8 ms·

At the end of day, this entire fiasco really drives home the point if its not your keys its not your coins. Shady exchanges/banks can always collapse and take y

At the end of day, this entire fiasco really drives home the point if its not your keys its not your coins. Shady exchanges/banks can always collapse and take your entire portfolio with it, but if you have a securely backed up wallet, then your coins will be untouchable no matter what kind of shady shenanigans goes down in the wider cryptocurrency landscape.

camjw 4y ago
Sure, you still have your coins, but who cares if they’re worthless? I’m not sure “not your keys, not your wallet” is really the message to take away from ~Celcius~ ~Terra~ ~TAC~ FTX.
- zmaurelius 4y ago
  I think people are too hyper focused on the price aspect of cryptocurrencies. The experiment that is Bitcoin shows that people do not need to rely on a monetary system where a cabal of rich and powerful individuals can arbitrarily modify the money supply without any regard to all the participants in that monetary system. The genie is already out of the bottle and there is no way to put it back. There will always be those especially in the younger generations that want something better than the current system. Bitcoin shows that you can have a completely transparent monetary system based on code that is available to be audited by anyone. Bitcoin may or may not survive, but the idea behind it will.
  - twblalock 4y ago
    What this has also shown is that most people (literally almost everyone) are better off relying on the traditional financial system.
  - camjw 4y ago
    > There will always be those especially in the younger generations that want something better than the current system. Sure, this isn't it though.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    > The experiment that is Bitcoin shows that people do not need to rely on a monetary system where a cabal of rich and powerful individuals can arbitrarily modify the money supply without any regard to all the participants in that monetary system. I don't get it. How does this description fail to encompass the likes of SBF, CZ, or Do Kwon? And while they didn't modify the money supply (although UDT kinda did), their actions had a strong impact on the value of money. So anyone holding coins in their own wallets still got screwed by their actions.
    - zmaurelius 4y ago
      Bitcoin only solves the problem of manipulation of the underlying money supply. It does not solve the problem of fraud and scams. Maybe one day we can also solve that problem with exchanges existing only as smart contracts, but with exchanges that are not completely transparent you always run into the risk of getting defrauded because you don't really know what's going on under the hood.
      - ahahahahah 4y ago
        Yeah. The transparency of smart contracts has ensured that there's no scams in that space.
      - Forgeties79 4y ago
        I always see advocates for crypto bashing central exchanges, but at the same time they bemoan the slow pace of adoption. I just don’t see it ever being even remotely main stream without central organizations. It is far too much work managing it all yourself even for tech savvy people. Just the process of downloading a wallet and downloading ledger is a huge pain in the ass. And then have to do it for every crypto if you’re not using a multi-wallet!
        EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
        Downloading a wallet takes a few seconds. You dont need to download a ledger to pay.
  - jcranmer 4y ago
    > The experiment that is Bitcoin shows that people do not need to rely on a monetary system where a cabal of rich and powerful individuals can arbitrarily modify the money supply without any regard to all the participants in that monetary system. Is this really true, given that the largest currency pair of Bitcoin is with USDT, which is alleged to have been arbitrarily created at whim to pump up the price of Bitcoin?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - this_steve_j 4y ago
    Let’s not forget the frictionless enablement of spectacular ransomware enterprises, and the glorious enrichment of dangerous actors with stolen funds. It’s a small price to pay for all this… freedom?
    - zmaurelius 4y ago
      It also enabled about $60+ million dollars to be donated to Ukraine and that's just one data point. Whether these other problems are a small price to pay will depend on who you are talking to. To the Ukrainians that benefited from these donations and to those that have food, weapons and shelter from these donations, it is most likely a small price to pay. Perhaps a portion of these donations could have come from other sources if cryptocurrencies did not exist, but there isn't really a good way to quantify that, so I won't go into that discussion.
      - camjw 4y ago
        A quick google shows that the US government has given $16.8bn in aid to Ukraine. It seems like the centralised system is doing significantly better.
        landemva 4y ago
        Giving my tax dollars to Ukraine without forcing Ukraine to negotiate an end to it is not "doing better".
        EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
        You are paying them to protect you and the entire world from unimaginable evil.
        landemva 4y ago
        Evil was German Nazis. And the Ukraine Nazis which the USA did not pursue after WW2. NATO pushing closer to Russia the past 30 years didn't protect anything except the paychecks of the war makers.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    It is true that a cabal of rich people cannot arbitrarily modify the money supply. We instead get a permanently chosen system of money supply that was created by an ideologically driven software engineer who appears to have vanished into the ether. Is it not possible that Satoshi chose a less optimal system than the central banks would? The finite and logarithmic rewards make a huge huge huge difference in the eventual distribution of BTC worldwide, should it become a dominant system. In my opinion, a system where early adopters get unimaginably rich forever is simply unethical. And if another system eventually wins... then isn't that simply an example of a cabal of people (though not necessarily rich at first in this case) modifying the rules for money supply? Doge produces a different outcome than BTC. That's important.
    - zmaurelius 4y ago
