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From Wikipedia;
beenz.com (don't click, site doesn't exist anymore) - founded in 1998
Was a website that allowed consumers to earn "beenz", a type of online currency (and BTC predecessor - possibly Satoshi's early work? Lol), for performing activities such as visiting a web site, shopping online, or logging on through an Internet service provider.
The beenz e-currency (lol, no cryptography involved I guess) could then be spent with participating online merchants.
The marketing and brand concept positioned Beenz as "the web's currency", global money that would challenge the world's major currencies.
The Beenz management team raised almost $100 million from venture capitalists including;
Michael Saylor of Microstrategy (lol this guy has been in the game for a loooong time), Francois Pinault of PPR, Vivendi Universal, Italian financier Carlo de Benedetti and Hikari Tsushin of Japan.
Since launching a new currency is illegal in many countries, beenz management and its legal teams had to meet with finance ministers across Europe to assure them that Beenz would be categorized as virtual points. (this bit is funny considering how many literal shitcoins have been launched in 2022 alone)
Beenz's offices in London were visited by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) on suspicion of operating an unlicensed bank.
The company could not go public, further funding did not materialize (social media shilling wasn't really a thing back then), and the company was sold to US-based Carlson Marketing Group in 2001 for an undisclosed sum.
Business model
The beenz business model was based upon arbitrage.
Companies purchased beenz from the company at a locally determined exchange rate.
They could then award these to consumers for actions to which the issuer attached value, such as making online purchases. Beenz were collected by the user clicking on a Java Applet and entering their email address linked to a beenz account.
Consumers were then able to use their beenz to purchase goods from online merchants. Each merchant was free to exchange beenz at any notional value they liked, the company assuming that the market would settle the exchange value of each beenz. Merchants were then able to sell beenz back to the company itself at a predefined exchange rate.
The company made its margin on the spread between the sell and the buy price of beenz in the market.
In the later stages, a professional economist was employed to model the behaviour of prices and flows of money in this micro-economy, and keep it healthy.
Cohen's stated long-term aim was eventually to allow consumers to purchase beenz directly from the company and for the "beenz economy" to eventually resemble that of a real economy.
However, at the time, this was fraught with difficulty, as some countries (such as France) expressed a view that such alternative currency schemes were undesirable and that they would seek to prevent them from operating.
Here's a more in-depth explanation in video format: https://youtu.be/5o9HEjuXsc0
EDIT: bots or shills are down voting your comments (including mine), you might notice this on other threads too. I upvoted all comments on this thread yet most are sitting at 0 or 1 (should be at 1 automatically after posting, since reddit includes your own upvote on your own comment)
I think the sub is compromised
So NYT writes an article painting SBF as a saintly entrepreneur who made a small mistake, making zero mentions about any possible crime, fraud, stealing customer funds etc. The article focusses more on how SBF can sleep and "clear his mind" than the damage caused to depositors and families wiped out by this fraudster
Apparently SBF plays a game Storybook Brawl to "clear his mind"
Of course, every scammer has to clear their mind to forget about their own scams
Digging into this game, it is developed by Good Luck Games, which coincidentally FTX acquired not too long ago
FTX own the company behind the game that SBF plays
Article about it: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/03/22/ftx-us-acquires-good-luck-games-amid-gaming-push/
The dude stoops to such a low that he has to shill his own shitty game after stealing and diverting over $10 bn in customer funds.
In the article he pretty much admits those creepy letter tweets he is putting out are some kind of wild goose chase for his followers.
1Y+ HODL Wave is a chart which uses on-chain data to show the percentage of bitcoins that haven’t been moved in over 1 year. This metric is currently at 68%, which is an all-time high. Not only have over 2/3 of bitcoins not been sold in over a year, but not even moved from wallet-to-wallet. Credit to Philip Swift and Unchained Capital for the graph.
How is this useful or significant?
Many in the Bitcoin community see this as a sign that:
Long-term holders are growing in the quantity of their Bitcoin stacks
Bitcoin holders currently have high conviction
Combining this info with additional data shows us that more people than ever before are holding their sats in their own wallets rather than on exchanges
Price is obviously in the toilet so people are buying and holding, not selling!
This data was recently discussed at length on a recent episode of What Bitcoin Did Podcast with Peter McCormack: Bitcoin Can’t Lose with Parker Lewis. This was one of my favorite recent episodes of this podcast.
