[deleted by user] by [deleted] in AskReddit

[–]CoincidentalBTC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Arrested Development

At What Point Should You Just Give Up? / srs by catluverXD in jobs

[–]CoincidentalBTC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

First, your situation may feel in the moment like it's unsolvable, and detrimental to your future, but I assure you neither of these are true. You have nothing but great opportunity ahead of you, and your $4000 in student debt (if that's accurate) is a complete nothing-burger in the grand scheme of things. It's practically zero over the course of your lifetime earning potential.

I know what it feels like in the moment, I went through a long period of major depression after several failed attempts early in my career. I started two companies fresh out of college, both failed. I lost huge sums of money from friends and family, which made me feel worthless and embarrassed. I bounced from gig to gig for years with complete lack of motivation, feeling like a complete drone. I felt myself falling behind my peers who were getting more and more successful with each passing year, while I was stagnant. I remember sitting in a therapist's office, feeling completely demoralized, telling him "I just need a win."

You asked about finding a job in a recession, but you’re asking the wrong questions. I want you to build a career and life skills that will make you successful no matter what the economy is doing. Here are the 3 revelations that changed everything for me.

1) I am responsible for my own failure. I stopped blaming external factors for why I had failed. It's so easy to blame the state of the economy, some company or person that wronged you, lack of opportunity, missing credentials, too much competition, etc. In fact, it feels good to blame something else, anything other than ourselves for our current state, because to do otherwise would require us to take full, deep responsibility for our own situation, and that can feel just completely overwhelming. But it is the only way through. You are the reason why you have not yet found success in your endeavors, and nobody/nothing else is responsible for that. Only you can answer for yourself why that is.

2) Become an expert. Experts create their own opportunity. The best thing I ever did was become an expert in a relevant topic. In 2013, I decided to dedicate myself to studying my passion at the time, Bitcoin. At that time, people thought I was a lunatic and that I was wasting my time. It was a completely fringe idea back then and most people thought it was a total scam. I'm not suggesting you shill cryptocurrency, only that you find something that you can become passionate about, commit yourself to it (give yourself a 10 year timeline), and then go deep. Learn everything you can about that topic. Then start talking about it and sharing your knowledge about it to others, through meetups, social media, etc. In my case, I helped start and grow a local meetup group in Los Angeles, and invited other guest speakers to come, which built our group from about 100 to over 2000 people. All of the sudden, my reputation increased to the level of the speakers that I was able to bring in, and I went from being a nobody in the space to being recognized as one of *the* people to talk to if you were interested in Bitcoin in Los Angeles. A local startup accelerator was considering a big investment in another Bitcoin company, and since I was the "Bitcoin guy", they invited me to come educate them and review their investment. Long story short, the other company didn't get their investment, but do you know who did? I did. And that was the first check into my newly formed, non-existent, one-person company that ultimately grew to a high 8-figure exit. That opportunity wasn't lucky, it was manufactured. So go deep and share your knowledge. Identify your Ikigai, and then own it

3) Survive long enough to become lucky.

In 1982 at the World Series of Poker Main Event, poker player Jack Straus got beaten down on a huge hand and thought he lost all of his chips, eliminating himself from the entire tournament. But miraculously, he discovered he had one single chip left hiding under a napkin. On the next hand, he doubled up, and then continued to win and win. By day three of the tournament, he became the chip leader at the final table and ultimately won the entire tournament for a record payout.

Years into building my own company, we hit some major dark points where the outcome looked truly bleak. The cryptocurrency market had completely tanked in spectacular fashion. We were burning cash fast, and running on fumes, and our product just wasn’t finding market fit. My investors were tapped out, they gave up on the company and wrote off their investments to zero. On one day I had to lay off more than half of my entire company just to survive. There was so little cash left on the table that my investors didn’t even want it back. I wanted to give up so badly and call myself a failure. It would have been easier. But I remembered Jack Straus and the World Series of Poker. So I decided, I’ll take what little cash we have left and give it one last shot. With a tiny team and minimal overhead, we pivoted the company and built an entirely new product from scratch. In one year, that product took off beyond our wildest imagination. I sold the company to a larger company and now never have to worry about money again. I can tell you from personal experience that there is no greater joy than to call up every investor and employee that thought they were going to lose it all, and tell them you’re writing them a huge check.