      I don't think fair distribution of cryptocurrency in the bootstrap phase is a solved problem. We got a long way to go if we are to come up with a fair system. Satoshi went with the best that he could come up with which is a no premine solution. A slightly better solution would be a no premine coin with a global announcement for 5 years before the mining begins so everybody gets a fair shot at participation. I am sure we can develop even more fair forms of distribution with sufficient research.
      - EFreethought 4y ago
        Honestly, that would give wealthy people (and possibly scammers) plenty of time to figure out how to game the rules.
    - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
      Nobody is going to be rich forever, because nobody is going to live forever. You have a very hard time limit to spend your coins.
      - UncleMeat 4y ago
        Coins don't return to the reward pool when somebody dies. A system of new aristocratic families based on who was an early adopter and held on to some BTC is not something I'm excited about.
  - FridgeSeal 4y ago
    > people do not need to rely on a monetary system where a cabal of rich and powerful individuals can arbitrarily modify the money supply without any regard to all the participants in that monetary system. Is this satire? Because crypto currencies are not the gleaming example of “free of manipulation” that you think they are. There’s endless cases of whales, exchanges, NFT groups and crypto-celebrities using their capital and power in order to manipulate markets and supply in exactly their favour. The NFT space was especially bad for this. In fact, a lot of those NFT groups are exactly what I’d describe as a “cabal”.
    - labrador 4y ago
      That was my reaction but you said it better than I could so I'll let Depeche Mode say it The grabbing hands grab all they can Everything counts in large amounts
  - ausbah 4y ago
    >The experiment that is Bitcoin shows that people do not need to rely on a monetary system where a cabal of rich and powerful individuals can arbitrarily modify the money supply without any regard to all the participants in that monetary system. if this is a stab at the federal reserve, my response would be "democracy" at least in the abstract. either way not much different from the whales that hold disproportionate amounts of influence in the system right?
- edwnj 4y ago
  Celsius = centralised, terra = centralised, FTX = centralised... The point is stop trusting centralised wolf in sheeps clothing.. same goes for ethereum with Proof Of Stake.. ur just reinventing central banking (but private).. The only truly decentralised coin is bitcoin..
  - methodical 4y ago
    and bitcoin has exorbitant transaction fees, slow transaction times, massive power usage for relatively little throughput, etc., etc. time to end the crypto social experiment and go back to using the traditional banking system which has safeguards in place to prevent people from being continuously taken advantage of. oh wait, nobody was really using crypto for anything other than a FOMO investment anyways
    - londons_explore 4y ago
      Bitcoin transaction fees are ~5 cents right now. Granted it's still slow...
      - UnlockedSecrets 4y ago
        According to this chart it is showing as still being about $1-$1.4 per transaction on average in the past month which is alot more then 5 cents? https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/fees-usd-per-transaction https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/fees-usd-per-tran...
        chromatin 4y ago
        Exchanges pay massive (often 10X required) fees for whatever reason. Real transactions are much cheaper. Try https://mempool.space/ https://mempool.space/
    - machina_ex_deus 4y ago
      By taken advantage of, you mean like becoming a debt slave paying off mortgage on overvalued house because of a housing bubble they blew out of proportion yet nobody was held accountable for?
DonHopkins 4y ago
What good are the keys to something worthless?
hvs 4y ago
So the lesson to learn from all of this is "stuff your money under your mattress otherwise it's not safe"? What a brave new world crypto is bringing us.
- ncallaway 4y ago
  > stuff your money under your mattress otherwise it's not safe This has always been the case with crypto. It's just much harder to successfully execute with crypto than it is with cash.
btown 4y ago
It's your keys, and your coins, and most importantly your initial and continuous due diligence... and not just on the asset itself, but on the possible motivations of any asset holder with a sufficient stake to meaningfully affect the price.
- DonHopkins 4y ago
  Should have done you initial and continuous don't diligence.
mexicanandre 4y ago
The whole crypto game is dead without these exchanges. To hold your own keys etc is just too complicated. I dont want to put 100k onto a USB drive where I may forget the PW to. Crypto is just not going to hit mainstream if you cant get exchanges "banks" to stop selfimploding.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago
  Coinbase, which happen to be a Y Combinator unicorn, is saying they're totally fine. Credit where it's due: Coinbase never ever dealt with Tether/USDT. They say the $42 billion of USDC they minted are all backed and that all the clients' assets on their site (USDC/coins/EUR/USD/etc.) are all backed 1:1. I hope Coinbase is and stays an honest (and regulated) player in that crazy space: https://www.coinbase.com/blog/our-approach-to-transparency-risk-management-and-consumer-protection https://www.coinbase.com/blog/our-approach-to-transparency-r...
  - dangero 4y ago
    Coinbase supports USDT https://www.coinbase.com/how-to-buy/tether https://www.coinbase.com/how-to-buy/tether
hartator 4y ago
The thing is non-centralized cryptos never worked as a currency.
MrMan 4y ago
creating 20,000 new currencies isnt really an economy, or rather its a purely entertainment based economy like Las Vegas or Macau. Those things I guess are valuable but is this the best use of our computing power and our Human Resources?
rchaud 4y ago
If you store your funds in a secure wallet, you will not be able to FOMO in recklessly on shitcoins hoping for a 10-bagger, the facilitation of which is the raison d'etre for most crypto exchanges. People don't want to buy and hodl, they want to get rich. There's no Benjamin Graham for crypto because crypto has no fundamentals, no underlying value to go long on. The best any crypto advisor can do is to warn you when to hit the ejector seat button.
kuratkull 4y ago
You have the coins, but the current state of affairs means they are not worth anything any more.
- secondcoming 4y ago
  To be fair, I have stocks that are not far off that scenario!
paulpauper 4y ago
Or better yet, stay away from crypto completely.

