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Peter Thiel’s fund wound down 8-year Bitcoin bet before market crash
- hiq 4y agohttps://archive.ph/ec2Pp https://archive.ph/ec2Pp
- HorizonXP 4y agoAbout 4-5 months too late IMO, but smart move. Cash is king for the foreseeable future.
- logifail 4y agoAs they say on Wall Street, "Nobody rings a bell at the top or the bottom of a market". Timing their exit to lock in $1.8bn of paper gains does look great ... with the benefit of hindsight. If the valuations had gone in the other direction, presumably there would be plenty of people saying what a stupid move it was to sell.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> As they say on Wall Street, "Nobody rings a bell at the top or the bottom of a market". Completely untrue. There are uncountable numbers of people ringing both of those bells at the top and bottom of the market. It's just hard to notice, because the bells ring at every other position of the market too.
- rcme 4y ago“Their decision looks great in hindsight. If something totally different happened they would look stupid” sounds like an amazing compliment, but the tone of your comment sounds like you didn’t mean to compliment them?
- jandrese 4y agoI like to think he saw the FTX commercial during the Superbowl and realized it was time to sell.
- nbardy 4y agoSite is down. Here's the google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8E9sp-jdMQUJ:https://worldnewsera.com/news/finance/stock-market/peter-thiels-fund-wound-down-8-year-bitcoin-bet-before-market-crash/&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8E9sp-...
- endymi0n 4y agoThis wasn‘t the market crash. The real one is still to come.
- kyleyeats 4y agoI've been reading a lot of the Coinfessions account on Twitter. It's where people post crypto horror stories anonymously. It's weird to think that they "generated" 1.8bn. If I made 1.8bn selling sandwiches, you could probably find evidence of it somewhere, like in product packaging in dumps. But here the only thing left behind is a bunch of guys going "Yeah I left my position open and drained my life savings by accident." Like, every bit of that money represents money that someone else lost, and basically nothing else. I can't wrap my head around it.
- klyrs 4y agoFirst off, I'd like to commend you for using landfill volume as a proxy for productivity. It's refreshingly honest and I wish economists would take note. That said, there are last-gen GPUs and ASICs going to landfills. Some people are actually getting paid to make the inputs to the otherwise-ephemeral pseudocurrency. Not to mention all of the CO2 released into the atmosphere... you can't see it but that $1.8B put it there.
- 323 4y agoHow legit is this site? There is this blub in their About which is not very reassuring (I never heard of them): > World News Era is the world leader in online news and information and seeks to inform, engage and empower the common men and all age groups. World News Era has millions of daily readers. https://worldnewsera.com/about-us/ https://worldnewsera.com/about-us/
- hristov 4y agoI would not put much weight on this article. The fund is entirely private, it does not need to disclose its holdings in public government submitted documents. This article does not cite any sources. It is always a good idea to use a heavy doze of skepticism when confronted with statements about someone's brilliance at market timing. Especially when those statements are not backed by any evidence. Peter Thiel previously had to disclose more of his trading and, other than his decision to put half a million in a tiny startup called facebook made a long time ago, he has not shown any brilliant market timing.
- rwmj 4y agoIsn't it all on the public blockchain somewhere?
- cft 4y agoThe original source is two Financial Times San Francisco journalists: https://www.ft.com/content/0a1d5597-7145-4035-987b-ff033bba3d75 https://www.ft.com/content/0a1d5597-7145-4035-987b-ff033bba3...
- hristov 4y agoWho do not site their source.
- guywithahat 4y agoA blogger spamming their article. Alternatively Hacker News only lets you post a link once. So if someone posted the FT link at a bad time, you wouldn't be able to post it again and it wouldn't get exposure. This gives the link a second chance
- hristov 4y agoMy point is that even the original financial times article did not seem to cite sources as to the fact that Thiel sold his bitcoin in the middle of 2022.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago> Founders Fund sold out of the vast majority of its entire cryptocurrency portfolio by the end of March 2022 In Feb 2022, when I saw crypto ads during the Super Bowl, it seemed like a warning sign that something was about to go bad and the existing players were looking for suckers.
- gpderetta 4y agoOn the London tube there were self referential ads saying "when you see crypto ads in the tube it is time to buy". /Facepalm
- neilv 4y agoThis article seems to be suggesting that Thiel was pumping while the fund was dumping.
- moloch-hai 4y agoThat is the inference to draw. Actually saying in print that Thiel was doing that might be risky.
- dkrich 4y agoThis episode from beginning to end is extremely interesting to me. Admittedly one of my areas of interest for the past several years has been studying bubbles from various eras but I think there is a lot to take from this story. First, bubbles typically uncover something revolutionary but because of the hype and hoopla, leverage, and endless promotion, the markets overshoot what is possible currently to a ridiculous extent and most lose huge sums of money. In the aftermath where once the sky was the limit everyone swears the idea off and leaves it for dead. An example: the Florida land boom of the 1920's. This is one of the wildest stories that many people who live in Florida don't even know about. They don't realize that nearly all of Florida was developed within the past 100 years and that major cities like Miami, Boca Raton, West Palm Beach, and on up the coast were created during this boom basically out of thin air by speculators. Throughout there were shameless promotions including one orchestrated by Charles Ponzi after he was released from prison as well as the creation of South Beach, the founder of whom ended up losing everything after spending huge amounts on land plots and promotional advertising. Anyone studying that era will see amazing similarities to the crypto bubble. But the interesting part of that story is that those who were engaged in land speculation in Florida were absolutely correct in seeing the potential for the area as were the rest of the promoters and speculators of which there were many. But the population and development of the time just wasn't enough to keep up with the spend at the time. Essentially they were early. With crypto, it was pretty much ignored until it wasn't. Then it hit a critical mass and the promoters seeing an opportunity to grift, came out of the woodwork. Once it hit a critical mass in price, people started to believe the hype and retrofitted use cases to it. Then after it crashed, most said "see I knew it was a stupid idea." Jamie Dimon was saying this as recently as this morning on CNBC. This is the second part of the story that's interesting. Many people argue "crypto has no tangible value, it's just fake money." Well, that may be true but those same people take as self evident that things like gold, Monet and Van Gogh paintings, and tons of other things that arguably have no tangible value are worth vast sums of money. It's all subjective. The bottom line is that things are worth what groups of people believe they are worth at a given time. This is a very difficult concept for most to wrap their minds around because it seems counterintuitive. Amazon stock is clearly worth $2 trillion because it's a massive company built by a forward-thinking genius. But when it was worth a few billion most thought it was too expensive. At each point in time the price wasn't right or wrong, it just reflected what people agreed it was worth. With cryptos they aren't inherently valuable or worthless, they are worth something if there is at least one person who is willing to pay for it, regardless of how stupid you think it is. So I would not be that surprised to one day see cryptos reemerge with new and better and clearer use cases which in hindsight will seem obvious but still very few will have capitalized on them. I'm not inherently bullish on crypto either. I've never owned any. But I also have been around enough to know that the crowd is smarter than I am and just because it seems stupid that something is happening in the market does not make it wrong. The fact that even now the price is over $20k is somewhat telling that the popular narrative is in complete disagreement with the fundamentals.