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This new opinion piece titled Idle Crypto Is the Devil’s Workshop from the New York Times is hilarious. Have a read if you want to be entertained. I'll leave a few choice excerpts that take the cake on their ongoing campaign of giving SBF a free pass.
In this light, Mr. Bankman-Fried’s downfall is spectacular and interesting — especially the revelations about his extreme disorganization — but really nothing new. He is yet another person in a long line of people who couldn’t stand to see all that money idly sitting by.
For many, the lessons from the collapse of FTX are clear: There’s something deeply wrong with cryptocurrency that makes it too dangerous to be included in the mainstream of finance. And the people operating cryptocurrency systems and the exchanges where cryptocurrencies are bought and sold are crooks, not visionaries.
Neither of these conclusions is correct. FTX’s collapse had very little to do with either the characteristics of cryptocurrency in general, or the specific features of the coins that FTX minted and distributed. FTX failed because the people who ran the company didn’t follow some basic rules of finance that can be difficult to enforce even in well-regulated markets.
And Sam Bankman-Fried is neither a visionary nor a criminal mastermind. He is a human who made the same poor choice that generations of money managers have made before him.
In 2010, a girl was kidnapped and taken to Mexico. Then began the search and rescue from FBI, CHP and state department which was later called off.
But girls father didnt give up. He was told it is an impossible mission to get her back.
But against all odd, with his hard work and love, He was reunited with his daughter 3 years later.
In 2013, girl was trusted with a phone by kidnappers, and she searched for her name on google. Which led her to the facebook groups created in search of her.
She dropped her location there, which helped her dad with her whereabouts.
She was 5000 miles away in mexico.
Father had mined 150 crypto coins from year 2010 to 2013. When his friends used the money for their startups. He used this money to fund rescue of his daughter.
A rescue mission that was successful!
A wholesome real crypto story!
You can find the thread on twitter account of the father on following twitter Id - bryceweiner
So, I was like on youtube this evening, like, like going through my like video stream, and like, I came across Tiffany's like video, like of her interviewing like Sam like Bankman-Fried and like, I couldn't like believe how like bad it was... like, it was like, erm... like really low on any content, like Sam is like, I don't know, like a fucking moron.
Sorry for the above... You can listen to it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHtThZ4717U&list=TLPQMjYxMTIwMjLjV0jnWxJo3A&index=2, but I wouldn't hold my breath. It is basically Sam saying "like" more times than he said anything else. He says polyamory as well, which I think we all know the definition of now. Oh, it sounded like he was chilling on the beach aswell.. which is nice.
I am sure this post will probably get flamed to the ground like all my previous ones, but I was just taken a back. If anyone of us tried to have any meaningful conversation with this guy, it would be plainly obvious that he has no fucking clue!
Neither do I, but I wasn't pretending to run a multibillion dollar business.
I added a comedy flair because I don't think anyone can take this guy seriously ever again.
I removed the comedy flair because this sub apparently has too much comedy at the moment.
Thanks for listening and sorry for the repost.
Bitcoin is down 76% since last year, while Luna, Celsius and FTX collapsed. The real red wave is in our crypto wallets all along.
So many articles (Bloomberg included) predicting the awkward Thanksgiving dinner conversations all across America. Like the title says, if you had one please share your story here.
Was there a reckoning? Where you disowned? Was there violence involved? How was the food?
No judgment here, we just want to have a few giggles during these dark times. Who knows, media lurkers here may even pick up your story for your 15 satoshis of fame.
Came across this and thought it was a cool story on people really using crypto to make a difference in the world, even in small ways. Tl;dr someone using crypto to make it easy to donate to orphanages in Lagos. Lightly edited from original here.
Over the past 12 months, Samuel Olapade (an ambassador for Nano) has led educational events online and face to face. And he's passionate about combining his work for the nano community with support for worthy causes in his own community.
“Life is all about giving back when you understand that there are people that really need your help in one area or the other.”
His latest project sees him turning these words into action. Samuel organised outreach projects to three orphanages in his community in Lagos - Saint Stephen Orphanage, House of Mercy Garden Home and Precious Pearls Orphanage.
As well as donating food and other essentials, Samuel set up nano wallets for each orphanage, meaning they can now receive donations for free, from anywhere in the world. He will also help them offramp the funds and support with however they wish to use them.
"Donations have been the key tools organisations use when it comes to fundraising. The currency to be used has to be easy to access, transparent in terms of transaction history, acceptable globally, and easy to exchange.
“Donations are one of the core use cases because it is easy to transfer from any part of the world. Our Nigeria team pushed for this in order to bring awareness to the use of Nano in the country as a currency acceptable in terms of donation.”
If you want to support the orphanages, you can donate directly via the wallets linked below.
