I am so far behind on WO, no way I will ever catch up. Sorry, all. Trying to survive here.
This stuck in my mind from last time I was here:
Will they go after Coinbase next?
If they could bankrupt Coinbase and cause all holders in Coinbase to loose their coin in the BK liquidation, that could also be a major blow to crypto/Bitcoin..
I doubt it. Coinbase is one of "them", as you put it. Not that that protects idiots who keep coins on Coinbase - not at all! But they probably don't want to wipe out Coinbase itself.
The rest of your post is vastly underrated, so I will try to do it justice.
They are in hyperinflation..
They are afraid..
Bitcoin is their biggest competitor..
It's that, and more.
The "wrong people" can have money now. Depriving ordinary people of access to liquid capital has been ongoing for decades. Bitcoin interrupted the trend. People nowadays have no idea what "middle class" used to mean - never mind what has happened to the working class.
Worst of all: Financial freedom. Decentralized. Permissionless. Uncontrollable. Be Your Own Bank. Will "they" accept that?
A form of money they can't control, which was created
without their permission, which
competes with them. Not allowed!
What would be your next move if you were “them”?
eddie, I began writing something long about this over two weeks ago. No time to finish it - no time still.
Compressed version:
OK, let's talk dystopian fiction. To write a best-selling dystopian fiction novel here, I imagine this: If I were the Fed, the big banks, Blackrock, Citadel, Wall Street, plus the CIA and all other alphabet soup, blah blah blah, then how would I destroy Bitcoin? I'm getting upset, since Bitcoin not only survived the attack of the Fork Wars, but emerged bigger and stronger. The dollar is the source of my power, and it is my greatest weapon.
When I put on my Evil Hat(TM), I see in the hypothetical an economic attack that goes A, B, C:
A. Bull traps. Destroying long-term confidence in BTC needs not one big crash, but a series of fake recoveries followed by worse crashes, false hopes, broken dreams. This is psychological warfare as much as economic warfare. We now have memes about "Slaying of a Bearwhale", Honey Badger - a common belief that BTC always recovers and goes up. Evil Hat wants to replace that with a popular belief that "what goes up, must come down".
Evil Hat(TM) wants to break all
long-term uppitiness in Bitcoin, shatter all
long-term trends, smash the 200 WMA line. Ultimately, it wants to throw BTC into a death-spiral that only bottoms out when 10k BTC buys 2 pizzas again.
This cannot be done with one simple crash. Contra proudhon, math and science prove that BTC's natural price is very high: To suppress it and destroy it permanently, Evil Hat(TM) needs the magnitude of long-term, grand-scale economic manipulation that bigbanks usually apply to destroying any large, powerful nations that they dislike.
After extended torture and destruction of the BTC market, "they" consign Bitcoin to the lessons for schoolchildren about tulip bulbs, Pets.com stock, and so forth. Don't you know, we need King Daddy Fed, ECB, et al. If you want "crypto", don't worry: King Daddy Fed will give you "crypto".
"They" bless Circle, so USDC is legit "crypto" for you. It is a de facto CBDC - already here, and you were too dumb to notice. Muahahaha! Oh fork, did I just say something that is reality, and already an accomplished fact? Sorry. Ahem.
Back to fiction.Evil Hat also wants to avoid opening an easy way for small traders to profit from a reliable short. The market needs to stay unpredictable. Fake little recoveries prevent undercapitalized, naive shorts from profiting too much.
Meanwhile, my Dystopian Fiction Evil Hat's supervillain teams of Blackrock/Citadel quants with blackbox algorithms, $billions, and >100k BTC in starting inventory always keep money in motion. Evil Hat can ride this thing all the way down, while pushing it down - extracting dollars by shorting every mini-top that they cause by pumping in some dollars at a mini-bottom, then buying back the BTC in the crash that they themselves cause. Thus, "they" will always wind up with both more dollars (which "they" created anyway; but "they" must prevent the value from escaping to others), and more BTC (which "they" want to devalue altogether).
B. Knock Tether off its peg. Maybe "they" already tried, a few weeks ago when USDT dipped under $0.95 very briefly. Tether people are not Terra! They are smart, they have backing funds, and they know they must defend their peg. But if any weakness could be found in that peg... I do not want to FUD the Bitcoin market by discussing hypotheticals of what would happen if Tether suddenly died. Nor do I want to discuss what Evil Hat(TM) imagines Tether's potential weaknesses could be - what dirty tricks my dystopian nightmare supervillains could play to crack Tether.
C. Systematically annihilate the altcoin markets. A few thoughtless types of Bitcoiners would cheer for this. They would not pause to contemplate the fact that capital flows between Bitcoin and altcoins are
bidirectional - and in many circumstances, more capital flows towards Bitcoin than away from it. More to the point here, altcoins suck capital away from BTC during bull runs - blunting the stupidly wild blow-off top spikes we don't need anyway - but BTC sucks capital away from alts during crashes, and this helps to support the BTC price when it most needs support.
Among other effects - in summary - burning the altcoin markets to the ground would deprive Bitcoin leveraged longs of emergency capital reserves held in alts, thus worsening and deepening the BTC cascading liquidations.* And the altcoin markets are so much more vulnerable to begin with.
There is more to it - much more - but this is the wrong venue to write what is assuredly, indubitably, absolutely only a fictional tall tale, anyway. Let's leave it at this: As part of a comprehensive strategy to target Bitcoin, Evil Hat points to the weaker altcoin markets and says, "Strike here!"
