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Is It Crypto Currency or Klepto Currency?
Allegations are being made about FTX, a cryptocurrency investment company that donated $40 million dollars to political campaigns. 92% of these donations went to Democrat candidates.
From a Fox Business News report:
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried denied speculation on Twitter that he had flown to South America after the cryptocurrency exchange filed for bankruptcy.
When asked whether he had flown to Argentina, as rumors swirled on social media, the former chief executive told Reuters via text message that he was in the Bahamas, where the company is headquartered.
Bankman-Fried, 30, served as the CEO until Friday.
He also denied “secretly” transferring $10 billion of customer funds from FTX to his trading company Alameda research and denied implementing a “backdoor” in FTX’s bookkeeping system.
“We had confusing internal labeling and misread it,” he said of the $10 billion transfer.
Reuters reported, citing two people familiar with the matter, that at least $1 billion of customer funds had disappeared, with records revealing the financial hole.
When asked about the missing funds, Bankman-Fried responded: “???”
In a release, FTX said John J. Ray III had been appointed CEO in his stead.
Also on Saturday, FTX said that it was moving funds into offline storage after reporting “unauthorized transactions.”
Analysts said millions of dollars worth of assets had been withdrawn from the platform.
Allegations are being made that financial aid sent to Ukraine might have been a money laundering scheme involving FTX and some politicians in Congress. Allegations are also being made that FTX accounts were ‘cracked’ and money taken from those accounts ended up in the campaign coffers of Democrat and some Republican candidates.
Allegations are not proof of wrongdoing; an investigation needs to take place.
In my opinion Crypto Currency investing is somewhat sketchy, especially when it involves offshore investment firms and the involvement of politicians that may have received $40 million dollars in campaign contributions.
Published in Finance
lol
What is it that I referred to as gambling?
If you read my Comment more carefully, you will know
But in your defense, the statement you made up and assigned to me really is stupid, just as you say. If I had said it, I would be just as stupid or ignorant as you assume I am.
Magic Fiat Dollar Money also benefits Democrats.
I was actually agreeing with you, by pointing to the historical manipulations regarding our nation’s economic affairs.
And then mentioning how these manipulations do not point <sarcasm alert> to running and ruining our economy by the laws of Vegas casino owners – because they were banker-approved.
Sorry if I was too obtuse. (Or cryptic, as one might say.)
“You will own nothing and be happy.”
Investing in stocks, bonds, foreign currencies, commodities, foreign exchanges, mutual funds, and whatever else you can think of there is a risk. Day traders compete with computer generated sell and buy trades with the big boy traders. There is always a risk because any system that can be gamed has already been gamed.
When 1 billion dollars disappears, it should be taken as a warning that some crypto investment firms may have no more virtue than any other grifter that has preceded them.
SOMEONE still owns those houses, it just won’t be the people living in them.
The big hole in allpolitical discussions is the one about housing.
The number one item that everyone in our society has always wanted, dreamed about and worked for has been housing. It is now an impossibility in so many places across the USA.
The Left has stuck themselves on the notion of ever increasing minimum wage raises.
It cannot work. The more the Left hikes up the minimum wage, the more jobs available to that type of worker either totally disappear or else go underground.
When living in the SF Bay area, I don’t even like to think bout the amount of money my household made each year. And even with our rent being low, the cost of living was just so high there in the metro area where good wages are possible that I think all bets about minimum wage hikes are off.
But wages and a decent standard of living could come about without a focus on the minimum wage if people were to have available and easy to afford housing. How was it that this was accomplished by the Eisenhower Administration? Yet never tackled again?
Trump had as one of this top agenda items the infra structure plan.
The Dem leaders hated it in part as if he didn’t do it, they could, state by state. So they have used infra structure as a way to keep newly imported immigrants at work making money. (Of course the companies that contract for them have execs who make good money too. But the middle class citizenry is peculiarly left out of this arena of life.)
I still maintain that a big part of the problem is limitations on building new housing, and jamming more people into existing cities rather than creating some new cities. That used to happen “organically” because to get started all it required was someone building their house and/or some kind of “trading post” at a crossroads or a river bend or something. Then dig an outhouse, etc. But now people won’t live somplace that doesn’t already have water, sewer, power, trash collection, high-speed internet… Which means that stuff has to be set up first. That’s been done in the past by people such as Del Webb in Arizona, but who will do it now?
If only I was any good at math. It took me two tries to get through 11th grade math. I got a 51% on the second try, and I’m convinced the teacher only passed me because he didn’t want to see me a third time.
