As usual this sub is completely misinformed (or bad-faith) post about politics.

The "AMERICA COMPETES ACT" was signed into law by President George Bush in 2007. The intent of the law is to "Create Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education and Science" (C.O.M.P.E.T.E.S). In essence, it looks to create opportunities (duh) and "promote excellence" as in regulate. It was updated once during Obama's government in 2011, and it's likely going to be updated once again in 2022.

Apparently the crypto related part is in page 1482 and a few totally not misinformed or bad-faith actors folks are pointing to this as something bad. It's not.

The updates change, remove, integrate, clarify etc. several things on the original legislation, and it's not a surprise that it's a very long legislation, specially with the crappy formatting and big fonts they're using. Here, check it yourself.

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Just in case you're lazy, I'll paste the text here and highlight the relevant parts (as in the justification of why they're even mentioning digital assets).

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Page 1482:

America COMPETES Act H.R.4521 - https://rules.house.gov/sites/democrats.rules.house.gov/files/BILLS-117HR4521RH-RCP117-31.pdf

Page 1482:

Congress finds the following:

(1) **The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN)** is the Financial Intelligence Unit of  the United States **tasked with safeguarding the financial system from illicit use, combating money laundering and its related crimes including terrorism, and promoting national security.**

(2) Per statute, FinCEN may require domestic financial institutions and financial agencies to take certain ‘‘special measures’’ against jurisdictions, in stitutions, classes of transactions, or types of accounts determined to be of primary money laundering concern, providing the Secretary with a range of options, such as enhanced record-keeping, that can be adapted to target specific money laundering and terrorist financing and to bring pressure on those that pose money laundering threats.

(3) This special-measures authority was granted in 2001, when most cross-border transactions occurred through correspondent or payable-through accounts held with large financial institutions which serve as intermediaries to facilitate financial transactions on behalf of other banks.

(4) Innovations in financial services have transformed and expanded methods of cross-border transactions that could not have been envisioned 20 years  ago when FinCEN was given its special-measures authority.

(5) These **innovations**, **particularly through digital assets and informal value transfer systems, while useful to legitimate consumers, are also a boon for bad actors like sanctions evaders, fraudsters, money launderers, and those who commit ransomware attacks on victimized U.S. companies and which use the financial system to move and obscure the proceeds of their crimes.**

(6) **Ransomware attacks on U.S. companies** **requiring payments in cryptocurrencies have increased in recent years**, with the U.S. Treasury estimating that ransomware payments in the United States reached $590 million in just the first half of 2021, compared to a total of $416 million in 2020.

(7) In July 2021, the White House, with support of U.S. allies, asserted that the People’s Republic of China was responsible for ransomware operations against private companies that included demands of millions of dollars, including the 2021 ransomware attacks that breached Microsoft email systems and affected thousands of consumers, State and local municipalities, and government contractors attributed to a cyber espionage group with links to the Chinese Ministry of State Security.

(8) As ransomware attacks organized by Chinese and other foreign bad actors continue to grow in size and scope, modernizing FinCEN’s special measure authorities will empower FinCEN to adapt its existing tools, monitor and obstruct global financial threats, and meet the challenges of combating 21st century financial crime.

SEC. 60202. PROHIBITIONS OR CONDITIONS ON CERTAIN TRANSMITTALS OF FUNDS.

Section 5318A of title 31, United States Code, is amended—

(1) in subsection (a)—

(A) in paragraph (1), by inserting after ‘‘Secretary of the Treasury may’’ the following: ‘‘, by order, regulation, or otherwise as permitted by law,’’;  

(B) by striking paragraph (2) and inserting the following:  

‘‘(2) FORM OF REQUIREMENT.—The special measures described in subsection (b) may be imposed in such sequence or combination as the Secretary shall determine.’’;  

(C) by striking paragraph (3); and

(D) by redesignating paragraphs (4) and (5) as paragraphs (3) and (4), respectively; and (2) in subsection (b)—

(A) in paragraph (5), by striking ‘‘on behalf of a foreign banking institution’’; and

(B) by adding at the end the following:  

