It is also amazing to see that CZ managed to walk away free of any jail time, kept most of his assets gathered by his con job.

Govt collects a big crypto fine, fine makes the big losers in FTX whole, problem solved.

CZ should have just bought FTX and closed the deal and made people whole, woulda saved himself some drama.

Only at the “modelling a cow as a perfectly thermoconducting sphere” level of analysis.

Actual damages and preliminary injunctions to preserve a situation remediable by damages are about that, other parts of what happens in civil cases are often not. E.g., punitive damages are, as the name suggests, punitive, not compensatory.

There's so many people who Trump and his various enterprises left stuck with sometimes very huge bills that it's a miracle he didn't get dinged years ago. And that is why Trump is being on the receiving end of the stick at the moment... he forgot one crucial point: never make too many enemies in life because eventually they will team up to get their revenge on you.

[1] https://eu.northjersey.com/story/news/columnists/mike-kelly/...

[2] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/0...

In US, you can be rich and get away with a lot of crime and crookedness.

If Trump does go to prison, that will make quite the news.

Putin and Xinping will be laughing because they have such a strong hold on their countries, them going to jail is unthinkable.

I think that (sadly) the key distinction in the American justice system has to do with how easily it is to justify your prosecution to the public. If you're wildly popular, you're probably able to get away with quite a lot. If you're wildly unpopular, it's probably pretty easy to get a conviction on any number of things.

Justice, in its broadest sense, is the concept that individuals are to be treated in a manner that is equitable and fair. A society in which justice has been achieved would be one in which individuals receive what they "deserve"

So, what do they deserve? It's up to a panel of peers to determine. Peers, mind you, that are representative of the society you live in.

So in a sense, public outcry and court of public opinion can sway personal opinions on what is just and fair and determine what people deserve. I find the entire system malleable and ripe for corruption.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170710014221/https://www.washi...

But he would do livestreams where he said anyone without insurance or that had insurance that wouldn’t cover it could DM him and he would take care of it for them. One of my online friends was able to get the medication this way.

I actually can't believe he didn't get jail time given the severity of what was uncovered.

https://archive.is/Q8uu3

Could we make a connection about Binance, and now Kraken prosecution with what happened after 9/11 where US pressed countries such as Switzerland to remove bank secrets? [1]

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/24/swiss-claim-the-us-banking-c....

Pretty much every major marketing push and normalized on social media (Including NFTs and influencer Culture) ends up being a massive scam.

It worries me that no one sees the trend and holds social companies & people involved properly accountable for this form of crowdsourced theft.

Is this conjecture?

most people criticize fines as a mere check for the offender belonging to some moneyed elite and nothing else.

fines are not replacement for civil law. if anyone think they were wronged, that's the only way. not a magically proactive government becoming their patents.

It was far cheaper for CZ to pay the $4.3B fine.

Sounds like kicking the can down the road to me. That won't end well.

SBF commits fraud and loses $8b, CZ pleads guilty and pays $4.3B fine and loses access to US market. I don't know why so many people think the crypto space is legit and this is just a temporary setback.

Otherwise somebody else will be left "holding the bag" eventually (and it will be a larger bag).

I might be old-fashioned but these fines and charges, to be clear, are for ACTUAL wrong-doing, you know, MONEY LAUNDERING. That's greedy-bad-guy stuff. It's not arbitrary or simply a matter of "avoiding drama".

TL;DR: they might have assets but they were and are still "awful financially"

"It's only when the tide goes out that you see who's swimming naked". The tide was going out even without CZ's actions. And FTX was swimming naked to the bone.

Here's a recent article

https://cryptoslate.com/reclusive-binance-co-founder-yi-he-s...

And all countries strong enough with their own fiat do care quite a lot to not having crypto in their country

One misstep and you wish you could be prosecuted in US instead.

Not a hater, just processing the dichotomy of his genius image with his ingeniously ungenius self-immolation.

Lesson: Looking like you make lots of money makes you look very smart.

He's essentially getting off with a slap on the wrist, 50m is nothing given his wealth. The fines against the company are also a pittance compared to Binance's annual revenue.

The moral for white collar criminals is: if you get caught, just cooperate and pay up, and live up crime another day. The cost of the fines is trivial.

Some Middle Eastern countries have extradition treaties with the US, but, more relevantly, a number of countries have legal extradition processes not dependent on treaties, including the UAE, the country where he lives.

