So this makes it the largest loss of bitcoin under such circumstances when you consider the contemporary value of the coins lost. The exchange, Africrypt, told investors they were the victim of a hack and not to alert the authorities, you know, cuz that's super legitimate. Some law firm attempting to investigate have tracked the stolen coins to tumblers and mixers to try and obscure where the stolen bitcoin was going. I guess it remains to be determined if they were actually hacked or stole the money themselves, but the two founding brothers can't be found. So another fishy situation where billions worth of Bitcoin is lost and the owners are missing and they are claiming it was a hack. How do they think they can get away with billions of dollars and it looks really fishy and we were not hearing about any major hacks for sometime and now this is a major theft/ hack situation and i really feel bad for the traders who held their coins in their exchange wallet. I suppose it's possible that being a couple of young kids, they designed the exchange so poorly from a security standpoint that someone was able to gain access and steal the coins. The disappearance then would be going into hiding I suppose because there are $3.6 billion worth of people pissed off at you. But as others have pointed out, with the touting of unrealistically high returns, this does look more like a ponzi scheme. |
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And as I've said before, for MSTR's sake I hope bitcoin stays above their average purchase price, because it's a hell of a lot of money they've spent acquiring it, even now taking on debt in order to finance the buy.
It would also be a good test of their resilience to hold for many years, it's easy when the price is rising, but the pressure starts to mount during big dips, would be interesting to see what his reaction would be. I get that, but we're not talking about just Michael Saylor here; he isn't buying all of that bitcoin for himself, but for MSTR--and they're publicly traded, which means there's a board of directors and shareholders who might be extremely unhappy should bitcoin tank. They might start to question why the money used to buy bitcoin wasn't used for their core business instead of using it for a bitcoin buying spree, which also increased the debt on their books. Again, I truly am hoping that everything works out for MSTR (and for all bitcoin holders), but surely everyone can see what might happen should bitcoin enter a prolonged bear market. MSTR might even be forced to sell, and that could well be a disaster for everyone else owning bitcoin. Plus, the more MSTR buys the more centralized bitcoin becomes, even though they're far from cornering the market in it. I'm hoping Michael Saylor knows when enough is enough. It's been pointed out many times in various Saylor-related threads, but he has a super majority of the voting power of the company. The board and shareholders don't have the power to check him when it comes to doing what he wants to do. His net worth is made up predominantly by the shares he owns of the company, so while he's buying bitcoin with the company's money, he's very much doing it for himself. Everyone else at the company is along for the ride. |
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Elon's preference for Doge over Bitcoin is no great mystery. Bitcoin is slow, clunky and expensive to transact in. Doge, even as a joke coin, beats bitcoin on everything you would measure a cryptocurrency by other than inflation.
You are coming off as delusional, jaysabi.  You may well want to check ur lil selfie into some kind of a clinic. Might be some kind of koolaide that you drunk? It's cute that you still take the time to post idiotic responses on mine like you're really gonna one up me. Maybe try reading, oh I don't know, anything Musk has written about Doge. I literally parroted what he said about it. If you refuse to educate yourself about the topics before you start sounding off on them, that's on you, but my suggestion would be to stop posting about things you literally have no clue about. Your head is so far up your own ass you can't even realize we're talking strictly about the tech here. Maybe go back and re-read the original post you responded to, you obviously didn't understand any of it. I stand by my earlier posts, and there is no reason to read or look into anything that Musk or anyone else has to say about such shitcoin as doge coin. If there comes some day 5-10 years down the road that doge coin is starting to supplant bitcoin, then maybe I will decide to get into it at that time.. but until then you are wasting your brain power on such nonsense if you actually have any brain power. If you are going to respond to a post that is specifically about what Musk has said about Doge coin, then yeah, you might want to do the minimal amount of research on the topic so don’t come off as such a massive bellend by interjecting dumb comments that have literally nothing to add to the discussion. Is this not a bitcoin thread? Did you respond with anything about bitcoin in your response? Like literally at all? Go back and read it if you’ve already forgotten. You literally only quoted the Doge coin bit and then said absolutely nothing about either bitcoin or Dogecoin in your response. It’d be one thing if your posts were just dumb and not dumb and completely off topic. Ffs, get yourself together. My point is that if we are in a bitcoin thread, and