Technically the US currently owns bitcoin too, since coins have been seized as part of investigations into illicit activities.  The coins are custodied by law enforcement until they get a court order to sell them.  Although it's probably not what you're looking for because they're not bought for treasury purposes, the US government technically owns the coins until they're sold nonetheless.

What China is doing doesn't fit the definition of FUD.  FUD is trying to bring the price down by talking negatively about it, but China is just outright banning it from the country.  They don't give a damn if that makes the price go up or down because they only care about getting it out of the country because they can't have anything challenge the digital yuan.  Since their actions are based on getting rid of it instead of affecting the price, it's not correct to call it FUD, which is a grossly overused term by this community as it is.

Thanks for checking and the info.  Sucks we're still in a place where gambling sites are blocked based on geography, and sucks even more that in places like the US this is mainly to protect places like Las Vegas because legal online betting would "cost Vegas revenues," or so the argument goes.

Out of curiosity, what site did they recommend using when you used a US location on the VPN?

It's a life insurance company, but yes, they are large.  About $560 billion in assets under management in 2020.  This is a state regulator though, and state regulator fines are rarely every eye popping amounts.  Ultimately for the thing they were charged with (failure to adequately supervise employees), this seems like an adequate penalty.


Yes, in the securities industry employees are required to report ALL their securities transactions and outside business activities to their employers.  It doesn't matter if you do it in your spare time or not, anything you do that is securities related needs to be tracked under rules established by the regulators to ensure there are no conflicts of interest and in the name of professional integrity.  Keith Gill did not do this, and was actively hiding his activities, which is why it's a problem.  Mass Mutual got hit because the regulator felt like didn't have adequate supervision since they weren't able to detect his activities, which he hid by posting under pseudonyms and not using his real name.


No, it has nothing to do with how much money you're making.  It has to do with how many trades he made that Mass Mutual was required to know about and didn't.  If it was one trade they didn't catch, that's not as much of a violation as a pattern of trading that all went undetected.  For the purpose of ensuring employees aren't committing transactions to benefit themselves at the expense of the firm's clients, this is a very serious issue.  The whole investment industry is predicated on being able to trust the people managing your money, so that's why there's so many rules about monitoring employees.


There's nothing questionable about the explanation here.  People invent conspiracy theories because they're too stupid to understand the real situation.  That's not an indictment of the media, but the idiots. 

Does DPLAY just do casino table type games or does it also have a sportsbook?  The table games aren't too appealing to me, but I do like sportsbooks, particularly for NFL and NBA.  Also, any geo-blocking issues for players to be concerned about?

Thanks for posting this.  Although it doesn't seem likely to me, I agree it's possible they're literally custodying the bitcoin in a wallet that's not part of a professional service by themselves.  I just don't know why anyone would do this when it's billions of dollars at stake and it increases the risks.  Since he's couching the above quote though as a contrast to lending, I think it's more likely that he means that they keep the bitcoin (through a professional custodian like Coinbase) and do not lend it out, with the "custodying" just meaning the opposite of "lending".  In the article, he talks about how much that increases the risk for an extra 5% return.  But again, they could mean custodying it themselves in their own wallet, but I would be surprised if this is the case.

Well the fine wasn't designed to address any of the things you mentioned.  First, Mass Mutual had nothing to do with any of the activities Keith Gill was undertaking.  Gill wasn't working on behalf of Mass Mutual when he made his trades or his social media posts.  Second, touting market moves isn't illegal, but the manner it which Gill did it was fraudulent, but again this has nothing to do with Mass Mutual.  Third, if short sellers are afraid to over-short certain companies because now they're at a high risk of being squeezed, I'm not really certain that's a net bad thing.  Shorting always carries more risk than buying long because your potential loss is infinite, and despite knowing this they put themselves in a vulnerable position anyway which was reckless and they have no one to blame for that but themselves.  The amount GME was shorted created a massive incentive for someone to put the screws to them, and Keith Gill eventually found a way to do that- just unfortunately committing fraud was a major component of it.

What this fine was about is failure to supervise employees adequately, and the fine and the bad press is going to have exactly the effect the regulator desires.  If you think other insurance companies and brokers aren't reviewing their social media policies and personal trading policies in this aftermath to make sure they don't get blindsided by something like this... well I wouldn't bet on that is all I'm saying.

This isn't really unique to bitcoin.  The ccp is exerting increasing levels of control over all aspects of chinese society.  China has always been hostile to foreign tech companies operating in the country, but recently they've started harshly restricting even chinese-based tech companies and basically anything that could exert influence over the society and sap loyalty from the party, including video game makers, tv and movie studios companies and others.  At the core of the moves are promoting ultra-nationalist tendencies as china gears up to challenge the US globally.  With the implementation of the digital yuan, bitcoin is just another element that threatens the party's power because they can't control it.  But unlike the maximalists on these boards that claim it's censorship proof and the government can't stop it, I say just watch how few people are going to be out of compliance now that it's fully illegal.  

But now you've given an example of gold's intrinsic value- use in jewelry.  The value comes from it's intrinsic properties; not people speculating on it's value, but actual use.  That's not where bitcoin's value comes from, nor NFTs.  In both cases, that value comes exclusively from speculation on the future value of them, based solely on a mass assumption of future worth.  To differentiate, gold as a store of value is completely arbitrary, just like bitcoin.  But gold still has a demand outside of store of value (the intrinsic value of gold) and bitcoin and NFTs do not.  That's the difference between bitcoin and gold and why there's no difference between bitcoin and NFTs.

