I'm a reporter at The Wall Street Journal and I'm reaching out on this forum in hopes of finding sources who may have concerns when it comes to consumer protections for Bitcoin users -- I'm especially looking for people in the U.S. who may have lost money/felt scammed and are willing to share their story, as well as Bitcoin users who may want to comment on the recent push by some regulators who say there should be protections in place to safeguard consumers -- is this a good idea? Why or why not? Please feel free to email me directly at
Stephanie.Armour@wsj.com.
write a story about Sean's Outpost or bitcoin100.org or the economy springing up around bitcoin, the possible innovations, or the good bitcoin is now, and may possibly be doing for people going forward? ya know, include some of the positive aspects as well?
nooooo, please tell me your horror stories so I can write about that in the WSJ.
I see that you are a consumer regulation reporter so possibly those sorts of topics are not within your scope/mission. Ok, maybe to frame it out for proper perspective pertaining to regulation of financial instruments or institutions, you could write a story including how Chase, Citi, Fannie and Freddie et al got too greedy for their own good and destroyed the entire global economy in the process. Millions of people lost their jobs and their homes as a result of what may have legitimately been the biggest scam in the history of the world. Nobody seems all that interested in regulating those people.
Bitcoin is consumer protection from the same people that were responsible for that entire thing, as anything that in any way chips away at their monopolies is beneficial to the consumer at this point. A few nickels here and there scammed in bitcoin, relatively speaking, will never add up to what was lost/stolen in that debacle in either dollars or sheer scope of corruption. Writing about the need for regulating bitcoin while the 800lb gorilla is still feasting at the buffet seems a bit off target. If anything, bitcoin provides a bit of much-needed competition for those institutions, which are running roughshod over the entire economy.
Does anyone in their right mind think that these people running the show right now care about consumer protection? These too big to fail banks destroyed the economy and nobody went to jail and nobody is wringing their hands in Congress over the need to reign them in. To the contrary, they were handed billions in bailouts, without ramifications for the people behind it.
HSBC was laundering drug money by the millions/billions for some of the worst cartels in the western hemisphere and undoubtedly have blood on their hands as a result of that activity. Nobody went to jail for that either and, again, nobody who is in the position to do anything about it seems to care.
Meanwhile, big banks rack up record profits, with some of them having zero, ZERO, net negative trading sessions for large portions of the last year, as if that were in any possible without massive illegal manipulation; and the global economy is still in the waste-bin. JP Morgan lost money zero days last year andmade in excess of 200 million on some days. I'm sure nobody lost money to good ole JP while it was hoovering up the greenbacks, as if those dollars simply appeared from thin air and were not taken from consumers that got suckered into the hustle that is trading against high frequency algorithms, front-running and other insider trading schemes such as what is being seen in the FOREX markets right now.
The entire market is so corrupt that it is nearly impossible for anyone but these people to make money in it, and they rack up millions by shearing the suckers that think otherwise. Again, nothing but crickets on any portion of that.
I'm going to go out on a very sturdy limb and bet that nobody goes to jail over this FOREX mess either, and these people were manipulating the entire global currency market.
Clearly bitcoin is a clear and present danger, while JP Morgan, HSBC and all the others, are totally playing by the rules and not trampling the consumers one bit, even though their recent accomplishments include:
1. Crashing the housing market, taking the global economy down the tubes.
2. Laundering millions/billions in drug money.
3. Allegedly manipulating the entire global currency market.
Clearly bitcoin is the the number 1 threat to consumers in the financial sector.
It seems to me the banks would like to see it regulated it to kill off potential competition and not out of some altruistic desire to protect the consumer, and are therefore disingenuously pushing that agenda, which is getting pushed by their lobbyists and other avenues of influence to the front of the line.
I've been one of the people on this forum actually arguing for some reasonable regulation that does not hamper the growth of this industry, and have been getting shot up pretty good for advocating that, but this to me looks like a hatchet job in progress. Maybe I'm wrong and, if so, possibly you can clarify what sort of research you're actually doing beyond soliciting horror stories from consumers to cite as support for what seems to be a predisposed position.