If looking at basic price charts just isn’t quite enough to satisfy you, lots more data like this is available on Look Into Bitcoin.
Its hard to believe that in just a few days its going to be one whole year since Bitcoin made its previous ATH of about $69.1k and since then we were in a brutal bear market with indeed a lot of highs and lows. But there were literally so many things that its very easy to lose track of, so here is a Rewind of One Year Bear Market, get ready for the rollercoaster:
- Complete Euphoria (Oct-Nov 2021)
The ride is going up now. We are back in November 2021, we just got a Futures ETF approved by the SEC and had a glorious Uptober, even hitting a new ATH. But now we have been ranging at about $60k for days waiting to go into Price Discovery mode and obviously we can not forget the infamous PlanB predictions, predicting a $100k EOY Bitcoin, we all love those.
Now we just got the Inflation data in and as its going higher and BTC is a inflation hedge obviously we rise to over $65k and there seem to be no stopping until the legendary $69.420k mark. But whats this? Resistance at $69k is so big we just got rejected.
- Denial (Dec 2021 - Feb 2021)
Now we have been in a constant downtrend for a few months and even further had made a low at $34k and the infamous PlanB predictions were shattered as we closed about 50% below them at the end of the year. But suprisingly, many still were looking for arguments that we are not a bear market yet but just a bigger than usual bull market correction. Also many were talking about the infamous fifth Wave of the Elliot Wave Pattern yet to happen.
A very high percentage of people actually still were bulls and thought that $34k is the bottom with ultimate fear. Well that did not end well…
- End of the World and Bull Market (Feb - May 2022)
Now we come to the time where fear was striking markets for the first time as a war was in the front between Ukraine and Russia and it did happen. BTC dived with stock markets to $34k again as many were expecting us to go way further as fear was high globally. But has Crypto ever done was people say? So instead BTC began what many thought would be the reversal with the last time we saw greed in crypto market. We had a rally to $45k and for many the bear market was once again done.
But even apart from all the prices BTC was also part of something beautiful that time, hundreds of millions of donations to Ukraine that they later even used to fund their military. That was (for me) one of the most wholesome things in crypto as crypto donations were apparently in a “hype“.
- The End of the World, this time for real (May - July 2022)
This may be the most brutal time in crypto, ever. We jus had a fall from our long standing $34k support as we got rejected from $45k and the FED was now starting to hike rates, that mixed with a very high correlation of us to the stock markets caused a crash to $26k and then up to $30k in about a day.
That was also the period of the LUNA implosion as their so hyped-up algo stablecoin depegged and LUNA was down -50%. But still too many here thought UST would definitely peg again as if it is an unwritten rule. People bought the “dip“ on LUNA and BTC was swinging around $30k in complete fear as the support was technically already broken.
Now the Annihilation, BTC as thought could not hold up and the Do Kwon drama had been exposed now as analyst knew UST would not make it back up and it was all broken now. BTC plunges to $17k in a few days as fear has been the biggest ever with people straight up leaving. The “dead“ of crypto was certain for everyone outside of the few still standing.
- Aftermath (July 2022 - Now)
Now its basically all been crabbing and crabbing with crypto being the most flat it has been since years. Hopes for a bear market rally come and go but the FED is keeping us down, a lot of false hopes. Just as the anniversary now approached we made another leg down in one of the most intense weeks ever in Crypto with the FTX-Binance drama unfolding and taking a ton of twists and turns, ultimately leaving crypto even more vulnerable.
Conclusion:
Now how has been the journey? Some scenarios and the overall development may be very similar to something we know:
This graph has been often memed about but I think it still showed our situation pretty well. We had Denial, we had anger and we definitively had depression. Where are we now? Who knows, but thats also not important as I think people like us who went through this one year of fear and ultimate fear and more fear, can surely survive longer.
If we have now come this far it would be silly to just turn around. Maybe we have a few months left in this bear or perhaps a few years but the right conviction and patience will get you past it just as it helped you moving until now.
Go out, touch grass, go on a hike. You were here until now and you surely will be here until tomorrow. Enjoy life.
Just about nine years ago the first Bitcoin ATM was launched marking a big retail crypto mass adoption back then. It was opened in a Coffeeshop in Vancouver. That ATM alone made a total $100k worth of transactions in just one week and today the ATM market hosts over 63k Crypto ATMs alone in the US. There has been massive growth all around Bitcoin ATMs as multiple companies have their business completely based off those like Bitcoin Depot or the biggest LibertX.
