OT: Bitcoin, Altcoins, NFT's & All Things Crypto
- Thread starter bob-loblaw
- Start date
Pomp, who was essentially my gateway into really getting into the crypto space had a pretty interesting interview on CNBC this afternoon. He's been pretty quiet post-FTX, for a litany of reasons. He was an investor in FTX. He also aggressively shilled BlockFi as they were one ofhis sponsors for a long time.
As I've gone deeper into btc I've shied away from him as him and his brothers were too rah rah on everything. Most notoriously Do Kwon and his Luna purchase of btc to hold as a peg to his stablecoin. We all know how that ended up.
Either way, he struggled the first part of this but came into his own towards the back half as Scott Wapner pressed him.
Pt 1
Pt 2
As I've gone deeper into btc I've shied away from him as him and his brothers were too rah rah on everything. Most notoriously Do Kwon and his Luna purchase of btc to hold as a peg to his stablecoin. We all know how that ended up.
Either way, he struggled the first part of this but came into his own towards the back half as Scott Wapner pressed him.
Pt 1
Pt 2
Wapner is such a dickhead. His whole network exists to promote things.
Pomp made some good points, but he also did a lot of deflecting, not really answering questions. That guy could talk a dog off the meat wagon.
He deflected a good amt as pretty much anyone interviewee does, but he straight went for the jugular of Wapners groupthink mentality on some of his assumptions. That part, is where Pomp truly excelled and Wapner was visibly flustered
Next up, Binance will be viewed as the devil by traditional media and by regulators. Might not be this year, but it's coming. CZ (binance owner) pretty much single-handedly destroyed the Democrat party's 2nd largest donor behind Soros. There will be hell to pay. Might be a good time to start considering moving assets off of that exchange if you have them.
The New York Times, as always, on the wrong side of things. Such a worthless piece of crap publication pushing their false narratives and coverups again. Hey--it's all OK, Bankman-Fried is an altruist!!!:I wouldn't call this a conspiracy theory. The dots are pretty easy to connect.
This paragraph from the below article is pretty damning.
SBF, you may recall, was one of the biggest donors to President Joe Biden, while his parents—both Stanford law professors—have ties to the party. His mother, Barbara Fried, leads a group called Mind the Gap that helps raise Silicon Valley cash for Democrats, while his father, Joseph Bankman, drafted tax legislation for the powerful Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass). It’s not a stretch to imagine SBF sought to exploit these political ties to his benefit.
The FTX debacle makes SEC Chair Gensler look bad—again
Gary Gensler missed the biggest crypto collapse to date. It’s a bad look for the SEC and by extension the Democrats.fortune.com
That NYTimes article was straight horeseshit. I've never seen such a puffpiece on a criminal. Dude stole 10B!
Here's the link again. https://archive.ph/mxOh5
sorry for the spammy looing URL, just stripping it of the paywall for those w/o NYT access.
Here's a good Twitter thread on all this
New York Times Runs Bizarre Softball Article on FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried
The Times paints a picture of a troubled businessman who made bad investments, rather than an industry built like a house of cards.
gizmodo.com
"In fact, the interview with SBF, as he’s often called, is presented with such a gauzy lens that you have to start wondering what the hell is going on with crypto reporting at the Times."
"The new article in the New York Times by David Yaffe-Bellany lays out the facts in ways that are clearly beneficial to SBF’s version of the story and leaves many of his highly questionable assertions without proper context or even the most minimal amount of pushback."
And the "media"--LOL:
"Over the past two years, Bankman-Fried cultivated the media lavishly, if not carefully. Drawing on what then seemed like an unlimited pool of cash, SBF (as we’ll call the mythologized version of the real person) dispersed investments, advertising dollars, sponsorships, and donations to key news outlets—including ProPublica, Vox, Semafor, and The Intercept—with extraordinary effectiveness.
Bankman-Fried’s head has filled the frame of the most coveted business news covers in the world, including Fortune (“The next Warren Buffett?”) and Forbes (“Only Zuck has been as rich (23 billion) this young (29)!”). CNBC star Jim Cramer once compared Bankman-Fried, who has been active in crypto finance for only a handful of years, to John Pierpont Morgan, the giant of industry who worked in banking for nearly four decades before striking out on his own."
