Remember when mainstream news outlets published a bunch of incredibly irresponsible articles about how rich people were getting off crypto, and then people bought in and got wrecked over the two years of "crypto winter" that followed?
Anyway here's a WSJ headline I just saw: "Young Men Are Making Risky Bets on Crypto and Politics—and Raking It In Right Now" (gift link)
Will the cryptocurrency industry’s endemic fraud and risk-taking ultimately be backstopped by government bailouts, funded by taxpayers who may themselves have no exposure to crypto assets? Has crypto become too big too fail?
My latest in Bloomberg Businessweek: Crypto Got What It Wanted in November’s Election. Now What?
taking psychic damage reading the lawsuit by Justin Sun’s Bit Global against Coinbase
i have to respect the argument that “memecoins... unlike wBTC have no inherent value other than demand created by their memetic potential as jokes”. your honor, wBTC’s lack of inherent value is for a different reason entirely
i do have to give Haliey Welch some credit for comedic timing. intentional or not, she perfectly timed her Hawk Tuah rugpull to steal the spotlight from bitcoin hitting $100K, a moment coiners have been awaiting for years. masterful stuff
Celsius CEO Alex Mashinsky has entered a guilty plea in his criminal fraud trial, which was scheduled to begin in about two months. His Celsius cryptocurrency platform collapsed in July 2022 after it couldn't meet customer withdrawal demands. Its failure was particularly devastating because it had actively marketed itself to customers as safer than banks, regularly telling customers that "banks are not your friends". Many people believed that because Celsius was based in the US, it was carefully regulated and therefore safe.
Letters written to the judge in the bankruptcy case revealed the extent of the devastation to people around the world, some of whom had their entire life savings or retirement money on the platform. I published some excerpts back in July 2022.
for those of you who've seen the supposed Enron relaunch and crypto project: their website's terms of use say it's parody.
tl;dr apparently someone thinks it's a good and funny idea to make a big joke out of a company that ruined people, and this is about as much oxygen as i'm inclined to give it
It's interesting to me that the Fifth Circuit only considered "control" at the smart contract level, and does not seem to consider the role of validators in their opinion. A substantial portion of ETH blocks are built with relays that censor transactions with OFAC-sanctioned contracts, and it seems to me there is now an open question as to whether validators that use non-censoring relays could be sanctioned directly.
(Not saying they should, just remarking on the fact that it seems to have gone completely unaddressed.)
The cryptocurrency industry spent almost $200 million to influence the outcomes of the 2024 United States elections. Let's talk about where the money came from, where it went, the cryptocurrency industry's political goals, and what’s next.
so it begins
I must once again urge you: please do not record your abortions on the blockchain.
There are a lot of very worried people right now, fearful of an impending regime that may well crack down on things like reproductive care, gender-affirming care, or the ability for immigrants to even continue to remain in the US. Some have suggested people get familiar with cryptocurrencies in the event they might have to circumvent an authoritarian state.
