/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>25953317
Ponzi's disappear anon

"""Hack""" steps in your way

>>25953317
This is better than Celsius correct? What about the defi industry like aave?

>>25953317
You could set up a good passive income for cheaper with a site like pic related

>>25953332
How is it a ponzi? They act like a traditional lending institution. They lend out BTC on deposit for a certain percentage, then pay out depositors a lower percentage. They profit off the difference.

>>25953337
Coins are held in custody by Gemini, yes I guess you have to trust them but they're pretty top-tier when it comes to exchanges.

>>25953379
fuck off.

>>25953351
I think they're similar, I just feel like Blockfi is safer. Defi sounds way too risky still.

>>25953317
in 2020 it was 5 btc for 6% interest, now it is 2.5 btc. this number will go down in the future.

>>25953317
>even Mtgox people got their coins back eventually
You're confusing cybersecurity risk with counterparty lending risk.
Mt. Gox didn't lose people's money on failed lending ventures. They lost people's money because they were hacked.
Blockfi actually takes your Bitcoin holdings the minute you sign on for your account with them. At that point your holdings are replaced with an IOU for the same amount of Bitcoin plus interest.
Crucially Blockfi does have insurance *for cybertheft* through Gemini while having the exact opposite of insurance for counterparty risk.
Not only do they have no insurance for the latter but they further go on to tell you in no uncertain terms that you're taking on their risk and not even you principal balance minus interest is guaranteed to ever be paid back to you.
>Digital currency is not legal tender, is not backed by any government, and the BlockFi Interest Account is not a bank account nor a brokerage account, and is not subject to FDIC, SIPC, or other similar protections. Interest rates, withdrawal limits, and fees are subject to change and are largely dictated by market conditions. This is not a risk-free product and loss of principal is possible.

>>25953517
>How is it a ponzi? They act like a traditional lending institutio
are they fdic insure? If not, you better get out. It's literally bitconnect2.0

>>25953317
Bitcoin was literally invented to prevent interest. It's a pyramid scheme.

Every penny of interest is new money being added to the monetary system. You can't add new bitcoin so you can't have interest.

>>25953700
Interesting... I’m currently staking on crypto.com I’m guessing that’s the same inherent “risk”. But could these companies really rug pull like that and get away with it? I feel like having those disclaimers wouldn’t nullify any legal recourse

>>25953317
This is brilliant.
>be whale
>loan bitcoins at $42k
>use your massive btc supply to sell btc for cash
>btc crashes
>buy back btc at $5k
>rinse and repeat
My god buttcoiners really are low IQ.

>>25953803
If Blockfi themselves think the disclaimers will let them do what their disclaimers say they can do is it really something you confidently trust your government to remedy for you?
I trust bulletproof vests more than I do the government and I still wouldn't ever volunteer to take a bullet while wearing one.

>>25953803
Also you have to ask: how can blockfi continually pay 15%? Whatever they’re doing is unsustainable and your money is caught up in that unsustainability

>>25953795
Smoothbrain detected

>>25954014
That’s pretty scary

>>25953317
bitcoin has a limited supply. so as more and more bitcoins are mined they will eventually run out of interest to give because there will be no more coins.

>>25954400
or the price just goes up until someone is willing to sell

It won’t make them any richer. They will fuck you

>>25953517
mtgox was pretty reliable too

>>25953317
They keep getting more funding from investors. Funding for what? Why aren't they making enough profit to tell investors to fuck themselves and since they aren't making nice profits what do the interest rates they offer even mean? If they're offering them without being profitable themselves those aren't real returns.

>>25954805
Why would anyone fund them if they're just clearly a ponzi without a way to pay back the investors? Surely the investors are savvy enough to see through their scheme, if it is a scheme.

>>25955321
Because they have well known early investors.
They didn't see through Theranos, Wirecard or Wework.

