BitCoin: "The Most Dangerous Project We've Ever Seen"

Steal Your Face · Jul 22, 2022

Tuckerfan said: ↑

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Tuckerfan · Jul 22, 2022

Blockchain.com Says Goodbye to 25% of Staff, Closes Argentina Office

Tuckerfan · Jul 30, 2022

Cryptolender goes bust.

Crumbling Tower of 'Babel' Traded $280 Million of Users’ Crypto, Lost It All

Babel Finance, the Hong Kong-based crypto lender, apparently had other designs when its worldwide user base handed over their crypto to the company than just borrowing and lending. It seems to have been doing what everyone else does with crypto, rapidly speculating and trying to make “line go up.” Of course, all that changed when the line no longer went up.

The Block reported based on restructuring proposal documents that Babel Finance had lost 8,000 bitcoin and 56,000 ether in June, worth close to $280 million, though of course the price is constantly fluctuating. The company had apparently been conducting proprietary trading with customers’ funds. It remains unclear based on reporting if users were/are aware their crypto was/is being used in this way. The company has not put out any formal statement about the issue, and did not immediately respond to Gizmodo’s request for comment through the main company email.

The documents were reportedly dated for July but they detail the company’s losses last month when it suffered liquidation due to the crypto bear market in June. According to the report, Bitcoin’s fall to $20,000 “chalked up significant losses” leading to the liquidation of multiple trading accounts, taking the thousands of crypto with it. Last month, the company halted withdrawals on its platform, around the same time all this was going down, describing “major fluctuations” in the market.

The restructuring proposal deck further described a “single point of failure” with their propriety trading team, basically throwing the workers under the bus for operating “outside the company’s normal business, which has otherwise been running smoothly.” However, the company’s attempts at speculation in the crypto market drastically failed with the overall market downturn. The company apparently did not think to hedge their bets on these accounts, and their trading operations weren’t even recorded in their internal system.

The company essentially acts as a “bank” for crypto, with savings and lending services, though of course any company worth their salt in the crypto-sphere avoids the connotation of “bank” whenever possible. Babel promotes several services including its lending and borrowing arm, asset management, and some crypto mining.

But despite the company’s finger pointing, Babel has been shown to be fast and loose with user funds in the past. Back in 2020, CoinDesk reported based on leaked private conversations between co-founder Del Wang and another, unknown person that the company was leveraging user funds, and that some of those activities had blown up in their face during a market crash.

The company later wrote that during that so-called “Black Friday crash” that they had started to gradually “increase hedge position through options.”

Babel’s point of failure has not just been hurting itself, but other exchanges that had been working alongside it. Friday reports showed the Thailand-based exchange Zipmex filed for bankruptcy protection, saying it had around $48 million invested in Babel and another $5 million in fellow failed crypto trading platform Celsius.

Babel does have a plan to restructure after all this mess, with plans to convert $150 million of creditors’ debt into bonds, then raise more in investments. The company has previously shown a $2 billion valuation thanks to institutional investors, so who’s to say how this will all shake out?
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Tuckerfan · Aug 19, 2022

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are crashing, sending Coinbase stock down, too

MikeH92467 · Aug 19, 2022

This is from David Marchant who publishes "Offshore Alert" a newsletter dedicated to exposing the dirty secrets of money laundering hotspots, particularly in the Caribbean. He is a really hard-nosed, hard-assed, pull no punches type. He's kind of like what the WikiLeaks crowd would like to believe they are. Anyway, this is from a Linked In post he recently made and it certainly resonates with me. (Doesn't mean either of us is right, but at least I'm not alone in thinking this way)
The price of Bitcoin will eventually go to zero or close to zero. It seems to serve no purpose other than to allow people to easily engage in unlicensed gambling (in a rigged market, no less). Crypto simply taps into an unshakeable belief that many people have that there's something out there that's guaranteed to make them wealthy without doing any work, assuming any risk, or having any skill or expertise. This is more-or-less the basis for every scam I've ever exposed. There's no financial product that has ever met, or will ever meet, this criteria.