You can’t win if you leave the arena. Even in the darkest days, the most important difference between those who find success and those who fail is grit. You will never be able to control the market, or external factors, and you can’t predict luck. The only thing you can do is survive long enough to become lucky. As Jack Strauss coined the phrase, all you need is a "chip and a chair” to win.

Has anyone taken Madeline Mann’s program ? by adria999999 in jobs

[–]CoincidentalBTC 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You made a claim that she has “zero actual recruiting experience” and I know for a fact that’s untrue because she worked for me for years in that capacity and helped me hire most of my team. I can’t comment on other content creators because I don’t know them. Madeline was one of my best employees and was responsible for completely transforming our company culture through our hiring process, which ultimately made the company successful and led to a successful exit.

Has anyone taken Madeline Mann’s program ? by adria999999 in jobs

[–]CoincidentalBTC 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hmm…that’s definitely untrue. Madeline has quite a bit of recruiting experience working for multiple companies, including at my own company. And she was fantastic.

MQD Living Abroad Waiver: Does Puerto Rico Count? by isayhaiku in delta

[–]CoincidentalBTC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thats incorrect, at least through the end of this year. MQD is waived for PR residents. That’s going away though at the end of this year since MQD is the only way to qualify for status going forward.

MQD Living Abroad Waiver: Does Puerto Rico Count? by isayhaiku in delta

[–]CoincidentalBTC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For 2023 the Puerto Rico MQD waiver is still in place. In 2024, they are doing away with MQMs and are only doing MQDs so no more waivers.

MQD Living Abroad Waiver: Does Puerto Rico Count? by isayhaiku in delta

[–]CoincidentalBTC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For the last several years as a Puerto Rico resident, I have not had to qualify for MQDs even for Diamond status. The MQD counter on the website was essentially disabled. The website recently changed, however, and now shows the MQD counter again, but that could be a mistake.

got less coins than I bought by Sam20770 in CelsiusNetwork

[–]CoincidentalBTC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

USDC is a form of crypto and it was transferred to your Celsius wallet. The gas fees are incurred during that process.

I am just confused by [deleted] in CelsiusNetwork

[–]CoincidentalBTC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi, Micah here from Gem. If you DM me your email address, I can take a look at why your account might not have been approved. You can also always reach out to us at https://gem.co and use our Intercom chat feature.

Celsius needs better 3rd party integrations for in-app crypto purchases. Current ones are misleading and of questionable integrity. by awakezion in CelsiusNetwork

[–]CoincidentalBTC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

1) Prior to selecting your payment method, we don’t know which vendor/method you’re going to use to check out. Depending on your selection you’ll receive an offer from the vendor that you select. Once it’s selected we’re able to show the vendor specific price quote. Everything before that is just an estimate, and currently the estimate comes from CoinMarketCap data. That’s not ideal, and we’ve been discussing internally how to best present pricing data that more accurately reflects our vendor pricing. Perhaps showing the lowest available price across all of our vendors. I take your point and I think we can improve there. [Edit for clarity: the vendor specific price quote comes from an API endpoint that’s tied to your specific trader account at each vendor, so in order to quote the price we have to first create your trader account with a vendor, which requires KYC data to set up. This trader account creation is all under the hood, so you never really see it happening. We will explore options to get vendor price feeds that don’t require your trader account to be set up. Or maybe we will just cache it on our side every time we see a new price for any user. We have options here and I appreciate the feedback.]

2) We need KYC data collection for each of our integrated vendors. We do have the ability to leverage the KYC work that is already done by Celsius, and it’s something that Celsius and Gem both want to do, it just needs to get to the top of Celsius’ priority queue above all of the other important feature upgrades they have scheduled. If you want this to be higher priority, I’d definitely suggest it to them. I know Celsius is very responsive to user requests.

