Just a bit crooked
Good news! Changpeng Zhao, Sam Bankman-Fried’s brother-by-another-mother, just got slapped with a $50 million fine and was forced to resign, while his company, Binance, was fined $4.3 BILLION.
Court papers filed by the government say that Binance chose not to implement anti-money laundering measures, essentially allowing the firm to become a clearinghouse for all manner of illicit financial transactions. Between 2018 and 2022, that led to nearly $900 million in financial transactions that violated sanctions against Iran, the court papers charge.
In June, the Securities and Exchange Commission came after Binance and Coinbase, another crypto exchange, asking Binance to freeze all assets on its U.S. platform and accusing Coinbase of acting as a securities exchange, broker and clearing agency.
The plea deal is the latest victory in the Securities and Exchange Commissions’s effort to rid bad crypto actors from the United States, said Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond.
Wait, how do you tell a bad crypto actor from a good one? Is it because the latter doesn’t exist?
Agree completely with your final comment. There are no good ones.
Only MOSTLY crooked, not ALL crooked.
Most are mostly twisted, largely bent and entirely crooked, but otherwise, OK.
I’ll just get my coat…
I do sometimes wonder if Satoshi Nakamoto (of Bitcoin) might have been a good actor in this space. Only because it was inevitable and he seemingly never cashed out his enormous stake.
(Probably wishful thinking, tho.)
(Apologies for the insta follow-up): At this point, it’s all grift, all day, every day.
Um, my eyes see things differently.
“Total Crypto Market Cap Chart
The chart below shows the total market cap & volume of cryptocurrencies globally, a result of 11,052 cryptocurrencies tracked across 935 exchanges.”
https://www.coingecko.com/en/global-charts
Just finished MIchael Lewis’ “Going Infinite” about Sam Bankman-Fried and his crypto-fraud firm, FTX. Billions of dollars fools invested in this scam that are lost. Completely in the wind. If, after finishing that book, you still are considered investing in bitcoin, just take your money and burn it in an incinerator. Yeah, you lose everything but at least you know where it went.
Larry, that’s not how it went. It was crypto, but it could have been anything tradeable. Stocks, bonds, derivatives, whatever.
What happened is that investors put money there so that they could use it for trading, and FTX took their money and lent it to his other big company (Alameda) which speculated with it, supposedly using their own bitcoin as collateral.
There has been a rather public trial that has established all of that.
Illegality may be baked into the crypto system.
What good are cryptocurrencies anyway?
They aren’t really currency because you can’t spend them most places.
They aren’t a store of value because their value varies unpredictably and can and
sometimes will head towards zero.
AFAICT, they are good for untraceable financial transactions.
Such as income tax evasion, money laundering, drug deals, and funding terrorism.
I don’t need cryptocurrencies for any of those things because I lead a boring life.
raven,
You are misinformed. They work on the basis of a public distributed ledger called a blockchain.
cf. https://originstamp.com/blog/how-to-trace-bitcoin-transactions/
John Morales. OK
It seems the answer to tracability is more complex, according to Google.
The government can trace Bitcoin Wallet addresses.
But the addresses don’t necessarily identify you.
“Without the ability to immediately uncover a trader’s identity, police have to go through an additional process to link the wallet address to a name.” If the Bitcoin Wallet is out of the police jurisdiction, they may have trouble seeing who owns the Bitcoin Wallet.
If it is a hostile jurisdiction, they won’t be able to.
The next problem is that even if the police gain possession of the Wallet, they usually won’t be able to open it.
Because the Bitcoin Wallets are encrypted.
So, as little as I understand this, in some cases the police can trace and recover Bitcoins.
In other cases, they won’t be able to.
No worries, raven.
