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Bitcoin versus other monies.

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  • Originally posted by Thoughtful Monk View Post

    Its major change though from paying taxes to the government to having the government tell you how to run your business. I'm in a highly regulated business so I see the impact almost daily.

    Given that people's money is involved, government regulation may actually be desirable.
    I agree. The problem with Cryptocurrency is that is not a domestic industry. It is international, so all the government can really regulate is the buyers and owners of the crypto, not the industry itself. But they could regulate the Exchanges/Brokerages like Coinbase and the ones you mentioned. Like making the wallets the property of the clients not the company.

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    • Originally posted by Sparko View Post

      I agree. The problem with Cryptocurrency is that is not a domestic industry. It is international, so all the government can really regulate is the buyers and owners of the crypto, not the industry itself. But they could regulate the Exchanges/Brokerages like Coinbase and the ones you mentioned. Like making the wallets the property of the clients not the company.
      Sounds about right to me. My guess is the regulations would be close to what the deposit regulations are on banks. This would include making loans based on deposits. In short, exchanges/brokerages should expect to be treated like just another bank.
      "For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings." Hosea 6:6

      "Theology can be an intellectual entertainment." Metropolitan Anthony Bloom

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      • Originally posted by Thoughtful Monk View Post

        Sounds about right to me. My guess is the regulations would be close to what the deposit regulations are on banks. This would include making loans based on deposits. In short, exchanges/brokerages should expect to be treated like just another bank.
        If it weren't for the FDIC Banks going bankrupt would lose everyone's money too. That used to happen a lot, until the Feds started insuring the money and taking over banks that went bankrupt or failed. SInce cryptocurrency is not backed by any real currency there is no way to do that. But maybe if they handled them like stocks, then the ownership of the crypto would belong to the buyers, just like you own the stock you would buy on Etrade or Robin Hood. You are not insured against loss of value but you still actually own the stock you bought even if the brokerage goes under. I think.

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        • Originally posted by Sparko View Post

          If it weren't for the FDIC Banks going bankrupt would lose everyone's money too. That used to happen a lot, until the Feds started insuring the money and taking over banks that went bankrupt or failed. SInce cryptocurrency is not backed by any real currency there is no way to do that. But maybe if they handled them like stocks, then the ownership of the crypto would belong to the buyers, just like you own the stock you would buy on Etrade or Robin Hood. You are not insured against loss of value but you still actually own the stock you bought even if the brokerage goes under. I think.
          So apparently for stocks there is a similar entity to FDIC called SIPC. If your brokerage is a member then your stocks are protected up to $500K. Maybe they need to figure out a way to do that for Crypto.

          https://www.sipc.org/for-investors/introduction

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          • Any way you look at it, the nose of government camel is going to get deeper into crypto.
            "For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings." Hosea 6:6

            "Theology can be an intellectual entertainment." Metropolitan Anthony Bloom

            Comment


            • Originally posted by Sparko View Post

              Because crypto is not regulated and basically anyone can create a crypto coin out of thin air, it's ripe for scammers to take advantage of the gullible fanbois.
              What's so hilarious is that at the height of the bitcoin craze, the argument bitcoin shills were making in favor of bitcoin was that it was unregulated and thus you were sticking it to the man (the establishment and the bankers) by adopting it. At least those were the arguments I heard in the bitcoin social sphere. So it's rich that Novogratz is now crying SEC didn't protect him.

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              • Originally posted by Sparko View Post

                So apparently for stocks there is a similar entity to FDIC called SIPC. If your brokerage is a member then your stocks are protected up to $500K. Maybe they need to figure out a way to do that for Crypto.

                https://www.sipc.org/for-investors/introduction
                Since the central banks are adopting their own CBDC, that will likely never happen. If they wanted to, they would have done it years ago. In fact, I imagine the more the crypto market collapses and the more scams the better, since it will make a more regulated system that the central banks will soon offer more attractive.