camjw 4y ago

Sure, you still have your coins, but who cares if they’re worthless? I’m not sure “not your keys, not your wallet” is really the message to take away from ~Celcius~ ~Terra~ ~TAC~ FTX.

zmaurelius 4y ago
I think people are too hyper focused on the price aspect of cryptocurrencies. The experiment that is Bitcoin shows that people do not need to rely on a monetary system where a cabal of rich and powerful individuals can arbitrarily modify the money supply without any regard to all the participants in that monetary system. The genie is already out of the bottle and there is no way to put it back. There will always be those especially in the younger generations that want something better than the current system. Bitcoin shows that you can have a completely transparent monetary system based on code that is available to be audited by anyone. Bitcoin may or may not survive, but the idea behind it will.
- twblalock 4y ago
  What this has also shown is that most people (literally almost everyone) are better off relying on the traditional financial system.
- camjw 4y ago
  > There will always be those especially in the younger generations that want something better than the current system. Sure, this isn't it though.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  > The experiment that is Bitcoin shows that people do not need to rely on a monetary system where a cabal of rich and powerful individuals can arbitrarily modify the money supply without any regard to all the participants in that monetary system. I don't get it. How does this description fail to encompass the likes of SBF, CZ, or Do Kwon? And while they didn't modify the money supply (although UDT kinda did), their actions had a strong impact on the value of money. So anyone holding coins in their own wallets still got screwed by their actions.
  - zmaurelius 4y ago
    Bitcoin only solves the problem of manipulation of the underlying money supply. It does not solve the problem of fraud and scams. Maybe one day we can also solve that problem with exchanges existing only as smart contracts, but with exchanges that are not completely transparent you always run into the risk of getting defrauded because you don't really know what's going on under the hood.
    - ahahahahah 4y ago
      Yeah. The transparency of smart contracts has ensured that there's no scams in that space.
    - Forgeties79 4y ago
      I always see advocates for crypto bashing central exchanges, but at the same time they bemoan the slow pace of adoption. I just don’t see it ever being even remotely main stream without central organizations. It is far too much work managing it all yourself even for tech savvy people. Just the process of downloading a wallet and downloading ledger is a huge pain in the ass. And then have to do it for every crypto if you’re not using a multi-wallet!
      - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
        Downloading a wallet takes a few seconds. You dont need to download a ledger to pay.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  > The experiment that is Bitcoin shows that people do not need to rely on a monetary system where a cabal of rich and powerful individuals can arbitrarily modify the money supply without any regard to all the participants in that monetary system. Is this really true, given that the largest currency pair of Bitcoin is with USDT, which is alleged to have been arbitrarily created at whim to pump up the price of Bitcoin?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- this_steve_j 4y ago
  Let’s not forget the frictionless enablement of spectacular ransomware enterprises, and the glorious enrichment of dangerous actors with stolen funds. It’s a small price to pay for all this… freedom?
  - zmaurelius 4y ago
    It also enabled about $60+ million dollars to be donated to Ukraine and that's just one data point. Whether these other problems are a small price to pay will depend on who you are talking to. To the Ukrainians that benefited from these donations and to those that have food, weapons and shelter from these donations, it is most likely a small price to pay. Perhaps a portion of these donations could have come from other sources if cryptocurrencies did not exist, but there isn't really a good way to quantify that, so I won't go into that discussion.
    - camjw 4y ago
      A quick google shows that the US government has given $16.8bn in aid to Ukraine. It seems like the centralised system is doing significantly better.
      - landemva 4y ago
        Giving my tax dollars to Ukraine without forcing Ukraine to negotiate an end to it is not "doing better".
        EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
        You are paying them to protect you and the entire world from unimaginable evil.
        landemva 4y ago
