Crypto scams are only on the rise in 2022, such a bad look for the space. Something more definitely needs to be done on the major exchanges/blockchains to curtail it.

Crypto market maker Wintermute loses $160 million in DeFi hack

"Wintermute, a leading crypto market maker, has lost about $160 million in a hack, a top executive said Tuesday, becoming the latest firm in the industry to suffer a breach.

Evgeny Gaevoy, the founder and chief executive of Wintermute, disclosed in a series of tweets that the firm’s decentralized finance operations had been hacked, but centralized finance and over the counter verticals aren’t affected.

He said that Wintermute — which counts Lightspeed Venture Partners, Pantera Capital and Fidelity’s Avon among its backers — remains solvent with “twice over that amount in equity left.” He assured lenders that if they wish to recall their loans, Wintermute will honor that."

Source: https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/20/cr...n-in-defi-hack

It's amazing how careless people are when handling other peoples money. Also, I'm curious as to what they think "solvent" means. Just because you have 200% of the money you lost or 2/3 of your money left, doesn't make you solvent. I don't know why I didn't become a money manager or whatever the **** these ******s are.

how in the world to you "lose" $160M?

I don't know, but I would be wondering if some of these big losses and blowups aren't an inside job.

Not saying that is the case with Wintermute, but just wondering in general. There have been so many of these thefts and problems.

How bitcoin/crypto is trading at these levels is just crazy! Who is putting their capital to work in this sector?

Of course a lot of them are inside jobs. There are 0 repercussions from all these "hacks". Its a fraudsters dream. Fraud always starts with opportunity, the rest tends to fill itself in

WSJ: Coinbase Tested Group to Speculate on Crypto

"Coinbase Global Inc. has been searching for new ways to make money. One business it flirted with was controversial: using its own money to speculate on cryptocurrencies.Last year, Coinbase—which operates a large cryptocurrency exchange that handles bitcoin and other digital coins—hired at least four senior Wall Street traders and launched a group to generate profit, in part, by using the company’s cash to trade and “stake,” or lock up, cryptocurrencies, according to people close to the matter. The activity was described as “proprietary” trading by the people at the company.

Earlier this year, the team completed a $100 million transaction that the group viewed as a test trade of the new effort, according to the people. The transaction came after Coinbase executives testified to members of Congress last year that the company didn’t buy and sell digital currencies for its own account."

Source:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/coinbas...to-11663806157

Hey all:

I've been looking at some of the publicly traded miners. There are several of these companies that are on the brink of SEVERE financial trouble.

How?

They aren't making money now. Most of them are losing a good amount of money.

Some of them have rather substantial amounts of debt.

If you add back depreciation on their physical plants, some of them are CLOSE to breaking even on a cash flow basis. The problem with that is that over the medium and long term, depreciation is going to be a very real expense to them. In 2-3-4 years, they are going to have to replace their mining equipment. IF they don't replace their mining equipment, then they have no business.

What is the business environment going to be like when they have to replace their mining rigs? All these guys borrowed money at historically low interest rates. What will interest rates be like in the future? I am going to guess that it will like 7%+. There might also be a problem that only strongly profitable companies are even going to be able to borrow money at reasonable rates of 7%.

My guess is that a lot of these miners are going to be out of business/merged UNLESS bitcoin appreciates in price substantially. If a lot of these companies go under, that is probably not going to be good for bitcoin.

Why are the weaker miners going out of business bad for bitcoin? Bitcoin price doesn't follow mining activity, mining activity follows bitcoin price. When price is high, it's more profitable and more miners come online, the opposite is true when price is low. There has already been a lot of btc selling from miners this year to sustain business expenses. If your argument is low bitcoin price is bad for miners which is bad for bitcoin, you can remove the miners from the sentence and say low bitcoin price is bad for bitcoin.

Bitcoin miners going out of business is bad for the price of Bitcoin. It is bad, as news of companies going under, is likely to drive people out of the market. It is also going to elevate the perceived risk level of Bitcoin for ordinary/potential investors. Thus, people who were considering it, are more likely NOT to be investing/involved with it IF they hear about a bunch of miners going under.

How will Bitcoin miners going under be GOOD for the reputation/price of Bitcoin?

I am really surprised at just how well Bitcoin has actually done. I would have thought it would be MUCH lower than where it is at now. I don't think it is going to go to zero or like $5/coin...but I could see it going down 80% from current levels.

As an aside, trading of NFT's is down about 97% from it's peak, as reported in Bloomberg:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articl...zy-fades-chart

More Than Half Of All Bitcoin Trades Are Fake

Title: More than half of all bitcoin trades are fake

Headline: A new Forbes analysis of 157 crypto exchanges finds that 51% of the daily bitcoin trading volume being reported is likely bogus.

Article: We used proprietary methodology to produce our own estimations

Because the business purpose of mining was to create a larger group of people than the actual investors to pump your product. Amazing how all miners say whatever they are mining is good.

miners don't pump bitcoin price. larger groups of investors putting money in drives up bitcoin price which makes mining profitable. miners chase bitcoin price, not the other way around.

Looks like we are at the “miner capitulation death spiral” part of the cycle again which is odd considering hash rate just hit a new ATH. Can’t wait to revisit this topic again in the weeks leading up to the 2024 halving.

For a poker forum, you guys sure put too much stock in a sample size of 3 aka halving.

CoinDesk: Celsius’ top executives withdrew a little over $17 million in cryptocurrency right before the company suspended withdrawals and filed for bankruptcy

https://www.coindesk.com/business/20...re-bankruptcy/

I fail to understand why current prices wouldn't already reflect the effects of this event since it's known to everyone well in advance.

Markets are not rational

correlation // causation

hey all:

There is a little bit of market turmoil today in crypto/bitcoin. Bitcoin is down a little bit....about $2,400 a coin to about $18,475.

There are going to be several LARGE bitcoin miners going bankrupt. The largest one of all, Core Scientific (CORZ) is pretty much done. They are the largest bitcoin miner in the world (measured by mining capacity). A couple of weeks ago, they announced that they would not be paying their November debt payments. They also put out a news release saying bankruptcy reorganization is a strong possibility at this point. That was with Bitcoin a bit over $20K, now it is $18.5K.

When you look at CORZ, these guys never made any money, and lost well over $1BB in just over a year. The stock is down like 98%+ Look at the chart, they sold to bag holders and it went straight down. Their business model was clearly flawed. If they can't make money mining bitcoin, who can?

As the economy slows, and interest rates increase, I think the whole crypto complex is going to collapse.

https://www.tradingview.com/x/TeqkBdqD/


Hit the .618 and the .66 to the dollar and had a massive reversal



Edit:
How do you post charts in this thing so people don't have to click the link? That's quite annoying

Copy the image on your computer, then paste in the response text box, i.e. Ctrl-C Ctrl-V using a keyboard.

Make sure javascript is turned on in your browser.

So what happens to BTC when only one miner is operating? When does the 51% scenario kick in and basically destroys trust in the network?

How are you crypto losers getting on?

It's almost as I knew what I was talking about, suckers never learn.