Tag Archives: SBF

Crypto security & securities

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According to The Hash on Coindesk, the next generation of crypto users want wallets that are easier-to-use & safer. Of course, this is impossible.

The risks of self-custody crypto wallets are user-error & hacks. The risk of crypto storage on a centralized exchange is FTX, etc. Do you feel lucky with Binance? The Hash recommends multi-signature cold wallets as best practice for crypto storage. To get into crypto, you need to be tech-savvy and know exactly what you are doing in every area, otherwise you’re a pigeon.

The SEC just announced their long-awaited lawsuit against Binance for (among other things) selling unregistered securities. Is crypto a security, as the SEC alleges? First, a few definitions. Commodities are basic goods produced by human labor which can be bought, traded or exchanged– such as grain, cotton, oil or gold. Securities are corporate wagers on yields & returns, such as stocks, bonds, derivatives, etc.

Crypto is a security with no legitimate use value, as it is a money laundering tool. Intelligence agencies & dictators around the world use crypto to fund their illicit activities, which gives bitcoin its hidden (but powerful) political support.

Warren Buffett represents a faction of US capitalism that sees the danger in crypto, defining it as, “rat poison squared.” Crypto is the most unstable ‘asset class’ because it really isn’t an asset. Venture capitalists poured into this Ponzi scheme for years, and then lost a bundle when FTX/Alameda collapsed last November. The entire crypto industry has essentially been on a knife’s edge since the Terra/Luna collapse of May 2022.

US banks have shut their doors to crypto since Silvergate, Signature & Silicon Valley Bank went under earlier this year, in the wake of the FTX bankruptcy. It is now widely recognized that the entire crypto market, from bitcoin to stable coins, is a fraud. That’s what the world learned in 2022, and it has created a permanent state-of-crisis for the entire crypto industry and the greater financial system.

There are ‘responsible’ old-guard capitalists such as Warren Buffett who advocate banning crypto entirely, and then there is Elon Musk who represents the new-age era of crypto billionaires. How everything works out politically (under capitalism) is that they both remain influential billionaires, while the rest of the world works harder to maintain this fiction.

That is the deeper meaning of all the anti-crypto rhetoric coming from Washington & the SEC these days, and then the hysterical responses from crypto fanatics. If your cyber-widget is listed on exchanges and its price goes up & down (causing people to make & lose money), while providing no use value to the greater population, then it’s a security.

There is no way the US government will protect people from crypto fraud, since its corporate-police-military-intelligence apparatus is so intimately tied into it. It is the working people of the world who must put an end to this crypto fraud. Crypto offers false hope, and is simply another capitalist gambling addiction. It’s message is: “Fuck the world & everything in it. Get as much for yourself by any means.” Does that sound like a future people want? These crypto libertarians just don’t care.

Bitcoin remains at ~$27K, despite the ‘crypto winter’. Crypto winter means it’s now very difficult to find new investors (suckers) of any wallet size. Bitcoin is being propped-up with hidden finance capital, because it is the most recognized crypto brand, with etherium & tether (top ‘stablecoin’) next on that list. These are the ‘assets’ which provides the CIA the means to funnel funds to fascists in Kiev, Al Qaeda in Syria, etc.

The recent US ‘debt ceiling’ debate was a politically stage-managed affair to force the working population to pay for all this militarization & fictionalization of the US economy. Permanent wars of aggression globally are the order of the day, with crypto/big bank bailouts as needed, and US workers & taxpayers are to foot the bill. The question becomes: At what point will the workers & youth revolt and what form will that take politically?

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Crypto contagion triggers global banking crisis

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To those who say crypto was just a bystander in this now global banking collapse, they are lying. Crypto is entirely fake, and was the trigger for this banking meltdown. Crypto has been in meltdown mode since Terra/Luna last May, then FTX last November. Banks that were heavily involved in crypto are now the first to go under, which has set off an industry panic and crisis of confidence in big banking.

The greater issue of the insolvency of the big banks, who all hold devalued treasury bonds, has been caused by the same policy that crashed crypto– a decade of free money followed by a sharp interest rate rise by the Federal Reserve. There is a connection there.