House of Mercy:
Nano address
Saint Stephen:
Nano address
Precious Pearls:
Nano address
Many touted Crypto last November to family as it hit $60k. Any update stories on how it went this year? Anyone blame you for their ruin because of not DYOR? Anyone demand restitution? Any real disaster stories from poor risk allocation or diversification ? Did anyone get into an argument or awkward debate? The media has turned on crypto and haters are now bolder. Did anyone get confronted or mocked by a crypto hater relative who now says he was right all along? Any smug geniuses in laws who bragged in 2021 lose it all in 2022? Tell us some stories!!!
So much has changed from last year at this time and my experience with crypto. Last Thanksgiving, I had around 90% of my crypto in Celsius and Nexo. I was certainly naive to the risks of holding coins on centralized lending platforms. There was a period of time, I even assumed I'd be holding coins on the various platforms forever to compound interest. My risk mitigation was splitting the crypto between platforms.
I'm thankful I learned the error of my ways before losing all my crypto (or at least not having access for who knows how long). In the early part of 2022, I transferred everything to a private key using a Trezor device. I've since learned to even transfer coins from the exchange as often as makes sense. I'm no longer not taking advantage of the benefit of self custodying my assets and having no counter party risk. A major benefit of crypto is that you can have total ownership of your coins. To not take advantage of this is to neglect the full value of owning crypto.
We all learn and become wiser with time. There are mistakes I continue to make and just try my best to move forward. Anyway, for those that celebrate Thanksgiving - Happy Thanksgiving and I hope you continue with your crypto journey.
I have been on this sub for quite some time and never took advice from any of you. I'd rather follow the DYOR method and the 'If CC says go left, go right'-method which sometimes paid of quite good.
Ever since the whole FTX debacle I kept seeing the most important advice pop up over and over: PUT YOUR CRYPTO ON A HARDWALLET/LEDGER. And so I did. I bought a ledger and took all my crypto off the exchanges and it feels SO good.
Binance/crypto.com/Coinbase acting suspicious? I don't care. Exodus and Metamask implementing weird shit? I don't care. It's not my concern anymore since my crypto is safe and sound on the blockchain and inaccessible to anyone but me.
Thank you guys! Thank you for keeping that advice on repeat and stating just how important it is. So far for the compliments...because the rest of your advice still sucks and nobody knows shit about fuck.
I've held a pretty strong BTC conviction since November of last year. Cycled out of all my alts and landed on 100% BTC by the start of 2022. I've been DCAing ever since. Kind of had the plan to only buy BTC going forward. I had made my mind up that BTC was all a person needed. I still believe it's the essential decentralized, no counter party, digital asset worth owning.
But now that I've been exposed to more of the crypto community, I've warmed up to Ethereum. I think it helps to view it as an entirely different value proposition. I wouldn't argue which one is better. BTC is separately unique. ETH is the leader in POS and has value as the leading smart contract platform. POS could help it be viewed more favorably by regulators.
With that said, I think I'm ready to split my DCA with ETH. I am still worried about its long term regulatory threats and success in executing its various development stages but I don't think competing L1s will kill ETH. Also, I have the advantage of pivoting with the market since I'm constantly following crypto news. I would have adequate time to react to real threats compared to the passive investor.
So, should I start buying ETH? Is ETH the real deal?
First of all, as always, I would like to thank everyone for the positive feedback given - writing original content about my experiences makes me happy (if there’s a particular topic you would like me to write about, leave a comment below).
I have recently come across a case, while helping a client out, about a Fake Phishing scam token that managed to siphon millions of USD in ether. Now keep in mind that it didn’t require many resources to pull this scam off and so, one would assume the scammers would try to cash out as fast as possible - but no!
The scammers split the transactions into hundreds of little transactions, which they then transferred to several other wallets and so on. This has been going for 700 days now - they have seen the price of their “investments” rise to 12 million and seen the price fall to now 3 million. They always keep the same pattern of transfers, doing transfers to secondary wallets each 30 days, and eventually transferring to a KYC wallet.
This a rare case where I can respect the hustle - they have kept it simple and organized. Unfortunately, along the way they have made a lot of mistakes (by sending funds to wallets that were already KYC, also cashing out small amount of funds to their personal wallets), leaving them wide open for some Queasy_Length justice!
From recent experiences, I have also seen a trend of leaving the funds in a decentralized wallet and waiting to cash out - and so this is my top 3 most patient scammers:
$720,000 in Ether – 352 Days
$1,700,000 in Ether – 215 Days
$625,000 in BNB – 195 Days
Please let me know if you like these posts. As always Stay Safe and Freak the Scammers!
I don't generally shitpost, but this was one of the interesting thing I read and decided to share
The tower of Babel is a story about mankind getting too full of themselves and trying to build a tower to reach up to heaven and become gods. So God foiled them by confusing their language and scattering them over all the earth.
