This sequence of tweets is beyond parody

In the last issue of my newsletter, I wrote: “Side note: If someone promises you a risk-free 20% annual yield if you just let them hold on to your dollars for you, the risk that that you never see those dollars again is in fact very high.”

Anyway, here’s a post from Justin Sun today:

what could go wrong with running betting markets like this?

apparently preventing fraud is “anti-crypto”.

according to this Fortune headline, the SEC going after fraud and deceptive business practices after a company publicly announced they were going to breach a previous agreement with the agency is an “anti-crypto campaign”

This is particularly hilarious given that Fortune has skewered Gary Gensler for failing to go after the FTX, Celsius, and Terra frauds.

Schrödinger’s regulator can’t go after fraud before the company collapses, but if it collapses and the SEC didn’t warn us, they failed.

Remember when mainstream news outlets published a bunch of incredibly irresponsible articles about how rich people were getting off crypto, and then people bought in and got wrecked over the two years of "crypto winter" that followed?

Anyway here's a WSJ headline I just saw: "Young Men Are Making Risky Bets on Crypto and Politics—and Raking It In Right Now" (gift link)

And an excerpt:

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