The EU (and everyone else) follow from the US Fed, since dollars are the international exchange currency and have been since the end of WW2. But increasingly, dollar dominance is being called into question by many different interests, particularly the government of China, hence the constant US propaganda campaign to demonize China & embolden fascist racist filth.

What we are witnessing now is a complete breakdown of the post-war monetary system. The Bretton Woods system of US dominance was established in 1945, by the winners. Richard Nixon took the US off the gold standard in 1971, because Fort Knox was running out of gold to convert into dollars at $35/ounce. Since then, all currencies float against the US dollar. All international settlements, particularly oil, are done in dollars. This is what makes the US dollar almighty.

Stagflation of the 1970’s, then Fed chairman Paul Volcker’s interest rate hikes in the 1980’s, which reached nearly 20%, enriched banks. Big corporations even started their own lines of credit cards to cash in for themselves. It was the best of times to be rich, as Reagan/Bush are revered for their conservatism on issues like global warming, and their enthusiasm for corporate & banking deregulation, etc.

In 1987, the first stock market crash in America’s post-war era (which took every bourgeois economist by surprise) established the “Fed put”, which ensured a taxpayer bailout for any bank or corporation deemed “too big to fail.” Timeline ahead: Asian tiger crash in 1998, dot com crash in 2001, and then the big one– the sub-prime mortgage collapse in 2008. All caused by corporate criminality. All the big fish got bailed out.

By 2010, the Fed started printing money and gave it away to all its cronies for over a decade. Every other central bank in the world followed suit. By the end of 2021, after a few abortive attempts (Dec 2020 – March 2021, most notably) at quantitative tightening, the Fed has taken a hard line on raising interest rates to induce a recession and quell workers wage demands.

Inflation is caused by massively increasing the supply of money, without having the economic fundamentals to back it. By ‘economic fundamentals’ I mean, actual (real world) use value. The Fed, Wall Street, the White House & US Congress all believe that inflation is caused by workers’ wages going up. That’s the class war that’s always raging underneath the fake news.

With capitalism in its speculative death throes, crypto has emerged as the libertarian answer to the international currency question. As far a being real money, you can buy lots of black market things with bitcoin. Things you can’t do with crypto include: pay rent, pay credit card, pay taxes… pay for a Big Mac. It simply has no value to the vast majority, and therefore must be abolished.

Trotskyists are the only ones who have taken this intolerant policy towards crypto from the start. The SEC, DOJ, & White House have now pivoted to an anti-crypto policy since the Silvergate Bank collapse less than two weeks ago.

Slivergate CEO Alan Lane, second from right, rings the New York Stock Exchange opening bell before his bank’s IPO begins trading, on Nov. 7, 2019.

There’s been lots of talk about making depositors whole, making sure small businesses can make payroll, etc, in the wake of these US bank collapses, triggered by crypto’s meltdown. Everyone knows the FDIC guarantees accounts up to $250,000. For businesses with more than that, there is the Deposit Insurance Fund, which is a privately-owned, industry-sponsored insurance program.

The DIF’s purpose is to 1) insure bank accounts over $250K, and 2) resolve failed banks. If crypto start-ups like Circle ($3.3B in SVB) didn’t hedge with DIF and can’t make their payroll, etc, then the CEOs of these companies need to pay out of their own pockets– or else go bankrupt. Poor risk-management is on the CEO/CFO, and NOT the responsibility of the US taxpayers.

Why didn’t these smart tech companies with million$ & billion$ in venture capital money have a DIF policy to protect against a bank collapse? Corporate Leadership 101– FAIL. NO bank bailouts!

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Coronavirus War update: crypto collapse

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Effective altruism has melted away and it’s been replaced by the slogan– make investors whole again! Especially the small ones, because they can least afford the losses, blah, blah, blah…

As a socialist, I feel very little sympathy for anyone in the crypto market. It’s been a scam from the start, and if you didn’t recognize that, then you deluded yourself. These fanatics are capitalists to the core, who do no productive work, and only got into crypto to make money for themselves. They look at all the odds stacked against them, while ignoring simple logic (AKA– FUD), to make themselves believe they can get something for nothing. People have to learn at some point, and while cases like Elon Musk (bitcoin whale) are beyond hopeless, those who can’t afford big financial losses in crypto are just as much part of the problem. Their fundamentalism blinds them.