In passing, I note that I am very much unimpressed with cryptocurrencies that waste a lot of energy by using proof of work instead of proof of stake, such as bitcoin.
cf. https://content.ftserussell.com/sites/default/files/education_proof_of_stake_paper_v6_0.pdf
It baffles me that people fell for crypto in the first place given it always looked dodgy AF and useless at best and a scam at worst to me. Never saw the appeal of it here even as a supposed get-rich-quick fad..
And how do you tell a good gun owner from a bad one? The good one shoots the bad one. Decisions like this are so simple.
@simplicio #15:
Granted that there are some circumstances where it’s quite clear that one person using or threatening to use a gun is the bad one and that shooting them can be the act of a good gun owner, but not all instances of firearms use are as simple as you say. If you can’t see that, even at first glance, then please never pick up a gun. And stay away from conversations about ethics and the law unless it’s just to sit quietly in the corner and listen honestly and thoughtfully.
@dontlikeusernames:
The creator of bitcoin was an ancap loon and bitcoin is in fact the ancap solution and their proposed replacement of current systems to create a regulation-free financial system. The fact that it explodes under the weight of the fraudsters, grifters, and charlatans is exactly the expected outcome and it has nothing to do with whether Nakamoto himself was a good actor or not. Even if Nakamoto was a fucking angel who never did anything wrong, an unregulatable financial system will eventually collapse because it will be dominated by frauds.
Rich Woods@16,
I think your sarcasm detector is on the blink.
BTW, this is from the “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”, the original paper that started bitcoin. It makes absolutely no sense in terms of practical value.
I’m quoting it in full:
Yeah, this is how bitcoin started. By bunch of computer scientists who were very good in one thing (coding and basic cryptography) but who were absolutely clueless and terrible at everything else.
There are very few topics in the world where I think my ignorance might actually be of genuine benefit to me. The overwhelming majority of things are worth understanding even if I never will get to them because I am tragically finite!
Cryptocurrencies/NFTs etc seem to me to be one of the very few topics where I am, at least slightly, glad I know absolutely fuck all. Not just a little fuck all, proper fuck all. I thought two things when I first encountered them: “Oh this could be an interesting addition to traditional currencies if well managed” and “This is probably a massive scam”. I don’t know which is true, or if even both or neither is true, but I value my ignorance on this! Judging by the Sound and Fury around the topic by fanbois, I’ve dodged a bullet.
Hoorah for ignorance!
Louis
Well, don’t click on this, Louis.
Louis: IMO at least, it’s not ignorance of crypto that saves us, it’s the acknowledgement that none of the explanations we’ve heard from crypto fanboys, apologists and hawkers really sheds any light on it or makes us feel less ignorant or more willing to trust the whole enterprise. That paper quoted by lotharloo above, for example, sounds like nothing more than some libertarian code-geeks pretending to “solve” a “problem” that only exists in their own heads. They’re complaining about a “trust based model,” and then advocating an alternative that demands a much larger amount of trust in systems and processes we know next to nothing about, and which they too often refuse (or are unable) to explain to us. That should be a huge tip-off to anyone, ignorant or not.
The documentary series “The Toys That Made Us” has things relevant to currency, things that I think do affect the situation but I’m still thinking them through.
Emotional value in physical objects that represent something else. I think there is a reason you see obsession with hoarding gold even though you can’t eat it. That very value is absent in crypto, and just an image no better than digital in an account with NFTs. I’m not sure where I’m going with this but I think it’s related somewhere.
This will help.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Toys_That_Made_Us
I hope Bitcoin evaporates and I won’t care. Ignoring all the ‘techno-hocus-pocus’ simply put: our ‘economy’ is too full of risky scams as it is.
@9 John Morales wrote: Larry, that’s not how it went. It was crypto, but it could have been anything tradeable. Stocks, bonds, derivatives, whatever.
I reply: all those ‘instruments’ you mention are highly risky investments. A number of people I know have lost their ‘assets’ by gambling on them.
@9 raven wrote: Illegality may be baked into the crypto system. . . . they are good for untraceable financial transactions.
