of computers was based on the limited headlines they saw on mainstream news
this dictated whether they wanted to spend any energy learning that a different reality was also happening and possible, this dictated whether they wanted to invest their resources into personal computers or upgrades
you can argue the empirical quantity of my experience, it is also the same behavior described about people averse to crypto: the negative sentiment and actions they are bombarded with doesnt compel them to be interested in seeking a different reality
These guys could have bought an island and retired in luxury with all that FB money. Instead they jumped on the crypto train. I wonder if they regret this path yet?
They could have, but there's a larger issue here - they are from one of the wealthiest towns in the entire country and while yes, they could have gone off and focused on other things after the FB trial (and to be fair, they did - they won rowing medals at the 2008 Olympics), but when you're surrounded by absurd amounts of money, all of a sudden a few hundred million isn't really all that much, as crazy as it is to say. They wanted more, because they were in an environment where someone calling it a day, no matter how much they made, is just unheard of and looked down upon.
Source: I too am from their hometown. I know billionaires who keep working because they feel they don't have enough. A gentleman who lived down the street from me has grossed probably close to half a billion in his career (maybe more), yet still goes to work every day. Granted, he has kids to feed, and the Winkelvii don't, but the song remains the same. People just want more, and sometimes they get used to a lavish lifestyle, and can't quit the grind because they like the lifestyle it brings....when they have the time to enjoy it.
That’s why as a well paid IC I don’t seek or envy that kind of money. Most people in America aren’t able to live comfortably (which IMO comes when you can do any reasonable thing without worrying about the price). But once you can what good is more money?
I think this is a common concept that people struggle to grasp, so let me offer a perspective. Those of us who have relatives who lived during the Second World War may have heard about famine, starving, and the like. But what you might have missed is that some of the people that lived through it look at food completely differently. There's no amount of food you can have at home where it feels enough, no pantry stocked well enough, because they remember, if the times get bad, they can get real bad. It needn't make logical sense, it's what they've instinctually learned. Money can work much the same way. If you come from a place of poverty then it can often be the case that there's no amount of money you can have in the bank that feels safe enough. This is of course only one way people can internalize concepts like this, peer pressure, family expectations, etc can all lead to similar ideas.
It does, if you actually bother to read the full comment. A lack of something isn't the only way these emotions form, like any arguably broken emotion the sources can be numerous.
You don't believe me? You might have a relative who experienced hard times, and sure, that affects you, I get it. But you've or they have probably not seen what the Winklevoss twins have, or what I have.
You weren't raised in Greenwich Connecticut where you were an elite rower and your parents were Ivy League professors. Cam and Ty's parents were very well off, and their sons went to a fabulously expensive private prep school ($30k per person per year, could be a lot more actually) in a fabulously wealthy town. The "I might not have enough" mentality is flipped, and it becomes an arms race of "I have enough, but my neighbor has much more" and thus forms an inherently competitive aspect to life, and worse, to making money. You've got a few hundred million? Cool story bro, that's pauper shit, my friend's got a billion. You've got a billion? Good for you, the guy down the street has 5 billion. Where the twins (and I) are from, you don't get admiration for getting that money, you get a target on your back, and everyone wants to outdo you. THAT is the world those guys grew up in (I did too). Nobody just says "wow, I made a billion dollars, time for me to go buy a place on some remote island or on the beach and just chill out with my family and those closest to me", they say "fuck, I got a billion but this asshole in my church just made 2 billion, and I want to beat him".
Nobody is content, which is stunning to me. If I ever get that kind of money, I'm buying a shack in the mountains, and a hut on the beach, putting a bit in a trust for my nephew, and donating the rest. Fuck the rat race.
Your inability to generalize a concept from one example onwards is stunning. Everyone's personality is a function of their surroundings. Just like misled behavior can stem from being desolately poor it can stem from social pressure, competitive nature, unmet wants and needs and so on. Which I already pointed out twice.
You say "they like the lifestyle it brings", but that feels like a euphamism. Cannibalism is a lifestyle some might not want to give up, if they're into that. When your conspicuous consumption is on the scale of peoples' whole livelihoods just winking out of existence, it's clearly not about anything material anymore. I'd suggest rather they are addicted to the power and status, to having people fawn and grovel, 24/7. Their careers are likely the place they get to exercise power the most, so it makes sense to keep "working" well past your material needs to keep your lording-over-people addiction sated.
I mean, your consumption is on the scale of people’s whole livelihoods, as soon as you leave a developed country. Are you just addicted to having people grovel? Or is it possible that people with a different baseline and experience have a different baseline and experience?
I don’t understand, especially on an SV-dominant board, this “anyone who has more than me is necessarily evil” mentality.
You’re purposely muddying the waters. These people don’t just have “more than me”. They have enough money to ensure their entire family will be set for life for generations if they were merely more modest.
They could do something good for humanity or something. But they don’t. This correctly raises eye brows and makes people question their motives.
And you have the same, compared to most of the continent of Africa. It just feels like blame-shifting, in GP’s frame.
Most folks on this board have vastly more wealth than I do - that doesn’t make them/you bad people, even if they/you pursue that raise and promotion at work. I dunno, I just think this recent tendency to call anyone with “more” inherently evil as a result (or to dog whistle at evil) is thoughtless, trite nonsense.
Comparing a middle class existence in a western country to average Africans is nonsense. What should I do with that information? Sell all my assets and move to Africa to try and live like a king? What's the point of this comparison? I live in a western country, my friends, family and responsibilities are here. That's what we have to navigate.
I'm not saying trying to be rich is bad. I want to be rich. But for most people, if you gave them enough money to never have to work again, but they would be permanently middle class, they would take it. I am very jealous of people that can do that. But eventually jealousy turns to suspicion. These people have enough money for their families and many generations after them to be better than middle class comfortable and they are doing shady things to acquire more wealth?
>These people don’t just have “more than me”. They have enough money to ensure their entire family will be set for life for generations if they were merely more modest.
This is my point. If someone's got under 10 million, and a large family, sure, keep working, that 10 million will be gone in a generation if not properly managed.
Someone's got 100, 200, 300 million, has no family to speak of or whatever? Dude, take a fucking break and live a little. Do some good for your community, your neighbors, your friends, etc.
You've got over half a billion, just stop - you've won capitalism. Congratulations. Sleep in. Go take a walk in the woods. Cook yourself a meal. Read a book. Just stop slaving away, you're not going to really make a difference in anyone's lives but your own if you don't stop and look around you.
> I mean, your consumption is on the scale of people’s whole livelihoods.
No, and particularly not my "conspicuous consumption" which is what I said.
> this “anyone who has more than me is necessarily evil” mentality.
That's not my mentality. I didn't say necessarily evil or even evil.
I'm postulating on the motivations of people who have access to every material comfort they could ever want, but still want 1000x that because someone else has 100x that. I'm nothing like them, nor the people in my wealth range that seem to have similar motivations --splurging on status signaling, doing anything to get more. It's irrelevant that I am richer than 3rd world people.
> No, and particularly not my "conspicuous consumption" which is what I said.
I mean, it is. There are multitudes in rural Asia and Africa who don’t have a fraction of a fraction of what you have and would regard most of your consumption as “conspicuous”.
And you may not have said the word “evil”, but your intent was quite clear. I’m suggesting that, as I said, your baseline for what someone has, and their baseline for it, are inherently different, and that ascribing motive to that doesn’t make sense.
Mostly, I think that pretending your ostentatious wealth is actually totally ok to flaunt, just because it’s yours and you don’t care about the people who see it as flaunting and ostentatious, is a moral relative, just like the one you’re suggesting is so bad.
