Coinbase sets up overseas exchange.

Was in US. Still is. But now also in Bermuda.

 

Coinbase sues SEC after months of silence from regulators - YouTube 

Here's what's behind cryptocurrencies' recent rally - YouTube 

During the past week of days when the market was bearish, bitcoin has risen significantly, like gold and treasuries, as a 'safety' move.

25% of American adults own Bitcoin according to some sources.

Stable coin scams

If they say the value is pegged to the dollar, and they don't have the capacity to keep that value there.

They also 'defeat the whole purpose of crypto currencies', Yanis said.

Bitcoin so far has never been macroeconomically significant - Yanis

Central banks can create tens of trillions of dollars. The crypto market cannot destabilize that.

Capitalism is unstable by itself.

$100 or 300t problem, potentially the biggest ... that the price of money is centrally planned - Dylan LeClair

50 years into global fiat currency experiment. Reaching a point where global debt burdens are so bloated that the only way out is monetary debasement.

#Crypto

Is this the same as ‘centralizing’ this decentralized thing?

#Crypto

'Sometimes you need to battle-test the infrastructure and the thesis (and see who are the survivors)' - Kathy Wood on crypto

"Cleansing bad players" - Tom Lee. 2023 if there's more fraud, Bitcoin will probably have another bad year, but good companies will emerge out of it, like how JPM came out of 08. Similarly, from the old internet, there were lots of software and media companies (Yahoo), which most people today have never heard of. Many went bankrupt. A few are big now.

There were 2 big 'white knight' players in a supposedly-supposed-to-be decentralized industry, FTX and Binance. Now there's just Binance. Binance is bailing out FTX and others. What happens if something happens to Binance. Who's going to bail out Binance?

Mix of lots of customer money, non-disclosure, and leverage (borrowing against it), and inside these companies trading.

The public, around the world, has got hurt by this. Laws can protect investors. Going into courts, telling judges the facts and the laws.

Celebrities. People can fall prey to their promotions, their marketing.

Education ('this is speculative') is part of the SEC strategy.

Of all the cryptos, Solana, etc, only 2 or 3 or 10 will survive. The next coins will be gen 3 or 4 or 5. Zuckerburg saw what was there at the time, learned from it, and improved it. Google saw other search engines at the time. Shkreli talked about this stuff.

TERRIFYING! What The USA Just Launched... - YouTube

FRED, Central Bank digital currency, biggest holder of mortgages, Citi, BNU Mellon, US Bank, Wells, etc. France, Switzerland, Singapore cross-border CBDC.

BIS is a private institution overseeing government things. Control over purchases, no cash, government can freeze accounts like Canadian Truckers participation and support. Events can also be faked while backdroors are pushed through. One digital identity mapped across all bank accounts, KYC. Carbon scores, social credit.

#Crypto #Privacy

What's the difference between bitcoin and the USD?

(If bitcoin is just fake money, with nothing of real value behind it, what is USD?)

$30t economy, full faith in credit, and Federal Reserve is behind the dollar, interest-bearing securities in which you can place your dollar with a relative degree of safety, USD still a very highly-rated credit despite debt to GDP levels. ... Ron Isana.

"It's a real thing." Comprises 65% of global trade. 95% of global exchange transfers. It's a reserve currency (bitcoin isn't, and "doesn't exist in any form except in the minds of those who created it.")

"We've done this a million times in the past, whether it's tulip bulbs, railroad bonds, electronics companies or bad internet companies. The underlying internet was important but a lot of the players like CNGI disappear because they had no functional use case"

Blockchain technology is useful though. (It is the underlying tech, and crypto is the overlay.) Cheaper, frictionless transactions, more secure, transparent.

Economic booms give rise to weird money industries, when interest rates at 0 ('money is free'), past 15 years

Chinese boom, Japanese boom, subprime, crypto (this boom).

#Crypto

Overlevered.

Reputational effects.

The space operates like a ponzi scheme, where it takes new money to pay out old money. Crypto still has no inherent value (use). It's still speculation rather than utility.

So if you have the best crypto (or company), but there's a ton of crap cryptos and they're all going down, some to zero, your good one will go down too as a part of that. Part is news, part sentiment, part that the people who bought those bad ones also bought the good one and they sell them at the same time, bringing prices lower.

 

$Hundreds of millions often.

#hacking #Crypto

The first African country to do so.

Is crypto democratized or democratizing, really?

Vice actually did something people said was OK again with this video.

#crypto

... and Bitcoin went up. His order was to look into it and come up with what to do about it, it looks like.

It's being seen by many in the asset class as a defining or watershed moment (just because it's getting this kind of attention and treatment, not because there's anything concrete, which of course there's not).

There had been questions about crypto. How to regulate it? Who's going to regulate it? What kind of posture should the US have in terms of competitiveness and innovation in this technology?

People say the markets like certainty, even if sometimes it's something not positive, it's the certainty that the markets react positively to.

What does this mean as a new competitive infrastructure for the US? How does the US stay strong in this industry, while still addressing the risks?

How does the dollar work in this new world? How is it kept safe and sound, so this can grow and flourish?

US dollar competitiveness on the internet is a strategic national issue.

Bipartisan engagement about this issue.

One of the questions is whether the US should do a central bank digital currency.

China has a stable coin, but it has a lot of surveillance in it.

#Crypto

... saying the money would be used to destroy as many Russian soldiers as possible, it was reported.

They've received several million into these wallets.

#Ukraine #Crypto #Technology

... because crypto trading isn't that high. There just isn't availability for the amounts he needs, people are saying.

