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by presheaf 1302 days ago
Looks like Paul Graham's friend was correct: https://mobile.twitter.com/paulg/status/1594446009010212865.
3 comments

Kinda like warning about a fire literally as it's occurring, the residents already evacuated, and already having made front page news. "More crypto exchanges are more than likely going to collapse shortly." There is my prediction. Feel free to link back to this comment as it occurs.
Yeah. The titanic has hit the iceberg, water is flooding the lower decks, people are fighting to get on the lifeboats, PG tweets "A person I have known for more than ten years, who I consider trustworthy, is convinced the titanic isn't all that seaworthy. I don’t know anything concrete, but if I were exposed, I would be concerned."

Also, anyone who thinks they aren't exposed is significantly underestimating the potential for contagion in the wider economy. As crypto-exposed funds have to make margin calls and take losses, they will need to liquidate assets in the normal economy, driving asset prices down across the board. It's not going to be as big an impact of 2008 but the economy is in a worse position to withstand shocks right now, with inflation high and years of QE overhang still to unwind.

Based on how my brother and his gf got sucked into it, a majority of my cousins, and a ton of friends of my brother and cousins, I agree there may be a correction that is needed and felt. Hell, I even managed to lose $1200 to a pig butchering crypto romance scam. Despite that, the day I stop getting interview requests for web3 companies and seeing them in the headlines every day is the day I will breathe a sigh of relief.
Nan, it’s nothing yet.

For now it’s just a bear market - not a collapse of the crypto system (which is coming). Dogecoin has a market cap of 10B ! We can start talking about the real storm when it’s 0.

Good point.
10.5 billion is a lot but it's less than FTX, if there's something apocalyptic coming it should be something else.
When the big systemic shock comes it's going to be USDT being revealed to be a fraud. Absolutely noone at all[1] saw that coming.

[1] By which I mean actually pretty much everyone. But it will still have a significant impact when it actually implodes.

Just curious how the dominoes will fall but it does seem like the people that invested in cryptocurrencies underestimated the risks of corruption. It looks like programmable money and clever financial engineering makes embezzling money a lot easier.
> Just curious how the dominoes will fall but it does seem like the people that invested in cryptocurrencies underestimated the risks of corruption. It looks like programmable money and clever financial engineering makes embezzling money a lot easier.

There is nothing of these failures that involves the programmable money part. DCG and Grayscale live in the traditional finance world, they are asset managers in traditional finance. Their accounting books are not a public, decentralized, cryptographically verifiable ledger . When you buy a stock of their fund, this is not settled on-chain in any way. If they are fraudulent, it's again the traditional finance controls that are failing.

That's a good point but that's the case with all fraud because the digital tokens have to be converted back into fiat at some point. FTT was created without much oversight because no one had enough experience to properly audit anomalous activity. Presumably someone can trace all the fraudulent FTT transactions because it's all public but it doesn't seem like anyone has actually managed to do that. Everyone knows the money is gone but no one knows how that happened and through which FTT transactions.
There is no news there.