Are we allowed to talk about Bitcoin?

It's a Reddit subboard, so I have no idea if any of that is for real or if it's performance theater.

But suppose it is for real, and people are suicidal because they leveraged their homes or borrowed from other sources, and lost a lot of money?

How fucking shitty do you have to be to see that and post, "LOL"?

 

BTW, I am sure few people on here follow that whole stablecoin saga, but whoever launched that attack on Terra / Luna probably made close to a billion dollars in a few days.

I feel bad for people who have gotten sucked into some of these things and the losses are going to be very real. At the same time, I marvel at how someone pulled this off.

The whole thing is reminiscent of George Soros breaking the Bank of England in the early 90s, and if people understod what happened, they'd understand that anyone pegging something to something else who says they are using an algorithm, isn't really creating a peg. That crypto was like a fiat currency that isn't pegged to anything, it's a matter of faith (wishful thinking really), and that made it vulnerable to an attack. Unlike a fiat currency, that foundation behind it doesn't have government muscle to change the rules on the fly. And it was especially vulnerable in this case, because the foundation behind Terra publicly announced a few months ago that it was buying billions of dollars of bitcoin as reserves to somehow try to keep the dollar peg, which set the stage for an attack -- because bitcoin is in a bubble.

Whoever took the thing down, probably started by borrowing a lot of bitcoin and started selling into the fundation's buying, creating billions of dollars worth of a short position in bitcoin -- much of it shorted near the top of the bubble, as it turns out. At the same time, they were building a huge stake in Terra (but smaller than their short position in bitcoin). Their attack consisted of liquidating the terra position, knowing that the foundation would sell bitcoins to try to keep terra pegged to the dollar, taking the price of bitcoin down (so they could cover their short position at a profit). Their execution was perfect, because they created such pressure with their sales of terra that some of the crypto exchanges started suspending wiithdrawals, which created panic and sent terra down to 60 cents on the dollar at its bottom. The whole time the price of bitcoin was dropping. ... and whoever launched the attack was ringing a cash register covering on its bitcoin shorts.

It was a very sophisticated attack, but what makes it remarkable isn't that someone thought it up. LOTS of people knew this thing was vulnerable, and could have come up with that kind of attack conceptually. What makes it remarkable is that it takes huge balls to try something like that with that amount of money, especially in an environment in which money is still way too cheap and keeping a lot of malinvestment propping up things that should be worthless. I don't think this would have worked even 2 or 3 months ago.

The thing that has changed is that the Fed has started a tenuous rate hiking cycle and started talking about a plan to run off its balance sheet. Whoever did this attack either got really lucky in their timing as markets suddenly started to sober up in a way they had still been refusing to (because we still have very negative real rates) after the Fed meeting last week, or more likely, this person or people correctly predicted that the Fed's dithering and bad messaging was going to finally create conditions nervous enough to make the success of an attack more likely finally. That was the remarkable part of it for me; it's being able to read the room and having the courage to go for it that separates the great ones from the people who play it safer.