Also, some endpoints are controlled.

#Crypto #Russia

#IMF #Crypto #ElSalvador

The devs issued a manifesto:

"... the main problem is that NFTs have no additional cost or wear and tear causing an over-population of these assets and thus reaching a point where some investors do not have the need to continue re-investing.

"This same re-investment effect is necessary in order to continue with a healthy and collaborative environment of a P2E game as there must be movement of investment, reinvestment, and new revenue to maintain a sustainable ecosystem over time or directly more longevity, CryptoMines at its peak managed to make refill its reward pool with more than 1.2million Mints per day, after the fall, we started to see numbers hovering around 50k and even less mints per day, accumulating a debt due to lack of trust and re-investment in the game."

#Crypto #Economics

It went down about 20% in an hour or something, amidst it's few-day drop and small rebound to $42k. It was around $57 before I think.

The whole market dropped significantly several days last week, on news headlines about a new strain of the virus. Rebound today for most stocks.

On bitcoin though: 'These cycles will continue to play out for three reasons. The first of which is there's higher volatility in crypto; there aren't circuit-breakers that we have in traditional finance, so nothing that can keep a floor after things start going down really fast; and the market never closes, so there's not really an opportunity for information to be digested once this cascading effect takes hold.' - Frank Chaparro

Went up like 2800% before, most assume, the owners of the scam converted their holdings into other currency.

Buyers were not able to sell. There was an element of this where they said they were going to make a video game, or something.

Fun fact: Devs, on the website, had profile photos from ThisPersonDoesNotExist, it's thought.

The first one the SEC let pass. Gensler hinted he's more comfortable with trading on an regulated futures exchanges like NYSE (where the Bitcoin ETF 'Proshares,' BITO, owned by ProFunds Group [$58b under management] is listed) than on Binance and that type of exchange.

BITO is not based on actual Bitcoin, but rather on futures contracts, and filed under mutual funds rules that provide significant investor protections, according to SEC. The product already exists, and this is just a repackaging, and if something goes wrong the SEC knows how to deal with it and knows how to intervene.

The futures in BITO are a bet on the price of bitcoin, without having to actually store bitcoin, so there's no risk of theft of coins or loss of passwords. If bitcoin goes down in price, your money goes to pay those who took the other side of the bet.

The risk is taken by the arbitrageur who holds bitcoins he buys for full price plus a margin of 1/3rd. Ie a bitcoin which costs $60k means $80k for him. They do this because they charge for this service.

The return for you of buying BITO is less than buying Bitcoin. It will tend to trade about 8% above the price of bitcoin. (Right now this premium is about 15%.) The ETF's management fee is about 1%.

So why is this product even necessary? Some experts say 'institutional money.' Boomer investors who will never get a crypto wallet even if it's easy to do, but who have money to invest and want to put it in bitcoin. Josh Brown recently said Chicago investment culture is such that they would approve an ETF for anything as long as they thought people would put their money into it, or something like that.

Bitcoin up steadily over the past months from it's 25k low (or 30 I forget) and is now at $55k (up several percent since BITO dropped).

#Crypto #Money #Stocks

US regulators are also looking at doing something. Notably DeFi (Gensler).

China is experiencing energy shortages (Goldman downgraded China's growth forecast for this), and it might last months.

Still, any Chinese with a wallet could trade on permissionless decentralized exchanges where there is no KYC.

There are also VPNs and many Chinese live and work overseas where it could be impossible to prevent their trading crypto.

#Crypto #China

This question was posed by an Indian-looking fellow at Codecon (who didn't give his name), to Elon Musk.

#Bitcoin #Blockchain #Crypto

... which hides virtually all transaction details, and is considered a privacy token. With Monero, it's more difficult to see who the sender and recipient are, and transaction amount. 90-95% of ransoms are still paid in Bitcoin, but Monero is increasingly popular.

Bitcoin is public ledger and stores all transaction history. It was headline news this month how the FBI recovered payments made with Bitcoin to the Colonial Pipeline hackers.

Difficulties with using Monero include that many regulated exchanges have chosen not to list it to to regulatory concerns, meaning it's less liquid and can't be cashed out as easily as Bitcoin.

The country doesn't have their own currency and uses USD. This means they can't print money, and that can be an issue when you're a net importer like El Salvador is (they could run out of dollars without the ability to print).

They also have high unemployment, and 70% of the population doesn't have a bank account, and many Salvadoreans receive money from relatives working in more prosperous countries (about 25% of Salvadoreans live outside the country, and the money they send accounts for 20% of El Salvador's GDP). Money transfers are always a challenge with conventional institutions, and can involve high fees for each transfer (sometimes as high as 10%, which is of course good for banks).

The bill passed Congress (62 out of 84 votes) to make El Salvador first country to accept crypto as an official method of payment ('unrestricted legal tender') beside the USD.

#Bitcoin #ElSalvador #Currency #Crypto

Basically all crypto dropped significantly, after months of increased speculative buying.

Other factors in the drop: further talk of regulation, ESG (energy use) concerns regarding mining, and China cracking down on crypto.

In somewhat related crypto news, Bitmix reportedly ceased operations, not long after the tentative conclusion of the DarkSide pipeline hack. Bitmix was a crypto money laundering service used by ransomware hackers.

Musk tweeted a "diamond hands" image, signifying he wasn't selling.

About a month later, Musk tweeted a more positive comment on energy concerns with crypto mining, causing Bitcoin to rise from around $35k to around 40k.

#Crypto #Hacking #Internet