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“DeFi markets, platforms or websites are not registered as DCMs or SEFs [swap execution facilities]. The CEA does not contain any exception from registration for digital currencies, blockchains or smart contracts,”
Interesting perspective, and at first pass difficult to disagree with. Question is do you adjust the regulations or enforce them. I don't know how you regulate a decentralized anonymous exchange though.
I was very interested when the FBI was able to find and seize most of the bitcoin that was paid to the ransomware hackers who held up Colonial Pipeline recently. I was very curious how they could do this with something that is generally thought to be untraceable (as it was thought by the ransomware guys.)
Well, some of it is due to the fact that the public key is visible in the blockchain leger to anyone. The other part was due to normal investigative work, the kind that is used to find out passwords, to find the private key. But this kind of sleuthing is the basic method of hacking everywhere -- how many systems get broken into because some doofus has their password written down on a sticky note on their monitor, or something equally basic?
The feds are not talking about how they did it, but persistence pays off, and they are in the sleuthing business.
Trading: Primarily Energy but also a little Equities, Fixed Income, Metals and Crypto.
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Rumor I heard was that they were keeping the Bitcoin at a Custodian for protection, and that the Feds got the Custodian to hand it over. In this case the Custodian would know the private key. As I say just a rumor have nothing to support that.
Maybe when they seized the servers, Darkside had their keys stored on them.
"DarkSide announced on Friday on a Russian cybercrime forum that it had “lost access to the public part of [its] infrastructure, in particular to the blog, payment server and CDN servers”. It added that “a couple of hours after the seizure, funds from the payment server (belonging to us and our clients) were withdrawn to an unknown account.”
Rejoice in the Thunderstorms of Life . . .
Knowing it's not about Clouds or Wind. . .
But Learning to Dance in the Rain ! ! !
Trading: Primarily Energy but also a little Equities, Fixed Income, Metals and Crypto.
Frequency: Many times daily
Duration: Never
Posts: 5,055 since Dec 2013
Thanks Given: 4,397
Thanks Received: 10,218
I wish there was more of a crypto community here. I trouble to find meaningful resources that aren't either companies hawking their product or a bunch immature people acting like 12 year old kids. Anyway onto this weeks why crypto scares me and why I am reluctant to venture past BTC and ETH.
Here’s a theory. You run a bank, and a smallish public company comes to you and asks you to lend it, say, $500 million. You say “okay I will need to know more about your revenue and expenses and assets,” and the company says “no no no never mind that. Here’s the thing. We have publicly traded stock. We can always issue more of it. Sure the price might go down but then we’ll just issue more and more stock; we can always issue any dollar amount of stock that we want. 1 Right now our market cap is $1 billion and we have 100 million shares outstanding at $10 each, but even if the price falls we could issue five billion more shares at $0.10 each, or five trillion more shares at $0.0001 each, or whatever. So we can always raise $500 million to pay you back; our stock might go down, but a dollar loaned to us will always be worth a dollar. So we are absolutely money-good for $500 million and you should lend it to us at the risk-free rate without inquiring into our collateral or cash flows.”
...
The way an algorithmic stablecoin works is that somebody creates two cryptocurrency tokens, let’s call them Dollarcoin and Sharecoin. And they write a white paper that says “Dollarcoins will always be worth $1, and if they are ever worth less than $1 we will print some Sharecoins and sell them to buy Dollarcoins until the price of Dollarcoins goes back to $1, and we can always print an arbitrary number of Sharecoins and sell them for a positive amount of money and use the money to buy Dollarcoins, so Dollarcoins will always be worth a dollar.”
And Finally...
Iron Titanium token (TITAN), the share token of a one-time multibillion-dollar decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, has fallen to near zero.
The token was last seen changing hands for around $0.000000035, down from Wednesday’s high of $65.
Trading: Primarily Energy but also a little Equities, Fixed Income, Metals and Crypto.
Frequency: Many times daily
Duration: Never
Posts: 5,055 since Dec 2013
Thanks Given: 4,397
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This is from New York Times 'On Tech' column today. As I read it I couldn't help but think of the parallels to some (but not all) of the crypto space. As you read it replace each company with a failed coin, and replace each person/CEO with 'anonymous' as we often don't know who these people are in the crypto space.
I am actually posting the entire piece so you don't just get piecemeal parts.