you are bringing up irrelevant nonsense like doge coin or how elon might feel about such coin as compared with bitcoin, then the burden is on you to prove your various points and how they might relate to the topic of the thread. I have no such burden, I was just responding to your nonsense irrelevancies, and likely just facilitated more drawing us off topic, so I apologize to anyone for entertaining the nonsesne of such thread hijacking regarding how Elon might or might not feel about doge coin and if it really matters to the topic we are talking about here. On an individual level we can allocate our portfolios however we want in terms if we want to carry some shitcoins such as doge coin, and if you want to invest in that crap then that is your choice. My brain is hurting just thinking about such stupid topic of doge coin having much if any value besides being a fun game with proven pumpementals. Lol, oh was that your point? Let's go back to the original post and see if we can identify anything there that supports that: You are coming off as delusional, jaysabi. You may well want to check ur lil selfie into some kind of a clinic. Might be some kind of koolaide that you drunk? Hmmm, nope. If that was your point, you need to put a lot more effort into your posts instead of just angrily shitposting responses. Here's a protip for you. If you're sorry about taking the thread off topic, then stop making stupid comments that take the thread off topic, especially when someone isn't responding to you and your only add to the conversation is a bunch of stupid drivel that relates in no way to what anyone was talking about. Easy fix! |
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The problem is the uncertainty, there are many countries that have moved forward very aggressively when it comes to the vaccination of their population but there are other countries that have not done so, whether this is because they do not have the money or there is not enough vaccine this is a risk, as this gives the virus the chance to keep spreading there and eventually mutate and if does in a strain that it is immune to the vaccine then we will be in trouble.
Every person the virus is passed on to gives the virus the change to mutate and become harder to control. The Delta variant is already far more transmissible than the Alpha variant, which was far more transmissible than the original strain. The virus is being given the opportunity to mutate because of the people who continue to downplay the severity of the pandemic, and those are almost exclusively conservatives in every country. |
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Kinda seemed that way, didn't it? But if you think about it, a lot of big companies are following the liberal agenda. Amazon's Prime Video has videos classified by race, if you can believe that. It's like all the companies are catering to the "woke" crowd, and I find that disgusting.
The social media and most of the mainstream media are under the control of a handful of ultra-leftist billionaires. And they decide what we should read and watch. I am talking about people like Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Jeff Bezos. The amount of radical leftist propaganda that is being dished out through these outlets is astounding. Two years back, in Netflix they had a movie named In the Shadow of the Moon. The subject was a mixed race woman doing time travel and killing those who have a conservative political view. Can you imagine this? A movie justifying murder, just because the victims were conservative. And given the current trend, this is not going to end here. Very soon the liberals will say that those who vote for Republican party should be murdered (we already have a thread in the Politics section). And then it will get worse. These people will say that anyone who is not a radical leftist doesn't have the right to live. Nothing announces you don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about like trying to claim Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are ultra-leftist, lmao. I mean, Zuckerberg is such an obvious leftist, Facebook's political action committee has given more money to republicans than democrats in every election cycle since 2012. What a classic ultra-leftist move to give more money to the party that is the exact opposite of what you supposedly believe in! And who can forget Bezos' ultra-leftist power move of seeking to minimize union efforts at all costs at Amazon? You take the clown makeup off before posting your deranged conspiracy nonsense, or nah? |
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[...] This is the essence of America ... Biden received 150 million purportedly anonymous donations, four times what Trump received, (therefore, I tend to agree that such measures are aimed at the pockets of wealthy middle-class Americans.). I would not be surprised that the lion's share of these donations was made by Bill Gates, since he fiercely criticized Trump in everything + he publicly approved the idea of raising taxes. One way or another, I will continue to adhere to the opinion of the Biden administration's distorted views on the current situation, (a simplistic view of wealth and disregard for financial discipline).In addition, the Biden administration's claims that the tax code update will ultimately bring trillions of dollars into the budget ... are wrong, (in the sense that in reality it will only increase the public debt).