Such as income tax evasion, money laundering, drug deals, and funding terrorism.
I reply: Yes, indeed. I hate our spying society, but being able to hide illegal transactions with crypto is a real problem. AND, blockchain does not make these transactions transparent and legal.
And, I detest the fact that there are entire power plants that have been bought and their thousands of MegaWattHours of electricity generated are (wasted) by being used to mine bitcoin.
Crypto = MLM for men.
WMDKitty, 1950 for men? What a weird thing to write.
It’s much more modern than that.
(It was Roman numerals, no? Because Multi Level Marketing has zero to do with cryptocurrencies)
@John Morales
I don’t want to assume I know for sure what WMDKitty had in mind, but I read it as Multi Level Marketing and crypto are very similar in formation and processes. Munecat and Folding Ideas on YouTube have covered this well, as with ProPublica and (podcast list isn’t at hand and that’d be a long list anyway).
Like MLMs, crypto is necessarily a zero-sum game. Like MLMs, crypto doesn’t work unless you can recruit downstream. Both rely on narratives of get rich quick. Both are basically schemes that rely on… you know, that geometric shape that’s got one less side than a square, that sort of thing.
twoangstroms:
Which is of course a very silly conceit. After all, MLM specifically refers to recruiting other people to sell a product they buy from you and taking a cut of their sales; a classic pyramid scheme.
And I reckon the kitty imagines that’s much the same as a Ponzi scheme, where money from investors is used to pay for the profits of new investors.
Nothing like that, of course.
Perhaps. If so, you have misunderstood what they covered.
What a silly claim. I don’t think you understand to what the concept of a zero-sum game refers, when you write stuff like that.
What? Nobody needs to recruit anyone to buy or sell crypto. Even slightly.
You are evidently exceedingly confused about the whole thing.
Huh. And here we have people who imagine it’s about hiding transactions, instead.
(I suppose one could argue the crypto bubble is not entirely dissimilar to an old-fashioned gold rush, but that’s a bit of a metaphoric reach)
Brony, Social Justice Cenobite @ 23, at least gold has some uses. It’s kind of purdy, it won’t corrode and hence, makes a good coating for metals that could corrode and well, it’s rather cool because it’s really silver.
Yeah, I’m serious. The color we see is red shifted due to relativistic electrons.
And it’s a fairly decent weight, so one could use it as a fishing weight in a pinch.
Silver’s tarnishes quickly, but is an excellent conductor, literally one of the best plain metal conductors around.
Platinum is a great catalyst.
Other than that, in a fiat currency economy, the worth of a “precious metal” is like the fiat currency or even cryptocurrency itself – what one values it at. Otherwise, one wouldn’t buy it or into it at all.
Hence, those metals aren’t worth anywhere near what price they fetch to me, as I really only view them from a utility perspective.
And yeah, I really skimmed over the relativistic electron part. Lead also had relativistic electrons, which is theorized as to why it works better than tin in lead-acid cells.
the biggest problem with crypto is that it is “money” in cyber-space but we live in meat space. I see no way nor have ever heard of any easy way to get the money in or out without some third party some financial institution of some kind being involved. ?? none that I can understand at least.
That’s quite true for my retirement check, which is direct deposited in my bank, which is 100 miles away. So, how do I get my money from my bank account to the store I’m shopping in?
A third party financial institution. The big difference is, those third party major players find shitcoin an excessive risk, both as value can suddenly fluctuate and foul up the exchange rate and well, general novelty and instability via multiple scandals. In shirt, the third parties largely prefer the fairly stable status quo, with only a few exchangers accepting the volatility and risk.
The biggest difference between the fiat currency that we use and cryptocurrency is, the national fiat currency is backed by a government, cryptocurrency is backed by a hard vacuum. And if I’m falling, I far prefer to try to catch myself against a solid wall, rather than a vacuum, as that vacuum will always let me down hard.