He lives in Dubai, within one of the US's closest allies in the region. I'd be worried.

Dubai has a lot to lose by damaging its reputation as a safe haven for wealthy exiles. My 2c.

They have even more to lose by creating an image of criminal safe-haven.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-10/uae-ramps...

They're also further inviting every country they've ever had a customer in to levy huge fines against Binance.

The US has recently (gradually over the past 20 years or so) started to really weaponize access to dollar-denominated accounts, essentially conscripting all the banks that want to do business with American banks into service of American foreign policy goals. This started in the aftermath of September 11th, for terrorism, then spread with the Magnitsky act of 2012 to include international corruption, and has slowly spread to more and more areas. So far the US has been somewhat judicious about using the tool- they seem to be aware that if they use it too often people will eventually just build ways around it- but it is a pretty big threat to wield against a company that absolutely needs to do business with somebody's banks.

all usd swift wires get routed through 2 of the major banks - think it was JP Morgan Chase & Wells Fargo. this allows them to check all of these transfers for aml/cft and other sanctions blacklists.

heard this from a guy who works closely with Tether so i'm sure he'd know well

However when you're talking about billions, it's difficult to keep them in anything but US treasuries.

If you were him, why would you lose ~20% of your customers when you could just pay a fine and keep going? Sure he steps down, but he still owns the company.

Looking forward to reading the Plea Agreement.

SEC investigations address both aspects, when it gets past investigation to litigation, they do civil litigation themselves and refer to DOJ for potential criminal prosecution.

Lol. Tether imploding anyone?

The name implies they are stable, what more could anyone want?

What, is the giant ticking timebomb of the USDT money printer not likely to 'negatively affect the industry'?

It's the perfect finetuned and still optimized PoS system.

https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/trading-investing/b...

That matters because cryptocurrencies don’t help at all with the inflation consumers are seeing, while adding more personal risk and an exchange rate to arbitrage.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/REAINTRATREARAT10Y

They poured scorn then, but I'm up to my eyeballs in bagpipes now

It's odd how clear the picture is but how many people have been fooled by fakes. What other industry is 99% scams and only 1% legitimate?

Also, except maybe for purely digital there will be "on-off ramps" anyway, except it will be for real goods instead of fiat currency. The government can ban you from paying the gardener or buying milk with XMR.

[1] And 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, ...

I'd be very happy if Monero somehow turned into the stable coin of crypto. It could just hover around $150-$200 forever.

Why would anyone bother with Bitcoin?

If you want to avoid financial regulations in transmitting value across borders or purchase black market goods and services, you're going to be caught since all/most Bitcoin is KYCd and impossible to keep private, unlike Monero.

If you want to avoid transaction fees, you're SOL since it's at $10 right now versus $0.06 for Monero.

If you want a store of value, it's poor because it's volatile, not backed, and theft is not reversible, unlike virtually any other regulated security.

If you want to make legal purchases with it, any transaction costs $10 and can take hours or days, and is not reversible if you are defrauded, unlike USD.

Bitcoin has no value proposition beyond being a speculative asset and a Ponzi scheme for early buyers.

- Unlike Bitcoin, Monero's monetary issuance is not auditable, which could prove a major problem in case of an attack, potentially leading to inflation.

- Monero faces blockchain bloat issues due to its ring signatures. It cannot scale gracefully.

- Privacy and transaction cost concerns with Bitcoin have largely been addressed by Lightning and potentially other upcoming layer 2 solutions. A lot of work is being done here. If you are technologically inclined, you can also participate: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/20...

- KYC happens on exchanges. Buy your BTC on decentralized platforms like Bisq or RoboSats and be done with KYC.

- A private-only ledger can pose challenges when transaction notarization is necessary. Bitcoin lets you choose between a private L2 transaction or a public blockchain transaction.

That said, I love Monero and am glad it exists.

I'm not sure you've used Bisq or RoboSats if you think they're good replacements for exchanges. Barely anyone is online at a given time.

Yes, it still has some rough edges but it's now mostly usable. https://medium.com/coinmonks/lightning-network-2018-to-2023-...

Besides, about 80% of transactions within exchanges are actually off-chain, so this is nothing new.

But the whole thing is a distraction anyway. The majority of transactions happening off-chain means that Bitcoin is an utter failure at everything it ever set out to accomplish.

The press has tricked you into believing every coin aside from a few popular ones are scams. Dig deeper.