shootER · Aug 20, 2022

Tuckerfan · Aug 20, 2022

shootER said: ↑

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And if there's any justice in the universe, once the judge is finished, dude'll be lucky to be living in a van down by the river.

matthunter · Aug 20, 2022

Tuckerfan said: ↑

And if there's any justice in the universe, once the judge is finished, dude'll be lucky to be living in a van down by the river.
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The way rent is these days, a van down by the river is considered upmarket.

Steal Your Face · Aug 21, 2022

matthunter said: ↑

Tuckerfan said: ↑

And if there's any justice in the universe, once the judge is finished, dude'll be lucky to be living in a van down by the river.
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The way rent is these days, a van down by the river is considered upmarket.
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After the past couple of years and the unstable future that’s coming, a van down by the river is sounding pretty good to me.

Tuckerfan · Aug 22, 2022

Tuckerfan · Aug 29, 2022

NFT market place Open Sea is basically dead. https://fortune.com/2022/08/29/nfts-opensea-crypto-winter-bubble-blockchain-web3/

Tuckerfan · Aug 31, 2022

Crypto.com takes months to figure out it sent someone $10 million by mistake.

shootER · Sep 3, 2022

Tuckerfan · Sep 9, 2022

The Bitcoin of Christ.

Tuckerfan · Sep 29, 2022

NFT Sales Have Lost Nearly All Their Allure

Tuckerfan · Oct 12, 2022

Did CNN Just Rugpull Its NFT Store?

TL;DR version: CNN's lost all interest in NFTs and has shafted people who paid for them.

Tuckerfan · Oct 14, 2022

matthunter · Oct 14, 2022

The fact a man with that face - a face that says "evolution wasted its fucking time on us" - had $623K to spend on a JPG is why the cockroaches deserve their turn.

Tuckerfan · Oct 24, 2022

This seems like a bad sign.

Freeway, Crypto Platform That Promised 43% Returns, Halts Withdrawals

Freeway, a UK-based crypto platform that promised annual returns up to a mind-boggling 43%, halted withdrawals on Sunday, according to a notice published to the company’s website. Freeway’s native cryptocurrency, which goes by the ticker FWT, plummeted 74% following the announcement and, to top it all off, the Freeway website appears to be scrubbing the names and photos of some executives.

Upset users have taken to the community Telegram channel for Freeway, expressing frustration that they can’t access their accounts. People who told friends and family members to invest in the platform seemed the most angry, based on comments viewed by Gizmodo early Monday.

The news, first reported by the crypto-watcher Twitter account FatManTerra, comes in the wake of other high-profile collapses in the crypto space this year, including Celsius, which has filed for bankruptcy. FatManTerra tweeted on Saturday that they believed Freeway was a Ponzi scheme which would likely collapse by this time next year.

Well, apparently we didn’t have to wait a whole year for things to collapse. It seems to have happened in just a day, as Freeway’s website includes a varied assortment of confusing terms to explain that users can no longer access their money. And it sounds a lot like what Celsius said after it announced it was halting withdrawals back in June.

“As all of you will be aware, there has been unprecedented volatility in Foreign Exchange and Cryptocurrency markets in recent times,” the note on Freeway’s website says.

“Freeway has therefore decided to diversify its asset base to manage exposure to future market fluctuations and volatility ensuring the long term sustainability and profitability of the Freeway Ecosystem. This will allow Freeway to maintain the highest level of Supercharger simulation rewards,” the note continues.

What the hell are Supercharger simulation rewards? A YouTube video titled “Freeway Superchargers Explained,” demonstrates how users can earn an incredible rate of return by giving Freeway money—from 10% for buying the native token to as high as 43% in staking returns. But it’s not clear how giving Freeway this currency actually yielded such an incredible profit for users. Oddly enough, users could also “stake” gold, earning a return. It’s also not clear how that was supposed to work.