What disregard for financial discipline is that again? The majority of the top 10 budget deficits in history are under republican administrations. Republicans routinely run up the deficit by increasing spending and cutting taxes. America wouldn't be in such a dire financial situation if it wasn't for the massive debt accumulation that started with Regan and accelerated under Bush Jr. and Trump, who inherited the best economy in decades and shrinking deficits and managed to blow the deficit back up to over a trillion dollars a year. In addition, the Biden administration's claims that the tax code update will ultimately bring in trillions of dollars are absolutely correct. Clamp down on the tax cheats by hiring more IRS personnel and the program will pay for itself multiple times over without changing any tax laws, just enforcing the laws already on the books. That's such an obvious fact it's stupid trying to pretend otherwise. |
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Was it really an exchange? Sounds more like an investing scam: https://coingeek.com/south-africa-btc-scam-africrypt-makes-off-with-3-8b-asks-victims-not-to-report/Africrypt targeted high-net worth individuals and celebrities, according to reports. As with any other scam, it promised ludicrous returns, at times claiming it could offer 10% daily returns. The company was so adept at targeting its victims that most of its investors treated it like their own secret path to a world of unlimited wealth. It was this target market that Africrypt used to reach out to other wealthy investors in their inner circles. Many clients invested upwards of R1.5 million ($105,000), with some going as high as R20 million ($1.4 million). Here is an archived page: https://archive.vn/8AoqXSounds more like the usual ponzi scheme, probably those 3.6 billions (calculated at max peak price) are more likely sums people though they have in their accounts than actual money invested. Anyhow, sorry to say it, but the ones investing millions with a company run by a 20 and a 17 year old were looking for a way to lose money. Good find. I highly doubt anyone did any research into who owned the company, just as I'm sure no one actually does any research before investing with Coinbase or Kraken or any other exchange. But this touting of ridiculous returns has red flags written all over it. I don't feel bad for anyone who lost money here, this had scam written all over it. |
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 Visualizing the History of U.S. Inflation Over 100 Years Is inflation rising? The consumer price index (CPI), an index used as a proxy for inflation in consumer prices, offers some answers. In 2020, inflation dropped to 1.4%, the lowest rate since 2015. By comparison, inflation sits around 2.5% as of June 2021. For context, recent numbers are just above rates seen in 2019, which were 2.3%. Given how the economic shock of COVID-19 depressed prices, rising price levels make sense. However, other variables, such as a growing money supply and rising raw materials costs, could factor into rising inflation. To show current price levels in context, this Markets in a Minute chart from New York Life Investments shows the history of inflation over 100 years. .... At the same time, the Federal Reserve is following an “average inflation targeting” regime, which means that if a previous inflation shortfall occurred in the previous year, it would allow for higher inflationary periods to make up for them. As the last decade has been characterized by low inflation and low interest rates, any prolonged period of inflation will likely have pronounced effects on investors and financial markets. We can see by the chart that US has a constant 1-3% inflation over the last decade. Somewhat controlled low inflation, but there were huge spike in the past. Those spikes (some of them more than 15% in a year) can destroy our economic power within a short period. Also, 1-3% inflation rate every year is also consuming our buying power every year. Will we face another of those spikes soon? I see that bitcoin rises is bringing up this discussion about inflation again, and I see this discussion all over the place. Bitcoin fell 50% last month. What's safer, a 1-3% predictable devaluation over very long periods of time or the unexpected 50% loss that can come at any moment? In bitcoin's short life, it has a well-established history of losing bigger amounts and more frequently than the dollar's worst years throughout history. Honestly, the argument that bitcoin protects against inflation is laughable because bitcoin has to be more stable than the USD to possibly protect against USD inflation, and it's just simply not. And there's no indication it ever will be. |
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Elon's preference for Doge over Bitcoin is no great mystery. Bitcoin is slow, clunky and expensive to transact in. Doge, even as a joke coin, beats bitcoin on everything you would measure a cryptocurrency by other than inflation.