If I dig deeper, and determine that is a scam, well, I am just looking at the wrong one.

If I dig deeper, and decide that it's not, and then get burned later, I should have done more due diligence.

'Digging deeper' in a minefield is, generally speaking, not great advice.

If you believe everything is a 'shitcoin' and you want to hold them forever then on your death bed you can look at the value and determine if it really was a shitcoin or if the media made me think everything was a shitcoin.

“FTX and Binance are not examples of true crypto!”

“Soviet Union and Venezuela are not examples of true communism!”

The Bolsheviks were a minority, but controlled key elements of the army. After months of civil unrest and violence, they staged an armed coup.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism_in_20_years

So for a while there was an actual date attached to the constitutional goal.

I believe the deadline was quietly buried by his stagnation-oriented successors, but I’m not sure.

you don't have be a believer in either to understand that objectively

Basically: buy cheap BTCs, print shitload of tethers, sell BTCs for real USD to the tune of tens of billions and now store these real USD in short term US treasuries (they don't own chinese treasuries anymore) bringing in 5% and more.

They're claiming they now have excess money (!) to back their tether due to the fact that they collect 5% or more of interest on the short-term treasuries they have.

Put it this way: even if they printed $40bn out of their arses out of $80bn of tether, the $40bn of actual USD they'd have would still net them $2bn a year in interest. That'd still be a big hole but...

What if they printed "only" 10 bn out of thin air out of 80 bn: they'd have near 70 bn bringing in 3.5 bn yearly at the moment.

They don't give any of the interest back to USDT (tether) holders.

So if they printed "only" 10 bn out of their arses, in less than three years they'd have these 10 bn for real on interest alone.

It's still criminal (I guess) but it may not be "0% of tether are backed".

People have tried to run the maths on how much money entered the cryptocurrency world (with Coinbase giving a huge hint).

Centre (Circle+Coinbase) has really $24 bn backing their USDC coin (they publish the individual US short term treasuries bill number).

USDT (tether) is much older than USDC.

Did they cheat? Most certainly.

Did they "fake it 'till they made it", helped, by sheer luck, by interest rates going like crazy?

I think it's possible.

1. Make Tethers out of thin air and sell for BTC

2. BTC price goes up because crypto boom

3. Sell enough BTC for USD to back the fake Tethers you made up in step 1

4. Balance sheet now looks legit, and you even have BTC to spare to buy yachts for everyone.

Coinmarket cap shows the USDT market cap going up by about $2 billion during that weekend, but it's not clear if they were using this strategy. (which would have profited ~1-10% of that figure).

[1] or, depending on how much risk they wanted to take, traded them for USDC and DAI! Those were trading for as little as $0.90.

Why else would the US allow the largest counterfeit money printer to continue for long?

Incompetence.

Are you taking about tether or the fed?

Somehow I doubt that. That would mean someone invested this in a save and independent way with enough return to keep it inflation save and apparently has no other idea on how to invest that even more magical.

How is tether really pegged safely?

Others would like to buy it via retirement plans and having an ETF makes this doable.

Those that want to hold BTC incase the US dollar collapses will hodl their own BTC.

Those that want to hold BTC incase it really appreciates will hold it via an ETF in a tax advantaged account so they don't have to pay taxes on their gains, depending on the account type.

Many financial institutions do not care about decentralization, but they do care about investing in an asset where they do not have to worry about managing the asset (in that regard, similar to REITs). Having the asset insured against various types of malfeasance is also a requirement for investments by many institutional funds.

Commodities are similar. People might invest in pork bellies even if they don't personally eat bacon.

But now the speculators have taken over, and all that really matters is what BTC is worth in dollars.

Also, CZ (pleads guilty to money laundering charges): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38366729

I'm not super savvy with money but why would anybody buy an ETF and pay their fees when the assets in the ETF don't grow or give dividends? How will they secure those assets? Cold wallet in a vault? What happens if they do their audit and the backing coins aren't there (stolen) or there's a hardware failure on the cold wallet?

The interesting ETF will be for Ethereum because a custodian can possibly stake it and earn yield. ETH can earn within the basic protocol.

Nothing you listed applies to bitcoin besides remote theft. The whole point of a blockchain is be fault tolerant in the face of those real failures. Remote theft occurs from a failure to secure your private keys. That’s human error and will be resolved in the same way as gold with… custodians aka a bank.