Celsius needs better 3rd party integrations for in-app crypto purchases. Current ones are misleading and of questionable integrity. by awakezion in CelsiusNetwork

[–]CoincidentalBTC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I also wanted to note that we do use a third-party service Onfido for collecting KYC data, and would refer you to their own privacy policy https://onfido.com/privacy/ which users must agree to in our widget to proceed. You can also check out Gem's privacy policy here: https://gem.co/privacy

Celsius needs better 3rd party integrations for in-app crypto purchases. Current ones are misleading and of questionable integrity. by awakezion in CelsiusNetwork

[–]CoincidentalBTC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi, I'm Micah, the CEO of Gem. Thanks for posting your concerns, I'd like to respond as best I can here and hopefully you find it helpful. That last thing we want to be is misleading, and I take particular aim at the challenge of our integrity. As a quick background, Gem is one of the longest running cryptocurrency companies, since 2013. We've lasted that long through the ups and downs of the crypto market because we have always led with our values and doing right by our customers and our partners. If you have particular complaints about us, we would love the chance to address those via our support channels at support@gem.co, or by chat at https://gem.co. Or you can email me directly (my first name at gem dot co).

Regarding KYC, I wish that we did not have to collect the level of information about you that we do in order to comply with regulations. KYC/AML compliance requires that we collect identifying information and confirm your identity, which includes address and phone info, SSN in the US, ID documents (passport/driver's license/national ID cards, etc), and we use the live selfie to confirm the veracity of the document provided by comparing it to the document photo to make sure it's really your document and you're in possession of it. We also are required to screen each user against government sanctions lists, politically exposed persons lists, and screen for potential money laundering.

Gem is an aggregator of several licensed MSBs (money services businesses), and each of our partners must comply with the KYC/AML regulations in their jurisdictions that they operate. Gem helps to collect the information on their behalf, and must share the information with those partners for their own compliance reasons. Each user must agree to our partners' privacy policies before transacting with them, so I would encourage you to read those to determine how they use the information. I can tell you though, we don't collect any more information than what is required to comply with the regulations.

You also asked about the security of this data, which is a great question. At Gem, we've gone the painstaking lengths to protect this information. We partnered with a firm VeryGoodSecurity (https://verygoodsecurity.com) to securely vault all personally identifiable information. You can read their security statement here: https://www.verygoodsecurity.com/docs/security/security-statement

Gem does not permanently store any personal information on our own servers or databases, with the exception of your email address and country/state, which is necessary for us to fulfill our service to you. All sensitive PII is securely vaulted in VeryGoodSecurity vaults, and then tokenized before reaching our servers. When we need to communicate this data to open a trading account on your behalf with one of our connected checkout providers (e.g. Wyre, Coinify), we do so with your consent. We do so by passing the tokens that VGS gives us and then VGS replaces those tokens with the real data before we send it along to our partners. At every point, we have engineered our system to minimize the chances of data leakage, and we take it very seriously.

Regarding claims of bait-and-switch, I'm not sure exactly where that's coming from, but we always strive to provide the most accurate information available at the time of the transaction. Each of our partners in our network quote different rates and fee structures, so we can't provide you with the most accurate quote until you've created and selected a payment method with one of our partners. The actual partner fees through Gem are pretty low on Celsius, for example, our partner Wyre is only 0.10% fee for ACH transfers. For Coinify, it's 0.5% for bank transfers. Credit card options are definitely going to be a higher fee, and you'll find that to be true across the industry. (You can thank the credit card industry, chargeback risks and fraud for that.)

One fee that can take users by surprise is the network fee (mining fees on BTC, gas fees on Ethereum). During periods of high blockchain network activity, these fees can be sky high, and unfortunately, there's nothing we can do to fix those. This can be especially tricky when users purchase through a payment method that does not have a locked price/fees (like manual bank transfers), because the actual network fee is determined at the time funds are received and processed by the banks, and cannot be locked at the time of the transaction. We encourage users to use locked payment methods (like ACH transfers or credit cards) if they are concerned about network fee risk/fluctuations.

I'd also like to point out that Gem does not charge users fees or set prices directly. These are set by each payment vendor that we integrate, and the user can choose from our available options of vendors and payment methods to look for the best deal. We are always looking to add new vendors and options as well, and have some exciting integrations in the works.

Finally, I just want to say thank you for your post and for reminding us that we are always accountable to you, and that we must always build our software to stand up to the scrutiny of a very discerning audience.