        Evil was German Nazis. And the Ukraine Nazis which the USA did not pursue after WW2. NATO pushing closer to Russia the past 30 years didn't protect anything except the paychecks of the war makers.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  It is true that a cabal of rich people cannot arbitrarily modify the money supply. We instead get a permanently chosen system of money supply that was created by an ideologically driven software engineer who appears to have vanished into the ether. Is it not possible that Satoshi chose a less optimal system than the central banks would? The finite and logarithmic rewards make a huge huge huge difference in the eventual distribution of BTC worldwide, should it become a dominant system. In my opinion, a system where early adopters get unimaginably rich forever is simply unethical. And if another system eventually wins... then isn't that simply an example of a cabal of people (though not necessarily rich at first in this case) modifying the rules for money supply? Doge produces a different outcome than BTC. That's important.
  - zmaurelius 4y ago
    I don't think fair distribution of cryptocurrency in the bootstrap phase is a solved problem. We got a long way to go if we are to come up with a fair system. Satoshi went with the best that he could come up with which is a no premine solution. A slightly better solution would be a no premine coin with a global announcement for 5 years before the mining begins so everybody gets a fair shot at participation. I am sure we can develop even more fair forms of distribution with sufficient research.
    - EFreethought 4y ago
      Honestly, that would give wealthy people (and possibly scammers) plenty of time to figure out how to game the rules.
  - EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
    Nobody is going to be rich forever, because nobody is going to live forever. You have a very hard time limit to spend your coins.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      Coins don't return to the reward pool when somebody dies. A system of new aristocratic families based on who was an early adopter and held on to some BTC is not something I'm excited about.
- FridgeSeal 4y ago
  > people do not need to rely on a monetary system where a cabal of rich and powerful individuals can arbitrarily modify the money supply without any regard to all the participants in that monetary system. Is this satire? Because crypto currencies are not the gleaming example of “free of manipulation” that you think they are. There’s endless cases of whales, exchanges, NFT groups and crypto-celebrities using their capital and power in order to manipulate markets and supply in exactly their favour. The NFT space was especially bad for this. In fact, a lot of those NFT groups are exactly what I’d describe as a “cabal”.
  - labrador 4y ago
    That was my reaction but you said it better than I could so I'll let Depeche Mode say it The grabbing hands grab all they can Everything counts in large amounts
- ausbah 4y ago
  >The experiment that is Bitcoin shows that people do not need to rely on a monetary system where a cabal of rich and powerful individuals can arbitrarily modify the money supply without any regard to all the participants in that monetary system. if this is a stab at the federal reserve, my response would be "democracy" at least in the abstract. either way not much different from the whales that hold disproportionate amounts of influence in the system right?
edwnj 4y ago
Celsius = centralised, terra = centralised, FTX = centralised... The point is stop trusting centralised wolf in sheeps clothing.. same goes for ethereum with Proof Of Stake.. ur just reinventing central banking (but private).. The only truly decentralised coin is bitcoin..
- methodical 4y ago
  and bitcoin has exorbitant transaction fees, slow transaction times, massive power usage for relatively little throughput, etc., etc. time to end the crypto social experiment and go back to using the traditional banking system which has safeguards in place to prevent people from being continuously taken advantage of. oh wait, nobody was really using crypto for anything other than a FOMO investment anyways
  - londons_explore 4y ago
    Bitcoin transaction fees are ~5 cents right now. Granted it's still slow...
    - UnlockedSecrets 4y ago
      According to this chart it is showing as still being about $1-$1.4 per transaction on average in the past month which is alot more then 5 cents? https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/fees-usd-per-transaction https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/charts/fees-usd-per-tran...
      - chromatin 4y ago
        Exchanges pay massive (often 10X required) fees for whatever reason. Real transactions are much cheaper. Try https://mempool.space/ https://mempool.space/
  - machina_ex_deus 4y ago
    By taken advantage of, you mean like becoming a debt slave paying off mortgage on overvalued house because of a housing bubble they blew out of proportion yet nobody was held accountable for?