Here is a graph showing how many Bitcoin ATMs have been added monthly:
As we can see we got a massive blow-off in this bull run and even now in this bear market we have been keep adding them. But we can also see that there has been a massive decline now even causing some to get removed. While they may have been big adoption for crypto in 2013, nowadays no one casually uses ATMs and especially not Bitcoin ATMs as they are just not needed.
And the biggest argument against them may be the Moon-high fees that are just awful:
As you can see the lowest fees are at about 8%, that is just crazy as most exchanges would offer way less fees than those even though exchange fees are already seen as high by many in crypto. And yeah its not a mistake on the graph, there are commission fees of literally 30% (!!!). Anyone paying that does not understand Crypto at all.
So my Verdict would be that Bitcoin ATMs are not only unnecessary but also a disgrace to crypto with their unbelievable fees.
14 years ago, the bitcoin whitepaper was born, and 12 years ago, the logo was born. The bitcoin logo we used today was not created by satoshi but rather by a person named Bitboy. I had to double check the name as well. But yeah, it's probably not the bitboy we all know and hate.
However, Satoshi did create a logo for bitcoin that is not in use anymore. Satoshi's original design for the bitcoin logo does look pretty nice. Here it is.
I will attach the link here for anyone who wants to see it for themselves.
Does anyone know why people decided to use Bitboy's logo over Satoshi's original logo?
Hopium ahead!
Today we celebrate the occasion of something which was going to change the world forever. Oct 31st, 2008 marks the date when Satoshi published the Bitcoin whitepaper titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf .
The initial goal was to allow purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution.
Hal Finney, who received the first BTC , predicted that one day it would become the "dominant payment system in use throughout the world" and 1BTC would be worth a whopping $10 million. He quoted “Current estimates of total worldwide household wealth that I have found range from $ 100 trillion to $300 trillion. With 20 million coins, that gives each coin a value of about $10 million�.
But this is not the first time 31st October has led to something this revolutionary.
Martin Luther, the priest, theologian famously known for being the he seminal figure in the Protestant Reformation and the namesake of Lutheranism also proposed an academic discussion of the practice and efficacy of indulgences in his Ninety Five Theses on Oct 31st, 1517.
This was the main event catalysing a series of events leading to separation of church from the state.
Bitcoin has started and would eventually to the separation of wealth and the state.
Happy Bitcoin Whitepaper day !
October 31st marks the 14th anniversary of bitcoin’s white paper release. A user by the name Satoshi Nakamoto released the white paper in an email via hyperlink (which still can be accessed today).
Regardless of what currencies we are all invested in, bitcoin in some way or another brought us all here.
The white paper proposed a system that would replace central authorities like financial institutions or banks to facilitate financial transactions:
(Quoting the white paper) “What is needed is an electronic payment system based on cryptographic proof instead of trust, allowing any two willing parties to transact directly with each other without the need for a trusted third-party.�
Bitcoin brought along with it many different types of individuals. The motives of those individuals seem to be one of three: those seeking new technological development, those seeking wealth, or those seeking dethronement of the current financial system (feel free to comment if you have another motive, I very well may have forgotten some). What really intrigues me is whenever I meet people at conventions or wherever who know about crypto, we instantly have a sense of camaraderie! And we all come from very different backgrounds.
I just want to celebrate this momentous day because bitcoin’s influence is being felt across the globe!
Here’s to another 14 years of growth for crypto!
Disclaimer: I am not a Bitcoin maxi, I just love history and this is one of the most historic occasions in crypto, regardless of what bags you’re holding.
October 29, 2013, the first Bitcoin ATM was opened in a small coffee shop in Vancouver, Canada. Trading at around $200, this enabled casual customers of coffee to swap fiat for Bitcoin and vice versa. Mitchell Demeter, co-founder of the Bitcoiniacs brand ATM said at the time: "Bitcoin is the best performing currency in the world. It has grown over a thousand per cent year after year, for the last four years. So people are using it also as an investment.�
Bitcoin later that year went on to hit a peak of $1,163 before cooling off. Most of us here probably have still never used an ATM to buy crypto, but something like this likely helped give it exposure to more than just computer geeks at the time.
Price go up, then price go down. It’s almost as if the only reason the crypto community exist is to invest in a specific set of high-volatility assets, that most people consider too risky to try out. Or at least this is how it feels for a newcomer to this world: the only thing you should look for is the price movement of a coin, buy at the bottom and sell at the top, plus everything in between. I’m fairly new to crypto, less than two years into the journey, and I got in for the money.