This sounds a lot like the "media" and "journalism" in The Fountainhead:
"Rand used the journalism we see in The Fountainhead to criticize the way media outlets could easily become biased, uninformative, and ultimately harmful. The press in this book has the power to attack people, to destroy people, to sway public opinion in bad directions, to misrepresent things, and to ignore important events."
The Fountainhead Journalism | Shmoop
Helping you understand Journalism in The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand - but, in a fun way.
www.shmoop.com
Binance is essentially the same story as FTX except a few years earlier, with less in your face marketing. I would guess the flaws in their balance sheet, which is counting random air dropped shitcoins where they hold a majority of the supply as assets, even though there is little real trading volume in comparison to what they hold, which means if they ever decided to cash out, the coin would be worthless. Until proven otherwise, you have to assume all of these exchanges are playing the same game.
He was a fn pawn they used to make look like a philanthropic wunderkind. Not to get too political again, but if SBF was a GOP donor, that NYT piece and every other report would look much much different. There would be demands to return payments. To set up a fund for users who lost everything, etc.The New York Times, as always, on the wrong side of things. Such a worthless piece of crap publication pushing their false narratives and coverups again. Hey--it's all OK, Bankman-Fried is an altruist!!!:
New York Times Runs Bizarre Softball Article on FTX's Sam Bankman-Fried
The Times paints a picture of a troubled businessman who made bad investments, rather than an industry built like a house of cards.
"In fact, the interview with SBF, as he’s often called, is presented with such a gauzy lens that you have to start wondering what the hell is going on with crypto reporting at the Times."
"The new article in the New York Times by David Yaffe-Bellany lays out the facts in ways that are clearly beneficial to SBF’s version of the story and leaves many of his highly questionable assertions without proper context or even the most minimal amount of pushback."
And the "media"--LOL:
"Over the past two years, Bankman-Fried cultivated the media lavishly, if not carefully. Drawing on what then seemed like an unlimited pool of cash, SBF (as we’ll call the mythologized version of the real person) dispersed investments, advertising dollars, sponsorships, and donations to key news outlets—including ProPublica, Vox, Semafor, and The Intercept—with extraordinary effectiveness.
Bankman-Fried’s head has filled the frame of the most coveted business news covers in the world, including Fortune (“The next Warren Buffett?”) and Forbes (“Only Zuck has been as rich (23 billion) this young (29)!”). CNBC star Jim Cramer once compared Bankman-Fried, who has been active in crypto finance for only a handful of years, to John Pierpont Morgan, the giant of industry who worked in banking for nearly four decades before striking out on his own."
This sounds a lot like the "media" and "journalism" in The Fountainhead:
"Rand used the journalism we see in The Fountainhead to criticize the way media outlets could easily become biased, uninformative, and ultimately harmful. The press in this book has the power to attack people, to destroy people, to sway public opinion in bad directions, to misrepresent things, and to ignore important events."
The Fountainhead Journalism | Shmoop
Helping you understand Journalism in The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand - but, in a fun way.
Honestly, the GOP is missing a tremendous opp to keep this in the news and demand campaign contrubtions get return to those who lost $$$
While I trust Gemini as an exchange, their lend program (which I pulled a healthy amt of btc off of backin May) is having issues due to their 3rd party lender, Genesis. Another lending partner with withdrawals suspended....
My guess GOP is pro crypto (see: welcoming mining in Texas), and politicizing crypto would motivate the Dems to pass tough legislation against it
I would say they are "the most reliable on & off ramp" between fiat and crypto. However the long term reliability of that ramp is in question. IMO the leadership team at Coinbase sought out a way to become public so they can become rich by selling off their shares in a legal way. Now that they have accomplished that, I have my doubts about their motivations to keep Coinbase from going off of a cliff. As Brian Armstrong has said publically, should that happen your crypto is theirs. Not your keys not your coins!