‘‘(6) PROHIBITIONS OR CONDITIONS ON CERTAIN TRANSMITTALS OF FUNDS.—**If the Secretary finds** a jurisdiction outside of the United States, **1 or more financial institutions operating outside of the United States**, 1 or more types of accounts within, or involving, a jurisdiction outside of the United 3 States, or 1 or more classes of transactions within, or involving, a jurisdiction outside of the United States **to be of primary money laundering concern**, **the Secretary**, in consultation with the Secretary of the State, the Attorney General, and the Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, **may prohibit, or impose conditions upon certain transmittals of funds** (as such term may be defined by the Secretary in a special measure issuance, by regulation, or as otherwise permitted by law), **to or from any domestic financial institution or domestic financial agency if such transmittal of funds involves any such jurisdiction, institution, type of account, or class of transaction.’’.**  

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TLDR: This update to the American COMPETES Act just aims to give FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) authority to deal (as in prohibit/track/impose conditions) on the transfer of funds between suspect entities. The justification for this is a rampant increase in Ramsomware attacks against american companies and money laundering.

At times it feels like crypto is being pretty widely accepted by the general public, we see guys like Mark Cuban and Elon Musk adopting it for their companies, many mainstream companies like Charmin and Taco Bell are getting into the NFT game and at times it's a mainstream media darling when it's doing well.

I would expect Reddit to be equally if not more supportive of crypto than the general public or that I might expect to see from say in a comments section on Yahoo News, however when I see Bitcoin or Crypto mentioned in more mainstream Reddit subs like r/news or others everyone seems to be talking shit about "crypto bros" or making references to Beanie Babies, its kind of crazy to me as Reddit tends to sku younger and be very tech friendly. Here's some of the types of comments I'm talking about and these are like handpicked comments this sentiment seems to be the majority.

"Looks like Cryptobros will have to go back to Amway."

"Pyramid scheme"

"Anyone who thinks the world's governments and central banks are going to allow unregulated virtual currency to take over is dillusional."

""Let's pretend a speculative asset masquerading as the most deflationary currency ever is the future of finance. This is a Very Good Idea and I'm actually an expert on economics, not a con artist trying to attract as many suckers as possible to pay me real money for my hoarded assets."

"I’m not convinced it is here to stay. What is the utility of bitcoin? At least gold is used in electronics, jewelry etc…"

"Digital Beanie Babies."

"I put my entire net worth into beanie babies and He-Man action figures."

"I mean NFTs are basically the crypto equivalent of beanie babies with the difference being that with beanie babies you actually have something that is worth a damn whereas NFTs are a fucking worthless scam."

"Jesus fuck what is wrong with that dude?

"El Salvadors President Jesus fuck what is wrong with that dude?"

"This year, I invested in pumpkins. They've been going up the whole month of October and I got a feeling they're going to peak right around January. Then, bang! That's when I'll cash in."

"I’m sticking with my tulip bulbs.I’m sticking with my tulip bulbs.

"Obligatory Beanie Babies vs Bitcoin Investment Guide"

"This happens to things whose only value is derived from what people are willing to pay for it. That bitcoin is worth anything is only because people think they will be able to sell it for more than they bought/manufactured it for. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think bitcoin is substantially different than beanie babies. If people decide it's no longer valued, it's just virtual junk."

Don’t get me wrong, everyone hates seeing their portfolio filled with red candlesticks but in the end, the top 2 coins will recover no matter what happens to them. It’s better to just buy more of those two coins right now. If the market crashes even more, heck! Buy even more. Take a look at every single crash the crypto market has been through and tell me ETH and BTC did not recover after all those years.

I’m also certain popular coins in the top 15 have a great chance of recovering once the market is on a bull approach. In the end, this is your investing decision as you’re the only one who can get up when you’re down.

Im kinda stupid, i dont really know whats happening these days, but just from looking at trends im noticing that "metaverse" type scenarios taking over look very likely, online digital worlds almost certainly run by digital currency.

Is there anything that would help me get ahead of the game as far as Crypto goes?