Freeway has processed roughly $160 million in value, according to its website, though that claim couldn’t be independently verified. There’s nothing on the website that explains how any kind of service was offered by Freeway beyond turning crypto into more crypto. And while it might sound great to just get paid a ton of money for doing nothing, that’s not typically how any real value is created in the world.

“We built it to create benefits and rewards for people and I want to see those people benefit and rewarded for it,” Graham Doggart, one of Freeway’s founders, said in a typical explanation from a video posted to the company’s YouTube channel.

Despite publishing dozens of videos on YouTube, each Freeway explanation seems to speak about the platform as some kind of great money-generating machine without actually explaining the mechanism that allows it to work. And incredibly, it doesn’t seem to matter if the crypto market more broadly is doing well or doing poorly, you’re always going to be making money, according to the promotional videos from Freeway.

“It doesn’t matter if the market’s going up or down, you’re always getting a little bit more of what we already have,” Matt Spangard, CTO of Freeway, said in a video from July 12, 2021.

“The market takes a dip, when it goes back up, you’ve got more than you started, so you’re way better off than if it was in a traditional account somewhere or even offline,” Spangard continued.

The Freeway execs call it “social finance,” which is described in similarly opaque terms.

“Social finance is a concept where money, or finance, is being executed in a way that benefits all the people that are connected to it,” Sadie Hutton, founder and co-CEO, said in a YouTube video without elaborating on what the hell that means.

One of Freeway’s claims to fame was winning an award for “Staking Platform of the Year 2022" at a conference called AIBC Asia in Dubai, where it was up against companies that included Celsius, according to a video published to Vimeo featuring a man named Martyn Richard, dubbed Chief Brand Officer.

The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine shows that eight people used to be listed on the company’s homepage as of last month. The site lists Sadie Hutton as founder and co-CEO, Graham Doggart as founder and co-CEO, as well as Peter Neilson as founder and Director, along with plenty of others. But the Freeway website currently doesn’t list anyone as being attached to the project.
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NAHTMMM · Oct 25, 2022

Oddly enough, users could also “stake” gold, earning a return. It’s also not clear how that was supposed to work.
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Anyone who can't keep vampires and Cybermen straight doesn't need your money.

Bickendan · Oct 25, 2022

NAHTMMM said: ↑

Oddly enough, users could also “stake” gold, earning a return. It’s also not clear how that was supposed to work.
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Anyone who can't keep vampires and Cybermen straight doesn't need your money.
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Delete. Delete.

Tuckerfan · Oct 28, 2022

He put the NFTs in the mashed potatoes! They call him the Matt Reed!

You Can Now Protest at Home by Defacing Priceless NFT Art With Digital Mashed Potatoes

Attempting to deface or destroy priceless works of art in the name of climate activism is all the rage right now, but what if you can’t make it to the Louvre in Paris, or the National Gallery in London? Don’t worry, there are still thousands of priceless works of art available online, and Matt Reed has created a simple browser tool that lets you deface NFTs with a simple click.

Matt Reed has made a name for themself by keeping their finger on the pulse of internet trends and then coming up with exactly the right tools the world needs. In early 2020, just as everyone was starting to get swamped with video calls while hiding at home from the burgeoning pandemic, Reed created a digital twin of themselves to sit in on those calls, complete with voice-activated automated responses to make it more convincing. And when the burden of endless video calls became almost unbearable just a few months later, Reed came up with a tragically short-lived tool that could Rickroll Zoom calls, with the goal of convincing co-workers to avoid sending invitations to Rickrollers.

If you want in on the food waste protest action without wasting real food or ending up in jail, you can find the code for Reed’s Protest-O-Matic tool on GitHub. All you need to do is create a new bookmark in your browser of choice, name it the “Protest-O-Matic”, and then paste that small chunk of code into the URL field.