A lot of them are. Sen Lummis out of Wy is one of the biggest bulls out there.
I don't think it's that.
Following up on this with this nugget.... However, Genesis Global currently serves as the liquidity provider of the popular $6.7-billion Grayscale Bitcoin Investment Trust (GBTC).
Grayscale is on the offense with this thread. I'm not truly concerned here, buuuuuut we've seen this before the last few mos. As I've been saying cold storage is key.
It's no different than what we see "approved" by the FDA, CDC, etc. All entangled conflicts of interests, pharma and food companies helping those that help them with donations, not giving a crap about ordinary citizens. Waiting for the day when there is a reasonable proposal for MyPlate and dietary macros that are not paid for by the crappy purveyors of foods that are making us sicker and die sooner.
Is this some sort of diversionary tactic?
Crypto starts to look like the house of cards many predicted.
Blame the gov’t. Blame the media.
Looks foolish.
I dont think it is. I think the reality is that this was a straight up house of cards that had so much investment in it, it was "too big to fail" Unfort., all it took was CZ openly saying he would sell his FTT tokens to kill the whole thing. The sale started, people shorted and the rest is history.
The reality is that crypto, defi and cefi failed. Bitcoin did not fail. Bitcoin has not failed. It keeps doing what it's supposed to do; mine new blocks. The poor reporting cannot differentiate that difference.
But back to SBF, this kid was anointed as the second coming of everything. Everyone gave him $$$ and he doled out $$$ to mostly Dem politicians. If you want to get super conspiracy theory-ish here, connect the dots of him and his parents, the father of the Alameda CEO and connect to Gensler and Washington. Timing of everything almost seems suspect, given Gensler never approved a spot ETF, but approved a short and futures ETF. Then days after the mid terms where he flooded races with $$$, the whole thing implodes on itself.
I try to avoid conspiracies, as most people I know who buy into theories wind up believing each and every last one presented in front of them, a la Alex Jones. But to me, there's some real fukkery at play here
Also, Cal's (UC Berkeley) football stadium had a $17.5 Million 10 year naming rights deal with FTX:
sfist.com
Crypto Giant FTX’s Massive Implosion Likely Means Curtains for Cal’s $17.5 million Stadium Naming Rights Deal
Cryptocurrency brand FTX went from $32 billion to bankrupt in just nine days, and the Cal football stadium’s $17.5 million naming rights deal is likely to go down the drain with it.
sfist.com
Dude is legit trying to win a psyops game by making himself the victim. It just keeps going
www.vox.com
Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself
The fallen crypto CEO on what went wrong, why he did what he did, and what lies he told along the way.
www.vox.com
Scary post by SBF.
Scary because it confirms what I once posted in the investment thread - namely that a lot of companies, banks, state/federal/local agencies etc have "sloppy" accounting and don't know realities.
Books get cooked so much (and throw-in some mergers and aquisitions with new computer admins) and people lose track - dispersal of responsibility, dishonesty, scaling complexities, derivatives etc etc - houses of cards everywhere
From SBFs list 24 point list:
"..9) Once upon a time--a month ago--FTX was a valuable enterprise.
FTX had ~$10-15b of daily volume, and roughly $1b of annual revenue. $40b of equity value.
And we were held as paragons of running an effective company.
20) I was on the cover of every magazine, and FTX was the darling of Silicon Valley.
We got overconfident and careless.
21) And problems were brewing. Larger than I realized.
Leverage built up-- ~$5b of leverage, backed by ~$20b of assets which were....
Well, they had value. FTT had value, in EV! But they had risk.
22) And that risk was correlated--with the other collateral, and with the platform.
And then the crash came.
In a few day period, there was a historic crash--over 50% in most correlated assets, with no bid side liquidity.
And at the same time there was a run on the bank.
23) Roughly 25% of customer assets were withdrawn each day--$4b.
As it turned out, I was wrong: leverage wasn't ~$5b, it was ~$13b.
$13b leverage, total run on the bank, total collapse in asset value, all at once.
Which is why you don't want that leverage.
