Holy shit you are exaggerating.
Yes... when some of these services end up going belly up, we end up seeing that they had been swimming naked, but that does not mean that everyone operating an exchange or everyone involved in various kinds of bitcoin businesses are without ethics, morals and/or even engaging in the same kinds of fraud and/or misrepresentations and/or failures/refusals to employ sufficient and/adequate risk management.
Sure, I will give you some benefit of the doubt to speculate that there are more of some of the persons and exchanges playing loosey and goosey with customer funds and/or employed degenerate gambling strategies and engaging in self-dealing rather than mostly sound business practices who have so far NOT gotten caught with their pants down and they may have been able to get by so far, this time..
I agree with not everyone, but this not everyone can be 1 out of 1000 and 999 out of 1000 at the same time, more bad guys than nice guys can also mean 501 to 499 and again 999 to 1.
I will agree that engaging in crazy-ass degenerate gambling can become contagious when witnessing others doing it, and being rewarded by such behaviors.. so within those atmosphere's it can become quite extreme to the extent that what they are doing is known..., and when it comes crashing down, then it does become more known than it was.. and it becomes more obvious that we should have known about the extremely risky and degenerate gambling that had been going on, so sure there is ongoing lack of due diligence from a lot of folks and negligence and even thoughts from those who know some of it, that they will get out before the others.. which sometimes happens and sometimes does not.
I will still proclaim that even though there are extremes, we still have to be careful about painting everyone (or even a majority) as if they are all engaging in the same levels of extremes, or in the same levels of blissful ignorance or failures to employ adequate risk management strategies. Maybe we are not going to agree about how to quantify or to clarify and I am largely just quibbling with you about semantics more than anything.
So, we could look at the most known figures, the largest exchanges, and do a bit of superficial math, how many were genuinely in just for the money, how many ended up bankrupting their exchange with greed, and how many encountered "hacks" or "sudden death by natural causes" and the ones that did not do even once something that would make your blood boil.
Yes.. you do recognize the existence of variance. Great.
As I'm truly a good and nice guy and I'm also pretty fair when it comes to things like this
You could be worse.
I will admit. I will take care of the list with the PoS (not the protocol) and list every single scammer, liar, fraudster and you can have the angelic figures. We can start as soon as I figured out how much free space bitcointalk has on its server
Sure, the list is long even including the variance... the good guy scammers and some of the innocent scammers... although we might not agree in which pigeon hole to put each one.
I agree with you also that there may well be a decent amount of futility of going through all the various scammers, even though there are people who dedicate a lot of time in the creation of such indexes.. even with descriptors regarding known direct evidence and inferred facts/logic.
And sometimes there could be a bit of a slippery slope in which they seem to start out as angelic but then somehow fall into a gambling trap... that ends up becoming more and more degenerate... whether they had such evil in them from the start or not.
Coinbase surely seems like one of them. and maybe it is a matter of degree too, that some of the ones engaging in risky behavior will have had learned to clean up their shit a bit so that they do not end up going bankrupt.. become more responsible.
Responsible? No, even with the first quarter decline they still pushed and bet on NFTs and all other hype products and here are the result of those actions, fresh report:
https://s27.q4cdn.com/397450999/files/doc_financials/2022/q2/Q2-2022-Shareholder-Letter.pdfTL;DR
Coinbase reported a $1.1 billion net loss, compared with $1.59 billion in net income in the same quarter last year,
Even though it seems that I agree with you that the progression of dumb and degenerate gambling does seem to get worse and worse, I am still not going to presume the outcome of a downfall due to such ongoing degeneracy to be inevitable, and sure Blackrock brings both capital to the scene but also a lot more skills/techniques in terms of using other people's money for degenerative corporate profits... that may well bite both of them in the ass - who knows?... sure Blackrock is likely NOT going to be whipping Coinbase into shape, but such infusion of capital may well facilitate a longer life to Coinbase and changes in the way that they are gambling with the funds of their customers - perhaps even bringing some greater skills in terms of which of them are allowed to gamble and how they are allowed to gamble.
My tentative theory is that Cotton (and perhaps others) were using the exchanges as ways to launder money, so it is probably not accurate to call it losses, even though technically there were losses involved.. in other words, Cotton was NOT likely so innocent as to have had been gambling with customer funds to try to get the money back, but instead just using those techniques as ways to get money to himself and/or to anyone who he was sharing with.
Hmm, it would have been a complicated thing, if you use something to launder money you don't lose things, casinos that are used for money laundering don't go bankrupt like this, and neither are all those restaurant chains or even small businesses when local mobsters launder their extortion revenues. If he would have mainly done so then it would have made little sense to tap the customer funds, and I think that when you launder money you're looking at keeping a low profile, so why embezzle all this and make yourself a target for the police for a whole new truckload of reasons? Also, if those losses would be coming from money laundering do you think anyone would file reports for that?
Maybe I am using the "money laundering" term differently from you? And I had not thought about this for years, so I might be forgetting some of the details, but what I am trying to say is that if Cotton took $100 million in customer funds and made it look like he was trading such funds because he created like 1,000 accounts in various exchanges, then there may well have been other accounts that were his that were able to profit from such known trades.. so he could have known that he was going to dump $100k in Novocoin, and since that market is so illiquid, he could have other accounts (that are not known to be his) playing the other side of those trades and making a lot of money... so in the end, if he ends up making $10million from the $100 million from which he started, that $10million may well NOT be known because those were other accounts that were controlled by other identities (of his)...
I am not claiming to know any details of how to do it exactly..but I know some scammers do those kind of more sophisticated things
And if we go further down the theory with the money laundering, on one side his "death" starts making sense as he wash probably eliminated but the cause could only have been by him again putting his full fist in the honey jar and trying to compensate his friends by robbing his customers till there was nothing left to rob.
Too complicated, and we have way to little info to speculate further than this anyway!
Sure.. some things might have been part of a plot and some things might have unravelled in directions that they had not expected, and it is possible that Cotton and one or two of his partners might have been planning to exit in a certain kind of way.. but then one of the partners double crossed the other, and maybe Cotton still ended up dead but not based on what he had thought was the original plan.. and surely like you suggest a lot of variations of what could have had happened because there does not seem to be enough evidence (at least not so far).. .. and it also could be that certain witnesses have evidence that will never be known because either they have gone to the grave or they know that there is no one else that knows some information that they know.. but the release of such information is not good for them.. and might never be good for them (on their deathbed will they speak? perhaps? but maybe not)..