Visiting a website containing your favorite NFT and then activating that bookmark brings up some simple on-screen tools giving you the option to deface the masterpiece with “Liquified Buttery Mashed Potatoes” or “Pie” with every click. The tool works on almost any website—just look what I did to our dear Gizmodo.com—and includes a handy template for where to super glue your hand to the screen so everyone knows you’re very serious about whatever cause you’re advocating for today.
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Tuckerfan · Nov 1, 2022

Fingers crossed! Boris Johnson and Dick Cheney will be speaking at a blockchain event. No word on if the two plan on going hunting after.

Tuckerfan · Nov 4, 2022

If you needed more proof that crypto is a scam and even the people who've hyped it are giving up on it, I've got it for you. Man-baby desperate for cash kills crypto project to focus on other ways of making money.

Elon 'Dogefather' Musk Reportedly Tells Twitter to Pause Crypto Wallet Efforts

Twitter is refocusing all its efforts on making the most money in the shortest possible time, according to some reports.

The tech blog Platformer reported late Thursday based on unnamed sources supposedly from within Twitter that the social media app’s new owner Elon Musk has truly shaken up the product roadmap. Apparently, Blue team is supposed to work through the weekend to come out with its $8 paid verification system (AKA paid-for blue checkmarks) by Monday.

Though much of the report states that these are just early stages of consideration, Platformer states that Musk also wants to pause the long-form writing project dubbed “Notes” as well as a just recently revealed crypto wallet. Both of those features have been long-requested by the blogging types and crypto bros, respectively. The report does not go into why these features are being put on hold, but if I had to guess, it’s because they wouldn’t make Twitter—and Musk—any immediate pocket change to justify the $44 billion escapade to take the company private.

Gizmodo could not independently verify Platformer’s report, and Twitter did not respond to a request for comment. The company’s press team has become practically mum since Musk took over the company last week, and it seems to be heading in the same direction as Musk’s other companies SpaceX and Tesla, which no longer have PR teams.

Still, Casey Newton, who writes the Platformer blog, has street cred on the tech beat and has access to internal Twitter slack, which leads credibility to his report. Reports that Twitter is laying off half of its total staff Friday have caused employees to call the day “The Snap” in reference to Thanos’ famous dusting of half of all sentient life in the movie Avengers: Endgame. The company is already being sued for laying off staff without giving them the proper amount of notice.

Newton’s report also mentions that the newsletter company Revue, which Twitter bought out back at the beginning of 2021, is being shuttered. On Thursday, the New York Times reported Twitter is considering adding paywalled videos and paid-for direct messages. The company is also looking at resurrecting short-form video app Vine, which one can expect in the TikTok age will be full to the brim with ads and paid-for content.

As reported by Coindesk, Dogecoin has been going on a rollercoaster ride of ups and down since Musk began his process of initially trying to buy his way onto the Twitter board, then eventually buying all of Twitter wholesale. After Musk finally bought the platform, DOGE’s price doubled over the past week. But with the news of Platformer’s report, the price of Musk’s beloved Dogecoin fell over 10%, according to data from CoinMarketCap. Dogecoin has long had a parasitic relationship with the “Dogefather,” and Musk’s public comments have caused the coin’s price to both spike and flatline.

Musk seems desperate to find ways for Twitter to make more money. Even while he claims things like paid verification would no longer make users “the product,” paying $8 for verification would only cut down on the number of ads users see, not the ads completely, at least according to Musk’s previous statements on Twitter.
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Now, the Venn diagram for crypto bros and Elon stans are basically two nearly overlapping circles. So, if Musk thought that crypto was a great way to make money, he'd have a willing audience of saps ready to mortgage their home to pump money into his crypto wallet.

Tuckerfan · Nov 9, 2022

Crypto Billionaire Bankman-Fried Loses Entire Fortune in One Day

NAHTMMM · Nov 9, 2022

Looks like he still has a billion to his name?