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                • Originally posted by seanD View Post

                  Since the central banks are adopting their own CBDC, that will likely never happen. If they wanted to, they would have done it years ago. In fact, I imagine the more the crypto market collapses and the more scams the better, since it will make a more regulated system that the central banks will soon offer more attractive.
                  Right now the biggest scam seems to be NFT's. It reminds me of the Beanie Baby craze. People are paying thousands and millions to "own" a digital trading card basically. A card that anyone can just copy freely. All they are buying is a digitally signed certificate that says they own a specific copy of that image. Like buying a signed print I guess, but anyone can copy it al they want just not the certificate. It's insane.

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                  • Once the dust settles, this will probably go down as worse than the dot-com collapse, especially considering that a lot of this was fueled by government stimulus, both direct (i.e. stimulus) and indirect (i.e. QE, easy low interest rate liquid access by financials, etc.) actions...

                    "Stupid, Delusional" Three Arrows Founders Emerge From Hiding To Discuss Their "Regrettable" Collapse

                    After the collapse of Three Arrows Capital (3AC) bankrupted creditors and ignited a massive selloff in crypto, founders Su Zhu and Kyle Davies went into hiding for five weeks.

                    Now, the 35-year-olds have offered an exclusive mea culpa of sorts to Bloomberg, chock-a-block full of quotables for future business school professors to hold up as examples of what never, ever, to do. Ever.

                    Su Zhu and Kyle Davies, both 35, first became friends in high school. They built 3AC into a crypto-trading behemoth before its collapse bankrupted creditors and exacerbated a selloff that foisted steep losses on mom-and-pop owners of Bitcoin and other tokens. At times contrite and at times defensive, Davies and Zhu, speaking from an undisclosed location, described a systemic failure of risk management in which easy-flowing credit worsened the impact of wrong-way bets. -Bloomberg

                    Now, 3AC creditors have filed paperwork claiming they're owed over $2.8 billion in unsecured claims - a figure that's expected to rise significantly. To date, only around $40 million in assets have been recovered by liquidators.

                    A few notable quotes:

                    "People may call us stupid. They may call us stupid or delusional. And, I’ll accept that. Maybe." -Su Zhu.

                    "The whole situation is regrettable ... Many people lost a lot of money." -Kyle Davies

                    "We positioned ourselves for a kind of market that didn’t end up happening." -Su Zhu

                    "We believed in everything to the fullest ... We had all of our, almost all of our assets in there. And then in the good times we did the best. And then in the bad times we lost the most." -Kyle Davies

                    The pair also deflected - blaming other firms' crypto woes for contributing to the crisis of confidence and subsequent sell-off.

                    "It’s not a surprise that Celsius, ourselves, these kind of firms, all have problems at the same time," said Zhu. "We have our own capital, we have our own balance sheet, but then we also take in deposits from these lenders and then we generate yield on them. So if we’re in the business of taking in deposits and then generating yield, then that, you know, means we end up doing similar trades."

                    And while taking heat for putting a down payment on a $50 million yacht before the fund went under, the pair claim to have been nothing more than humble crypto merchants - with Zhu saying that the boat "was bought over a year ago and commissioned to be built and to be used in Europe," and "has a full money trail."

                    "We were never seen in any clubs spending lots of money. We were never seen, you know, kind of driving Ferraris and Lamborghinis around," he added. "This kind of smearing of us, I feel, is just from a classic playbook of, you know, when this stuff happens, when funds blow up, then you know, these are kind of the headlines that people like to play."

                    In short, their name is mud because of baseless smears.

                    It's Luna's fault!

                    Davies and Zhu have pointed to surprise losses stemming from large investments in both Luna and the once-stable 'stablecoin' TerraUSD.

                    "What we failed to realize was that Luna was capable of falling to effective zero in a matter of days and that this would catalyze a credit squeeze across the industry that would put significant pressure on all of our illiquid positions," said the Lamborghini-less Zhu, who admitted that they may have been 'too close' to Terra's founder, Do Kwon.

                    "We began to know Do Kwon on a personal basis as he moved to Singapore. And we just felt like the project was going to do very big things, and had already done very big things," he added. "If we could have seen that, you know, that this was now like, potentially like attackable in some ways, and that it had grown too, you know, too big, too fast."