Would it just be a good idea to continue holding the mainstream coins, or are there some just starting out i should be interested in?

Also similar to the point, are there already worlds being built that look likely to stand the test of time? I dont know where to start! Haha.

And when I say anyone that means other than me on this post. I’ve been a contributor on this sub and other crypto subs for the past 4+ years.

I’ve made plenty of profit because of the time I’ve been invested in this market but like many others, I’ve made some investments at times that I shouldn’t have. I jumped in right before the tippy top of 2017. I mined a lot during the bear market. But I didn’t invest much.

Now that I have some extra cash I’ve decided to buy a little over the past several months. I thought to myself “I’ll check out some of the coins/tokens that are talked about here and then make a decision for myself.� Almost every coin/token I’ve bought that I read about on here has gone down. I don’t mean just a little bit. It’s gone down significantly. Like more than 50%. This place has turned into a complete pile of garbage. Maybe some of these coins will be ok in the long run but right now it’s a giant shill fest. You’re better off waiting to see what happens during the next bear market when it comes to alts.

I’m still buying for the long term but I urge you new comers to stick to the blue chips for now. 99% of the Alts will go to zero long term. Please don’t yeet into these coins. Fight the urge. It’s not worth the risk. No one on this sub knows what they’re talking about. It’s all for moons.

I obviously see the irony in this post but this is what we used to do before moons. We actually tried to help each other. Unfortunately many who used to post here stopped a long time ago.

Around 4-5 months ago, this subs favorite low market cap coin was Ergo (ERG).

During its hype it was hovering around $14-$18, a few months later and it’s down at $4 - down more than 70% from its ATH.

This is an even better post about this topic.

^{As you can see, when OP made the post Ergo was at $9.99, it’s down even more now!}

An Ergo shill post, a really good one tbh!

^{Down 54% since this post.}

Don’t miss out on Ergo!

^{Don’t miss out on a way to lose 67% in 4 months.}

What’s the top comment in a post asking about the best project outside top 100 market cap? Guess?

^{Ergo everywhere.}

Don’t make my mistake. If a coin is shilled way to much here don’t buy it.

People from this sub have and will always be wrong about the projects that will take off. Don’t ever take suggestions from anyone of this sub not even mine. They missed their ride on Solana, Ada, Avax, and Luna notice how those are not super popular here. Fantom and cosmos(Atom) aren’t super popular here either and those will be the next projects to take off not Algo or VET. I am not even shilling but just warning people not to pay attention to coins being shilled here. I hope I get downvoted(I know I will). I bet the Algo maxi’s will start shitting on fantom now.

Look out, here they come….

So with 2022 right around the corner I was wondering how this sub performed this year.

https://subredditstats.com/r/CryptoCurrency

https://preview.redd.it/oe56zhlzmq881.png?width=1103&format=png&auto=webp&s=7b007e9fde0660019b590009b2e4a9e9163f43d5

You can clearly see how fast things were moving this year, compared to previous years. I still believe we are early but this movement is crazy.

Obviously Reddit doesn't show everything but an increase like this shows that crypto is getting closer to mass adoption every second and more people are getting interested, especially seeing this exponential growth.

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Happy New Year everybody!

It has been a good year for Crypto, this is the r/CryptoCurrency 2021 recap, listing the most popular posts of 2021:

15.

People That Say "Imagine If DogeCoin Went to $10 or $100" Do You Guys Understand Market Cap and Circulating Supply?

14.

I made a post about the scam OpisHub yesterday. The scammers didn't like that and bought downvotes to make my post invisible. So this is an even more detailed post about them.

13.

"If I had bought BTC in the early 2010's at 10 cents, I would be a millionaire now". Truth is: You would have sold long before BTC reached even its 2017 ATH of 20k USD.

12.

John McAfee found dead in prison cell after Spanish high court allows extradition, according to Spanish newspaper El Mundo

11.

Squid Game from $2856 to $0.0008 in 10 minutes

10.

My daughter is dating a douche-bag

9.

Leaked Documents Show that Citadels CEO Lied Under Oath about a Collusion Between Robinhood Stopping Trades and Citadel: Do You Really Want Them to Control Your Crypto too?

8.

Elon Musk: Tesla stops accepting Bitcoin as payments. Looking at other Cryptocurrencies that use less energy

7.

Reminder: Robinhood blocked several stocks from being bought. They locked the buy button when it suited them. Don't buy Bitcoin on Robinhood. The dust has settled, but we remember.

6.

Elon Musks affect on crypto is completely exaggerated by the press and soon his tweets will have no impact on price. The sooner the fanboys realize this the better

5.

Britney Spears has been using Bitcoin since 2014 to hide purchases from her dad

4.

Elon Musk Is Not One Of Us. Stop Using Him As a Role Model.

3.

It's been a crazy ride these past 7 years, but I'm selling

2.

Binance CEO, CZ, shades Elon Musk in tweet. - ''When you use electricity to run cars, it’s environmentally friendly. When you use electricity to run the most efficient financial networks in the world, it’s an environmental concern.''

Most upvoted post of 2021:

You hear about the kid who put in $500 into a memecoin and made 100k, but you don't hear about the hundreds who put $1000 and are left with $0.1

Best win for Crypto in 2021: Bitcoin being made legal tender in El Salvador, the first CryptoCurrency to achieve this status

Biggest Crypto fail in 2021: Squid Game Crypto losing 99,999% of its value in under 10 minutes

What do you think is the best Crypto win/fail of 2021?

I am by no means crypto savvy. I do however know more than I did 6 months ago but the reason everything takes so long to learn is that you can’t trust anyone.

I posted a question about MetaMask on their specific subreddit and that’s a huge mistake. It’s basically like walking down the street wearing your ledger around your neck with a neon sign displaying your portfolio held above your head outside of a wrench store. Bunch of wolves lying in wait.

But it sucks. It makes everything so much harder. Every piece of advice I get, I double and triple check. It takes for-ever. So basically unless you want to just buy on a CEX, stake on the CEX and move on, you’ve gotta look up every. single. thing.

Maybe I’m just old and super paranoid. Maybe I shouldn’t research everything to death before I connect my wallet or send funds to a new contract or chain. Maybe I should just learn to have more of a YOLO attitude.

Unfortunately, those are the things that give me the peace of mind to jump Into new and early crypto projects and I don’t think I’m the only one. For all the other weirdos like me who aren’t cool with just YOLOing blindly into whatever new shiny thing comes along, I guess we just have to be ok with it. I suppose it’s the price of being early. But man does it become tiresome at times.

Dear CC community! Time for me to give something back to this community.
Might I add this is not financial advice, and you should only do this if you can afford
to lose the money you invest.

Currently the APY on FTM-Tomb is around 480%, which is a crazy return considering the risk is relatively limited in my opinion. Tomb is a token pegged to be at least worth as much as Fantom, and Fantom is a top 50 crypto, which is quite stable and somewhat on 50% of it's ATH. So in my opinion there are 3 risks you are taking:

1. The farm platform being hacked (in this case, Reaper.farm), lately grim.finance was hacked for 30 milion dollars, and it seems that Grim is taking effort to return some money, but still..
   
2. You being hacked, so make sure to take the right security measures (write down your seed phrase on paper and keep it somewhere safe)
   
3. FTM & Tomb losing value, which is ofcourse a risk always in crypto.
   

So lets get started!

FTM-TOMB Liquidity farming on Reaper.finance
Step 1 If you don't already have one, create a wallet on Metamask and write down your seed phrase on paper and keep it somewhere safe.

Step 2 Buy some Fantom (FTM) and transfer it to your MetaMask wallet (buy FTM at Crypto.com, Binance or other exchange).
Now we need to have the FTM on the Fantom Opera Network, but most exchanges only offer it on the Ethereum main network. If your exchange allows you to transfer FTM to Fantom Opera Network, than this will be perfect! If not you will buy FTM and will have to transfer it to Ethereum Main network on Metamask and you need to follow step 3 and 4

Step 3 Buy some Ethereum (around 50 dollars) to cover for the gas fees. Note that there are some times where the gas fees are lower, since the traffic on Ethereum is lower. During the low traffic times of the day, you pay around 15-20 dollars gas, during high traffic periods it can go up to 60 dollars is my experience. I live in the Netherlands and when it is 10 AM here, usually the gas fees are very low. So you need to keep the Ethereum in your Metamask wallet (Main network)

Step 4 Go to spookyswap.finance and connect your Metamask wallet. If you use Google Chrome and install the Metamask extension, you can simply press on MetaMask wallet and approve. Press on "Bridge" and switch the network on your wallet as the spookyswap requires. Set from to "Ethereum" and to to "Fantom". Then select Fantom as token. First approve the FTM and than press bridge and approve the transactions as requested. So now you will pay 2 times Ethereum Gas fees. After a minute or two, your FTM should be visible in the opera main network, in your MetaMask wallet.

Step 5 Now you need to decide how many FTMs you want to invest and you will have to buy 50% of that worth of Tomb token. For this you go to tomb.finance and you connect your MetaMask wallet again. Now you press on "Buy Tomb" and fill in the amount of Tomb tokens, so for example if you want to invest 200 FTM, then buy 50% of that worth of Tomb (approx 100 Tomb tokens, based on Tomb value on that moment).
Note In your MetaMask wallet, on the Fantom Opera Network, always keep some FTM (at least 3 pieces) to cover for the gas fees on the network. You will thank me later for this tip.

Step 6 Browse to reaper.farm and connect your MetaMask wallet again. Now you filter on Tomb so you find the FTM-TOMB pair and click on the title "FTM-TOMB Tomb Crypt" which opens the pair on Spookyswap. Now your balance of FTM and Tomb should both be visible. Select your Tomb balance and press Max. Then press on approve and after that press on Supply. After a minute or two, the balance should be visible on reaper.farm at the FTM-TOMB pair, behind "In wallet".

Step 7 On reaper.farm now approve of the FTM-Tomb LP and select deposit (ofcourse select max quantities). For some reason, sometimes you need to repeat this step, since it sometimes fails for no clear reason. Then after refreshing the site and filtering on Tomb your LP value should be visible behind "Your LP" and "LP value".

Good luck and feel free to ask questions!

This sub currently looks at NFT's like the general public looks at crypto. You only see the "scammy" surface and don't see the potential they offer.

NFT's have a lot of promise. Its still early days so there's bound to be a lot of cowboys. Same as regular crypto had a few years ago, and even now still does to some degree.

People just get fixated on the "hurr durr I can right click save" meme, which misses the point. They are digital proof of ownership, and already a lot of nft projects are realising that just a picture isn't enough, they need to offer value to the buyers, so many are now acting effectively as exclusive memberships.

Hell there's even one project coming along now that will be able to act as a personal AI, that can potentially be trained to do almost anything. Give another nft a brain? Want your own personal chat bot? Want to train it to do automated trading? All these sorts of things are are just round the corner. Personal verifiable ownership is the key takeaway for me, not "right click save lol"

Can we just stop throwing rocks at each other? Ethereum, Solana, Cardano, etc. We're now in a vicious cycle of shitting on each other's project. Rocks have been thrown and it doesn't matter who threw the first one, because now everyone is throwing rocks at each other.

Can't we talk more positively of each other? TBH zoom out and you'll see that each of our chains have their own strengths and weaknesses. There's no one perfect blockchain. Whether it's network effect, number of dapps, blockchain issues, person of interest issues, we're all degenerates.

The in-fighting just feeds more ammo to those who want to bring down blockchain tech. All those nasty headlines about your favorite crypto are because we keep feeding the media stories. Imagine the confidence of the public if they see a strong ass community working together to help each other through mistakes.

Decentralization won't rely on a single lone blockchain. Scalability won't competitive without competition. Security will be tighter when we learn from our competition and ourselves. Can we start a movement to stop hating on other chains? I'll personally stop shitting on BSC haha. I've been perpetuating the toxicity, and now moving forward I think we need to first stop the cycle in its tracks.