Where's this written? Genesis Chapter 11.
Guys GENESIS CHAPTER 11. GOD DECENTRALIZED US AFTER GENESIS CHAPTER 11
I'm not done .The book after Genesis? Exodus
EXODUS
Exodus is greek for "THE WAY OUT"
MY BROTHERS IN CHRIST, MANKIND'S HUBRIS leads to GENESIS CHAPTER 11 leads to DECENTRALIZATION leads to THE WAY OUT
GENESIS CHAPTER 11 THEN DECENTRALIZATION & THE WAY OUT
IT WAS ALWAYS HERE
nitter link: https://nitter.net/RyanSAdams/status/1594861274097238018#m
We all have heard the Story’s of investors who bought high and sold low. Hell, even I put a bit of play money into altcoins and projects that turned out to be scams, especially at the beginning.
Some just sounded too good to be true and it was in most of cases. Still that didn’t stop a lot from putting at least some money into it.
There were a few cases with luck and right timing where people made huge gains but it feels like the time where more people who just witnessed good advertisement campaigns won’t buy anymore just because of that.
So what should future advertisements include to get the main focus back on the technology again and maybe educate a few lost souls on the way?
To me, BTC feels like the only coin that makes total sense and that I can have conviction independent of the price swings. I'm not saying that other coins don't have merit but I can never fully understand their unique value proposition and place in the market long term. I have to buy into their ideas and rely on others to show me their place in the market.
Also, many altcoins seem threatened by competing coins in the long run. Their thesis is agile and will change to capture a larger audience and more dollars. They are dependent on hype stirred up by their communities and individual leaders. You look to a person or group for reassurance that they will succeed. In some groups, you almost have to deny Bitcoin of its value to fully appreciate putting your dollars into an altcoin instead. It's easier to buy altcoins if the community is telling you they're better than Bitcoin. Although, the comparison never seems appropriate.
To me, Bitcoin seems involved in the least amount of scammy activities. It doesn't offer the complexity to allow for the same level of manipulation and opportunistic behavior that many altcoins possess. I don't look at Bitcoin to convince me of anything. I know what I'm holding and don't have to worry if I'm making the right choice.
The allure of altcoins' superior gains seem like a trap to me most time. I often convince myself to buy an altcoin without fully understanding why. With Bitcoin, I understand why. I don't need a hyper pump that offers a brief moment of peak gains. I just need long and slow Bitcoin adoption and supply/demand growth.
For these reason, I don't worry about Bitcoin. I can just hold and, when the market recovers or enters the next bull market, I'm almost guaranteed for BTC to follow along.
I've been in the crypto space for about a year now, and for almost the entire time, I've kept my coins on CDC where I bought them. Things were good during ATH and I felt comfortable having my coins there. Of course, with all the recent collapses and implosions, I took more time to learn about how CEXs work and hearing the horror stories about withdrawals being suspended. I got nervous smart and joined the wave of people buying a cold wallet. I went with Ledger.
My Ledger came in the afternoon while I was out, and as soon as I got home, I opened it up and got myself onto Ledger Live, and transferred each of my bags one by one (doing test transactions first to make sure I did it right, of course). It was easy, it was fast, and it was inexpensive, especially when compared with the possibility of not being able to access my funds at all. It truly is a sense of relief knowing that you are in total control of your assets!
Now, some questions for those who use Ledger. Does anyone take advantage of staking any coins through Ledger Live, and if so, how confident are you in staking there? And does anyone buy crypto through Ledger Live, and if so, what does that look like with fees and whatnot? Or is it better to continue buying through the CEX and transferring to Ledger?
Today I'm going to share with you some stories about the dumbest scammers I have encountered while working as a crypto bounty hunter. Once again, I would like to thank you all for the positive vibes sent on previous posts and if you have any questions make sure to comment and I'll help you out!
The Investment Guru
While working on behalf of a client, I encoutered a scammer who remained anonymous while pitching the next big thing in the energy sector to a client. This scammer happened to have a revolutionary techonology that used crypto and renewables combined. They only needed a small investment of 100,000 USD to kickstart the venture. Obviously, after receiving the funds they disappeared - while leaving a trace! Not only was I immediately able to link them to a KYC, I found their opensea account and their .eth address were linked to a twitter account. Safe to say they didn't keep the funds for long.
The Greedy God
I encoutered an address who had stolen 500+ BNB and used a common service called Tornado Cash which makes transactions hard to trace (but not impossible). The tornado cash service allows you to deposit 100BNB at a time in the contract to later withdraw - the thing is, you need to pay for fees, so if you have exacly 500 BNB you can only deposit 400BNB because the remaining amount will be something like 98BNB. This scammer got greedy, and after all that carefulness, he took the remaining funds and transfered it to his main wallet, awarding him the Greedy God tag in my heart.
