This does not necessarily mean a #cryptocurrency token. I don't imagine he would enjoy the "visible to the world" nature of most cryptocurrency transactions. It could be something more like "Linden dollars" in Second Life or the Fortnite in-game currency (I occasionally buy a gift card for it then send the card to my grandson #A1).
@fu I don't know much about #Gitcoin, but I'm sure the anti #cryptocurrency crusaders throughout the #Fediverse and in other #FOSS contexts are going to try to roast #Tor over the hottest flames of hell.
Most of this was predictable. The company (and other #cryptocurrency firms) spent quite a bit of time trying to get clarification from the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), without any response. You should not be able to refuse to clarify, then sue for unclear violations.
Barney Frank, co-sponsor of Dodd-Frank bank reform law, says financial regulators caused #SBNY Signature Bank failure to send a message to #cryptocurrency.
He explains that the bank's fundamentals were good, with more than enough assets.
> In a phone call interview with CNBC, Frank stated, “We had no indication of problems until we experienced a deposit run late Friday, which was solely due to contagion from SVB.”
> Frank explained that concern began to spread last week as Signature’s customers began transferring deposits from the New York bank to larger financial institutions such as JPMorgan and Citigroup. Although the former politician saw “no real objective reason” for Signature to be seized and shut down, he suspected that U.S. regulators may have been sending a message.
> “I think part of what happened was that regulators wanted to send a very strong anti-crypto message,” Frank stated. “We became the poster boy because there was no insolvency based on the fundamentals.”
That's a pretty severe point of view: regulators picking and choosing which banks to close because they wish to stop people from fleeing the banking system because of their own manipulation.
Also, the follow-up post says that more than 20 private jets flew to Omaha #NE yesterday ... speculation being that regional bank CEOs are coming to see Warren Buffett for some sort of bailout. I don't necessarily hold to that view, simply because with so many publicly traded entities, someone would have said something that required a disclosure filing with the #SEC (the real one, not the South Eastern Conference of college football, but the Securities and Exchange Commission). They may or may not have filed such a filing, but for sure, those CXOs would go out of their ways to avoid the appearance of needing to file.
Note also that most recent problems in the #cryptocurrency space have been caused by entanglements with traditionally regulated commercial #banks, #exchanges, and other regulated #financial companies. I don't think people should consider cryptocurrency an "investment" so much as a secondary channel for transactions that may offer continued access when your bank is inaccessible.
I recently experienced a bank being inaccessible, as the bank I'd been using since the 1990s sold the branch where my account was located and I've spent the last couple of months dealing with a bungled transition. Coming on top of six months without income, it has been highly stressful. Just yesterday, they notified me that they think they've cleared the last obstacle.
> "Overnight, the Department worked with key partners here and abroad to disrupt Bitzlato, the China-based money laundering engine that fueled a high-tech axis of cryptocrime, and to arrest its founder, Russian national Anatoly Legkodymov," said Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, who led Wednesday’s press conference.
> "Today’s actions send the clear message: whether you break our laws from China or Europe – or abuse our financial system from a tropical island – you can expect to answer for your crimes inside a United States courtroom."
@gnu2 These people sought to "invest" their #cryptocurrency in interest-bearing accounts. Now, I haven't done any crypto investing, but my impression is that there are some smart contracts that one can use without turning control over to a company in order to lend & receive interest. But seeing that the ToS / ToU language appears to be widespread, people should be *immediately* trying to redeem & withdraw their funds.
But you are correct that giving control to someone else is a mistake. (Indeed, even #FTX customers could only have lost money to the extent that they didn't immediately sweep their funds out of FTX's custody.)
#Bankruptcy judge in Celsius case rules that #cryptocurrency deposits belong to the company, not the depositors (who are now unsecured creditors). This appears to be based on contract language, but I wonder how this would go with a "M of N" type arrangement, where the company is unable (not just by internal policy, but enforced by smart contract) to touch depositors funds without those depositors' allowance.
(Also, I wonder what the legal gobbledegook that cryptocurrency exchanges make people sign has similar clauses.)
It still means, however, that the exchange's customers got hurt because they didn't keep their balances at or around zero, as they should. When $ORGANIZATION encourages you to let them keep custody of your assets, they're probably not doing it just because it is more convenient for you, but because it makes it easier for them. And as you've seen, one of the ways it makes it easier for them is that it leaves assets lying around for them to pilfer.
An exchange should be pass-through and make its money on transaction fees. A bank is storage, and makes money by using your stored funds, along with fees. And when you're talking about #cryptocurrencies, you should be very explicit about the purposes for which you're using an intermediary, due to the whole _the person who holds the private key for the wallet where your #cryptocurrency resides effectively owns your cryptocurrency_ thing.
U.S. Congressman Warren Davidson: Self-custody #cryptocurrency wallets are an antidote to #FTX style scams, because they can't steal money / #cryptocurrencies from wallets they don't control.
He's absolutely right, and that's how the exchanges are supposed to be used, but with few onramps and offramps, people tend to leave their investments in their custodial wallet (e.g., the one where the exchange controls the secret key, not the customer) where bad things can happen.
Former #Alameda CEO confirms they illegally borrowed billions from #FTX customer deposits without their permission.
Can we start to understand #Alameda and #FTX as finance-oriented scams and not just #cryptocurrency related businesses? Even regulated financial industries have this sort of behavior (I keep going back to Wells Fargo, but they aren't the only one).
Likewise, there would be no need for exchanges to provide "proof of reserves", because they'd only need to hold enough reserves to handle expected transaction volume.
As I read the financial news, I'm ever more convinced that the standard financial system's built-in racism will never be fixed. It exists at every level from regulators to Joe Banker who denies you a loan to buy a used car, and is reinforced from the top, but means of regulations and orders that often disguise their effect in high-sounding phrasing.
When I read "Bitcoin and Black America", I felt like he overstated his point, but his point--that Blacks need to get out from under the racist financial system and find a way to fund their own businesses and jobs outside of it--still stands. Even though I'm not wedded to cryptocurrencies, I believe they offer the best shot at doing this of any financial medium I've ever heard of.
> Bankman-Fried’s arrest comes the night before he was scheduled to testify remotely in front of the House Financial Services Committee, which is investigating the collapse of his multibillion-dollar crypto empire. Bankman-Fried — who until early November was the toast of Washington policy circles — has faced mounting allegations that he misused FTX customer assets to prop up his investment firm Alameda Research.
> In prepared testimony for House Financial Services, the company’s new CEO John Ray III, wrote that Alameda used client funds to engage in margin trading, exposing customers to massive losses.
> "[T]he FTX Group’s collapse appears to stem from the absolute concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of grossly inexperienced and unsophisticated individuals who failed to implement virtually any of the systems or controls that are necessary for a company that is entrusted with other people’s money or assets,” Ray, who stepped in as the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange’s top executive last month, wrote in prepared Congressional testimony on the exchange’s collapse.
If he was going to try to follow #Wells_Fargo's example, he needed to follow it more closely. I recently posted a link to angryretailbanker's article where they described why they didn't believe WF's top managers should be jailed. (I personally disagree about Wells Fargo management, simply because if you see the same misbehavior sprout up at the same time across the whole organization, it generally means one person or group with supervision over the entire group ordered or suggested it ... often off-the-record, so you'd have to actually investigate to find enough evidence to convict.)
It sounds like BSV had some good ideas, but I think most of those were already in the pipeline before BSV split from BCH. I'm talking about things like increasing the block size, so that more transactions can be processed in each ten minute interval. BSV currently has a market-determined variable block size and BCH has a 32MB block size. The original BTC still uses 1MB ... which causes contention for fewer slots inside the block, and raises both transaction costs and the average wait time for transactions to process. AFAIK, BSV is the only member of the Bitcoin family to give major attention to smart contracts ... including creating a new scripting language ( "sCrypt":{https://scrypt.io/} ) to make them easier.
IMO, "smart contracts" make it easier to create non-financial applications for #blockchains and other ledgers.