Core Scientific Declares Bankruptcy as Crypto Winter Lingers (bloomberg.com) 33
Core Scientific, one of the largest miners of Bitcoin, became the latest crypto company to file for bankruptcy as the industry reckons with a plunge in digital-asset prices. From a report: The Austin, Texas-based company listed $1.4 billion of assets against $1.33 billion of liabilities in its Chapter 11 petition, which was filed in the Southern District of Texas. The company's shares, already down 98% this year to trade at a fraction of a dollar, lost a further 40% on Wednesday morning.
Chapter 11 bankruptcy allows a company to continue operating while it works out a plan to repay creditors. Core Scientific said in a statement that it intends to reach a restructuring agreement with a group of convertible bondholders and continue operating its mining and hosting business. The company contributes about 10% of the computing power to secure the entire Bitcoin network. It had 243,000 servers for Bitcoin mining with 143,000 for self-mining. It has provided hosting services to the largest miners in the industry.
Chapter 11 bankruptcy allows a company to continue operating while it works out a plan to repay creditors. Core Scientific said in a statement that it intends to reach a restructuring agreement with a group of convertible bondholders and continue operating its mining and hosting business. The company contributes about 10% of the computing power to secure the entire Bitcoin network. It had 243,000 servers for Bitcoin mining with 143,000 for self-mining. It has provided hosting services to the largest miners in the industry.
Hardware liquidation sale!!!!!!1 (Score:2, Funny)
For the very first time in my life, I feel like saying: "Drat, I don't live in Texas."
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I'm not sure what you would want a bunch of obsolete purpose-built Bitcoin miners for, unless you're looking for a unique way to heat your apartment.
Maybe they'll have some nice office furniture, but it's not like they're going to have a warehouse full of modern GPU's to purchase.
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For the very first time in my life, I feel like saying: "Drat, I don't live in Texas."
From what I've read, you wouldn't want an ex-mining rig - they're rode hard and put away wet.
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I love posts like that though. I know exactly what the arseholes on Fox News are saying and I never have to actually watch Fox News.
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Have you tried watching it in the last 5 to 8 years? It's a lot more unhinged than it used to be. It seems they were losing viewers to the competition (not just TV news, but social media) and so had to go further down that rabbit hole to stay relevant.
Not something I would expect normal people to know, but having grown up watching Fox News every day in the Bill O'Reilly era, I was shocked to see how it had devolved even from that.
There's a similar race to the bottom going on across many of the Christian chu
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To be perfectly honest, I'm not a consumer of any live "news network" content. I listen to NPR/MPR on my car rides to/from work, that's about the extent of it. That being said, I'll read articles from just about any source if the topic is of interest and the tone isn't too batshit crazy. Fox News articles are one of my regular reads from the "other side" of the spectrum.
Unfortunately I think the 24-hour news networks, no mater what side of the political spectrum you are on, have gone completely unhinged. I
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Seek professional help. When you fill out the form asking what symptoms you are experiencing, write in "severe and aggressive disconnection from reality."
Re: Hardware liquidation sale!!!!!!1 (Score:2, Interesting)
Sadly what we do is give them loans so that they can buy our excess products. By doing that we flood the place with cheap products, and kill their local industry perpetuating the problem.
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Forget investing, I think just ceasing to actively dick these countries would help plenty. There is a long history of the US actively messing around in these countries' internal affairs. Plus drug prohibition in the US has single-handedly turned Mexico into a narcostate. (Not to mention all the corruption it causes within the US itself.)
Re: Hardware liquidation sale!!!!!!1 (Score:2)
The only purpose these things serve is to mine Bitcoin. And they use up so much electricity to do so that it costs you more than the Bitcoin are worth.
I suppose they might make decent space heaters with a tiny Bitcoin rebate on your bill.
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I wouldn't really know though. I don't keep up to date on how scammers operate.
Those are not up for sale... (Score:1)
Hardware liquidation sale!!!!