You are coming off as delusional, jaysabi. You may well want to check ur lil selfie into some kind of a clinic. Might be some kind of koolaide that you drunk? It's cute that you still take the time to post idiotic responses on mine like you're really gonna one up me. Maybe try reading, oh I don't know, anything Musk has written about Doge. I literally parroted what he said about it. If you refuse to educate yourself about the topics before you start sounding off on them, that's on you, but my suggestion would be to stop posting about things you literally have no clue about. Your head is so far up your own ass you can't even realize we're talking strictly about the tech here. Maybe go back and re-read the original post you responded to, you obviously didn't understand any of it. I stand by my earlier posts, and there is no reason to read or look into anything that Musk or anyone else has to say about such shitcoin as doge coin. If there comes some day 5-10 years down the road that doge coin is starting to supplant bitcoin, then maybe I will decide to get into it at that time.. but until then you are wasting your brain power on such nonsense if you actually have any brain power. If you are going to respond to a post that is specifically about what Musk has said about Doge coin, then yeah, you might want to do the minimal amount of research on the topic so don’t come off as such a massive bellend by interjecting dumb comments that have literally nothing to add to the discussion. Is this not a bitcoin thread? Did you respond with anything about bitcoin in your response? Like literally at all? Go back and read it if you’ve already forgotten. You literally only quoted the Doge coin bit and then said absolutely nothing about either bitcoin or Dogecoin in your response. It’d be one thing if your posts were just dumb and not dumb and completely off topic. Ffs, get yourself together. |
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You are coming off as delusional, jaysabi. You may well want to check ur lil selfie into some kind of a clinic. I respectfully disagree; I've said the same things about doge before in a few threads (though in a tone that wasn't so negative against bitcoin), and it's really hard to argue that bitcoin makes for a better currency, i.e., one that you buy things with. Assuming doge network fees and confirmation times stayed the same over time, it'd be so much easier to spend doge than bitcoin. You've been around long enough to remember times when bitcoin transaction fees were through the roof and it took forever to get one confirmation even if you paid a substantial fee, so surely you can admit that doge (and other altcoins) have at least that advantage over bitcoin, no? And I haven't drunk any of Elon Musk's Kool Aid, and I don't even own any doge, nor am I a big fan of it either. But I don't have bitcoin blinders on that prevent me from seeing its disadvantages. It's a very good investment and the king of crypto. It just sucks as a form of money. Like you, I think bitcoin is a poor currency. As a medium of transfer Doge is actually far superior, but that doesn’t make it a good currency either. As a medium of exchange, it’s faster and it’s cheaper; just overall far less clunky. Bitcoin’s obvious advantages as a cryptocurrency though are first mover and more recently institutional adoption to a small extent. It’s definitely better at holding value, as Doge’s inflation is a major problem, but Bitcoin absolutely fails as a store of value, just like every other crypto except maybe Tether, or other stable coins that are pegged to the dollar, but I wouldn’t trust them for other reasons. I don’t take Elon as being too serious about actually wanting to improve Doge, I view it more as a way to stay in the headlines by continually talking about it. He’s proven to be quite the flake on the subject of crypto so anything he says should be viewed skeptically at this point. But if I was starting from fiat and wanted to send a fast, cheap transaction to someone on the other side of the world who was going to convert it immediately to their local currency, Doge beats Bitcoin in this instance for the above stated reasons. I soundly use either as a day-to-day currency though because they’re both terrible for different reasons as a currency. Bitcoin is a bad medium of exchange for being slow and expensive and Doge coin is literally a meme coin and can’t be trusted to hold any value to an even worse degree than bitcoin. |
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Elon's preference for Doge over Bitcoin is no great mystery. Bitcoin is slow, clunky and expensive to transact in. Doge, even as a joke coin, beats bitcoin on everything you would measure a cryptocurrency by other than inflation.
You are coming off as delusional, jaysabi. You may well want to check ur lil selfie into some kind of a clinic. Might be some kind of koolaide that you drunk? It's cute that you still take the time to post idiotic responses on mine like you're really gonna one up me. Maybe try reading, oh I don't know, anything Musk has written about Doge. I literally parroted what he said about it. If you refuse to educate yourself about the topics before you start sounding off on them, that's on you, but my suggestion would be to stop posting about things you literally have no clue about. Your head is so far up your own ass you can't even realize we're talking strictly about the tech here. Maybe go back and re-read the original post you responded to, you obviously didn't understand any of it. I stand by my earlier posts, and there is no reason to read or look into anything that Musk or anyone else has to say about such shitcoin as doge coin. If there comes some day 5-10 years down the road that doge coin is starting to supplant bitcoin, then maybe I will decide to get into it at that time.. but until then you are wasting your brain power on such nonsense if you actually have any brain power. If you are going to respond to a post that is specifically about what Musk has said about Doge coin, then yeah, you might want to do the minimal amount of research on the topic so don’t come off as such a massive bellend by interjecting dumb comments that have literally nothing to add to the discussion. |
