Is Crypto dying or just dropping for the moment?

[Jayjay]

You guys ( Swammerdami & Jajay) must be crypto oracles or something cause FTX Trading Limited is looking like

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Hey, I'm just interested in the tech. I have no clue if crypto is a good investment.

I got some cryptos around somewhere but I take the attitude that it's worth nothing, and maybe will check again in decade or two.

Steve is correct. The FDIC would not allow a bank to make the crazy investment that FTX did. The comparison to 2009 is faulty. They crypto investments are gone. No recovery. Many of the bad loans from 2009 were paid back (often when the home sold or was foreclosed).

I don't see how that contradicts with anything I said. Crypto bullshitters like FTX deserve to crash and burn. I wouldn't touch them with a 10-foot pole. And obviously, if a regular bank would do the same, they'd endanger their customers' savings and the damage would be even worse.

But I was talking about banks being in a good position to provide custodial services, maybe act as trusted crypto exchanges. Not dabble with "to the moon" investment schemes.

 

[Gospel]

I think that reply was meant for TSwizzle.

Anyhow, I bet top dollar this part of the bloomberg podcast explaining how to make money in crypto being told by a stand up comedian verbatim would get laughs from many familiar with Crypto accept Tom Brady.

 

[steve_bank]

STX took daily user money and invested in risky ventures,. A regulated bank could never do that.

Are you kidding, sarcasm or just a bad memory?

Mainstream financial news.

I am not an economics expert, but I know regulated banks are supposed to have a firewall between your checking and savings accounts and risky investments.

Crypto as a safer alternative to a banking system with a central bank and control of the money supply failed miserablyy.

The crypto crash is about not having security to back inventiveness. As Harry said in the hoisng crash the banks eventually recovered at least rt of the losses through sales of foreclosed homes.

The dollar and other currencies in the end are tied to real goods and services. Crypto is not.

From the reporting there is a defacto central bank in crypto. There are practical reasons why the financial system has evolved to where it is today. Decentralized multiple crypto currencies in the long run is unstable and wide open to unregulated abuse.

Imagine California and Texas having there own currency and banking system.

The 90s .com bust was similar. A lot of companies operating out of a rented office with no physical infrastructure. A company fails and investors loose it all.

There was a comay strup with a couple of guys. They went public and sold a litte stock to gey syared. For some reason the stock proce skyrocketed. The owners were puzzled when interviewed. They had no product and haven't even stared development.

 

[Gospel]

I bet he was using chain pealing to convert stolen crypto to fiat currency while kicked back at a beach in San Pedro.

 

[Swammerdami]

I don't follow cryptocoin news much, but thought the FTX disaster was about what one might expect in a culture where teeny-boppers are awarded billions for cutesy TikTok scams.

But a click at another message board showed me that the FTX scamming was even weirder than expected: Exec who cleaned up Enron calls FTX mess unprecedented

The man who had to clean up the mess at Enron says the situation at FTX is even worse, describing what he calls a “complete failure” of corporate control. The filing by John Ray III, the new CEO of the bankrupt cryptocurrency firm, lays out a damning description of FTX’s operations under its founder Sam Bankman-Fried, from a lack of security controls to business funds being used to buy employees homes and luxuries.

“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here,” Ray said. “From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”

Ray was appointed CEO on November 11, after the company was near collapse and its previous management sought legal counsel on what to do next. Bankman-Fried was persuaded to give up control of the company by his lawyers as well as his father, Joseph Bankman, a professor at Stanford Law School, according to Thursday’s filing...

It gets weirder. The top execs in FTX lived in a polyamorous cluster in the Bahamas. The head of their Alameda Research trading unit had a really weird tumblr blog for years. https://decrypt.co/114719/tumblr-blo...arem-polyamory

 

[Harry Bosch]

I think that reply was meant for TSwizzle.2009

Anyhow, I bet top dollar this part of the bloomberg podcast explaining how to make money in crypto being told by a stand up comedian verbatim would get laughs from many familiar with Crypto accept Tom Brady.

Sorry. Yes, my reply was to Tswizzle. But to add, crazy to compare 2009 real estate crash to crypto crash. RE values plunged by 30, sometimes 40% in 2009. That hurt millions no doubt. But the values rebounded. And people who didn't sell were fine. Crypto however plunged to 0. The FTX guy literally was worth 16 billion one day, a week later is in bankruptcy.

