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Wait, I have a few CDs that are "FDIC insured", according to Fidelity, offered by banks I absolutely don't know. In fact, that's the reason I choose them over T

Wait, I have a few CDs that are "FDIC insured", according to Fidelity, offered by banks I absolutely don't know. In fact, that's the reason I choose them over Treasuries, which are not FDIC insured. Is my money safe or could it be a fraud like FTX? I learned to trust Fidelity over the years, maybe now is the time to be less complacent.

ChainOfFools 3y ago
FTX is really no separate phenomenon than the underlying crypto industry itself. The entire space rests on the metrics generated at the whim of perhaps a hundred or two extremely (crypto-)influential individuals who are all affiliated with one another and whose incentives and behaviors are highly correlated even when that affiliation is weak or antagonistic. I'm referring here to the large established miners, both public and dark (i.e. bot farm based, corrupting gov. officials, etc.) As well as the pools that they pretend not to control, and to a lesser extent the operators of the larger exchanges - although they are not nearly as free to move in recent years as the miners still are. It's no accident in miners are extremely publicity shy. This group, which behaves like a cartel so it's reasonable to think about it as one, self-generates nearly every metric used to determine the size and depth of the entire industry. The fees and other costs to create fraudulent statistics would be impossible for anyone who is not a miner to swallow, but if you're mining at scale there is an enormous discount - because an inverse scale fraction of those fees are paid to yourselves. Transaction volume, price, number of nodes, number of accounts, velocity of funds, everything that is used to construct a picture of the real human interest in this market via the lens of virtual numbers that describe it is completely under the control of a few people. Although some of them are more regulated today than they were in the past, for a good part of a decade there was effectively no oversight into how any of these operations worked, and they were free to openly front run the market, buy electricity at substantially corruption-reduced cost or just outright steal it- and again in the early days this paid off extraordinarily well because early large block rewards could be sat on and held until they bubble-appreciate several thousand of percent above acquisition cost. when you're paying reduced (or nearly zero) cost for your production infrastructure you don't need to sell all of your product right away, and you thereby accumulate a future war chest to create a market 'bottom' anytime liquidity gets a little bit too loose for your liking: simply slow-roll selling new block rewards and voila, price stabilizes. Your carefully managed low public profile lets the media and public fill in their own self-serving explanation, which is that the public must be crazy about this stuff it cant stop buying it.
prepend 3y ago
You can check those banks to confirm they are fdic insured. Although it’s a lot easier to trust a boring and stable company like Fidelity that’s not offering snake oil.
- zamnos 3y ago
  You mean like this? https://www.fidelity.com/crypto/trading https://www.fidelity.com/crypto/trading
randerson 3y ago
Treasuries aren't FDIC insured, but they're considered the safest asset on earth because they're backed by the government. At least historically. Who knows if that will continue to be the case next month.
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
  >> next month Exactly)

ChainOfFools 3y ago

FTX is really no separate phenomenon than the underlying crypto industry itself. The entire space rests on the metrics generated at the whim of perhaps a hundred or two extremely (crypto-)influential individuals who are all affiliated with one another and whose incentives and behaviors are highly correlated even when that affiliation is weak or antagonistic. I'm referring here to the large established miners, both public and dark (i.e. bot farm based, corrupting gov. officials, etc.) As well as the pools that they pretend not to control, and to a lesser extent the operators of the larger exchanges - although they are not nearly as free to move in recent years as the miners still are. It's no accident in miners are extremely publicity shy. This group, which behaves like a cartel so it's reasonable to think about it as one, self-generates nearly every metric used to determine the size and depth of the entire industry. The fees and other costs to create fraudulent statistics would be impossible for anyone who is not a miner to swallow, but if you're mining at scale there is an enormous discount - because an inverse scale fraction of those fees are paid to yourselves. Transaction volume, price, number of nodes, number of accounts, velocity of funds, everything that is used to construct a picture of the real human interest in this market via the lens of virtual numbers that describe it is completely under the control of a few people. Although some of them are more regulated today than they were in the past, for a good part of a decade there was effectively no oversight into how any of these operations worked, and they were free to openly front run the market, buy electricity at substantially corruption-reduced cost or just outright steal it- and again in the early days this paid off extraordinarily well because early large block rewards could be sat on and held until they bubble-appreciate several thousand of percent above acquisition cost. when you're paying reduced (or nearly zero) cost for your production infrastructure you don't need to sell all of your product right away, and you thereby accumulate a future war chest to create a market 'bottom' anytime liquidity gets a little bit too loose for your liking: simply slow-roll selling new block rewards and voila, price stabilizes. Your carefully managed low public profile lets the media and public fill in their own self-serving explanation, which is that the public must be crazy about this stuff it cant stop buying it.

prepend 3y ago

You can check those banks to confirm they are fdic insured. Although it’s a lot easier to trust a boring and stable company like Fidelity that’s not offering snake oil.

zamnos 3y ago
You mean like this? https://www.fidelity.com/crypto/trading https://www.fidelity.com/crypto/trading

randerson 3y ago

Treasuries aren't FDIC insured, but they're considered the safest asset on earth because they're backed by the government. At least historically. Who knows if that will continue to be the case next month.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
>> next month Exactly)