Bitconnect founder indicted in global $2.4B cryptocurrency scheme

> Kumbhani is charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodity price manipulation, operation of an unlicensed money transmitting business, and conspiracy to commit international money laundering. If convicted of all counts, he faces a maximum total penalty of 70 years in prison.

Liberty Reserve operator Arthur Budovsky is serving his 20 year prison sentence, Kumbhani will likely serve 40+ years.

Liberty Reserve wasn't even incorporated in US or did a lot of business after getting booted but that didn't stop it from being used as money laundering.

Tether isn't very much different, LR/E-gold both tried various forms of insulation (LR not providing fiat on-ramp/off-ramp but through "verified" 3rd party).

In the end, the trail of money and cui bono ultimately indicted Arthur for facilitating money laundering and subverting US banking system. It's very likely that DOJ and other three letter agencies are utilizing Tether/Bitcoin/Monero as a honeypot to gather intelligence on the parties.

Imagine the wealth of information they are sitting on after capturing the hard drives of darknet marketplaces like Alphabay which were allegedly used to trace a former YC alumni's stolen Bitcoins.

Tether is a well known cable for moving money out of China and into real estate markets in the West, it's ironic that so many do not see the complete geopolitical ramifications: housing affordability has been hijacked to facilitate money exfiltration in authoritarian countries by the elites in the West, to make cheap goods.

In the West, lower and middle class unwittingly traded affordable housing for affordable consumer goods produced by authoritarian labor control and the beneficiaries of this were able to move their wealth out of reach from the same authoritarian government. Now that the musical chairs is ending, the same demographic in the West are being encouraged to become unwitting exit liquidity for the upper class. I predict this would have destabilizing effect on societies all over the world, especially countries that are over-leveraged and buying crypto on margin.

- transparency Crypto, besides privacy coins is the most transparent you can possibily get. It's a public, immutable ledger. The US can literally go in an change the total supply anytime with zero transparency. And since USD is the global denomination of debt, when i increase my supply it actually makes my currency more valuable since everyone is shorting their own currency (Since their debt is in USD) and inflation leads to asset inflation which is a good thing for the wealthy, but a negative thing for those holding and dealing in USD. = us plebs.

- fraud detection

See point above, fraud is built into the system.

- political sanctions (russia vs. ukraine, north korea, iran...)

Political sanctions have been this economic philosophy that hasn't entirely played out in the countries doing the sanctions favor. These economies, due to force have been required to be much more verticly integrated and invest into the economies most hit by sanctions. Sanctions don't do much and the problem is, the more you sanction the less leverage you have.

- fairness due to transparency (you pay your taxes, i do: we both pay our fair share of infrastrucutre cost etc.)

What is fair about the current tax system? See my transparency point above, all those people trying to evade crypto taxs are in for a rude awakening when the governmeent develops machine learning to track and trade public ledgers... Everyone knows it's a public ledger... exactly the oposite of being descrete.

- easy to use (my grandparenst were able to use it)

Becausee it started being built when your grandparents grandparents were alive. Most shops didn't accept CC's when they first came out and it took a generation for the technology to preliforate. I'd say crypto has done what the old system did in 1/4 of the time.

- save

I get 4% APR on my stablecoins. 20+% on my DeFi Pools paid in stable coins.

- easy authentication and authorization system (i can get money with my passport)

I can provide authorization with a 10 word pneumonic.

- globally accepted

What is globally accepted exactly? USD? no it's not... it's only acceepted in the US. If i want to do business globally i have to swap to that asset. I not only have to worry about remittance, currency exchanges, trade fees and loan denomination. Terra has the ability to swap between many different currencies using stablecoins with almost no transaction fees.

- low transaction fees

BTC and Eth have extremely high transaction fees, but any V3 crypto has lower transaction fees than the current financial system. - self optimizing system due to capital market (one bank can do transactions faster and cheaper than you can)

self optimizing system due to capital market (one bank can do transactions faster and cheaper than you can)

Play around with some decentralized exchanges, solona or DOT. they can do transactions faster and cheaper than any incumbent, including VISA or the NYSE.

You've just made one.

Fees are why I haven't moved my ETH after using an exchange to buy some for USD. I don't want to pay the stupidly high costs to move the ETH into a wallet that I fully control. Especially because turning that back to USD so it's actually usable in day-to-day transactions would require paying yet more fees to move the ETH back to an exchange (or to an independent buyer).

Some stocks have no expected cash flows, some cryptocurrencies have expected cash flows. You can't generalize entire asset classes like that.