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Surprise!

Crypto lender Genesis suspends withdrawals as FTX fallout continues
Suspensions follow reports of BlockFi exploring possible bankruptcy

7 thoughts on “Surprise!”

  1. Is there going to prove to be any important connection between crypto world and sane world? Bank runs are caused by a positive feedback effect so that even modest beginnings can turn into widespread panic. I suppose the journalistic cliché applies: “only time will tell”. But there must be people who are paid to estimate the likelihood of “contagion”. Any news on that front?

  2. A fair bit of VC money has been invested in crypto businesses but it’s a drop in the broader PE ocean. Tesla invested a few billion in bitcoin and made considerable losses.

    A few managers have invested in crypto businesses quite recently. Blackrock, for example, and Aberdeen (an investment manager so fucking stupid it can’t spell its own name properly). But again, relatively tiny amounts.

    I do not believe there is much risk of the wider financial world being affected by crypto going tits up.

  3. @MC

    ‘I do not believe there is much risk of the wider financial world being affected by crypto going tits up.’

    The wider financial world is utterly fucked as it is. Though, as I’ve said before, my wife works in mergers and acquisitions and corporate finance and business has been booming.

  4. “Is the tulip market holding steady?”
    Currently, yes. There’s a thriving trade in tulip bulbs. How do you think they end up on your garden centre shelves?
    Which is why all this is good news for those of us would welcome crypto being used in commerce. (I’ve got to buy some BC myself to pay something. I’ll be using a pre-payed debit card because I don’t want my bank account flagged for crypto deals) If we could only get rid of the idiots speculating in it, it would have commercial utility.

  5. Has anyone else seen the Zerohedge post on the FTX bankruptcy filing?

    https://www.zerohedge.com/political/worse-enron-new-ftx-ceo-slams-unprecedented-failure-corporate-controls

    The whole thing was a clusterf*ck to end all clusterf*cks. So much so its as if you gave a bunch of toddlers a few billion dollars and told them to run a crypto exchange with it. The guy in charge of the bankruptcy can’t believe what he’s seeing, and he oversaw Enron’s bankruptcy.

    How on earth did the people investing in this not cotton on that the whole thing was a house of cards? Do these venture capital people (and a large pension fund) not do any due diligence? In my extremely limited experience of dealing with people and large sums of money being paid over in return for something the people doing the paying have expensive lawyers and accountants up the wazoo, and nothing gets paid until they have crawled all over everything and accounted for every last item, including the number of paperclips that are supposed to be in the stationary cupboard. If high finance in the fiat money world consists of throwing cash at semi-autistic kidults without checking anything first, then I really don’t think that anyone can throw rocks at the crypto world for being a scam. I mean, motes and beams come to mind.

    Factor in that the entire UK pension industry thought it a good idea to leverage their entire industry by taking a trillion pound bet that interest rates would never go up again, and you have to ask yourself if the fiat money finance world is any less of a fraud on the public than crypto is painted as?

  6. Tesla invested a few billion in bitcoin and made considerable losses.

    Point of order. They speculated in Bitcoin.

    Every time one of the plonkers at work said they were going to “invest” in crypto I insisted that it was speculation. They’ve stopped talking about it now though, oddly.

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