Poor baby. Never fear, he has "bank" in his name, the feds will bail him out.

Steal Your Face · Nov 9, 2022

NAHTMMM said: ↑

Looks like he still has a billion to his name?

Poor baby. Never fear, he has "bank" in his name, the feds will bail him out.
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Should have put your money in the bank, man.

Tuckerfan · Nov 10, 2022

NAHTMMM said: ↑

Looks like he still has a billion to his name?

Poor baby. Never fear, he has "bank" in his name, the feds will bail him out.
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Probably not for long, though. The deal he put together to try and save his company just flamed out and there’s this tidbit that’s caught people’s eye.

But you know who might really be hurting?

We Are Borg · Nov 10, 2022

Probably one of the greatest lines ever written in the world of crypto reporting:

"On Tuesday, FTX announced it would be bought out by its rival Binance, now looking to cement itself as the largest degrading egg carton on the quickly disintegrating crypto trash heap."

https://gizmodo.com/tom-brady-crypto-ftx-1849761830

Tuckerfan · Nov 11, 2022

Let's get ready for economic implosion!!!!

Canadian teachers could have a $95 million hole in their pensions due to the FTX crypto implosion

The crisis at cryptocurrency exchange FTX is having ramifications far and wide. Now Canada’s third largest pension plan is revealing details about its exposure to the troubled company led by 30-year-old crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried.

On Thursday, the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan (OTPP) released a statement saying that in October 2021 it invested $75 million in both FTX International and its U.S. entity FTX.US. Additionally, it said, it made a follow-on investment of $20 million in FTX.US in January this year. The potential losses it could face are still unknown.

The OTTP wasn’t the only one burned by FTX’s collapse. Sequoia Capital, one of the most successful venture capital firms of all time, said it will mark down its investment of $214 million in FTX to zero. “We are in the business of taking risk,” it wrote to investors. “Some investments will surprise to the upside, and some will surprise to the downside.”

Other blue-chip backers of the platform include BlackRock, SoftBank, and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek.

U.S. federal regulators are now reportedly investigating FTX to determine whether it harmed clients or violated financial regulations.

It’s been a bad week for FTX. Over the weekend, the CEO of rival exchange Binance tweeted that he was dumping FTX-linked coins. Many crypto investors subsequently fled FTX, which saw $5 billion in withdrawals on Sunday alone. Binance then seemed to come to FTX’s rescue on Tuesday before ditching its 11th-hour bid to buy its rival the very next day, stating that the company’s issues “are beyond our control or ability to help.”

The Wall Street Journal reported that FTX had lent billions of dollars to affiliated trading arm Alameda Research, money that was used to fund risky bets.

Cryptocurrency prices fell amid concerns about FTX’s solvency and fears of a possible contagion.

The OTPP said any loss from its exposure to FTX would have a limited impact on the pension plan. It made the investments through its Teachers' Venture Growth (TVG) fund, representing less than 0.05% of the pension fund's total net assets, it said.

“TVG was established in 2019 to invest in emerging technology companies raising late-stage venture and growth capital,” it wrote. “TVG’s investments are structured to provide Ontario Teachers’ with returns commensurate with the risk undertaken and to provide proprietary insights that inform investing elsewhere across the Plan. Naturally, not all of the investments in this early-stage asset class perform to expectations.”
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This is starting to smell like early '08 when the housing market bubble burst. Only question is: Will it take down the rest of the economy? Rumors are swirling that just about every other crypto exchange out there is in trouble due to FTX going tits up. At its peak, the crypto market had $1 trillion in "value." It's now dropped below that. The housing market crash blew a $2 trillion hole in the US economy, and there's an increasing number of folks in the sub-prime auto loan market who are either behind, or have had their cars repo'd.

Kinda feeling like Santa Monica, right now.

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