I want to tell you how my outlook on crypto has changed since.
Recently, I stumbled across one of the most widely famous books in the community: “The Infinite Machine�; The Infinite Machine is a book about the creation of Ethereum: now, if you are here now there is no need to explain the details Ethereum itself and is probably much more interesting to look at the bigger picture. Let's start with the origins of it all.
With Bitcoin, it was finally implemented a currency independent from governments, banks and capable of connecting financially anyone with a connection across the globe. Ethereum takes this process of decentralization a step further: not only it is now possible to run a currency on a blockchain, but now the blockchain has the goal of becoming the internet itself, independent and decentralized.
Why do we need someone to reinvent something that already exists?
In times of green candles and economical growth, like the last decade, is easy to forget how flawed the financial system is. Ours is a system relying on Banks that grant loans with money they do not have and the government bailing out banks that took too much of a risk. Mix this with questionable money printing tactics and the grand scheme of things is clear: we live in a rotten system that structurally needs cyclic periods of heavy crisis. At the same time, the main victims paying the price of economical recessions are not in the 1% that ignited the crisis.
Decades of movements and political unrest to fix this (probably) broken system did not result in a revolutionary restructuring of the global economy, any attempt to bring an element of divergence to the establishment was met simply by absorbing the divergence. At some point around the 2008 crisis, fed up with it, some unknown developer(s) thought: “if the system is resistant to change, I might as well create an independent and better financial system that the world can rely upon. Unchangeable, incorruptible, and most importantly decentralized. Bitcoin was born to fill the demand for a currency not bound to anything apart from the basic rule of supply and demand, which was able to verify transactions between users independently from a central authority.
With Bitcoin, there would be no such thing as decades of savings evaporated by raging hyperinflation. There would not be any arbitrary seizure of your money from banks. The blockchain became a way to give back control of their money to people.
In the bigger picture, the price movement of bitcoin (lowercase, just refers to the coin itself and not to Bitcoin, the blockchain) is largely irrelevant. Right now we are in a phase of adoption, with an unstable price movement and a lot of speculation going on, but that does not change the fundamentals of the breakthrough: a way to escape the established financial system exists, for anyone with an internet connection.
Now, why not scale this, from “just� a payment method, to the whole Internet?�
That is the goal of Ethereum.
I hope to talk a bit about Ethereum in a follow-up post, this is already a pretty big one. Thanks for reading up here, here is a link for a PDF of The Infinite Machine for the people that want to know more.
Found some interesting stats today...
- The honey badger is Bitcoin’s unofficial animal mascot
- The earliest Bitcoin faucets dispensed 5 BTC per visitor
- Men comprise 85.77% of all Bitcoin users.
- The FBI is owning one of the largest Bitcoin wallets Bitcoin users
- The longest ever average block mining time for Bitcoin was 94.8 minutes.
- Bitcoin reached a value of $1 in February 2011.34% of Americans believe they’ll buy Bitcoin within five years.
- The richest Bitcoin wallet holds 293,427 BTC as of December 2021.
- 90% of all bitcoins have been mined.
- Bitcoin’s Lightning Network can handle millions of transactions per second.
- Bitcoin mining consumes 0.54% of the total world electricity supply.
- The Mt. Gox heist of 2011 claimed 80,000 BTC.
- 2140 is the year when the last Bitcoin will be mined
On the 21st October in 2011, exactly 11 years in the past, The Economist posten an article about Bitcoin, one of the first ones it had ever done. The title of it, “The bursting of the Bitcoin Bubble“ already says what their stance was towards crypto already back in the days. The circumstance was one of the first bitcoin bull runs ever fading. Bitcoin had plummeted from $33 to $2.5.
tldr of the article is basically that a swedish Pirate Party politician had bought BTC at $18 and now had started to sell it at $2.52.
They have also done an article about the technicals of Bitcoin literally called “bits and bob“, high level journalism that is.
Not only does this show how far we have come from then but also how mainstream media will just forever call us in a bubble and call it a bubble bursting once we enter a bear market. We must be the first bubble that has been blown and then bursted for over 400 times now.
We will also surely look back one day at this bear market and just laugh just as we are laughing at the prior bear markets. If there is one thing that has been consistent in crypto, it is not TA, not fundamentals, definetly not the price but the fact that patience always wins.