Innovation invites hucksters
Unscrupulous, boundary-pushing executives seem to be an inescapable part of the most exciting technology.
By Shira Ovide
I’m angry about start-up founders who over-promise, behave badly and sometimes crater their companies and walk away unscathed.
But deep down, I also wonder whether unscrupulous, boundary-pushing executives are an inescapable part of innovation — rather than an aberration.
If we want world-changing technology, are hucksters part of the deal? This is a version of a question that I wrestle with about technologies including Facebook and Uber: Is the best of what technology can do inextricably linked to all the horribles?
I’ve been thinking about this recently because of the glare on two start-up founders, Adam Neumann and Trevor Milton.
Neumann used to be the chief executive of the office rental start-up WeWork. He boasted that his company would transform the nature of work (on Earth and Mars), forge new bonds of social cohesion and make boatloads of money. WeWork has done none of those things.
A new book details the ways that WeWork mostly just rented cubicles, burned through piles of other people’s money, treated employees like garbage and made Neumann stinking rich as the company nearly collapsed in 2019. WeWork has stuck around in less outlandish form without Neumann.
And last week, federal authorities charged Milton with duping investors in his electric truck start-up Nikola into believing that the company’s battery- and hydrogen-powered vehicle technology was far more capable than it really was. Among the allegations are that Milton ordered the doctoring of a promotional video to make a Nikola prototype truck appear to be fully functional when it was not. (Milton’s legal team has said that the government was seeking to “criminalize lawful business conduct.”)
It’s easy to shake your head at these people and others — including the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes who will soon be on trial for fraud — and wonder what personal failures led them to mislead, hype, and crash and burn.
But people like Holmes, Neumann and Milton are not oopsies. They are the extreme outcomes of a start-up system that rewards people who have the biggest and most outrageous ideas possible, even if they have to fudge a little (or a lot).
I am constantly furious about this system that seems to force start-ups to shoot for the moon, or else. WeWork had a basically smart, if not entirely original, idea to remove many of the headaches of commercial office leasing. But that wasn’t enough, and I almost don’t blame Neumann for that.
Disproportionate rewards go to the entrepreneurs and companies that can sell a vision of billions of users and values in the trillions of dollars. This is why Airbnb doesn’t merely say that it lets people rent a home in an app. The company says that Airbnb helps “people satisfy a fundamental human need for connection.” It’s why delivery companies like Uber and DoorDash are aiming to deliver any possible physical product to anyone, and companies think they have to make virtual reality become as popular as smartphones. Merely earthbound ambitions aren’t good enough.
Those conditions tempt people to skirt the edges of what’s right and legal. But I also wonder if curtailing the excesses would also curb the ambition that we want. Sometimes the zeal to imagine ridiculously grand visions of the future brings us Theranos. And sometimes it brings us Google. Are these two sides of the same coin?
Elon Musk shows both the good and the bad of what happens when technologists dream outlandishly big. Perhaps more than any single person, Musk has made it possible for automakers, governments and all of us to imagine electric cars replacing conventional ones. This is a potentially planet-transforming change.
But Musk has also endangered people’s lives by overhyping driver-assistance technology, has repeatedly over-promised technology that hasn’t panned out and has skirted both the law and human decency.
I used to half-jokingly ask a former colleague: Why can’t Musk just make cars? But maybe it’s impossible to separate the reckless carnival barker who deludes himself and others from the bold ideas that really are helping to change the world for the better.
I hate thinking this. I want to believe that technologies can succeed without aiming to reprogram all of humanity and without the associated temptations to engage in fraud or abuse. I want the good Musk without the bad. I want the wonderful and empowering elements of social media without the genocide. But I just don’t know if we can separate the wonderful from the awful.
Trading: Primarily Energy but also a little Equities, Fixed Income, Metals and Crypto.
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Entertaining read. Author creates his own hype coin 'idiotcoin', which (spoiler alert) fails. What was interesting though is the 'industry' that has evolved around setting up these scams. So easy to do. Even things like buying Reddit Up Votes.
NYTimes:- Going for Broke in Cryptoland
Some hype coins mint instant millionaires. Others go bust. Why not take a chance?