---
24) Shrapnel"
threadreaderapp.com
Scary because it confirms what I once posted in the investment thread - namely that a lot of companies, banks, state/federal/local agencies etc have "sloppy" accounting and don't know realities.
Books get cooked so much (and throw-in some mergers and aquisitions with new computer admins) and people lose track - dispersal of responsibility, dishonesty, scaling complexities, derivatives etc etc - houses of cards everywhere
From SBFs list 24 point list:
"..9) Once upon a time--a month ago--FTX was a valuable enterprise.
FTX had ~$10-15b of daily volume, and roughly $1b of annual revenue. $40b of equity value.
And we were held as paragons of running an effective company.
20) I was on the cover of every magazine, and FTX was the darling of Silicon Valley.
We got overconfident and careless.
21) And problems were brewing. Larger than I realized.
Leverage built up-- ~$5b of leverage, backed by ~$20b of assets which were....
Well, they had value. FTT had value, in EV! But they had risk.
22) And that risk was correlated--with the other collateral, and with the platform.
And then the crash came.
In a few day period, there was a historic crash--over 50% in most correlated assets, with no bid side liquidity.
And at the same time there was a run on the bank.
23) Roughly 25% of customer assets were withdrawn each day--$4b.
As it turned out, I was wrong: leverage wasn't ~$5b, it was ~$13b.
$13b leverage, total run on the bank, total collapse in asset value, all at once.
Which is why you don't want that leverage.
---
24) Shrapnel"
Thread by @SBF_FTX on Thread Reader App
@SBF_FTX: 1) What 2) H 3) A 4) P 5) P 6) E 7) N 8) E 9) D 10) [NOT LEGAL ADVICE. NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE. THIS IS ALL AS I REMEMBER IT, BUT MY MEMORY MIGHT...
threadreaderapp.com
"While SBF donated mostly to Democrats, a top executive at FTX Digital Markets, Ryan Salame, spent about $20 million to support Republicans during the same cycle, according to OpenSecrets. Some of those politicians are also returning funds."
Politicians spurn contributions from bankrupt crypto exchange FTX and its former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried
Bankman-Fried donated $40 million to support Democrats during the most recent election cycle.
The numbers to each individual politician seem rather tame, and many are donating whatever amount they were given to charities.
I did not know who Robby Starbuck was when I posted that. He seems to be a fairly far-right leaning politician who ran for Congress in Tennessee. In typical fashion, one side (or both) will try to make this an issue about the other party, just like they did with Epstein, when both sides had dirt on them."While SBF donated mostly to Democrats, a top executive at FTX Digital Markets, Ryan Salame, spent about $20 million to support Republicans during the same cycle, according to OpenSecrets. Some of those politicians are also returning funds."
Politicians spurn contributions from bankrupt crypto exchange FTX and its former CEO Sam Bankman-Fried
Bankman-Fried donated $40 million to support Democrats during the most recent election cycle.
The numbers to each individual politician seem rather tame, and many are donating whatever amount they were given to charities.
Greed failed. Crypto leverage failed
Bitcoin powers on, block by block.
So there's two things weighing on my mind right now.
1. I have major major concerns if genesis goes insolvent. It will be, really really bad. As in near crippling bad.
2. If that does not occur, all this has to help btc price as a vast amount of pretend or borrowed btc will no longer exist.
BTC/crypto will need a miracle. This mess is not going away. One of the CNBC commentators said it best this morning and I’ve beaten this dead horse: the internet didn’t need tokens/coins to succeed. Just like blockchain doesn’t need it now. It’s all one big sham starting with Satoshi Nakamoto. The sooner blockchain can divorce itself from the token/coin BS, the faster it will succeed.
My bad…I must have forgotten to drink my Kool-Aid this morning. I wish you well and hope for your sake and others that I am wrong. If you think there is a way out then feel free to share it here. The way I see it the two likely scenarios are (1) contagion will crush crypto, or (2) the news cycles will shift to Trump/politics and crypto/token/coins will die a slow death leaving only blockchain tech and some form of NFTs.
