Activity tagged "crypto"

Will the cryptocurrency industry’s endemic fraud and risk-taking ultimately be backstopped by government bailouts, funded by taxpayers who may themselves have no exposure to crypto assets? Has crypto become too big too fail?

My latest in Bloomberg Businessweek: Crypto Got What It Wanted in November’s Election. Now What?

taking psychic damage reading the lawsuit by Justin Sun’s Bit Global against Coinbase

i have to respect the argument that “memecoins... unlike wBTC have no inherent value other than demand created by their memetic potential as jokes”. your honor, wBTC’s lack of inherent value is for a different reason entirely

i do have to give Haliey Welch some credit for comedic timing. intentional or not, she perfectly timed her Hawk Tuah rugpull to steal the spotlight from bitcoin hitting $100K, a moment coiners have been awaiting for years. masterful stuff

Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky has entered a guilty plea in his criminal fraud trial, which was scheduled to begin in about two months. His Celsius cryptocurrency platform collapsed in July 2022 after it couldn't meet customer withdrawal demands. Its failure was particularly devastating because it had actively marketed itself to customers as safer than banks, regularly telling customers that "banks are not your friends". Many people believed that because Celsius was based in the US, it was carefully regulated and therefore safe.

Letters written to the judge in the bankruptcy case revealed the extent of the devastation to people around the world, some of whom had their entire life savings or retirement money on the platform. I published some excerpts back in July 2022.

These Celsius letters to the bankruptcy judge should be required reading for anyone who thinks that the only victims of crypto collapses are degens out there gambling on memecoins.

They thought they were insured from losses (and some believed Celsius had FDIC insurance like a bank would). Some of them only had money in stablecoins, which themselves make big promises about reliability. They believed US regulators wouldn't let this happen.

These letters are a big reason why I don't have a lot of patience for people who react to crypto scams with "they should have known better" or "they had it coming".

for those of you who've seen the supposed Enron relaunch and crypto project: their website's terms of use say it's parody.

tl;dr apparently someone thinks it's a good and funny idea to make a big joke out of a company that ruined people, and this is about as much oxygen as i'm inclined to give it

The cryptocurrency industry spent almost $200 million to influence the outcomes of the 2024 United States elections. Let's talk about where the money came from, where it went, the cryptocurrency industry's political goals, and what’s next.

so it begins

I must once again urge you: please do not record your abortions on the blockchain.

There are a lot of very worried people right now, fearful of an impending regime that may well crack down on things like reproductive care, gender-affirming care, or the ability for immigrants to even continue to remain in the US. Some have suggested people get familiar with cryptocurrencies in the event they might have to circumvent an authoritarian state.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: in very bad situations, bad solutions can sometimes still be better than nothing. I make no secret of my views on the cryptocurrency industry, but I am the last to judge a person for using whatever means they have available to them to take care of themselves and others.

But please remember that most popular cryptocurrencies use public ledgers, where every transaction is visible to anyone who cares to look (no warrant required), where true anonymity is extremely challenging, and where tracing technology is getting only more sophisticated. Popular on-ramps like Coinbase and Gemini and other exchanges require customers to provide similar kinds of identification as banks, linking your future transactions to your real-life identity. (And many of these companies have thrown themselves wholeheartedly behind Trump, by the way, despite their “anti-authoritarian” claims). 

There are cryptocurrencies that are more anonymous than the bitcoins and ethereums of the world (privacycoins like Monero and Zcash for example), though there are still attempts to trace these types of tokens and you have to be knowledgeable and very cautious about how you use them so as not to inadvertently reveal your identity.

If you’re in a bad situation, do whatever it is you need to do. I’m certainly not going to judge you. But please be very cautious, and be highly skeptical of anyone who presents cryptocurrency as a magic solution to authoritarianism.

Further reading: “Abuse and harassment on the blockchain”, “Anonymous cryptocurrency wallets are not so simple”