Bitcoin, Blockchain, Battlestar Galactica

There was a report on Bloomberg today that US bitcoin miners could account for up to 2.3% of the nation’s electricity consumption. Crazy.

 

So the lawyers running FTX's bankruptcy have determined that it is impossible to restart the company and instead of reorganizing it are going to liquidate it. I though anyone who knew anything about FTX would know it is a criminal enterprise and could never function both legally and profitably, but I'm sure that it's an honest mistake on their part. Which coincidentally allowed them to take hundreds of millions in fees from what was left of FTX.

Yeah, quite a coincidence.

 

Binance has delisted the major privacy coins including Monero, the world's favorite way to pay for drugs and worse. It's probably going to get stricter as the Federales ramp up their control of Binance's activity. Monero still exists, but it got harder to convert money to Monero and much much harder to convert Monero to money.

If they are going to continue on the thread of stopping crypto-assisted crime, they will have to stop dealing with anything on Justin Sun's TRON network. Looking forward to that.

 

We got some reporting from the public Bitcoin miners, and it doesn't look good for them. Marathon went from producing 1853 Bitcoins in December to 1083 produced last month despite a slight increase in hash rate. Transaction fees are also dropping as the Ordinals fad is slowing down. Riot is even worse, not just down month-on-month, but down 30% year-on-year, despite a 33% increase in hash rate. The world wide hash rate has spiked recently. Don't know why - state actors? But everyone wants in on the game and as long as everyone is playing everyone is losing.

As part of Bitcoin's deflationary design, the rewards that miners get gets halved every 4 years or so. The next of these is expected this spring. There's no way these public miners survive that.

 

So ETFs were supposed to be a big deal in the Bitcoin world. But now inflows are drastically slowing and there was no price jump. Turns out that a big chunk of the money going into ETFs was just internal shuffling of coins for these companies. We know that Blackrock and Fidelity at least had large Bitcoin custody services ($13 billion! for Fidelity), and just moving clients over to the ETF doesn't move the price any.

 

I won't bore you with the details, but it really looks like there are severe money problems inside Justin Sun's exchanges and other defi companies. He's been stealing money from depositors through various schemes and using the money to prop things up. He also has the backing of Tether, so it all might limp on for a while yet. Tether on Sun's TRON blockchain is a fantastic way to do money laundering and other crime and Tether doesn't want to lose that.

The thing is, while there are Federal watchdogs inside Tether, they can only stop things that are certainly, provably wrong (like funding terrorists) and not things are are very likely, but not proven in court bad (like funding presumed criminal enterprises). They are keeping receipts so when this all goes to trial a decade from now they will have proof, but I'm sure that will be cold comfort to the people being scammed now.

 

The Circle stablecoin is winding down operations on Justin Sun's TRON blockchain. While coins minted there can still be held and traded and redeemed, no new ones can be made. This isn't that big - most criminals use Tether on TRON and while Sun is currently moving large blocks of money and redeeming tens of millions through Circle, he's doing it all on Binance so as to keep prices stable on his falling-apart constellation of companies.

What it is is an indication of were things are going. Sooner or later Tether and Binance are going to be forced to stop dealing with Sun. Binance's watchdog will be starting soon (don't know how watchdoggy they will be as it looks like it will be FTX's old law firm) and there is strong indications that both Europe and the US will be making new anti-Tether legislation... at the speed of new legislation.

 

Something weird is going on. The price of Bitcoin is going way up, but volume isn't that big. What seems to be driving it is trade in futures, which have spiked and are as high as ever. I guess the exchanges were worried that retail customers would take this moment of high prices and high leverage to start taking profits and cause a massive crash. So what Coinbase and a few other large exchanges did was stop customers from doing transactions. It's been going on all Wednesday.

 

Wtf? I'm not gonna pretend that I understand crypto, but the main reason I didn't invest in it is the fear of not being able to get my money out (even if I made a profit). Total scam!

 

So is crypto just an MLM for bros?

 

Yes in an indirect way. Because there is no actual economy in crypto (except the criminal kind), one way for the price to go up is if more people were interested in it and bought it. So they try to get new converts because in the long term every convert helps line go up.

 

The criminal organizations behind Pig Butchering have amassed $75 billion dollars worth of crypto. It isn't clear that all this is only from that scam, but certainly a large part is.

https://torontosun.com/business/mon...chering-nets-more-than-75-billion-study-finds

I don't know why they aren't shutting TRON down, since the vast majority goes through there.

 

Nigeria just fined Binance $10 billion for debasing their currency and assisting in people financing terrorism. Two people from Binance have been held in custody for a few days now.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/nigeria-orders-cryptocurrency-firm-to-pay-10bn/ar-BB1jblWL

 

Binance did this by creating an arbitrage situation. What they did was find nations with falling currency value (Nigeria, but they also did this in Argentina and others places) and then offer people desperate to get a more stable currency the option to buy stablecoins at a markup (like say 1800 monies per dollar when the official exchange rate is 1600). Then Binance exchanges that money for dollars using more official channels and pocket the difference. So they set a new lower black market exchange rate for the native money and extract wealth without doing anything economically productive.

 

Offering people a chance to avoid exchange rate controls is a service I would say.

 

Money exists as a means for a government to allow commerce and control how that commerce is done. And that includes controls over how much leaves the nation. If money is free to move everywhere, then the wealth of the nation can flow out. Instead of incentivizing or forcing a rich Nigerian to invest in Nigeria, crypto allows them to invest in the US. That might be good for me, but it's bad for everyone else.

You see this effect in large nations or blocks that share money - dollars are drawn towards the American coasts, Euros go from Greece and Italy and Spain towards Germany and France. That's why the US and the EU pump so much money back towards those poorer places - it allows that cycle to keep going instead of just bankrupting the poor parts which then stops the rich parts.

 

There are now multiple charges against KuCoin, one of the larger exchanges, for money laundering and various securities violations. Money is rushing out the exits. It is a favorite place to launder money from Tether and the various Justin Sun enterprises.

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/p...change-kucoin-and-two-its-founders-criminally