I’ll play along. The current blockchain that people are using, building on, investing in, etc is run based on a coin/token economy and is in varying degrees decentralized (no real owner). In your form of blockchain, who runs it? Who owns it?
Failure all across the landscape
Regulators and politicians (including foreign) failed because FTX was a scam, money laundering operation that they benefitted from.
SBF's academic mother - Barbara Fried - is a Marxist and WEF player - his aunt is on the WEF board. His brother raises millions using the pandemic as an exucse. The whole family is a WEF building block
Fried runs a group - "Mind the Gap" - dedicated to "quietly" raising millions in political funding
"Fried, Brest and Gottlieb wrote in the memo that MTG hopes to avoid media attention to reduce the chances of Republicans responding with early funding to counteract MTG investments in otherwise off-the-radar races.
According to the memo, in 2020 MTG hopes to target state and national elections, directing the most funds to presidential battleground states.
MTG intends to raise as much as $100 million for mail-based voter registration, $30 million for GOTV efforts and $10 million for direct campaign funding — totaling to $140 million overall, with a minimum suggested contribution of $40,000 dollars. "
They were all involved with Ukraine crooks laundering money from "war funding."
Anyone could see the Ukraine thing was a scam because Congress intentionally avoided any accounting or monitoring of funds. A lot of "war funding" came back for last election.
Now the people up to their necks in the corruption want to use the corruption to take more control - which has always been their goal and crypto has just been a horse to ride short term.
We live in a synthetic bubble of con jobs (including ESG, "climate" etc)
How World Economic Forum, others are hiding their past ties with FTX
The Geneva-based organization was not immediately available to respond to Post inquiries as to why it deleted reference to FTX from its platform.
nypost.com
Stanford-connected fundraising group wants to raise $140 million for Democrats in 2020
In 2018, the secretive Stanford-connected Democratic fundraising group Mind the Gap (MTG) funneled over $20 million toward competitive U.S. House of Representative elections and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) organizations. In 2020, MTG wants to increase that number to $140 million.
stanforddaily.com
Posted it above but a different FTX guy donated a bunch of money to Republicans.Failure all across the landscape
Regulators and politicians (including foreign) failed because FTX was a scam, money laundering operation that they benefitted from.
SBF's academic mother - Barbara Fried - is a Marxist and WEF player - his aunt is on the WEF board. His brother raises millions using the pandemic as an exucse. The whole family is a WEF building block
Fried runs a group - "Mind the Gap" - dedicated to "quietly" raising millions in political funding
"Fried, Brest and Gottlieb wrote in the memo that MTG hopes to avoid media attention to reduce the chances of Republicans responding with early funding to counteract MTG investments in otherwise off-the-radar races.
According to the memo, in 2020 MTG hopes to target state and national elections, directing the most funds to presidential battleground states.
MTG intends to raise as much as $100 million for mail-based voter registration, $30 million for GOTV efforts and $10 million for direct campaign funding — totaling to $140 million overall, with a minimum suggested contribution of $40,000 dollars. "
They were all involved with Ukraine crooks laundering money from "war funding."
Anyone could see the Ukraine thing was a scam because Congress intentionally avoided any accounting or monitoring of funds. A lot of "war funding" came back for last election.
Now the people up to their necks in the corruption want to use the corruption to take more control - which has always been their goal and crypto has just been a horse to ride short term.
We live in a synthetic bubble of con jobs (including ESG, "climate" etc)
How World Economic Forum, others are hiding their past ties with FTX
The Geneva-based organization was not immediately available to respond to Post inquiries as to why it deleted reference to FTX from its platform.
Stanford-connected fundraising group wants to raise $140 million for Democrats in 2020
In 2018, the secretive Stanford-connected Democratic fundraising group Mind the Gap (MTG) funneled over $20 million toward competitive U.S. House of Representative elections and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) organizations. In 2020, MTG wants to increase that number to $140 million.
So yeah rich people donate to politicians. But thats not the story here.
yes, politicians like money...
no..there is ZERO comparison to any cash given to the Right vs. the absolute shitshow of payoffs and laundering done FOR the Left...