 

[senor boogie woogie]

I guess if I cared I could do the research, but I dont even know at all what "Crypto" is. Or what "Bitcoin" is for that matter. What do I do with it? Can I use it as currency? Can I buy things with it?

How and why does it gain or lose value? Why is it tangible? I would support an alternate currency if it would work, but it probably wont since the government doesnt like competition and the alternate currency would be in private hands, and we humans like to take everything we can get.

 

[Gospel]

I don't follow cryptocoin news much, but thought the FTX disaster was about what one might expect in a culture where teeny-boppers are awarded billions for cutesy TikTok scams.

But a click at another message board showed me that the FTX scamming was even weirder than expected: Exec who cleaned up Enron calls FTX mess unprecedented

The man who had to clean up the mess at Enron says the situation at FTX is even worse, describing what he calls a “complete failure” of corporate control. The filing by John Ray III, the new CEO of the bankrupt cryptocurrency firm, lays out a damning description of FTX’s operations under its founder Sam Bankman-Fried, from a lack of security controls to business funds being used to buy employees homes and luxuries.

“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here,” Ray said. “From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented.”

Ray was appointed CEO on November 11, after the company was near collapse and its previous management sought legal counsel on what to do next. Bankman-Fried was persuaded to give up control of the company by his lawyers as well as his father, Joseph Bankman, a professor at Stanford Law School, according to Thursday’s filing...

It gets weirder. The top execs in FTX lived in a polyamorous cluster in the Bahamas. The head of their Alameda Research trading unit had a really weird tumblr blog for years. https://decrypt.co/114719/tumblr-blo...arem-polyamory

And if everyone kept their crypto in a cold wallet none of this would have happened. That's why I thought your's and JayJay's conversation had remarkable timing.

 

[Jarhyn]

provide a custodial service to its customers to hold their bitcoin (or other crypto) for them. Basically what all crypto exchanges do already now

The problem with this is that it is currently recognized that the correct action after purchase on an exchange is to IMMEDIATELY transfer the coin to a user wallet.

Generally holding coins anywhere with a remote wallet is considered risky and furthermore is unnecessary.

If you want to do investment banking that's what dollars are for. To have money nobody can take away, and nobody can tell you how to spend it, that's what crypto is for.

Crypto is for crime.

There's a reason the only place you can reliably find a Bitcoin ATM is a headshop.

 

[Jarhyn]

I guess if I cared I could do the research, but I dont even know at all what "Crypto" is. Or what "Bitcoin" is for that matter. What do I do with it? Can I use it as currency? Can I buy things with it?

How and why does it gain or lose value? Why is it tangible? I would support an alternate currency if it would work, but it probably wont since the government doesnt like competition and the alternate currency would be in private hands, and we humans like to take everything we can get.

It's usually drugs.

Occasionally prostitution.

Rarely murder for hire.

Bitcoin is a Cryptocurrency, a currency based around cryptographically signing transfer requests on a publicly shared ledger using a "certificate".

Think of that one pacific island nation that used to use huge rocks as money. They would trade fractional ownership of the rocks by filling out a ledger associated with the rock. After all, it's not very convenient to carry around a rock, but trading on a line of a ledger is easy. This is in fact an evolution of that very same concept using numbers instead of rocks.

There are rewards for updating the ledger, and so there are rules around who gets to do the ledger updates. that's what "mining" is: generating solutions to update the ledger which satisfy an arbitrarily difficult math problem, so as to lottery out who gets rewards for doing the accounting. This is in fact similar to the activity of going out and finding big but interesting rocks: its arbitrarily difficult so as to slow the influx of new ledger resources.

The government can't really stop it. As long as there are coins like Monero, whose transactions are opaque (they look like any other anonymous packet of random/encrypted data), the government has no leverage against the activity. They might as well declare secretly trading baseball cards illegal. There's just no way to enforce against it.

The issue is that these "baseball cards" are the token of choice for trading on the black market for exactly the reason that there's no way to enforce against it.

 

[steve_bank]

HaaaaaHaaaa....a digital wallet.

Hmmm...I thought crypto currency was supposed to be ultra secure, I guess not.

A bank and credit or debit card sounds a lot better in practcal terms.