Any ByBit users here? My friend's made +$2M trading ETH derivatives on ByBit this year, trades on a 15min chart, 24x7, so his personal overall life enjoyment is kinda rekt, but he's starting to reel back into normal and get out of tilt. He does some crazy Martingaling stuff he inherited from his blackjack money management system, so he puts himself through mega drawdowns but still comes out ahead.
I joined this forum years ago, and learned so much here. By far my favorite forum and place to come for knowledge.
I started trading EMINI futures at the same time I joined this forum, and soon learned the hard way that I was in over my head and was overleveraged for my purse and risk tolerance.
It was fun but I pulled my remaining funds out before my account was completely wrecked and went back to work knowing that one day I would return with a bigger bag and a more mature sense of risk management.
Unluckily for me I returned to trading late and got into crypto early this year.
Thanks to the knowledge I received in this forum many years ago, while I was slightly down in the count in mid May , I was able to recognize that capitulation that was about to occur and pulled all of my cryptos in to cash 2 days before the BTC move down to 30,000. I was then able to swing trade and accumulate several coins at the lower price ranges and get back my basis and then move into the green.
I really do attribute my ability to keep my head above water to this forum.
The days of Tiger Trader and Ichymoko have passed and I was heartbroken to read in the past posts that Ichymoko had left this earth.
He and I had become friends and exchanged private messages and talked about many deep and interesting subjects and of course..trading! I faded away though, as the trading world, I left behind.
I have popped my head in on occasion this year, and even bought some TEZOS after Big Mike made a post about it, and cashed it out for some redeeming profit before the crash of the market in MAY.
I've always had my eye on it since and look at it today!
I would buy some, but like most cryptos it seems attached to the hip of BTC which I'm not extremely bullish on, and as BTC approaches 60,000 I have a hard time feeling safe holding coins whose destinies are controlled by BTC.
Also the lack of the ability to do bracket orders on ERC20 tokens on defi, AND my centralized exchange of choice, coinbase, combined with the time I spend at my day job left me wanting a a crypto that can be held and offers the potential for exponential gains with out being drastically effected by the price of BTC.
My search has led me to HEX. I could go in to details about the performance of this coin and how I've watched my first smaller investment almost x4, an the additional swap of most of my altcoins and ETH into HEX get doubled.
Had I discovered it when I first entered crypto in Q1 2021, and put my entire balance into it, I would not be working my day job anymore.
I could go into details but I know this is a highly intelligent group that always does its on research, so I will spare you the hype and simply state that charts don't lie.
HEX IMO, is the best modern crypto and that when the founder of HEX Richard Heart forks ethereum mainnet into a new block chain called PULSE in the coming months, date to be announced,
that HEX and PULSE may very well offer the oppurtunity for life changing profits, even with a falling BTC..
I would encourage anyone here who is in to crypto to look at the chart and to do their research.
HEX, which is a decentralized certificate of deposit, just keeps doubling. Also the staking rewards are carefully designed to award the biggest bags and the longest stakers.
The charts just don't lie and I would guess that some of you would find the the HEX and PULSE rabbit hole to be an interesting and complex rabbit hole to take a peek in.
Rest in peace Itchy! I know you are sorely missed!
As for any one else reading this, I hope you are all happy and successful, and thanks for all that you taught me so many years ago!
Aight! Peace. Over and out.
"Napoleans severest comment on his beaten enemies - that they "saw to many things at once""- Hart
Trading: Primarily Energy but also a little Equities, Fixed Income, Metals and Crypto.
Frequency: Many times daily
Duration: Never
Posts: 5,055 since Dec 2013
Thanks Given: 4,397
Thanks Received: 10,218
I know in the crypto space, nearly everybody thinks their coin is going to the moon, or .... hang on futures.io doesn't have a rocket emoji? - oh well you get my point ... but I believe Bitcoin & Etherium sentiment is very bullish right now. On exchange inventory is low, chain analysis shows lots of holiding rather than speculating, lots of people staking Ether which reduces supply, and Q4 is traditionally very bullish. I guess we will see. Of course with at 46k, a move to 60k would be a 30% move, so it could go to 60 and fail, and both potential scenario's could be correct!
My wife has mentioned HEX to me, but I never followed up. My concern with so many of these coins is that unless you have audited the code (and I am not able) you never know what could happen. Case in point the Titanium/TITAN. This was a highly respected project, and had some big names invested in it (eg Mark Cuban) but that didn't stop an un-anticipated software interaction taking it to zero!