291–300 of 379 posts
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Thank you! I never understand why journalists don't link to court documents.
newspapers can't sell ads on a remote court document site which leads to a great business idea, run a mirror that republishes legal / government documents in a syndicated fashion with [your ad here]
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Almost every word of that is untrue in practice. But let's focus on the core part, "successful". Let's compare with M-PESA, a money transfer solution that started around the same time. M-PESA has steadily grown, doing 26 billion transactions last year. [1] Bitcoin was somewhere around 100m transactions for the same period. [2] That's about 0.5% of the volume. And its worse than the raw numbers suggest, in that the M-…
Firstly, Transaction volume and total number of transactions are two different metrics. Bitcoin transactions are generally in the $400k-$800k range. Couple things that makes bitcoin more than what it appears: The metrics you quoted are on chain. There are no telling how many transactions are rolled up through the lightening network. With around $20B of various wrapped bitcoins being used in defi, you can easily put t…
What percentage of those 400k-800k transactions do you think are by the very banks and hedge funds that crypto advocates claim to be subverting and defying? For a currency that is supposed to help the masses that sure doesn’t seem like the kind of money most people play with.
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The physical collectibles market is over a century old for baseball cards. So far the SEC hasn't stepped in for places trading baseball cards, magic cards, pokemon cards, sneakers, etc. So the burden of proof seems to be on the claim that they're the same, or that it's a meaningful analogy. But hey, let's look at the this case - the accused did the following: * created their own token (ok, so they aren't just a card…
To be clear, I think Celsius committed actual fraud. I just want to talk about one particular point here. > So the burden of proof seems to be on the claim that they're the same, or that it's a meaningful analogy. I have a pair of “Dear Summer” Off-White x Nike Dunk Lows, the last collection released while Virgil Abloh was alive. The SNKRs (Nike) app randomly selected active users for the chance to purchase them; nec…
2) I've used the app before, the fact that someone else and I both want these sneakers doesn't make our purchase of a pair each a "common enterprise".
3) I didn't expect profit, and buying a thing which can be resold for profit doesn't mean every purchase of it was an expectation. All my sneakers are worn.
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The SEC is not focused on making the "institutional investors" whole. That is happening in bankruptcy court, because Celsius declared bankruptcy, and that is how bankruptcies work: the senior creditors get their money back first. If you have problems with that, take it up with the bankruptcy court and U.S. bankruptcy laws that classify customers as junior creditors. In fact, the SEC does not ever get involved in "mak…
The SEC does indeed get involved with recovering money for victims of investment fraud. Source: me. The SEC recovered about a third of the money I unwittingly invested in a Ponzi scheme.
The SEC can order disgorgement of profits from an investment scam (which are then returned to victims to the extent such profits are recoverable), but making victims whole for their losses is a very different thing.
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The physical collectibles market is over a century old for baseball cards. So far the SEC hasn't stepped in for places trading baseball cards, magic cards, pokemon cards, sneakers, etc. So the burden of proof seems to be on the claim that they're the same, or that it's a meaningful analogy. But hey, let's look at the this case - the accused did the following: * created their own token (ok, so they aren't just a card…
To be clear, I think Celsius committed actual fraud. I just want to talk about one particular point here. > So the burden of proof seems to be on the claim that they're the same, or that it's a meaningful analogy. I have a pair of “Dear Summer” Off-White x Nike Dunk Lows, the last collection released while Virgil Abloh was alive. The SNKRs (Nike) app randomly selected active users for the chance to purchase them; nec…
E.g. if we interpreted the test like that, wouldn't we end up with nearly any "limited run" product being a security? And that's never how the law has been interpreted or enforced, and certainly can't have been the intention.
So I'm unconvinced by the lay reading of the law of folks saying "this makes sneakers a security too" since it seems no more valid than a lay reading that doesn't and there's been no official indication that sneakers or trading cards are getting anything like the attention crypto did from regulators, despite being much older markets.
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AI is not in the same category in my book. Both may be overhyped in some ways, but blockchain technology was fundamentally a bad idea with no legitimate use cases.
For better or worse, Crypto is legitimately the easiest way to create a financial application, derivative, exchange etc... any programmer can create interesting, useful, and novel financial instruments like Squeeth, crvUSD, PoolTogether, etc in short order. Good luck recreating those in TradFi in under a decade, let along making them interact with each other in atomic transactions. Of course, some people see this as…
Financial software is regular software with additional audits and checks to make sure it's safe against the flood of attacks it will receive. With the kind of money we are talking about, you can hire people with the expertise to reasonably protect you against bugs and software exploits (something most traditional financial companies have a close to 100% track record in but many crypto projects failed).
But after that you have a mountain of issues to consider that have little to nothing to do with software:
- financial logical holes like flash loans being used to extract money "democratically"
- people committing age old scams "but on the block chain"
- founders not understanding problems such as that you cannot secure one unsecured coin with another one no matter the algorithm.
- all sorts of unpleasant people using your "financial playground" to do things society frowns upon.
All of these are solvable but not by choosing a better technology stack. Look at how much traditional institutions are spending on compliance and realise that you probably won't be able to cut that by an order of magnitude.
Crypto is learning very quickly that most regulations do not exist to "keep the little man down" but because having regular people get fleeced over and over by charismatics liers/fools can have a devastating effect on any community.
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When your house of cards comes tumbling down might as well take a bath to relieve the stress
No one can bother you in the bathroom.
Let's say I run a swap meet for people to buy and sell Pokémon cards. There are lots of scammers out there, but I promise people they are going to get good prices. And I even offer to buy cards off of people at good prices to drum up interest. Tomorrow, the SEC decides that Pokémon cards are securities (far-fetched, but work with me here) Suddenly, anyone buying and selling them becomes a criminal. I tell people via…
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If you are willing to share: How did you end up getting tricked and how can other people avoid the same.
It was a pretty good scam. The scammer had a company that sold fractional profit shares in oil wells. Without getting too deep in the weeds, he sold the equivalent of more than 100%. He invested the proceeds of new investment in paying out old investors and buying new oil wells. Eventually he ran out of new investor money and the scheme unraveled. I don’t know how I would have caught it. The regulatory oversight in o…
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The SEC does indeed get involved with recovering money for victims of investment fraud. Source: me. The SEC recovered about a third of the money I unwittingly invested in a Ponzi scheme.
So...the SEC didn't try to make you whole...it recovered about a third of the money you lost to the Ponzi scheme through a disgorgement order. The SEC can order disgorgement of profits from an investment scam (which are then returned to victims to the extent such profits are recoverable), but making victims whole for their losses is a very different thing.