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The FBI wants to keep $86 million in cash and millions more in jewelry and other valuables seized in a raid on a Beverly Hills, California, safe deposit box business, even though a judge specifically said the contents of the boxes weren’t up for grabs. Prosecutors claim it’s fair to make the renters of the 369 safe deposit boxes forfeit their valuables, because they were engaged in criminal activity, the Los Angeles Times reported. But there’s no evidence to support the allegation. The box holders and their lawyers say the FBI is trampling on the rights of people who were unaware the business, U.S. Private Vaults, was charged in a sealed indictment with conspiring to sell drugs and launder money. The warrant that US Magistrate Steve Kim signed on March 17 giving permission for the FBI to raid the business even said, “This warrant does not authorize a criminal search or seizure of the contents of the safety deposit boxes.” If the FBI wanted to search the boxes, it needed to meet the standard for a warrant of probable cause that evidence of a crime would be found. But agents rifled through about 800 boxes anyway, filming their searches and bagging the property as evidence even when the holders were unknown and not suspected of crimes. Now, the government is trying to keep the cash, gold and silver bars, pricey watches and even $1.3 million in poker chips from a Las Vegas casino. The government “can’t take stuff without evidence in the hopes that you’re going to get it later,” Benjamin Gluck, an attorney who represents box holders suing the government to retrieve their property, told the Times. “The Fourth Amendment and the forfeiture laws require the opposite — that you have the evidence first, and then you can take property.” “We have some basis to believe that the items are related to criminal activity,” Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the FBI’s LA office, told the Times. The contents of about 75 of the 800 boxes initially seized have already been returned, and at least 175 more will be given back, Mrozek said. The feds haven’t figured out who owns what was stored in many of the others. The indictment says U.S. Private Vaults marketed itself to attract criminals who wanted to store valuables anonymously and hide from tax authorities. One of the company’s owners and a manager were involved in selling drugs and co-conspirators helped customers convert cash into gold to evade government suspicion, the Times reported. But box owners like Joseph Ruiz, who kept $57,000 in cash from two legal settlements there because he doesn’t trust banks, say the government is stealing their money. “I’m made out to be a criminal, and I didn’t do anything,” said Ruiz, the son of a retired Los Angeles police officer, told the paper. “I’m a law-abiding citizen.” Ruiz has joined one of 11 lawsuits filed by box owners seeking the return of their property. https://nypost.com/2021/06/12/fbi-aims-to-keep-valuables-86m-cash-found-in-safe-deposit-store-raid/.... Interesting story here. The FBI confiscated more than $86 million dollars worth of money, valuables, jewelry and items stashed in safety deposit boxes, in a raid. Despite a search warrant which expressly forbid them from confiscating anything contained in the boxes. This happened in los angeles. Of course, this being america there were lawsuits filed. But it seems the FBI and the state have no intent to return much of the stolen items. Despite them not having filed lawsuits against the holders of the property or providing evidence suggesting any of the assets were involved with illegal activity. There have been claims of the DEA (drug enforcement agency) confiscating $100,000 from the safe of legal medical marijuana retailers. Without the lost funds being returned. But this is on an entirely different level with more than $86 million confiscated. Not from fringe operations like legalized weed. But from middle class or wealthy americans, who don't seem to have been involved with anything illegal or sketchy. This is the most open and shut case I've ever seen on the 4th amendment. The government has no evidence any of the property seized is related to criminal activity. They also violated a court order in seizing the contents of the boxes. On a related note, Congress needs to outlaw civil asset forfeiture on a national level, local police departments abuse the system far too much to be trusted even with stricter oversight. The only remedy is eliminating the program. |
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Elon's preference for Doge over Bitcoin is no great mystery. Bitcoin is slow, clunky and expensive to transact in. Doge, even as a joke coin, beats bitcoin on everything you would measure a cryptocurrency by other than inflation.