Thank goodness we don’t have SATs in the Great White North! I got into a university that didn’t require any math credits for acceptance to a social science program (which seems kinda dumb in hindsight).
;-)
All investing is educated gambling. You’re betting that the value of the asset you’re purchasing will increase (or decrease) within a certain period of time. That’s gambling. It doesn’t mean that the outcome is random, but it’s never 100% predictable.
For some reason I feel compelled to go on the record: I own zero crypto.
It may be more predictable if you’re also among those creating the regulations etc.
Here in Our Fail City, they’re only building apartment buildings. Lots and lots of them. With very high rent.
I don’t see single-family homes going up anywhere.
That’s partly because, like I said, they keep trying to cram more people into the existing cities.
You and Flicker are occasionally too subtle for me. My apologies!
The point is, the ownership is excessively centralized.
The constant creation of either CPI or asset inflation forces socialism.
Exactly. These holding operations have been crashing and burning for years. Keeping out banks, govt treasuries, brokers and everyone else but buyer and seller is the point. An exchange for cash should be a one-off, not long-term asset storage.
I have limited Internet access this morning but I have to get this out there because I don’t know how long this is going to last.
Last night, Jessie Waters had a reporter from the New York Post about the FTX scandal. Must watch. The conspiracy yarn board on this thing is just devastating and easy to understand. (the Dan Bongino’s segment is related and very good)
Then on Tucker Charlie Gasparino.
The chief regulator is a yarn board mess. I think he supposedly “taught crypto” at MIT and got completely sucked in. I was always suspicious of this because the guy is like a million years old. I don’t care how smart he is, you just can’t be that old and do that. Total Democrat establishment.
This wasn’t on the shows, but they have got Bloomberg news screwing up coming and going. Owned by Michael Bloomberg, obviously.
The main guy is a yarn board mess including his parents.
The guys girlfriend’s family.
The Democrat party, obviously.
This wasn’t on the show, but Anthony Scaramucci. The guys he works with are huge Democrat donors.
The video of Cramer on CNBC from six weeks ago is unbelievable.
I have to be leaving something out.
You know the state controlled national regime media is going to try to suppress it.
Life is about supply, not money printing, forcing CPI + asset inflation and government.
Trade and automation are about better living through purchasing power, otherwise known as deflation. Loosen up the rules on business activity, stop creating inflation, and then you get the positives and the negatives of deflation handled more humanely. We ignore this, so we have a regressive economy where people want socialism and populism.
I just heard this explained.
It’s called the Sequoia hedge fund. They invested in FTX. This pumped up FTX’s self-invented tokens, which Sequoia already had on its balance sheet. Then FTX invested back into Sequoia. Then everybody gives millions to Democrats. lol you can’t make this (redacted) up. He literally said $3.6 billion. I suppose that the sum of the parts at the top.
The other thing he said was there is no bitcoin in the vicinity of this exchange, basically. That doesn’t make any sense to me but that’s what he said.
Obviously he’s not an unbiased observer, but the CEO of Coinbase has some interesting things to say about the FTX drama, how the story is being covered by the MSM, and how regulation of crypto in the USA is far too ad hoc and unpredictable so entrepreneurs set up their crypto firms overseas where it isn’t regulated at all:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/savingandinvesting/sam-bankman-fried-is-a-criminal-says-coinbase-ceo-calls-out-mainstream-media-for-puff-pieces/ar-AA14bnZD
I haven’t seen it spelled out anywhere explicitly, but any article I’ve read on FTX seems to suggest that it was focused on low-market-cap crypto tokens rather than established cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
It’s sorta kinda like the crypto version of Jordan Belfort selling over-the-counter penny stocks to unsuspecting amateurs who thought they were buying serious publicly-traded stocks.
Here’s an interesting article from Coinbase on FTX:
https://www.coindesk.com/tech/2022/11/17/4-key-takeaways-from-the-ftx-fiasco/
Thanks for that. I have a limited Internet today so I’m not sure when I’m going to get to see that.
One of the things I heard this morning from Charles on the fox business channel was, bitcoin is obviously a commodity. If they aren’t set up as a commodity they are a security. It seems silly if it’s not a commodity but what do I know.
Maybe what it means is these two outfits were taking investor’s money and “investing” it back and forth in each other, which pumped up the “price”/”value” of both even if they never actually owned any crypto currency?
Isn’t this something like what happened with the Great Depression and the investments in Belgian steel?
The truth of “bitcoin is a commodity” cannot become obvious to me until you specify which of several distinct commonly used definitions you are using. I have no way of reading your mind. It might be obvious or it might not be.