                    Yes, if only people knew that stablecoins might lose their pegs. Who. Could. Have. Known.

                    "It was very much like a LTCM moment for us, like a Long Term Capital moment," said Zhu. "We had different types of trades that we all thought were good, and other people also had these trades ... And then they kind of all got super marked down, super fast."

                    One of those trades involved an Ethereum-linked token called staked ETH, or stETH -- designed to be a tradable proxy for Ether and widely used in decentralized finance. While every stETH is meant to be redeemable for one Ether once long-awaited upgrades of the Ethereum blockchain take effect, the turmoil sparked by Terra’s collapse caused its market value to fall below that level. This, in turn -- in Zhu’s telling -- caused other investors to put on trades that could benefit from the widening gap.

                    ...

                    Still, the fund was able to continue borrowing from large digital-asset lenders and wealthy investors -- until, that is, they blew themselves up.

                    After Luna’s implosion, Zhu said lenders were “comfortable” with 3AC’s financial situation, and that they allowed them to keep trading as “as if nothing was wrong.” As courts filings have now revealed, many of these loans had required only a very small amount of collateral. -Bloomberg

                    "So I just think that, you know, throughout that period, we continued to do business as usual. But then yeah, after that day, when, you know, Bitcoin went from $30,000 to $20,000, you know, that, that was extremely painful for us. And that was in, that ended up being kind of the nail in the coffin," said Zhu.

                    He then admitted to a disturbing lack of economic literacy - saying that "if we were more on our game, we would’ve seen that the credit market itself can be a cycle and that, you know, we may not be able to access additional credit at the time that we need it. If, if it kind of, you know, it hits the fan."

                    It's GBTC's fault!

                    The pair also hit a huge snag after 3AC invested in closed-end fund Grayscale Bitcoin Trust - which allowed investors who don't want to directly own bitcoin to invest in the cryptocurrency. Grayscale let 3AC and similar large firms to buy directly by depositing Bitcoin into the trust - which would then entitle them to selling the shares on the secondary market in the hopes of capturing a premium.

                    At the time of its last filing at the end of 2020, Grayscale revealed that 3AC was its largest shareholder - with a $1 billion position. Unfortunately for Davies and Zhu, the shares bought from Grayscale had a six-month lockup period, which became a huge problem starting in early 2021 as GBTC's price slipped from a premium to a discount - with shares worth less than the underlying Bitcoin.

                    Zhu says that after they started piling into GBTC, "then like others copied us into that trade later on and then lost not just the money, but also went into negative. Because everyone did it, then the trust went to discount and then it went to a far bigger discount than anyone thought possible."

                    "For us, if you go to our website, we’ve always had massive disclaimers about crypto risk. We’ve never once pitched ourselves as risk-free, like a simple yield," Zhu said, in their defense.

                    What's next?

                    The pair is reportedly transitioning to Dubai, with Zhu's 'main hope' being that they get a 'calm, and orderly liquidation' for their complex book.

                    "For Kyle and I, there’s so many crazy people in crypto that kind of made death threats or all this kind of noise," he said. "We feel that it’s just the interest for everyone if we can be physically secured and keep a low profile."

                    Comment


                    • Is this the final nail in the bitcoin coffin?

                      Crypto giant files for bankruptcy as CEO resigns in a stunning downfall

                      To make a long story short, the crypto market (primarily bitcoin since that's the king of crypto currencies right now) has been delivered blow after blow of major crypto companies going under. First it was the collapse of Luna-Terra (and other less major companies in between going under), and now it's FTX.

                      Very brief history. FTX was the king of kings when it came to representing the crypto market, much like Luna-Terra was, only probably bigger. Sam Bankman-Fried, the guy who ran it (all 30 years old of him lol) was touted on every major financial network as a crypto genius (like they always do with these financial con artists). So he was getting multi billion dollar investors onboard, and even got high profile celebrities to endorse it. FTX was even a major source of bail-outs of other crypto companies that were going under.