You are coming off as delusional, jaysabi. You may well want to check ur lil selfie into some kind of a clinic. Might be some kind of koolaide that you drunk? It's cute that you still take the time to post idiotic responses on mine like you're really gonna one up me. Maybe try reading, oh I don't know, anything Musk has written about Doge. I literally parroted what he said about it. If you refuse to educate yourself about the topics before you start sounding off on them, that's on you, but my suggestion would be to stop posting about things you literally have no clue about. Your head is so far up your own ass you can't even realize we're talking strictly about the tech here. Maybe go back and re-read the original post you responded to, you obviously didn't understand any of it. |
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https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-taxIn 2007, Jeff Bezos, then a multibillionaire and now the world’s richest man, did not pay a penny in federal income taxes. He achieved the feat again in 2011. In 2018, Tesla founder Elon Musk, the second-richest person in the world, also paid no federal income taxes. Michael Bloomberg managed to do the same in recent years. Billionaire investor Carl Icahn did it twice. George Soros paid no federal income tax three years in a row. I am forced to post this, because a lot of people have been brainwashed into thinking that the Democrats are in favor of higher taxes for the rich. Democrat heavyweights such as Michael Bloomberg and George Soros always argue in favor of higher income and capital gains taxes. But the truth is that the Democrats only want the middle class to pay taxes. Billionaires such as Soros and Bloomberg never pays a penny in taxes, because they never sell any of their assets. Instead, they take loans by mortgaging their assets. And yet, they are thick skinned enough to gloat in the public that the "rich" should pay more taxes. This is the reality behind the new "American families plan" by Joe Biden. The additional $6 trillion burden will fall on the middle class, while the uber-rich will continue to pay near-zero taxes. According to the research by ProPublica, the billionaires in the US saw their wealth increasing by $401 billion between 2014 and 2018. And they paid a total of $13.6 billion in income taxes during this period (which corresponds to a rate of 3.4%). An upper middle class family in high-tax states such as California and New York are required to pay close to 60% of their income as taxes, while these people are paying around 1/20th of that amount. If people still believe in Biden and his stupid spending plans, then the future looks hopeless for the United States. Instead of repeating republican talking points about how democrats = taxes = bad, maybe read up on the fact that republicans created this system and always fight to keep it that way because if it wasn't for the rich and the religious extremists, they couldn't find anyone to vote for them. What your post ignores is that Buffet and Bezos don't pay much in taxes because they don't really have income; their wealth comes from unrealized capital gains that aren't taxed until sold, and even then at far lower rates than income. I haven't been in favor of a wealth tax, but when you put it like this, perhaps unrealized gains should be taxed. Republicans ought to sit down and shut up now, they are the reason the system is as screwed up as it is. |
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Yeah Epstein killed himself too........ I don't know enough about this case. High profile people committing suicide conveniently tends to be odd.
Shocker how people who do horrible things after living a life of luxury might not want to live in a prison for the rest of their lives, right? I mean, we should build a bunch of tin foil hat crazy conspiracy theories about it instead of looking at it from the most likely and least insane point of view. Because the conspiracy theories are definitely more probable than Occam's razor. |
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So this makes it the largest loss of bitcoin under such circumstances when you consider the contemporary value of the coins lost. The exchange, Africrypt, told investors they were the victim of a hack and not to alert the authorities, you know, cuz that's super legitimate. Some law firm attempting to investigate have tracked the stolen coins to tumblers and mixers to try and obscure where the stolen bitcoin was going. I guess it remains to be determined if they were actually hacked or stole the money themselves, but the two founding brothers can't be found. From Endgadget: Cryptocurrency investors in South Africa may have lost nearly $3.6 billion in Bitcoin following the disappearance of two brothers associated with one of the country’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges. According to Bloomberg, a law firm in Cape Town says it can’t locate Ameer and Raees Cajee, the founders of Africrypt. In April, the exchange told its investors it was the victim of a hack and asked them not to report the incident to the authorities on account it would “slow down” the process of recovering their missing money.
Some of those involved in the exchange hired Hanekom Attorneys, the law firm that said it couldn’t find the two brothers, to investigate the incident. It found that someone had withdrawn Africrypt’s pooled funds from the local accounts and client wallets where the coins were stored originally and put them through tumblers and mixers, making it difficult (though not impossible) to trace the money. “Africrypt employees lost access to the back-end platforms seven days before the alleged hack,” the law firm told Bloomberg. The outlet attempted to call both Cajee brothers multiple times only to get their voicemail each time.
Complicating any recovery attempt is that South Africa’s Finance Sector Conduct Authority can’t launch a formal investigation into the incident because cryptocurrency isn’t legally considered a financial product in the country. If no one can recover the money, it will go down as the largest cryptocurrency loss in history, easily overshadowing the approximately $200 million CAD that disappeared when the founder of Canada’s QuadrigaCX exchange died while travelling in India. |
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It pretty well explains the volatility that dominates the Bitcoin market without being a study about Bitcoin.
