Another company pauses withdrawals It is a "smaller" one with only 500 clienteles, allegedly valued at $2 billion back in May.
Bitcoin keeps trying to recover the last few days, but it is trending downward and is fishing dangerously close to a notable psychological point of $20,000.
With all these failures, does anyone believe that someone out there is legitimately buying at slightly over $20K? I still suspect that there is some kind of artificial prop-up going on.
Well, here's the thing: you still need to buy bitcoins to buy drugs at scale without risk or trust.
Hasn't that moved to Monero since Bitcoin proved to be too trackable?
How do you think Monero is purchased? People buy bitcoins and process an atomic swap for Monero. They need immediate coins and are going to buy the coins that are out there, if only to swap them off ASAP. Then the coins go back round the ringer and hopefully don't depreciate too much to make the swap providers quit. Granted this allows dealers to use the swap to get clear currency, and the laundry process is then complete almost seemlessly, owing ironically enough to the "losses" on running swap.
OK, makes sense. Trading fake money for fake money at the hope you can trade it for real money at some point. Yet another reason to hope that the whole thing collapses.
More, trading in one fake money because banks sell it and it can be trustlessly, banklessly swapped for another fake currency that can be traded trustlessly, banklessly, and anonymously, and as a seller in this market of drugs, you:
Keep a supply of bitcoins and sell them at market rate to finance immediate supply chain payment and cost of living (small loss, usually).
Swap Monero for Bitcoin. This is how you get cash (see above).
Swap Drugs for Monero. This is how you get Bitcoin (see above).
If done in this way, the drug dealer suffers no exposure as all their gains of Bitcoin can be from "selling NFTs" or whatever. Assuming that their swap engine launders the purchase of an NFT with the shared Bitcoin txid, they are invisible tax-wise. Their business is apparently entirely legitimate and they have a real product, and it's DRUGS.
They can even resell the NFT to some pharmabro or whatever and make more money.
*I have never actually done this. I just figured it out because I'm a heck of a reverse engineer. I realized parts of the whole structure... Well, while I was writing the post.
There are probably other transactions that can be milled from crypto "sale", but it essentially amounts to "launder the XMR sale with some other crypto sale to the BTC."
I keep saying this, cryptocurrency discussions are fundamentally discussions about the drug trade and it is... Frankly quite
shocking that so few people understand this.
It's just that in addition to the drugs thing, people started legitimately speculating and the speculation... Obscures the drug market even further.