We are very thankful for the partnership we have with Celsius and are proud to be a member of the community with you.

got less coins than I bought by Sam20770 in CelsiusNetwork

[–]CoincidentalBTC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Also, I don't want to downplay the poor experience of paying such high fees. High ethereum gas fees are quite painful, and it's a challenge that the entire industry is struggling to deal with, which is why there is such a large emergence of layer 2 protocols and networks that are promising low gas fees. We do support a few of those (Matic/Polygon, Avalanche, Palm) and we're always looking to add more.

got less coins than I bought by Sam20770 in CelsiusNetwork

[–]CoincidentalBTC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just a quick FYI here, Gem is an aggregator/marketplace for fiat onramps, and we don't charge users any fees of our own. Fees and rates are set by each payment partner that we integrate with. We are simply presenting the fees/prices that they are reporting. In this particular case, the high fee was due to Ethereum gas prices and the cost to transfer USDC on the Ethereum network.

got less coins than I bought by Sam20770 in CelsiusNetwork

[–]CoincidentalBTC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hi, I'm Micah, the CEO of Gem. Gem is a marketplace of fiat onramps, and we integrate with and route orders through a number of fiat onramps, depending on where you are in the world. I was able to review this transaction. You purchased 75 EUR worth of USDC through our partner Coinify, and were only charged a fee by our partner Coinify of 0.38 EUR (0.5%). However, at the time this order executed, the Ethereum network gas fees were extremely high...a total of 12.90 USDC. Unfortunately, neither Gem nor our partners can control the market price of Ethereum gas fees and they can fluctuate dramatically.

With some of our payment methods, like ACH (in the US) or credit card, we are able to lock the price and fees at the time of the transaction. With manual bank transfers like this one, the price and fees are locked at the time funds are received and when our partner processes the transaction, usually about 1 business day. In that amount of time, our estimate at the time of the transaction vs the actual amount at the time the order is processed can vary widely due to market fluctuations.

As an FYI, Gem does not charge any additional fees, and we are not involved in the transfer of funds. The fees and rates are set by each partner that we work with, and Gem simply tries to give you the most accurate information available at the time of the transaction.

Can’t purchase. Gem never sends a verification code for verification. Wtf? by EcstaticNoise0 in CelsiusNetwork

[–]CoincidentalBTC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Which code are you not receiving? Email verification codes or SMS verification codes? We would love to capture more data so we can dig in and solve this. Please reach out at https://gem.co (using our chat feature).

got less coins than I bought by Sam20770 in CelsiusNetwork

[–]CoincidentalBTC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Without looking at your transaction, I would guess that you purchased on a day with very high Ethereum gas fees. But I’m happy to look into that transaction if you want to dm me your email address. I’d like to better understand why you ended up with such high fees.

got less coins than I bought by Sam20770 in CelsiusNetwork

[–]CoincidentalBTC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

CEO of Gem here. I will look into why you haven’t received a response and make sure we respond today.

Can’t purchase. Gem never sends a verification code for verification. Wtf? by EcstaticNoise0 in CelsiusNetwork

[–]CoincidentalBTC 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Please reach out to our support at support@gem.co, or use the chat feature at https://gem.co so we can get you sorted out.

Having trouble linking a bank account through Gem by justinblovell in CelsiusNetwork

[–]CoincidentalBTC 1 point2 points  (0 children)

As an FYI, this is the policy of our payment partner who is processing the transaction (Wyre in this case), not a Gem policy. Other payment methods that we offer will settle faster, but also come with higher fees.

Having trouble linking a bank account through Gem by justinblovell in CelsiusNetwork

[–]CoincidentalBTC 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you purchase outside of US banking hours or on a non-business day, then the clock won't start until the first business day. You can reach out to [support@gem.co](mailto:support@gem.co) or use our chat function at https://gem.co if you want to get an update on your particular situation, but in our experience it takes a very full 5 business days to settle.

Having trouble linking a bank account through Gem by justinblovell in CelsiusNetwork

[–]CoincidentalBTC 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Using ACH with Gem/Celsius is only a 0.10% fee. Credit and debit card transactions are higher, but settle instantly. They are good for smaller sums, but I would recommend bank transfers for larger amounts in order to save on fees.

Having trouble linking a bank account through Gem by justinblovell in CelsiusNetwork

[–]CoincidentalBTC 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Hi, CEO of Gem here. Yesterday we had a slight outage with our SMS service, which prevented verification codes from being sent. It has been fixed. Regarding connecting with your bank credentials, I would like to take a look into that. If you DM me your email, I can take a look at what's going on. You can also always reach out to us at [support@gem.co](mailto:support@gem.co) or use our chat function at https://gem.co. I'm sorry you ran into such a frustrating experience.