These wanna-be’s envy criminals like Elon Musk, the fascist billionaire. Taking a look at his CV for just the past few weeks, Elon Musk has drained his core company Tesla, selling it’s stock at a premium before it goes bust, to finance his takeover of Twitter which has cost him tens of billions of dollars to date. He had to do this because all his bitcoin busted before he’d done any due diligence on Twitter, but after he’d committed to buying it. Some genius huh? So now, advertisers & users have abandoned what was once the 2nd-most popular social media platform, as Musk took it over and turned it into a toxic wasteland. Twitter has gone the way of MySpace, via Mein Kampf.

Even Donald Trump, who has 88 million followers on Twitter, won’t return to the platform after Elon Musk re-instated his account with much fanfare. Trump started Truth Social, his proprietary platform, on which he posts exclusively– to his 2 million followers. Donald Trump wants to be president again, yet he accepts 1/44th the social media reach, because more importantly he wants to make money for himself. Trump does this by pumping his brand. Every other industry he’s ever branded himself in has gone bankrupt, or if it’s still in existence, is under federal investigation for tax fraud or some other form of criminality.

So of course, Donald Trump has now launched his own crypto, a $99 NFT of trading cards in his image. It will be worthless in the near future, but you can still own those images & digits in cyberspace. Of course, if you keep them in a cold wallet with responsibility for your own keys, you will lose 99% of your crypto, according to Changpeng Zhao, the Binance CEO & crypto whale.

It’s tough to pass on crypto when you die because 1) the keys are hidden and hard to get to, because if they aren’t, you’ll get hacked and lose everything instantly; and 2) inheritors often aren’t familiar with the crypto world, and thus getting through all the online steps needed to liquidate can be an insurmountable task. Even with crypto exchanges such as Binance, this is an issue, but Changpeng Zhao didn’t mention that.

Some crypto industry leaders who got burned in the FTX collapse, are now calling for regulation. Crypto is deregulated finance by definition, hence the industry term “de-fi.” According to the libertarian economic model, de-fi opposes centralized finance, breaking the bounds of national banking by creating an international currency on the foundations of freedom & privacy– [* until it all collapses and they need a bailout]. What libertarians never strictly define are these emotionally-charged terms: freedom & privacy, which means they can mean anything. To SBF & Co., it means the freedom to embezzle everyone’s crypto on his exchange in the privacy of his luxury villa in the Bahamas.

That’s life in a post-modernist world, and it’s what happens when you are too lazy to strictly define important core values within the community. The ‘crypto community’ was built on vague altruistic ideals which could be changed or discarded at any time, by any actor, because those were the rules everyone allowed from the beginning. The crypto community isn’t the cooperative idealistic paradise it markets itself to be. Just about any crypto investor would steal a kajillion dollars of crypto if they thought the could get away with it. How can anyone regulate with these industry-wide ethics? Crypto has been around for only thirteen years or so, and yet its demise is imminent.

Crypto lacked a credible core philosophy to justify its existence. Ask any crypto believer, and none of them will take you any further than what I’ve just spelled out. It’s all about making money by doing no real work. These are lazy & privileged kids along with mathematical whizzes who learned computers, but got on the wrong track from the start. None of them understand the fundamental nature of money and what it represents. They just want to create an algorithm that makes money for themselves. Crypto-currency is anti-productive & anti-social to its core.

No more cheap money from the Fed, along with rising costs for electricity to mine crypto, means this fake industry is about to go tits-up. Only massive infusions of liquidity on a daily basis (from a central source) are keeping this crypto boondoggle afloat. The big hedge fund investors & venture capitalists are already lining themselves up for another bailout. Congress will have bi-partisan support for this, but the rub is the crypto industry has been so discredited in the eyes of so many people that another such corporate bailout is a tough sell politically.