>>25953317
>don't own your private keys
>don't own your bitcoins

>>25953517
Bitcoin in general is a ponzi scheme. What can you do with it except hold it and hope the price goes up? You can say "store of value" all you want, but all that means is "hold it and hope the price goes up." Eventually you'll run out of retards wanting to buy and then everything will go to zero.

>>25955321
>Surely the investors are savvy enough to see through their scheme, if it is a scheme.
Wouldn't this logic lead to you believing any business venture with lots of investors must be low risk, viable, and honest?
Elizabeth Holmes convinced investors to give Theranos $4.5 billion, compared to Blockfi's $800 million.
Madoff Securities was literally the #1 market maker on NASDAQ and was the exact definition of a Ponzi scheme with Bernie Madoff swindling $50 billion from investors.

>>25955594
>What can you do with it except hold it and hope the price goes up?
you can send it around the world without an intermediary. that alone gives it value. you can also store the seed phrase in your memory and escape totalitarian countries without having your wealth confiscated. both things you can't do with gold.

>>25955693
Sure, the investors could be being bamboozled right now. You're cherry picking, though. 2 out of thousands of companies that these big investors put money in ended up being frauds. Their success rate is surely way, way higher than their "we got tricked by a ponzi" rate. And would it be better if Blockfi had zero big investors? No, it would mean they almost definitely have a bullshit product.

>>25953795
>Every penny of interest is new money being added to the monetary system
Lol, no.

>>25955706
No you can't, because you need an intermediary to cash the bitcoin out. If you're sending money to a guy in Russia so he can buy a car, he'll still need to turn your BTC into cash so he can get the car. Transaction fees to send it and cash out, money gone if there's a mistake, have to trust the people to cash you out, value could fluctuate overnight and now he doesn't have enough, etc etc.

>>25953317
it could be 10-20 years before bitcoin reaches 200k.

>>25953795
Dude you obviously understand nothing and are educated by Youtube videos. Don't take this the wrong way but in your position it's best to read more and type less.

>>25955893
good thing he can cash out in 10 minutes

>>25955820
>You're cherry picking
Your argument was:
>>25955321
>Surely the investors are savvy enough to see through their scheme, if it is a scheme.
It only takes 1 example of a "scheme" with as much money or more money invested in it than Blockfi is receiving to invalidate that.
Moreover Bernie Madoff did this with so much investor money that it triggered an even greater $363 billion pull out of investors from the market. If wealthy investors have a way of spotting schemes they certainly didn't learn that skill at any point prior to 2008 given how many of them not even involved with Madoff panic sold when they realized it could happen to them too.
And it's maybe even more ridiculous in the case of Theranos since the deliverable they claimed is unambiguously impossible on a basic physical level. This is something any of their investors could have learned if they spent even the slightest amount of effort doing their own research and consulting biomedical tech engineers before opening their wallets.
So surely Blockfi's investors would be "savvy enough" to recognize a "scheme?" No, there is no reason to make that assumption.
To get completely out of specific examples and into investing as a whole, the market is a zero sum game. Nobody wins in a big way without others losing in a big way. By its very nature there are always investors losing out for lack of good judgement. Non-managed index funds doing nothing but tracking the market outperform the majority of managed portfolios. This is a piece of trivia almost everyone has heard at some point. And yet investors with plenty of money every day continue to hand their money over to these portfolio managers.

Lending out your crypto like this is how people get JUSTED.

>>25956762
Okay, but now you have an intermediary. A bank could instantly transfer money too, there would be no risk of the value suddenly shifting wildly, if you made a mistake in the transfer you could reverse it, and the only people you have to trust (bank) have a great reputation and are known to law enforcement and government if they screw you.

>>25953317
Who is borrowing this stuff? Why would you borrow a bitcoin? Especially because you need to have collateral to take the loan. Your plan for retirement is to give loans to people who want to take out a loan for less money than they have in cash.

"Here's my 150 dollars, can I borrow 100 dollars for a month? Thank you. I'll pay you back 110 dollars for this privilege."

How can that be real?