The big thing that can happen is regret if you use your appreciating bitcoin today to but a depreciating asset like a car. Suing someone because bitcoin went down in value is insane. Giving how the value of fiat drops annually, everyone would be open to suit under that standard.  It you can handle that risk, convert it to fiat.

It would be interesting to see the same stats but leave off coins that were never moved after being mined.  I suspect there were many people who mined the coins and then didn't care enough to save the private keys.  Or they did and then lost them.

Hard to believe he got off with only a year.  Makes one wonder what SBF will get away with.  Let's see if SBF's was $21 billion and his was 3, maybe he'll get 7 years.      As mentioned above, if they were liquidating that much in a short, it certainly would increase the supply and consequently decrease the price. 

Yeah, I didn't say ChipMixer was a honey trap, but that the ones that pop up to replace it could be.

Perhaps because it is a palindrome in base 5 or perhaps because it has divisors of 2 and 31 and 2^31 is 2147483648?
Or maybe in base 3 -> 2022  which if you add the digits you have 204 and then rearrange it to 420?  lol
Perhaps though it has to do with the symbol for element #62:  SM

Any centralized service, whether mixing or not, is prone to this.  Sure others will pop up, but there is no way to tell a priori whether they are legit, scams to steal coins or set up by the authorities themselves.   A protocol level privacy layer is one long term solution.  There are current solutions but none are as elegant as something at the protocol level.

Just to be clear, I didn't go the next step to open an account so I don't know if they have a withdrawal option.  I just didn't see it discussed on their site.  Likewise I tried it from a HSA account so it could be different from a regular brokerage account.

Any adoption is good, some is obviously better.

It appears to involve another step.  When I check, it says:
"You don't have a crypto account
Start trading with Fidelity Crypto℠ today."

Then you can open an account.  I don't need one since I wouldn't trust a third party with my coins and it appears it is only trading and custody without any way to take the coins out of Fidelity.

It is certainly better than nothing, but I don't see a "withdraw" or "send bitcoin to address" option in the information and without that, it is really hobbled.

The article is from 2018.  It is valued higher (at times at least) now - $14 billion as of recent quotes.

Regarding this:
"they were fascinated to see that a little-known token that’s supposed to be backed one-for-one to the dollar was getting printed in large quantities. "

The token was tether.  Has anyone actually believed that these stable coins are truly backed one-for-one?  When tether came out, it seemed awfully scammy to me.  It is easy to claim it was backed by the dollar, but not have the reserves without any way to prove it at the time. To me, I'd rather have bitcoin for crypto and not mess with stable coins.

I'd ask, do you think the spike in the last 18 hours was because it was "propped up"?  I am sure there are attempts to manipulate it, but the question is how much is it truly manipulated?  How long could one keep up the manipulation?  What was the reason for the manipulation in the last 18 hours?  I don't know the answers, but the paper seems to say only some of the time.  As the market gets large, it gets more difficult to manipulate.  ETFs and the like would make the market even large and consequently more difficult to manipulate. 

Not to mention that it is difficult to carry substantial amounts of fiat, silver, gold etc over a border if you have to flee someplace like Venezuela, Germany in the 1930s, Russia at the time of the Russian revolution (under Stalin, Lenin, or even today), China under Mao, etc.  There are statists and authoritarians the world over who want to force you to pay for their choices, protect yourself.



Part of the reason it hasn't happened is that fiat is no longer backed by silver or gold.  It is backed by nothing except the whims of a government.  Look at Cyprus 10-11 years ago, since few people had gold or silver and the euro (like the dollar) is backed by nothing, they just gave everyone's bank accounts a haircut.  They didn't have to expropriate gold or silver.  If the euro had had silver or gold coins or even been backed by a PM things would've been different.  Like when the democrat president (FDR) expropriated gold in the 1930s and devalued the dollar.  Once the full tie of the dollar to silver and gold was lost in the 1960s and 1970s, it is only a matter of time before the value of the currency is completely lost.

With no anchor to fiat, they can inflate value away, expropriating it by a slightly stealthier method than outright seizure. 

I saw this article and I love how they try to divide people by immutable, irrelevant, characteristics.  Yes, bitcoin is good for wealth preservation, yet that applies to everyone regardless of sex, skin color, hair color or eye color.  I can see why they are trying to carve a niche, but CNBC should recognize that and point out that bitcoin can help everyone protect themselves and note it for what it is: marketing based on the racist notion of skin color being relevant.

I worked at a large (20k+ people) computer company out of grad school (this was several decades ago) with lots of buildings, some older, some newer spread out over a larger geographical area for the part I worked with, maybe 2000 people in that section of the state, with plenty of areas that were empty except for maybe 1 person.  I wouldn't have done it if bitcoin had even been around then, but it would've been easy to have a few miners in one section of the office and no one would even see it.  With that many people in so many different buildings, multiple floors, secure areas etc also, I doubt they would've noticed the change in power usage.

It may not happen on the scale shown, but one or two in a closet off the office or under your desk, I bet that happens pretty frequently.

Pretty much the answer is: if you hold the keys, they are your coins.  So if you both have the keys, you better move the coins immediately to a wallet that you control.  And if a criminal has the keys, they probably will have already done that.

This - just ask the people of Cyprus, Venezuela, Germany in the 1930s, North Korea, China, Russia etc.  Other countries in the future.  Perhaps even the US if the statists get their way and destroy liberty there.

Plus the fact that the value of the asset keeps the blockchain secure.  If you have a cartel that controls the blockchain and don't care about the security, then you really don't need crypto, just a distributed, shared database.  If you want something secure in a trustless environment there has to be some value there to secure or else who is going to care?

You are right.  The only people helped by these regulations are the people in power.  You can have as much regulation as you want and there will still be scammers.  People like Warren are no friend of freedom, she wants power and control.  Global regulation is particularly bad because it will end competition between jurisdictions.  In all likelihood you'll end up with a terrible, global regime which will only entrench those in power and enrich them while stopping everyone else from getting out from under their thumb of the century+ long fiat disaster.   With global regulation you might as well completely shut down bitcoin and crypto and general and embrace a digital fiat where every move that every single person in the world makes will be tracked, analyzed and controlled.

They like to muddy the water:  "cryptoisation" - transitioning from fiat currencies to digital fiat is digitalization.  If by crypto, they mean bitcoin, then it means much more: decentralized, censorship resistant among many other things.  Digital fiat is the dream of statists, fascists, communists, socialists and all other authoritarians around the world.  They can stifle dissent and control everyone and they will do so.  Look at Stripe, PayPal and various credit card processors and banks.  They are already trying it even when it involved a billionaire (or extremely wealthy), sitting President of the US.  What will they do to regular people if they can?

---

Yeah, the BIS doesn't like crypto either.  CBDCs are worthless to regular people, even worse that paper fiat.  At least with paper fiat you can make a donation without someone people able to track it.  And stable coins?  When have they ever worked out well? lol

[moderator's note: consecutive posts merged]

The only people helped by these regulations are the people in power.  Look at the US (and the world) which has a large regulatory system in place - you had Madoff, Enron, WorldCom, Lehman, Tyco, Theranos, Shkreli, Allen Stanford, Tom Petters, Rothstein, Nicholas Cosmo, Wells Fargo.  Don't forget Wirecard, Volkswagen,  ZZZZ Best etc.

You can have as much regulation as you want and there will still be scammers.  The best choice is to keep your bitcoin in cold storage.

Global regulation is particularly bad because it will end competition between jurisdictions.  In all likelihood you'll end up with a terrible, global regime which will only entrench those in power and enrich them while stopping everyone else from getting out from under their thumb of the century+ long fiat disaster.   With global regulation you might as well completely shut down bitcoin and crypto and general and embrace a digital fiat where every move that every single person in the world makes will be tracked, analyzed and controlled.

First of all, it is Gensler, so much should be discounted immediately.   Second, if the SEC would approve a "physical bitcoin" ETF vs the futures based ones, many people who want to hold bitcoin would do it that way and "investment advisors" would be able to use the ETF.  Third, perhaps some of the large players who are already custodians would just hold crypto,  e.g. Fidelity, Vanguard, ML, Schwab etc.   

People shouldn't be hold bitcoin on most of these new exchanges anyway and scammers may say they are segregating investor's bitcoins, but they'll find out later that they weren't.

Wow!  That is huge.  I am surprised this hasn't received more attention.  I suspect though that all the extra costs imposed by regulators worldwide and the cash ban, along with the insanity caused by the scammers at FTX and the like they couldn't make it work.  Between all those, the trading volume seems to have cratered. 

Sad day for the people involved and for people who would want to use it in the future.

Have you seen the sloth scene in Zootopia?  You hit the nail on the head above:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0woPde7OE1k

As far as the bill, yeah, it was introduced, but will it be passed by the legislature and then signed by the governor?  Given many people in NY have an aversion to independent, free people, who can operate outside of their control, I wouldn't count on it.

As far as fees go, some places will charge a 3% fee on credit cards, so anything under that is a plus.