The classic description is - Zerohedge, the site that predicted 200 of the last 2 recessions.

There isn't a day that goes by that they're not predicting absolute ruination for everyone. They must have developed an audience that simply can't get enough of being fed stuff like that so they carry on playing up to that.

I assume many, many more people were attracted there by one particular headline, read a few more, realised what it was and never came back.

When your agenda is that relentless and obvious you make yourself irrelevant and puerile and they're the posterboys for that.

According to Brian Coinbase it seems a few have already decided to let the US government pick up their BTC bill. Will you be doing the same?



https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/1250907110730170370

If that's not your thing there is an even worthier alternative here - https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8226305/Controversial-Louisiana-pastor-wants-people-donate-stimulus-checks.html

I never used them largely because their attempts at servicing foreigners were half hearted and confusing. They did a fixed 5% discount from themselves I think. It was offered to me as a Brit but if I remember rightly it could only come from Amazon.com which isn't much use if it breaks or I need it within a couple of weeks.

Similarly there were very few offers from non Americans.

It seemed such an obvious avenue for fraud that I assumed they had some sort of super robust system to kill it whenever it popped up.

The alternative of it being a total free for all seems too obvious so maybe that is what it was.

40% is pretty darned extreme. I hardly ever saw that big a discount. If you want to let go for that little then that was your choice but I for one would've been more than a little wary of buying one with that desperate a discount. No idea what the stats were for carded codes but they must've been horrific.

The people paying for the discount were those who wanted rid of Amazon gift card balances. I seem to remember reading people get paid in them quite often. It seems like a painless way to get BTC if you don't have many or any other options. I guess the most obvious alternative is buying something on Amazon and selling it on Ebay but that could easily wind up losing you more.

Where did they make their actual money? I could never be bothered to figure out how they worked and it was never completely clear how/if it worked for non Americans.

The obvious one is no one spending with the price down. I wonder whether there was anything AML ish too.

I would start off seeking context rather than nuts and bolts.

The best intro to the early history along with a fairly brief overview of how it works and why it was invented is Digital Gold by Nathaniel Popper. It gets boring and irrelevant later on but the first bit is very good.

Diving immediately into something that goes into heavy economics or computer noodling would glaze my eyes over at least.

But once again that doesn't make them anything special. They're tied to the value of a much larger market with added risks too.

Some seem to believe they solve a financial problem like a proper cryptocurrency. The only one they do solve is trading shitcoins in more shitholes.

Why do so many people have such a weird conception of what stablecoins are?

All they are are dollar tokens with dubious means of redemption. They are 100% tied to whatever policies are imposed on the dollar with the added spiciness of not knowing whether certain ones are backed by proper dollars and the possibility the person controlling them will tell you to piss off if you try to exchange them for real dollars.

That makes them multiple times crappier than a real dollar. They're a creature of cryptoland with huge added dangers and uncertainty. They ain't changing anything for the better and may change other things for the worse.  

Libra will never exist in the form they're proposing. No government would let third parties with user bases of billions blow their own currencies apart. If it ever does emerge it'll be a watered down bitch that does their bidding.

If it ever did emerge in the form originally proposed it wouldn't be a threat to BTC. It is just as vulnerable to the weaknesses of fiat currencies as its value is derived from them, but it's vulnerable to more of them.

I would instantly bin any service that asked that of me. It sounds like they had it in for you. I verified once a year or two ago and they haven't asked again.

I've paid for plenty of things through Paypal with it. I've never had a payment refused either. I did have loads with the Xapo card.

No government needs to ban it to keep a lid on it. All they need to do is make it hard enough to move in and out of to deter the average person from waking up to it. There'll always be weirdos like us who are willing to duck and dive. Most other people can't be arsed or can't be bothered to inform themselves.

China figured that out and murdered the exchanges there. It's still vibrant in a small way there but very much on the fringes. Imagine what it would've looked like at the peak in 2017 if all their exchanges were running there, then again the peak may not have happened without China getting the boot.

Then they go away and someone turns up who can earn money.

I remember threads like this around the last halving. People rolled out the evergreen mining 'death spiral' trope. I'm not sure how many times higher hash rate is now than back then but it is many, many, many times higher.

No one who is not mining needs to give a shit about mining. It takes care of itself and always has.

Some day we will need to pay proper attention to the diminishing block reward, its effects on miners and whether fees are going to do the job they were intended for to replace it but we're quite a way from it still.

Are the people who proposed this credible characters? Never heard of either of them.

I found the one off $1200 pretty weird. It would've been better to drip feed the same amount on a tiered basis but perhaps that's too close to UBI for their liking. Maybe they thought the idea of a one time windfall was less Unamerican.

I wonder when you add up the cost of tax breaks, subsidies, stimulus packages, welfare systems and the apparatus to administrate it all whether ongoing UBI would work out cheaper overall. Like many things even if it is cheaper the spiritual implications might be too much to countenace.

Since we're supposed to be having an AI-assisted jobs bonfire in the near future perhaps they've just brought the inevitable forward a bit.

Did they ever own bitcoins themselves? As far as I know insider trading with crypto still isn't a crime so they may as well hang on to those at least. Lots of possibilities for milking us lot.

This should serve as a reminder of what The Man is like even if they start making positive ish noises about BTC.

There is no Dai ban. They won't know or care what it is. It's irrelevant. It only lives in one microscopic corner of crypto.

This is about things like Libra. That would instantly eat the world and take many currencies with it. If you were in Venezuela would you prefer the Bolivar or Libra? It's a no brainer. That's why they won't permit it.

The idea of global stablecoins died the second Libra published its intentions. Unless it comes direct from the heart of government or central banking such a thing will never, ever, ever be permitted to exist. End of.

There's no crypto impact.

Not in crypto. Roger Ver publicly admitted to doing it and declared it was a good thing.

All the same this sounds like a crock of runny shit. Unless she's yanking the phallus of the CEO of Bitmex on a weekly basis what useful info could some random internet bint have about crypto markets?

If she can post a photo of Arthur Hayes's penis with his and her face in it then we might be getting somewhere.

I don't want to in case it gets even more laggy than it is already. It's been like this for several months on two different devices. I genuinely have never had any other app that acts this way. The fact that's it's one that ties up my money is not arousing.