I don't think that can be applied to Bitcoin nowadays as amateur traders don't dominate the Bitcoin market. They have some influence but they definitely don't dominate it. If you were talking about the past, maybe the 2016-2017 market I could agree, but not nowadays. That said, it must be recognized that they have influence over the price, especially when they are over-leveraged and at the slightest drop in the price they get margin calls, thus lowering the price even more, as we saw recently. I think quite the opposite. Bitcoin has always been driven by individual investors, it's only very recently that institutional investors starting getting involved. Whether individual investors still drive most of the trading is debatable, but you'd have to have data to support an argument that what has always been is no longer. |
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I think everyone knows by now that intelligence and surveillance agencies have long held a controlling interest in VPNs, proxies, TOR and anything involving encryption and anonymizing on the internet. As many hacking groups have learned the hard way.
Lack of international cooperation on extradition is likely the biggest obstacle to prosecuting internet criminals. As well as the biggest enabler for how ransomware and electronic crime occurs.
Seizing the ransomware payment proves cryptocurrencies like bitcoin are largely unsuitable as a medium for money laundering and crime. Unfortunately, I doubt many will see it that way. Investors and capitalists often having mentalities revolving around worst case scenarios, some will assume a worst case where the government has broken fundamental aspects of bitcoin encryption. Which I think it is not true.
As everyone said, law enforcement most likely assumed control of the ransomware payment through criminals using a wallet service which was vulnerable.
Tor was created by the US military to anonymize and protect their own communications with intelligence agents around the world. Whether that means they can spy on you easily, I don't know. Perhaps if your traffic is flowing through a government-run node, but otherwise I don't know. Bitcoin wasn't compromised in this action, as noted the physical server where the bitcoin private keys were stored was seized, allowing the government to have control over the bitcoin there, but absent a mistake like this from the hackers, the bitcoin wouldn't have been recoverable. |
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A nice thread, where someone thought a little bit deeper than the usual Pavlovian reflex to Musk tweets.
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A good analysis, yet with a few not-so-logical steps (GPU miners? really) but something definitely worth reading.
I think a lot like this guy. Looks like he is a hurt fanboy who wished that Elon and Bitcoin never broke up.I was excited about the possibilities of BTC being the currency on Mars way before he announced this. It is obvious that people will need to transfer value and cryptocurrency is the only possible solution to ensure that you can actually "possess" and "transfer" money in an inter-planetary setting. For sure, the astronauts/ workers wouldn't carry cash to spend for a beer on the Mars city pubs after a long day of hauling sand. Yet, He seems to have taken a fantasy for DOGE instead. My theory is that Elon still wants a cryptocurrency but over-time, he has seen that Bitcoin is too far down the road for him to make any impact. (And we all know he is a show-off deep inside). It will not be possible for him to have a significant share of the future of currency if he bets on BTC. With DOGE, (or another possible <1% shitcoin he plans to support) the possibility to influence and own is far greater. I just hope that the genius under whose leadership, SpaceX re-landed what is literally a Stainless Steel building, has more insight to realize that any such plan would fail. If you don't have PoW and Bitcoin's decentralization, there is no future cryptocurrency to be had. UPDATE:WTF??
NOW HE HAS CHANGED HIS PROFILE PIC TO THE BITCOIN LOGO COMPLETE WITH LASER EYES!!Bitcoin definitely won't be useful on Mars, at least not for hundreds of years (if ever). It's pointless for Mars to have a currency, because there is no commerce and no economy until there is excess effort that can be put into creating things other than what is needed for survival. And the point where a native population could sustain itself without supplies from Earth would be hundreds of years in the future. Elon's preference for Doge over Bitcoin is no great mystery. Bitcoin is slow, clunky and expensive to transact in. Doge, even as a joke coin, beats bitcoin on everything you would measure a cryptocurrency by other than inflation. |
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Since we are in a Bitcoin forum, it is normal to think that the best protection against inflation is Bitcoin. And it is not that it is (only) a distorted thought, the (short) history of the Bitcoin proves it to us.
Then there are other things that are debatable. Gold today is not bad, but if most of the money that is invested in gold goes to Bitcoin, it will not serve to protect much. That's what has happened this past year.
NASDAQ 100, OK. I prefer the S&P 500 which is more diversified in sectors. The NASDAQ 100 has been more profitable than the S&P 500 in recent years but that can change at any time.
Then I also miss good, well-located, Real State on that list.
The short history of bitcoin definitely does not prove it's a good hedge against inflation. Bitcoin is down nearly 50% since the beginning of May. When was the last time the dollar was down 50% in a matter of weeks? Never. You can't hedge 2% inflation losses with an assets that routinely swings 20% or more in a single day. |
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