Please let me know if you wish me to continue this series.
As always Stay safe and Freak the Scammers
I just made another deposit to my IB account to average down on my ETHE position. I decided to share my venture since there are people asking me how I am doing since my last post talking about ETHE at a 35% discount on NAV.
New wire deposit, so I can buy it on Monday when people dump.
My current position on ETHE:
Didn't want to make this a long post since I already talk about why I invested in ETHE in my last post, and I want to remind people this is only a fraction of my crypto portfolio and most of my ETH holdings are locked in validators and not withdrawable until the Shanghai update.
My original plan was to only DCA slowly with MEV income from my validators and some additional savings from my income while the discount is >30% (about ~$1k/month), so why did I make another large deposit?
- The discount at 45% on NAV is just too tempting, it's basically like buying ETH right now at $664
- The fear that causes people to dump on Grayscale Trust is mostly unfounded and caused by rumours that they do not have the actual reserves.
44.65% Discount on NAV as of 18th Nov 2022
What if I'm wrong? If people believe Grayscale doesn't have the actual reserves it means they would also believe Coinbase, their custodian that attested to their reserves to be lying as well.
If that's the case then I would probably lose my investment in ETHE, a fraction of my crypto portfolio, but the market are surely going to be more fucked up if both Grayscale and Coinbase failed, and I guess that kind of shit is going to send the entire crypto market to another -50%, which mean I would just continue DCA into the regular ETH anyway.
Above is my thought process, you can disagree or agree, but I'm just sharing an opposite perspective of this sub, which I think would be interesting to some people.
The free market for BTC and crypto in general, has led to the explosion (at first figuratively and later literally) of centralized exchanges. The nature of hosting an exchange where BTC sellers are matched with buyers is a convenient service but when the purchased BTC never left an exchange, it became too susceptible and tempting for large scale manipulation.
When there's no demand by customers for on chain proof of reserves or other types of attestation, these exchanges were free to exercise all their naturally greedy human desires. They were so drunk on their perversion, they began offering to share their ill gotten gains to entice more customers to hold their BTC with the exchange. For 6% APY, you could participate in the manipulation and cooercision of BTC's price!
Further, when customers weren't demanding to ever transfer their BTC off the exchange, their power grew and the perversion worsened. Now they knew they could sell paper BTC and a buyer would be none the wiser. Their only constraint was being able to have the minimum volume of actual BTC to service the very little volume of requests to move BTC off the exchange. They likely could just buy actual BTC at the exact moment a customer requested a transfer. Literally only ever buying the absolute minimum amount of actual BTC.
All of these games that have brought us to this point have nothing to do with a decentralized protocol. These are all the results of centralized power and a never ending amount of customers buying BTC for mad gains with no respect for self custody and decentralization. The true BTC believers knew this would happen and have been the ones holding their BTC in cold storage.
Every bitcoiner with conviction has held their BTC in cold storage, off the exchange. My hope is that the recent events have inspired more conviction and we'll see BTC return to offering sovereign property rights to those that have learned their lesson or learned by witnessing others.
With that said, the price of BTC is listed on the same exchanges that have served us all this molarchy. To me, this price means nothing coming from them. It is the product of all the perversion. To me, the true value of BTC remains the same for all of us that hold it in self custody and those that soon will.
Don't trust the BTC price until the BTC is verified.
For a disclaimer this is too much for me to understand or wrap up fully but I want people to be up to date on what's happening, I'll be citing tweets and articles but if someone in the comments can provide more information about the situation it would be awesome.
Ok, so first of all. What is GBTC?
"GBTC (Grayscale Bitcoin Trust) is a Bitcoin fund launched by Grayscale in 2013 as a Bitcoin Investment Trust. GBTC allows investors to gain BTC exposure through a private trust that trades directly on the U.S. stock market. "
How GBTC works, credits to @ lookonchain on twitter for explaining this:
As of right now 1GBTC is $8,35 while bitcoin is trading at $16 613
As of recently after the FTX crash there has been concerns about Grayscale having to dissolve their Bitcoin trust:
The parent company DCG aka Digital Currency Group is now requesting a 1 billion emergency loan due to the recent Genesis situation
One of the most concerning things about this is that GBTC is refusing to give proof of reserves information due to it being a "security concern":
The GBTC bitcoin fund is trading at a 40% discount right now like i said earlier, 1GBTC being $8.35 while bitcoin $16 613:
This could end horribly since they presumably hold over $10 billion worth of bitcoin. Let's just hope we get more clarification to what's happening with them over the upcoming days.
Topping this off with an infographic too hard for me to understand about how they operate:
