Bitcoin, Blockchain, Battlestar Galactica

I have a cousin (I'm Irish Catholic, I have 41 first cousins) that used to ping me with his spray-in insulation business.

I guess it didn't do too well, because last week I got an invite to a meeting to be sure I didn't miss the massive cryptocurrency investment opportunity.

 

Donald Trump, Crypto Bro. Cross posted with the Vance thread.


https://archive.ph/u6pVW#selection-889.0-901.356

Long article from the NYT by Thomas Edsall on Trump's massive financial inroads to Silicon Valley. Good article, worth at least a skim. And if anyone with actual knowledge of crypto can weigh in on its merits...good.

Crypto companies — and the venture capitalists heavily invested in them — have returned the favor, not only throwing their support to Trump but helping Trump and the Republican Party to crack open a Democratic bastion, the high-tech industry.

A story from April on Puck, “All-In For Trump,” reflects the changed political environment:
"An election cycle ago, Silicon Valley Republicans had to go into witness protection to support Trump. Now, post-cancel culture and post—“All-In,” an influential cohort of billionaires and quasi-billionaires is getting ready to write checks for 45."

William D. Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute, replied by email to my question about the evolution of Silicon Valley’s support for Trump:
"Trump’s popularity in the tech community is highest among extreme libertarians and/or megalomaniacs like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey. They see him as a disrupter, and as the political figure most likely to reduce taxes and regulations in ways that give them maximum freedom in how they run their businesses and spend their money.

"There is a messianic streak running through large parts of the Silicon Valley defense startup and venture capital communities that argues that they are the true ‘doers,’ the real modern day patriots, and the only ones who can restore America to dominance abroad and greatness at home — if only government would get out of their way and let them do the job."​

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Here is a really important graph from a FDIC report on Bitcoin usage in the US.



The dashed line is the price of Bitcoin and Etherium, the two blue-chip crypto tokens. The solid line is amount of money being deposited into exchanges. There is a pretty decent correlation between the two until about six months before the Big Crash of spring 2022. After the crash it looks like there was a little interest in getting coins on "discount", but then people's interest in sending money to exchanges vanished and it has not come back. But the price of the tokens started going up. This is pretty clear evidence that the price of Bitcoin has no connection to reality any more, not even to speculation and mania. It is complete fabrication by the people running crypto.

And no this isn't because people moved to ETF's. That started January 2024, after the data on the chart ends.

 

My mom asked me a few weeks back what crypto is. I explained it as best I could, but I basically ended it when she asked what it’s good for, and my response was that it makes it easier for criminals to get ransom payments, blackmail payments, etc.

That’s its purpose, and until I read a convincing counter argument, that’s the only purpose it ever could have had. There was no “wrong path.” It was the only path.

 

So the Council is block(chain)ing him from digging up his money.

 

Cambodian police have raided an office park in Phnom Penh housing a crypto money laundering / gambling / pig butchering operation. Over 600 people have been detained. Most of those are probably slaves doing the work - some previous escapees alerted the police to the location. The people come from all over Southeast Asia and China.

https://1-cc--times-com.translate.g...l=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=wapp

 

Michael Saylor, head of the small and slowly dying software company slash massive store of Bitcoin MicroStrategy says that he will be buying $42 billion in Bitcoin over the next couple years funded by newly issued MicroStrategy stock.

That sounds bonkers. Trying to gin up some interest in a crypto few care about any more? Or maybe too much gin period.

 

It might have worked, so some extent. Bitcoin's gotten a bunch of headlines as it broke $80,000, and it kinda looks like MicroStrategy's recent $2 billion spend on the crypto coin is what did it.

In a bizarre and I'm sure totally unrelated coincidence, Tether created $2 billion out of thin air recently.

 

The bankrupt remnants of FTX is suing Binance for $1.8 billion. Binance originally funded the start of FTX in exchange for 20% of the ownership, something that always rankled SBF. A little before FTX fell apart, SBF bought out Binance's partial ownership. Now FTX is saying this was a illegal use of funds for a company already insolvent, so they are trying to claw that back.

Exchanges have a lot of "value", but not a lot of cash, so Binance alone might have trouble raising that if they lose. But I'm sure the rest of the fake money universe wouldn't let that happen - they can't let the world's almost respectable entry point into crypto fall.

 

The Trump kleptocracy is starting.

The Wisconsin pension fund now includes over a hundred million dollars in Bitcoin.

Pennsylvania introduces bill to create bitcoin strategic reserve. They are not the only state looking into this.

Senator Cynthia Lumis is introducing legislation for the Federal Government to buy a trillion dollars worth of Bitcoin.

 

If one gets blocked: https://archive.ph/xmBsf

And this could have been in the "Adventures in Policing" thread based on this one...

Federal court records trace Iza’s alleged crimes back to 2021, when prosecutors say he began paying Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies to be his hired muscle and help him steal from his enemies.

One of the lawmen — identified as Deputy 1 in court records — ran a private security company that Iza allegedly paid more than $100,000 per month to provide “teams of active LASD deputies” to accompany him around the clock.

During a party at Iza’s home in Bel-Air in August 2021, his bodyguards — at least one of whom was in law enforcement — held the event’s hired planner at gunpoint, according to court filings. Iza allegedly took the man’s phone and used it to transfer money to himself because he was unhappy with the festivities.

Iza is accused of keeping pictures of the party planner’s credit cards and enough other personal information to continue taking money, eventually depleting the man’s accounts of “tens of thousands of dollars.”

A few weeks after the incident, according to Iza’s indictment, Deputy 1 contacted a narcotics detective and told him a confidential informant claimed the party planner had large amounts of fentanyl and cocaine at his house. Sheriff’s deputies later raided the home — but found no drugs.​

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