It sounds like you're mistaking what makes mania. It's not duration, it's severity of the bubble.  Nobody ever knows they're in a bubble until after it pops, otherwise you'd never have bubbles.  People buying tulips during the tulip bubble didn't know they were buying into a bubble, just like the people buying houses in 2007 didn't know they were buying into a bubble, just like (for all you know) the people buying bitcoin now don't know they're buying into a bubble.  It is impossible to dispel the non-existence of a bubble contemporaneously, it's something that can only be known after-the-fact.

Making statements about stocks isn't illegal, but making false representations while you're doing it is fraud and that is illegal.  When a Bill Ackman goes on CNBC and says "We're shorting this stock because it's a garbage company and it's going to zero" there's nothing wrong with that.  But that's not what Keith Gill did.  He created several online alter egos and pretended to be an amateur trader in order to get people to trust him and buy into the narrative that the little people could band together and stick it to the professional traders, never revealing that he himself was actually a professional trader.  That's fraud.  That's illegal.

That's because most brokerage firms didn't have near the exposure to GME that robinhood did through its client base.  There was no conspiracy.  The market makers demanded more collateral from robinhood to continue having access to that market as the frenzy was making it prohibitively expensive for the market makers to continue facilitating trades in that market, and robinhood didn't have the cash for it.  Eventually they were able to raise a ton of cash on an emergency basis for collateral, but until then they were cut off from the market and were forced to cut their customers off as a result.  I suppose if you don't understand what was going on behind the scenes it's easy to just call it a conspiracy theory, especially when you want to believe in the boogeyman, and most people around here do.  Doesn't make them any less stupid for doing so.

No.  Mass Mutual didn't know and didn't have an positions in the stocks.  Nothing Gill did benefited them, in fact he only caused reputational harm to the company by exposing how inadequate their compliance procedures were that they couldn't detect his social media activities.
I feel like Gill was part of the plan of Mass Mutual, they needed a fall guy and so they chose Gill to be that person, the company won't be hit too much by this fall out but Gill is going to have his life collapse right in his face.

Kinda missed my point.  I'm not talking about the literal differences between bitcoin and NFTs, I'm talking about what makes each "valuable."  You probably should have been able to pick that up from the context of the rest of the post.  Your post didn't address the substance of my post, which is how are you drawing an arbitrary line between NFTs and Bitcoin and trying to pretend they're different when it's the exact same thing that makes each valuable- large groups of people who arbitrarily agree they are.

And you're grossly overstating Bitcoin's utility as a payment method.  15k businesses worldwide is nothing, and extreme volatility makes it a piss poor currency.  Bitcoin is a speculative asset, same as NFTs.  Anyone pretending otherwise is perpetrating a fiction.




Fair enough, but everything you're saying about NFTs are the exact same thing that's been said about Bitcoin (and continues to be said about Bitcoin by the naysayers) that you take such exception to.  You're just drawing a line that around NFTs and saying "Come on, how is that going to be worth anything in the future?" the same way the mainstream financial media has been doing about bitcoin since it started gaining widespread notoriety.  It does remain highly amusing to me that anyone who thinks bitcoin is the future uses the same arguments against NFTs that they have rejected against Bitcoin for the last 10 years without a hint of irony.  Highly amusing.

Oh well I look forward then to having some NFL games to pick through in the near future.  A bit surprised to hear the NFL is your least favorite sport, but to each their own though.  If nothing else, it's a great betting sport so at least it should drum up some extra wagering business for the site once you get some games up.

Extremely unlikely there is multisig in any fashion going on.  I also agree with Fillippone that I would expect that the coins are professionally custodied by Coinbase since I believe that is the company that is buying the coins on MSTR's behalf.  It would make poor business sense and be extremely risky to have Coinbase execute the trades and then move billions of dollars worth of coins to another wallet controlled by Saylor personally, or some combination of Saylor and the Board in a multisig set up.  I would be extremely shocked if those coins ever left the custody of whatever platform placed the trades to buy them, because there's no logistical or business reason for them to and only increased risk associated with doing so.

The difference between Gill and Musk is that Gill created false personas to hype his personal holdings, and Musk did not.  You can't even say that Musk is trying to hype things for his personal benefit, as opposed to just stroking his ego by watching you all freak out over everything he says and does.  Gill had a position he was trying to make more valuable through fraudulent actions.  You can't say the same about Musk. Two entirely different scenarios.

The "democratization" of communication was supposed to be a great thing for humanity, but giving everyone a voice just conditioned everyone to think that their opinion was the most important and that if things weren't happening the way they wanted then the government or the system or the world was broken.  The internet created echo chambers that reinforced the notion that anyone who didn't agree with you was your enemy who had to be defeated.
 In reality, the internet ushered in this era of extremism and vitriol we see in politics now, and it's not fixable.  The internet and social media has ruined public discourse forever and turned everyone into intolerant trolls.

I'll take "left wing" regulation over the arbitrary legal hellholes like the Brazil Bolsonaro wants to create every or the religiously fueled insanity in Florida or Texas day of the week if that's the trade off you're trying to offer with this post.  You can really feel the desperation in this post to make this a left vs. right divide though with how far you're reaching.  Is a lying, pandemic denying politicians like Bolsonaro now one of your great heros because he's too busy undermining democracy to regulate crypto?  Cuz he's not exactly a useful advocate to those of us in the civilized world.

Because reducing the number of infection vectors is a major part of defeating the virus.  The more people who are vaccinated, the fewer bodies the virus can propagate in.  Vaccines, masking, social distance- all three of these reduce infections.  It's insane at this point there are still people who don't understand how this works, but that's exactly why the world is still as bad off as it is- people who question why vaccines are necessary or why there are mask mandates.  You're very clearly part of the problem.