From the summary, sounds like they are just going to keep mining and will not have to sell off hardware, probably the debt-holders figuring that continued mining will get them more of a payback than selling a bunch of old mining hardware no=one wants right now.
What I like best about these miners (Score:2)
Loan officers are salesmen scored on how many loans they approve. Seems like that would be a problem. Especially with how often people change jobs nowadays.
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Sounds like the loan underwriters deserve what they bought. I expect the loan officers to write any kind of trash paper they can, as that's what they're paid to do.
The underwriters are supposed to make sure that the trash that the loan officers write doesn't make it over the finish line.
YAY ! Fuck you all you selfish mining bastards. (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember: Until bitcoin is $0 again, it is overpriced.
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OK buddy, settle down now...
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It is not crypto winter. ... (Score:1)
Nope! Crypto will die. Its not seasonal or cyclic.
In the early days of crypto people thought it was totally anonymous and it attracted lots of tax dodgers, money launderers and criminals thinking it was anonymous.
Then they learnt its actually totally public, and it is anonymous only to the extent you can hide your real identity from your wallet. All it takes is one transaction using that wallet tha
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So what we will probably see in a decade or so is something calling itself crypto taking off, but it will have only a surface
Re: It is not crypto winter. ... (Score:1)
Mining for what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Calculation (Score:3)
Before bankruptcy, reckless mode: Mining has to pay for electricity, staff, interest..
After bankruptcy: Mining has to pay enough so your electricity supply isnâ(TM)t cut, and enough for staff not to leave.
After that: No mining, just unpaid bills.
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Yep, after all was said and done, Bernie Madoff' AS/400 is still plugging along, printing out the paper trails for a small group of loyalist investors.
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99 crypto miners against the wall (Score:3)
99 crypto miners
One goes bankrupt, with owners corrupt,
98 crypto miners against the wall
Can someone finally get the firing squad in? Pretty please?
It really is a gold sim (Score:3)
Having followed the gold market (it was impossible to ignore because there are so many touts) I learned a few things. The interesting thing about a gold mine, which makes sense if you think about it, is that it's more volatile than gold. What I mean is, the price of mining stocks goes up more than the price of gold and it also goes *down* more than the price of gold. There may be an odd case here an there, but it's a pretty solid rule based on fundamentals.
Consider what makes a gold mine (or any mine) profitable. You have to get more value out than you put in. The people who run mines know all about this. The cost of extraction is generally calculated out in advance, to the extent you can do that subject to other things like labor and fuel costs; but it's not rocket science for business. So you'll get situations where a mine spends $1200/oz. mining and when gold is $1800/oz it's ducky; but the if gold falls to $1100/oz., suddenly they stop thinking about profit and start thinking "burn rate" and if you hold stock in a company like that you're going from having a very good reason to hold it to having NO REASON AT ALL in short order.
You can even see this effect when looking at the charts of GDX (a fund that tracks gold miners) vs. GLD (a fund that tracks gold). It's almost like they ran the charts through some kind of amplifier. GDX goes up faster, and it goes down faster.
Another obvious rule of finance is that *options* on any stock go up or down faster than the stock, ie, they're more volatile than the stock.
For a straight-up gamble, try playing options on GDX close to expiration, LOL. Not for the faint of heart; but if you somehow knew that gold was going to spike or tumble next week you could totally clean up. I suspect the addage, "If you're not cheating you're not really playing" has been put to use on more than one occasion in such markets.
So of course Bitcoin, which is very much like digital gold, is going to have similar effects. Look for more miners to go bankrupt in the coming days as the cost of mining is no longer justified at these prices, and they've waited long enough with their burn rate to see if prices will come back.
Prices probably will come back at some point, but there is no more Bitcoin Pizza. That was an entirely different effect--the transient that comes from a market that never existed before, suddenly appearing. You don't get 50,000X gains from something that's as established as Bitcoin is now.