                      Finally the mirage was exposed and it turned out the kid was a fraud and so his company was about to go under. Binance (another potential crypto fraud in the making) was actually going to bail them out (it serves the crytpo enthusiasts' purpose of bailing each other out to try and keep the bitcoin mirage going as long as they can). But apparently they saw something in FTX books that spooked them and backed out (rumor has it that they saw all sorts of corruption and fraud in the books and wanted no part of it).

                      So here we are. Bitcoin, now well under 20k from all the other prior hits, is crashing again, down to 16.8k (as of this posting).

                      How long can the crypto market survive is anyone's guess, but since the crypto industry is essentially being run by con artists and very audacious young people that know very little about finance, it seems pretty inevitable that more of these companies will go under and the crypto market will keep taking hits like this.

                      Comment


                      • Glad I stayed out of crypto. While there are issues, when it comes to my money, I'll go regulated every time.

                        I wonder what this will do to El Salvatore's economy. They went on bitcoin a couple years back and from what little I read, it isn't working very well.
                        "For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings." Hosea 6:6

                        "Theology can be an intellectual entertainment." Metropolitan Anthony Bloom

                        Comment


                        • Originally posted by Thoughtful Monk View Post
                          Glad I stayed out of crypto. While there are issues, when it comes to my money, I'll go regulated every time.

                          I wonder what this will do to El Salvatore's economy. They went on bitcoin a couple years back and from what little I read, it isn't working very well.
                          To be honest with you, I kick myself not investing when I had the chance. I was there when bitcoin was just kicking off and I probably could have gotten in at well under $100. But then again, maybe that was a good moral choice I made since I knew there was something highly suspicious about it. I don't know how that would have made me feel making all that money off of something that turned out to be a scam and hurt a lot of people.

                          Comment


                          • the biggest problem I see with crypto is that nobody actually uses it as money to buy things or pay for services. Other than hackers and crooks trying to extort people or buy things on the dark web. Most people just use it as an investment, hoping to make money off of it rising in price, like a stock. They are basically stocks with nothing behind them but hype. No company or product. Ghost stocks. And no regulations. Anyone can create a coin and hype it. That is why they are so volatile.

                            I have some money in crypto, but just enough to play around with it. If I make some money great, and if I lose it all, it won't hurt me.

                            Comment


                            • Originally posted by Sparko View Post
                              the biggest problem I see with crypto is that nobody actually uses it as money to buy things or pay for services. Other than hackers and crooks trying to extort people or buy things on the dark web. Most people just use it as an investment, hoping to make money off of it rising in price, like a stock. They are basically stocks with nothing behind them but hype. No company or product. Ghost stocks. And no regulations. Anyone can create a coin and hype it. That is why they are so volatile.

                              I have some money in crypto, but just enough to play around with it. If I make some money great, and if I lose it all, it won't hurt me.
                              Yup - me too. In the off chance that I could make a profit, totally realizing it might be futile.
                              The first to state his case seems right until another comes and cross-examines him.

                              Comment


                              • Originally posted by Sparko View Post
                                the biggest problem I see with crypto is that nobody actually uses it as money to buy things or pay for services. Other than hackers and crooks trying to extort people or buy things on the dark web. Most people just use it as an investment, hoping to make money off of it rising in price, like a stock. They are basically stocks with nothing behind them but hype. No company or product. Ghost stocks. And no regulations. Anyone can create a coin and hype it. That is why they are so volatile.

                                I have some money in crypto, but just enough to play around with it. If I make some money great, and if I lose it all, it won't hurt me.
                                The other problem is that so many folks were susceptible to this, like it was the greatest thing since slice bread. I can see why young people would've gotten sucked into it (youth today are so freaking audacious and think they know everything), but it was outright bizarre how the financial networks were pushing it as hard as they were. When the NFT craze broke out, it was so crazy to me why so many people thought something so dumb was a great idea. It was like right out of Idiocracy. It reflects things like Metaverse and why that turned out to be such a failure in spite all the hype. I really think this is a reflection of who we are as a society now. I know that might sound dramatic, but it's true. It also is why the stock market nowadays makes absolutely no sense anymore.

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