The continuing calamitous crypto currencies crash of 2022

Your crypto purchase bought me another
bottle of champagne for my asshole!

Just think!  Every Bitcoin you bought at the end of 2021 lost you $50,000 USD.

Hey you!  Yeah, you!  Join the 21st century!  Get out of the Stone Age!  Money isn't rocks!  Crypto comes from computers!  Real Money is 1s & 0s.  Give us that worthless fiat currency and we'll give you these digital tokens!  Trust Us!  Crypto isn't some Scam!

Of course, when you realize that Crypto Currency is a massive scam and that the creators of the scam made the money then you realize the goal isn't to create the Block Chain or create Non-Fiat Currency or Democratize Banking or The Digital Currency Utopia but to swindle hard-working but, financially immature or novice investors of their Real Money then you understand that a BitCON Artist actually made that $50,000 USD.

Every cryptocurrency is a scam to transfer money to thieves from hardworking people.  Yes, some individuals may have successfully rolled the dice in the crypto market over the past 5 years and made a small fortune for themselves (doubtfully over $1,000,000) but, in the aggregate a lot of innocent, inexperienced, or foolish people invested money they could not afford to lose... and... lost it.

The FTX Sam Bankman-Fried scandal is merely the latest biggest of the crypto scams not the only one.  Bankman-Fried took the real money he was swindling from people and used it to buy real assets, cases of $10,000-a-bottle champagne, multi-million dollar ocean-front Bahama properties, politicians...  And then everyone involved in FTX was getting high and fucking each other as they swindled and screwed people out of their life-savings.  And then $30,000,000,000 was gone.  Straight up embezzlement.

In July, 2022 Three Arrows Capital collapsed in a spectacular flame out of, at the time, the biggest crypt scam as the two founders Su Zhu and Kyle Davies vanished leaving the $150,000,000 superyacht Much Wow, in dry dock in the Italian port of La Speiza.  The fallout from Three Arrows Capital Ponzi scheme affected numerous other companies,

Crypto companies from New York to Singapore were the direct victims of Three Arrows. Voyager Digital, a publicly traded crypto exchange based in New York that once had a multibillion-dollar valuation, filed for Chapter 11 in July, reporting that Three Arrows owed it more than $650 million. Genesis Global Trading, headquartered on Park Avenue, had lent Three Arrows $2.3 billion. Blockchain.com, an early crypto company that provided digital wallets and evolved into a major exchange, faces $270 million in unpaid loans from 3AC and has laid off a quarter of its staff. 

Among crypto’s smartest observers, there is a widely held view that Three Arrows is meaningfully responsible for the larger crypto crash of 2022, as market chaos and forced selling sent bitcoin and other digital assets plunging 70 percent or more, erasing more than a trillion dollars in value.

Fortunately, the owner of a Crypto Currency Company 100% on the Up-and-Up determined that Three Arrows was almost uniquely responsible for Crypto's Woes in July 2022, 

Sam Bankman-Fried, who as CEO of FTX, a major crypto exchange that has bailed out some of the bankrupt lenders, has perhaps more visibility on the problems than anyone.

“I suspect they might be 80 percent of the total original contagion. They weren’t the only people who blew out, but they did it way bigger than anyone else did. And they had way more trust from the ecosystem prior to that.”  

 I wonder what ever happened to that guy Sam who said the above quote? 

The long NYMag Intelligencer talks about how for a decade the Two Thieves at Three Arrows tried to break into the world of High Finance but were unable to and remained small time, until Crypto came along and they convinced almost everyone their schemes were genius.  And then billions of dollars were gone and so were the two thieves of Three Arrows.

In June 2021, Kim Kardashian took her giant oiled ass to Instagram and told her millions of followers to invest in Ethereummax and the EMAX cryptocurrency.  Kardashian and several other celebrities were paid icky fiat currency to hype Ethereummax.  6 months later EMAX had lost 97% of its' "value" and, once again real people lost real money they couldn't afford to lose.  But, the Kardashian Klan monetized themselves again for icky fiat currency and after paying a small fine to the SEC for failing to disclose Kim was paid to tout the crypto went back to making more icky fiat currency.  And now Kim can luxuriate on her ass implants a little easier because a Class Action lawsuit against her was thrown out,

In his ruling, Judge Michael Fitzgerald of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California agreed that the lawsuit’s claims raised legitimate concerns about “celebrities’ ability to readily persuade millions of undiscerning followers to buy snake oil with unprecedented ease and reach.” However, he explained: While the law certainly places limits on those advertisers, it also expects investors to act reasonably before basing their bets on the zeitgeist of the moment.

Buyer beware indeed!  The "Zeitgeist of the Moment" is a nice turn of phrase to describe the latest get-rich-quick and Ponzi schemes thieves have invented to separate regular people from their hard-earned real money.

Laws and Governments are really behind and really underserving their citizens.  There are hundreds of laws on the books and thousands of police to catch the pickpocket but, woefully few resources and scant understanding available to police the lawlessness of the digital frontier.  And so every so often a 20 something year old "Genius" over-leverages his phony position and uses social media to hype the latest don't-miss-out-on-this-can't-miss Crypto! well... a bunch of people suffer but, that "genius" got to live it up on Other People's Money! And that, living the life on Other People's Money, has always been the dream and goal of all Ayn Randian / Qelon Musk Capitalists in America!

"I believe they and the estimated 40 million other Americans who have invested in cryptocurrency have been sold a bill of goods.  They have been lied to, in ways both big and small, by a once-seemingly mighty crypto industry whose entire existence in fact depends on misinformation, hype, and yes, fraud." - Ben McKenzie.