I don't have to buy dollars to pay for a product. My bank accounts are FDIC insured.

For a while there were commercials on making money o commdoties exchanges. Buy somebody's software and after a broefonline traing session the money rolls in.

Then was the old get rich in rel este with no experience scams. Take seminars or buy CD;s and learn how to get rich in real estate. Before digital you got audio tapes. Trump had his Real Estate University and scammed millions from people who thought they'd learn how to get rich.

There are adds for browsers that say you can make money in crypto with browser, and yiu don't have to do anythng!

An economy based on a for profit crypto currency is a very bad idea.

 

[Jayjay]

HaaaaaHaaaa....a digital wallet.

Hmmm...I thought crypto currency was supposed to be ultra secure, I guess not.

A bank and credit or debit card sounds a lot better in practcal terms.

I don't have to buy dollars to pay for a product. My bank accounts are FDIC insured.

That's right. The best use case for using bitcoin right now (apart from crime) is if you don't have access to trustworthy banking for some reason. Say you live in a third world country that's in a civil war. Armed groups will check your pockets at the checkpoints. How are you going to transfer your money out?

With bitcoin, if you can find someone to exchange money at point A to bitcoin, you can memorize a pass phrase and keep it in your head when you cross over the checkpoint, then at your destination B just change it back to local currency.

Similarly, if you have legitimate fear that the government will nationalize all the banks, or imposes draconian rules as to how you can use your money (price controls, banning foreign currency, etc.) using bitcoin might be a good idea.

These are marginal use case, but use cases nonetheless.

 

[steve_bank]

In the newFTX was based in the Bahamas, hat should have been a big red flag.

The top people bought extensive real estate.

At the bankruptcy filing they had 3 billion in debts and lost 8 billion. A lot of money just disappeared.

They were utterly incompetent and inept.

 

[Swammerdami]

A major "benefit" of cypto-coins was supposed to be freedom from big banks and government regulators. I wonder if this "benefit" is being dropped from brochures now!

In the newFTX was based in the Bahamas, hat should have been a big red flag.

The top people bought extensive real estate.

At the bankruptcy filing they had 3 billion in debts and lost 8 billion. A lot of money just disappeared.

They were utterly incompetent and inept.

It was even worse. Among themselves they were almost openly bragging about blatantly illegal activity.

Sober adults trusted billions to some wacky nerds barely out of their teens and running unregulated financial razzle-dazzle. Who could have guessed anything might go wrong?

 

[lpetrich]

Interview: Fallen crypto CEO Sam Bankman-Fried opens up about FTX, Alameda Research, and his regrets - Vox

Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

The fallen crypto CEO on what went wrong, why he did what he did, and what lies he told along the way.

On regulators

Before his empire collapsed, Bankman-Fried was actively engaged in lobbying in Washington for a regulatory framework for cryptocurrency. While many crypto CEOs — like Bankman-Fried’s nemesis Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao — are openly skeptical of government regulation, Bankman-Fried has largely avoided criticizing regulators. But in our conversation, he dismissed their role. He characterized his past conciliatory statements — like when he said just last month that some amount of crypto regulation would be “definitively good” — as little more than “PR.” In doing so, he all but confirmed the view of critics who have argued that his overtures to Washington were much more about image than substance.

His exchange collapsed and he waves away regulators. One has to question his judgment and his moral sense.

 

[lpetrich]

Then on being willing to behave unethically, then on bending the truth.

Bankman-Fried has maintained that FTX has never invested the deposits of crypto account holders on the exchange. I pressed him on that point via Twitter, and while he continued to insist that FTX did not directly use account money in this way, he said that Alameda — which he also owns — had borrowed far more money from FTX’s balance sheet for investments than he had realized, which ultimately left FTX vulnerable to the crypto equivalent of a bank run.

Why didn’t Bankman-Fried realize what was happening until it was too late? “Sometimes life creeps up on you,” he said.

Then

On what he regrets

Bankman-Fried acknowledged that he “fucked up. Big. Multiple times.” But he also insisted that much of the trouble could have been avoided if FTX had not declared bankruptcy, which has largely taken financial matters out of his control.

