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Yea, then you lose all your money to cryptobros instead of traditional finance bros. Voyager & Celsius halted all withdrawals within the last month. You can cla

Yea, then you lose all your money to cryptobros instead of traditional finance bros. Voyager & Celsius halted all withdrawals within the last month. You can claim "no true Scotsman", but the fact is billions of dollars of customer funds are locked up in these platforms.

traveler01 4y ago
You still made his point. Those guys lost their money because they trusted a centralized institution. If you keep your cryptos in your wallet, one which you own the keys, it's a lot harder to lose your money.
- system2 4y ago
  Not the amount of crypto, the value of crypto is the problem. Assuming you invested in Cardano or Bitcoin, now you lost 70% of your money in 1 year. Value crashes because of unknown background trading and shady chinese whales.
  - InvertedRhodium 4y ago
    The value of the Lira dropped by 44% in 2021 alone, and is expected to be as low as 70% by the end of 2022. So the use of fiat currency in Lebanon seems kind of on par with BTC in that respect.
  - traveler01 4y ago
    With the "small" marketcap of crypto, any shake in the market will lower the value a lot. Scary is seeing how big the inflation rate has been in USD and EUR.
delabay 4y ago
Not your keys etc. Picture this. You're in Lebanon circa 2020. You face a guaranteed loss of 90%+ if kept in traditionally Lebanese system. Or you can self custody a usd stablecoin. Which do you choose?
- kube-system 4y ago
  > you put it all in UST > whoops now you lost 98% Stablecoins aren’t a zero-trust system. It’s a system where you need to trust both the underlying currency and the developer.
  - notch656a 4y ago
    Is anyone using crypto as a hedge seriously dumb enough not to diversify their holdings?
    - kube-system 4y ago
      Yes, more than one person has lost their life savings investing in garbage coins. But if I can’t trust cryptocurrencies either, I might as well use a bank.
      - notch656a 4y ago
        I mean it sounds as if you can't trust either one on an individualized basis, but it may be more pragmatic to diversify your hedge with different coins than diversify 20 different bank accounts which all suffer under a broken national framework.
      - delabay 4y ago
        Using a bank in Lebanon is the same as losing your life savings
        kube-system 4y ago
        If we can judge banks by the worst of them, then we can judge crypto by the worst of them. As for me, if my US FDIC insured bank fails, I’ve got bigger problems than money.
        notch656a 4y ago
        Western banks will likely never fail in the way banks can fail in a place like Lebanon. In a situation where all US banks are falling flat, the fed will just happily print money to fulfill the FDIC insurance and you'll be left with some great toilet paper.
nootropicat 4y ago
Neither voyager or celsius are defi. They were exclusively used by people that trusted centralized financial institutions more. They are the equivalent of those Lebanese banks here. The fact all those companies put people's funds into a ponzi scheme was only mildly surprising.
kebman 4y ago
If you buy Celsius, you should already know the added risk of buying a shitcoin and act accordingly. Meanwhile when you use a bank, then you expect to always be able to access your funds. If that social contract is broken, then you can expect real consequences. In this case it was a man making legitimate use of force to get access to his own property. Many crypto coins attempt to solve the problem of third parties confiscating your property, and first and foremost of them is Bitcoin. That's where the moniker "unconfiscatable" comes from. And let’s face it, if the guy had instead used Bitcoin, he would never have gotten into this problem (tho the value of his holdings would indeed be very volatile). Sure, you can always act like a criminal and make threats or use torture to get it. But IMHO that's a very quaint and sad example that only serves to prove the point, because those are the lengths you have to go to in order to get it, as it's otherwise impossible to pry out of your brains. That’s why all serious "cryptobros" suggest that your highest allocation should always be Bitcoin, before you even consider any other crypto coin. Because the quainter and more experimental the alt coin is, the higher the risk of frozen accounts or worse, a coin that goes to zero such as Luna.

traveler01 4y ago

You still made his point. Those guys lost their money because they trusted a centralized institution. If you keep your cryptos in your wallet, one which you own the keys, it's a lot harder to lose your money.

system2 4y ago
Not the amount of crypto, the value of crypto is the problem. Assuming you invested in Cardano or Bitcoin, now you lost 70% of your money in 1 year. Value crashes because of unknown background trading and shady chinese whales.
- InvertedRhodium 4y ago
  The value of the Lira dropped by 44% in 2021 alone, and is expected to be as low as 70% by the end of 2022. So the use of fiat currency in Lebanon seems kind of on par with BTC in that respect.
- traveler01 4y ago
  With the "small" marketcap of crypto, any shake in the market will lower the value a lot. Scary is seeing how big the inflation rate has been in USD and EUR.

delabay 4y ago

Not your keys etc. Picture this. You're in Lebanon circa 2020. You face a guaranteed loss of 90%+ if kept in traditionally Lebanese system. Or you can self custody a usd stablecoin. Which do you choose?

kube-system 4y ago
> you put it all in UST > whoops now you lost 98% Stablecoins aren’t a zero-trust system. It’s a system where you need to trust both the underlying currency and the developer.
- notch656a 4y ago
  Is anyone using crypto as a hedge seriously dumb enough not to diversify their holdings?
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Yes, more than one person has lost their life savings investing in garbage coins. But if I can’t trust cryptocurrencies either, I might as well use a bank.
    - notch656a 4y ago
      I mean it sounds as if you can't trust either one on an individualized basis, but it may be more pragmatic to diversify your hedge with different coins than diversify 20 different bank accounts which all suffer under a broken national framework.
    - delabay 4y ago
      Using a bank in Lebanon is the same as losing your life savings
      - kube-system 4y ago
        If we can judge banks by the worst of them, then we can judge crypto by the worst of them. As for me, if my US FDIC insured bank fails, I’ve got bigger problems than money.
        notch656a 4y ago
        Western banks will likely never fail in the way banks can fail in a place like Lebanon. In a situation where all US banks are falling flat, the fed will just happily print money to fulfill the FDIC insurance and you'll be left with some great toilet paper.

nootropicat 4y ago

Neither voyager or celsius are defi. They were exclusively used by people that trusted centralized financial institutions more. They are the equivalent of those Lebanese banks here. The fact all those companies put people's funds into a ponzi scheme was only mildly surprising.

kebman 4y ago

If you buy Celsius, you should already know the added risk of buying a shitcoin and act accordingly. Meanwhile when you use a bank, then you expect to always be able to access your funds. If that social contract is broken, then you can expect real consequences. In this case it was a man making legitimate use of force to get access to his own property. Many crypto coins attempt to solve the problem of third parties confiscating your property, and first and foremost of them is Bitcoin. That's where the moniker "unconfiscatable" comes from. And let’s face it, if the guy had instead used Bitcoin, he would never have gotten into this problem (tho the value of his holdings would indeed be very volatile). Sure, you can always act like a criminal and make threats or use torture to get it. But IMHO that's a very quaint and sad example that only serves to prove the point, because those are the lengths you have to go to in order to get it, as it's otherwise impossible to pry out of your brains. That’s why all serious "cryptobros" suggest that your highest allocation should always be Bitcoin, before you even consider any other crypto coin. Because the quainter and more experimental the alt coin is, the higher the risk of frozen accounts or worse, a coin that goes to zero such as Luna.