Bitcoin, Magic Beans, and Ponzi schemes

Bitcoin is a terrible commodity and borderline outright fraud.  Crypto, in toto, is a classic Ponzi Scheme.  Since I took that screenshot of the plummeting Bitcoin price it's gone down another $2000 while also fluctuating wildly.  In addition, there have been several other Crypto implosions and frauds exposing the volatile nature of Crypto, "Oops, Poor Again!" Changpeng Zhao.

I know some people who made "money" via Bitcoin a few years ago.  I always point out that when they speak about the Value of Bitcoin it's described in USD and not of the Crypto itself.  But, they also laud and describe Bitcoin as the harbinger of Utopia, as the panacea which will remove all the evils of globalist bankers and fiat currency and crime associated with money.  I've tried to point out the history for such loaded terms but, when you're a true believer and have made a "profit" from crypto it's trying to reason with an addict.  

As I said, I pointed out that the "profits" my coworkers have made aren't an intrinsic value associated with Bitcoin or Tezos or whichever magic beans they're hawking but, because they've "acquired" other peoples' money.  But, trying to point out that the money they made was other investors losing money doesn't register because The Blockchain can never fail, it can only be failed, as it were....  Of course, so many people have bought into the Rightwing framing that there is no such thing as society (weepy bigot Jordan B. Peterson told them so) so they have no duty to anyone else and besides people are dumb investors anyway (Buy High/Sell Low) so why shouldn't they profit from other peoples' mistakes.

So, trying to get my coworkers to understand that our job as police should be too safeguard society and a government's primary duty is to protect people from rapacious thieves stealing from the untrained, or unsophisticated investors, or the gullible instead falls on deaf ears.  

I seemingly can't get them to understand a group of unscrupulous Tech Bros have concocted a scheme to get people to invest real money while providing them digital chaff.  In my experience, Cops tend to be incredibly credulous about things while lauding themselves as having a fine tuned baloney detection kit.    Of course, we know the Crypto creators quickly transfer real money into their bank accounts.  It's the epitome of a Get Rich Quick Scheme;  Here's how to make money from nothing; gussied up with futuristic (and poorly understood) technobabble, don't worry you're definitely not the mark!

This is part & parcel of the pseudo-libertarian Ayn Randian belief in which everyone else is a mooch and a taker, while I am a great and noble and brilliant singular genius who would never be tossed into the charnel house when Government is done away with by the Powerful.

I don't look forward to these crypto rollercoaster rides because when it does go bust a lot of poor people and pensions are going to be swindled just like when the Bankers Housing Scam burst in 2007.  Of course, enough people have convinced themselves that they will be the last to get out and the other guy is going to be left holding the bag...

Apparently, Gotham's Finest Detective Ben McKenzie has quite an informed understanding of of the CryptoCon.

Twitter & Crypto

"The reason today's sale of Twitter is big news; the reason it could turn out to be a pivot point in our history..." all you need to know is conservatives are ecstatic about the sale as Tucked in dick Carlson explained on his racist agitprop show.

As everyone knows Elon Musk "bought" Twitter yesterday.  Twitter isn't essential or anything new.  Now, I don't know if Musk, the man who's taken credit for many things he hasn't done, used his leveraged Tesla holdings to make the purchase or spent worthless Cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency is a terrible terrible thing.  It's a computer solving puzzles and people declaring it's "MONEY!"  The way it makes actual money by it's holders and/or creators is to convince (scam/fool) people to invest real money when Crypto is high and then laughing as the Crypto craters.  Then those people "buy" it back and resell it when it goes up in "value" again.  Stealing old people's pensions and getting people who are too financially immature or unversed in risk/reward thinking.  Of course, the problem is on an individual level some people will end up with big windfalls, meanwhile society loses out because of the number of investors who make poor choices in the aggregate and the damage computers running 24/7 sucking in huge amounts of power and producing huge amounts of heat*.  But, one of the things which has emerged is the sheer hatred conservatives have for society writ large (a topic for another post). 

It's ironic the 21st Century Billionaires have made their money by manufacturing nothing.  It's all hype as the production is elsewhere.  As manufacturing jobs were sent away from the Nation so was any sense of Noblesse Oblige, obscenely rich men felt towards America and society in general.  Elon Musk's fanboys have always grossly exaggerated his actual contributions.  To be fair Tesla cars did fill a niche that the Big Automakers ignored or moved away from because of the non-stop lies and pressure from rightwingers or the to lucrative Chinese Market.  

But, what will Musk's purchase of Twitter mean?  The reason GETTR, GAB, or Trump Social fail is because there are no liberals on those platforms.  Sure conservatives love getting together to plot assassination attempts on Democratic Governors and Congresspersons but, the constant conservative circle jerk bores them after a while.  What they yearn to do is to insult and threaten Liberals.  To see their most hated enemies scared and upset.  To waste peoples' time.  To get you to engage with them.

Twitter is for the Fash.  So is Fashbook.  So is Youtube, which consistently and forcefully recommends rightwing lies and propaganda.  Techniques for monitoring assholes are far behind the assholes techniques for flooding the zone with shit.  So, Twitter may or may not descend fully into the fascist cesspit that so far it has barely avoided but, conservatives definitely believe their MAGA God will resume his Tweeting and that their violence and harassment of "The Left" shall be able to commence unbound and unimpeded.

Certainly, pyschos like Twitter's wrongest man Alex Berenson, fake physical and real terrorist Simone Gold and all-around loon Naomi Wolf expect to be reinstated to peddle Covid nonsense. Personally, I think Musk bought Twitter to keep people from saying mean (and true) things about him.  

*- The Bitcoin mining destroying towns is an eerie echo of past historical injustices and harbinger of future atrocities.  From Open Veins of Latin America, you can read about Potosi and the silver mines of the Cerro Rico, which consumed 8,000,000 souls in the rapacious pursuit of wealth.