(What do alts look like right now?)
D. Do Kwon. Whoops. Did I say "A, B, C"? That was a copypaste from a draft I wrote weeks ago while fictionally drunk, living in a real dystopian nightmare.
That was before Do Kwon decided to steal the money of
everyone who rushed in to defend Terra when it was on its deathbed - before he centrally commanded a contentious hardfork to suck value out of bagholders into his and his cronies' pockets, and executed the fork in 10 days from announcement to fork time (wtf!?!?!) - also before the evidence came out that seems to indicate that LFG
probably dumped its BTC to bail out a few insider-trading whales, then let the whole system collapse while everyone else took the hit. (I am cautious, when the dust has not yet settled. "What the hell did they really do with the BTC and its proceeds?" remains a question. But if they did what it looks like they probably did, then that means
I lost my BTC to liquidation in a market crash created by a swindler to protect his pals.
)
Do Kwon has done everything as wrongly as he can, to make bad into worse and kill any chance of an organic recovery. He has violated so many laws, openly and wantonly, it's amazing he is not in jail - things that would get you or me arrested in three seconds for $1000, he does in broad daylight for $billions, and
continues to do.
Mr eddie cypherpunk man, no, I am not crying "oh noes, call the police": I am wondering why when there are multiple high-level police investigations in multiple countries, he goes ahead and openly steals fantastic amounts of money. It's as if
nobody can stop him! And this is not only "crypto law" he is violating - let's start with "don't steal" and "don't commit fraud". I think it's bizarre. It sort of reminds me of Craig Wright. Is he untouchable? If CIA Gavin pops up his head from Ethland and solemnly swears he verified that Do Kwon is the real Satoshi Nakamoto, I will
shit a brick not be surprised - nothing surprises me anymore - it is all so surreal, it feels to the observer like Alice in Nightmareland.
Evil Hat(TM) has some wild thoughts for its dystopian fictional nightmare. If Evil Hat(TM)
really wanted to destroy all Bitcoin, all cryptocurrency, all concept of
permissionless money, then Evil Hat(TM) imagines creating a character
just like Do Kwon as a gift to Janet Yellen.
Disaster made to order. Preplanned from AtoZ. Create Terra as a Judas Goat for permissionless-money idealists, then use it as a lever to destroy
all permissionless money. Prime target:
Bitcoin.You know that tweet where Do Kwon explicitly invited billionaires to attack the UST peg? In my dystopian fiction, he really
was asking for it! It was a public joke played out between insiders in a grand plan, muahahaha!
Make the public hate all "crypto" except USDC, love the dollar, beg for regulations and laws and massive crackdowns. Do Kwon is doing a
perfect job for that. Oh fork, am I talking fiction or reality?
And now, I will make Evil Hat(TM) STFU because it's beginning to rant like a real LUNAtic. Even fiction needs to be plausible - to keep the reader's suspension of disbelief. LOL. Forget everything I just said. It's too strange for fiction.
In reality, of course, it's entirely possible that Do Kwon is merely driven by a combination of greed and stupidity to do exactly absolutely everything that makes the public case for Yellen, et al.
(NOTE:
I will always stand up for the principles that I expressed in my prior post about Terra. They are the principles that Do Kwon betrayed when he decided to hardfork what turns out to be a ridiculously centralized blockchain, openly renounce the obligations of the UST peg, rip off everyone who most believed in Terra at its worst moment, and play some of the worst possible shitcoin shellgames to divert value according to his own wishes.)
This list could be continued a bit - probably to around X, Y, Z. But I need to think, and exercise some discretion; my Evil Hat is too scary.
* death_wish removes his Evil Hat, and shivers.
These are not new thoughts. For years, I have
expected a large-scale economic attack on Bitcoin.
For years, I was proud to hold BTC only in my own wallet.
For months, I have been pathetically wailing to myself:
Why, why, why
did I play with margin!?For the past few weeks, I have been adding:
And why
did it have to be now!? I immediately apperceived this as an economic attack on May 5, when the BTC chart started to look weird as hell - May 5, right after the big Fed meeting - May 5, when Terra still looked healthy. From May 5 until Terra started imploding, the BTC chart looked... unnatural to me. After the initial spectacular crash, it spent days moving down in neat increments - cleanly and inexorably as if an autistic bear with OCD had total, absolute dictatorial control of the BTC price.
Now, unless I want to live up to my username, I should desist from telling tales of WOe, and go back to that "surviving" thing. Maybe a few little posts first - other random things I noticed.
* Relevant disclosure: I am still in a situation where my remaining fraction of a BTC is at high risk - and I can't even pay off debt to free it, because my remaining scraps of alts are so low. If I were to try, I would risk being left flat broke with zero. And yes, even though >99.9% of alts give the rest a bad name, I even like some altcoins. BTC is #1 - my first love, and the greatest because it is the freest, most decentralized, most secure. That's why I sacrificed almost everything else struggling to save my BTC! That is why, over the years, I have sucked plenty of capital out of altcoin markets to take profits in BTC. But I do not need anyone's permission to have other money; and I am not interested in the types of arguments that come off like a jealous girlfriend throwing a hissy fit.
P.S., apropos nothing, fork Solana - fork it with a big red candlestick! It brings some some good tech ideas, and puts them in service of extreme corruption.
Poll