The crypto industry is a joke because everyone in politics has taken money from these criminals, but none of them can clearly explain why crypto has value. The same applies to economists, industry experts, talking heads, etc. Tens of millions of dollars a day (minimum) is what is going into the crypto market to keep it “legitimate.” Cold wallets won’t save any investors because it is the crypto itself (bitcoin, ether, etc) that is worthless. Blockchains are becoming too costly to maintain due to rising energy prices. This inflation crisis has been caused by unlimited QE for over a decade, and accelerated by the disastrous official response to COVID-19, and the US-provoked war in the Ukraine.

Bitcoin’s value to the ruling classes is that it’s a tool for laundering large amounts of cash. Imperialist governments & their intelligence agencies have many uses for this, all nefarious & undemocratic. So the question of questions for SBF & Co. in the wake of the FTX/Alameda Research scandal is: Where is the money?

Where did all that crypto go? What about FTX’s ‘Aid for Ukraine’ campaign launched last spring? Where did all the aid money go? Who was/is connected to all this? Both the Democrats & Republicans have prominent figures in their upper circles who participated in this criminality. The first step in damage control is to silence SBF. His arrest in the Bahamas on Tuesday (Dec 13), after weeks of delaying, was timed to prevent his sworn testimony, via Zoom, to US Congress. Tens of millions of people would have watched that, waiting for bigmouth SBF to spill the beans on everybody. As mentioned in my last piece on FTX, this case has Jeffery Epstein-type implications, and must be handled very carefully by the ruling elite, otherwise the truth will get out and the establishment will be publicly discredited.

The crisis of capitalism has become an existential issue, so what is at stake is the ruling class’ right to rule. If politicians and their media apologists can’t convince the working people to bail out the crypto industry to avert an “economic collapse,” then the game is over. This is their greatest fear being realized, and their only answer is more lies, more attacks on living standards, and more hate & violence. That’s what happens when you start with no ethics and then become financially bankrupt.

For the ruling classes, any major wildcat strike or other form of labor shutdown can only be met with media hysteria & demonization, followed by physical attacks from right-wing goon squads aided by the police, intelligence agencies & the military. Workers & youth must organize into workplace & neighborhood committees with the goal of taking control over worker production & neighborhood safety. Uvalde proved, without a shadow of a doubt, that the cops have no interest in protecting teachers & children, etc. Productive workers & youth must organize & unite to protect each other from the propaganda & violence of all the world’s ruling classes.

The Coronavirus War concludes it’s third year with an increase in fascist propaganda & policy by every nation. In China, the origin of COVID-19 from human-animal crossover in a Wuhan wet market, the ruling bureaucracy has just ended its Zero-COVID policy which had been successful for its duration, but only within its borders. COVID-19 is a global virus that mutates constantly, and is increasingly evading vaccine immunity. US President Joe Biden has declared the pandemic over, when clearly it isn’t. Trump denied the pandemic was real, so Biden is merely following the fascist policy of his predecessor. That’s what Democrats do, as anti-science reigns supreme in the pseudo-academic, liberal, middle-class milieu that is obsessed with race, gender & sexual orientation.

This crypto collapse marks a turning point in the Coronavirus War, which up to this point the fascists (of all stripes) have been winning. Fascist ideology has long-since been rejected by the working masses of the world, while right-wing corruption rules over them. Now, fascist money is becoming increasingly worthless, which makes it harder for them to buy people. This weakness is being exposed daily, in the collapses of crypto exchanges & lenders. Crypto auditors (who love their big fee$) won’t even stand by their “all good” asset ratings anymore, deleting them from their sites, etc.

The leading industry site is Coin Desk, which is tangled-up in the FTX collapse in a myriad of ways. Fundamentally there is no honesty in their “journalism” because there are deep dark truths about crypto which they can never reveal– not even to themselves. When yet another exchange halts withdrawals, and Coin Desk reaches out to that company for a comment, it’s either 1`) No comment, unavailable, no response; or 2) public relations BS such as, “we’re working to make investors whole again… our fundamentals are sound,” etc.

So… where’s the money?

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