...
On what’s next

Bankman-Fried says his No. 1 priority now is to try to raise $8 billion to make account holders whole. “That,” he told me, is “basically all that matters for the rest of my life.” But while he said that “a month ago I was one of the world’s greatest fundraisers,” that $8 billion dwarfs what FTX was able to raise so far, there’s no indication any investors would bite, and even if he could secure funding, it would likely require both creditors and the bankruptcy court to get on board

 

[steve_bank]

Trump like. Trump has manged to cover his money trail. He always seems to escape with money when his ventures go belly up.

If you look at how the economy works using crypto to make pruchases is only one part of the economy.

Companies typically run on cash flow, monthy expenses cover monthly expenditure. An order cmes in and you do ot have the cash to buy parts. You get a short term line of credit form a bank to buy parts. Make product, ship, get paid, pay off bank.

I don't see how crypto would work in these kinds of situations. Inevitabl crypto organizatios become banks. Lending currency at interest.

And that gets into regulations.

I don't see crypto s unregulated multiple sources is reliable for commerce. Especially international transactions. China is trying to replace it, the dollar I belive is still the international currency.

A national crypto currency backed and regulated by the government could work. The problem is still energy demand.

From a show I watched on hina it is difficult to make a purchase withut a smart phone. Go to a resturant and you scan amneu item.

The [roblem with a coubtry like China is that in a complete digital currency they can see all transactions. It can become a form of c=governmet control.

What does China's Digital Yuan mean for Bitcoin?

PROMOTED

www.sharecast.com

Just when you thought the war between hard currencies and digital currencies, like Bitcoin, couldn’t get any more interesting, China released its Digital Yuan. Although China’s not going to replace its fiat currency with the Digital Yuan completely, it’s too soon to tell as trials are still going on with central banks, like the People’s Bank of China, leading the operation.

What is the Digital Yuan?

Officially known as a Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP), China wants to replace its fiat currency with the digital one to encourage cashless transactions, ushering in a new era for world economics. Like Bitcoin, it also relies on blockchain technology to facilitate and verify transactions, but unlike Bitcoin, it is centrally controlled by regulatory authorities and backed up by fiat currency reserves.

How does it Affect Bitcoin?

China has a somewhat unclear relationship with the popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin. China still accounts for more than half of Bitcoin mining, but recently the government has led a crackdown in China’s mining hub, Inner Mongolia. The reason stated was concerns related to the climate as bitcoin mining requires tremendous amounts of energy to run Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) – computers that solve complex cryptographic mathematical problems part of the verification process in the blockchain. Even before that, initial coin offerings (ICOs) for many cryptocurrencies, like Ethereum, were also banned. This leads many to believe that the world’s second-largest economy is moving towards banning cryptocurrencies altogether.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

I guess if I cared I could do the research, but I dont even know at all what "Crypto" is. Or what "Bitcoin" is for that matter. What do I do with it? Can I use it as currency? Can I buy things with it?

How and why does it gain or lose value? Why is it tangible? I would support an alternate currency if it would work, but it probably wont since the government doesnt like competition and the alternate currency would be in private hands, and we humans like to take everything we can get.

Well all that and FTX, Celsius, and all the crypto failures showing why tge unregulated ‘currency’ idea is fucking stupid. And that is ignoring tge wild volatiility of Bitcoin.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

So another company goes into Chapter 11.

What strikes me as odd is that there are these companies in the US, involved in dangerously unregulated commerce regarding funny money... yet, still manage to be able to apply for bankruptcy protection?! It is the perfecta! Not regulated and you get protected, after your scam company loses people's money.

 

[Oleg]

I guess if I cared I could do the research, but I dont even know at all what "Crypto" is. Or what "Bitcoin" is for that matter. What do I do with it? Can I use it as currency? Can I buy things with it?

How and why does it gain or lose value? Why is it tangible? I would support an alternate currency if it would work, but it probably wont since the government doesnt like competition and the alternate currency would be in private hands, and we humans like to take everything we can get.

Well all that and FTX, Celsius, and all the crypto failures showing why tge unregulated ‘currency’ idea is fucking stupid. And that is ignoring tge wild volatiility of Bitcoin.

Well, there's nothing really special about crypto in this instance. Fraud is fraud. That happens with regulated secuirties, too. Hello Mr. Madoff!. Those crypto outfits with links to FTX will naturally fall. The problem is like those Dutch tulips; too much hype.