DonHopkins 4y ago

What good are the keys to something worthless?

hvs 4y ago

So the lesson to learn from all of this is "stuff your money under your mattress otherwise it's not safe"? What a brave new world crypto is bringing us.

ncallaway 4y ago
> stuff your money under your mattress otherwise it's not safe This has always been the case with crypto. It's just much harder to successfully execute with crypto than it is with cash.

btown 4y ago

It's your keys, and your coins, and most importantly your initial and continuous due diligence... and not just on the asset itself, but on the possible motivations of any asset holder with a sufficient stake to meaningfully affect the price.

DonHopkins 4y ago
Should have done you initial and continuous don't diligence.

mexicanandre 4y ago

The whole crypto game is dead without these exchanges. To hold your own keys etc is just too complicated. I dont want to put 100k onto a USB drive where I may forget the PW to. Crypto is just not going to hit mainstream if you cant get exchanges "banks" to stop selfimploding.

TacticalCoder 4y ago
Coinbase, which happen to be a Y Combinator unicorn, is saying they're totally fine. Credit where it's due: Coinbase never ever dealt with Tether/USDT. They say the $42 billion of USDC they minted are all backed and that all the clients' assets on their site (USDC/coins/EUR/USD/etc.) are all backed 1:1. I hope Coinbase is and stays an honest (and regulated) player in that crazy space: https://www.coinbase.com/blog/our-approach-to-transparency-risk-management-and-consumer-protection https://www.coinbase.com/blog/our-approach-to-transparency-r...
- dangero 4y ago
  Coinbase supports USDT https://www.coinbase.com/how-to-buy/tether https://www.coinbase.com/how-to-buy/tether

hartator 4y ago

The thing is non-centralized cryptos never worked as a currency.

MrMan 4y ago

creating 20,000 new currencies isnt really an economy, or rather its a purely entertainment based economy like Las Vegas or Macau. Those things I guess are valuable but is this the best use of our computing power and our Human Resources?

rchaud 4y ago

If you store your funds in a secure wallet, you will not be able to FOMO in recklessly on shitcoins hoping for a 10-bagger, the facilitation of which is the raison d'etre for most crypto exchanges. People don't want to buy and hodl, they want to get rich. There's no Benjamin Graham for crypto because crypto has no fundamentals, no underlying value to go long on. The best any crypto advisor can do is to warn you when to hit the ejector seat button.

kuratkull 4y ago

You have the coins, but the current state of affairs means they are not worth anything any more.

secondcoming 4y ago
To be fair, I have stocks that are not far off that scenario!

paulpauper 4y ago

Or better yet, stay away from crypto completely.