Tag: Nouriel Roubini

News: Tether prints $1B at a time, Tesla buys bitcoin, Roubini calls Saylor a cokehead, scammers hijack QuadrigaCX website

We are midway through February. Tether has surpassed $32 billion in tethers and appears to be quite proud of the fact. BTC is scratching $49,000 and ETH is over $1,800. There is so much craziness now in the crypto markets with shitcoins pumping galore, and big companies getting in on the bitcoin Ponzi.

In the meantime, I am concerned crypto is going retail again. Friends are calling and asking about bitcoin. One of my friend’s offspring was talking up dogecoin on Facebook. And I am overhearing conversations about crypto in grocery stores and parking lots—flashbacks of 2017, but this is worse. Retailers are going to get hurt all over again.

Another reminder, I have a Patreon account. If you want to support my writing, please consider subscribing. I’m currently making $572 a month on Patreon, which is fantastic because I can now buy decent bottles of wine. But at some point, I would love to bring that up closer to $2,000 or find a way to make a living doing this.

Tether: We’re done with the baby prints

On Thursday and again on Saturday, Tether issued $1 billion in tethers. These are the biggest single prints of USDT ever—and there were two in a row. Previously, the biggest prints were $600 million, which was rare. Normally, bigger prints were $400 million, and if Tether needed more, it would simply issue several in a row. But that’s clearly not enough to feed the monster now. 

By monster, I mean this snowball is getting so big, Tether is struggling to manage it. Seventy percent of bitcoin is traded against tethers, and as real money keeps getting siphoned out of the system, Tether needs to create more and more fake dollars to fill the ever-widening chasm. Tethers are counterfeit. They are not real dollars, but they are treated as such on offshore exchanges.

You can’t have a system built entirely on fake money. Eventually, it will collapse under its own weight. We saw this with QuadrigaCX. As soon as enough people tried to cash out, the exchange’s founder Gerald Cotten flew to India and pulled off what appears to have been one of the most bizarre exit scams in history—unless you believe he is really dead.* I’m still getting calls from reporters and filmmakers wondering what the hell happened.

Tether CTO Paolo Ardoino says the $1 billion prints were for replenishments and chain swaps—wherein a customer sends in tethers and gets them reissued on a different blockchain. If it were a chain swap, you would see a corresponding burn. But we aren’t seeing any burns, meaning those tokens went almost immediately into circulation.

Luca Land tracked the first 1 billion print and found that the entire amount—previously, I said “majority,” but Luca says all of it—went to Bitfinex, Huobi, RenrenBit, Binance, and FTX.** The largest recipient was FTX, followed by Binance. Those of us who follow @whale_alert are accustom to seeing tethers flying off to “unknown wallets.” Luca thinks those unknown wallets serve as intermediate wallets to throw us off the trail.

The Block published a story on Thursday, right after Tether’s first monster print, with lots of quotes from Ardoino, who explains that big companies are buying USDT from over-the-counter desks and high-frequency trading firms. This explains the demand for all these tethers, he claims.

“When clients of these firms want to buy bitcoin, they send USD, and then these firms convert USD to USDT to bitcoin. This method is faster and most convenient,” he told The Block. 

Why would someone go to the trouble of converting cash to USDT to buy BTC when they could simply buy BTC directly with cash on a regulated exchange? That makes no sense—unless it involves money laundering and capital flight. Tether does have a big market in Asia, Ardoino said.

Another explanation is that Tether is printing USDT out of thin air, using those to buy bitcoin with alias accounts on unregulated exchanges and cashing out via banked exchanges and OTC trading desks. Or else, they buy BTC and hold onto it as a way to make the markets more illiquid and easier to manipulate. (If they sold all the bitcoin they were buying with tethers, they would crash the markets, so until a new influx of cash comes into the system, they have to hold onto it.)

Coindesk interviewed Nouriel Roubini on CoindeskTV. Of course, he gave it to them straight, calling Tether a criminal enterprise and Michael Saylor a cokehead. The three reporters broke out into giggles. The questions they asked were naive, for instance, how is Tether printing tethers different from what is going on in Washington with all their dollar printing? Roubini made important points and predicts Tether will be dead within the year—read the transcript on my blog.

NY AG Tether investigation update

Tether has agreed to hand over a slew of documents to the NY attorney general showing how they issue tethers, what’s behind tethers, and so on. The original deadline was Jan. 15, but they needed another 30 days and the NY AG was okay with that. We are looking for another court filing to drop at some point after Feb. 15.

Don’t expect miracles anytime soon, though. The NY AG will still need time to take a position on what she has received. I’m sure her office is working with the Department of Justice in their investigation—and passing all the material along to them.

Someone was asking me on Reddit, what can the NY AG actually do to Tether? Answer: She has sweeping investigatory and prosecutorial powers, and she can issue a cease and desist. But ultimately, the U.S. Department of Justice and Homeland Security will be instrumental in taking Bitfinex/Tether down.

To put things in perspective, Tether has been in operation for six years. It took seven years and the coordinated effort of law enforcement in 17 countries to bring down Liberty Reserve. (ABC News)

Tesla buys BTC with clean car credits

The big news of the week was Tesla purchased $1.5 billion of bitcoin, as revealed in its 10-K filing. Here you have a company dedicated to clean energy buying one of the filthiest assets in the world. The bitcoin network requires the energy of a small country like Argentina, Norway or the Netherlands. Musk doesn’t give a hoot about the planet. (My blog)

Just to be clear, $1.5 billion is peanuts. It will support the bitcoin miners for about a month. Of course, on the news of Tesla buying bitcoin, the price of BTC shot up from 39,400 to 48,000 in less than 24 hours. The higher the price of BTC, the faster real money exits the system when the miners sell their 900 newly minted BTC per day.

Michael Burry, the investor from “The Big Short,” said in a series of deleted tweets (apparently, he routinely deletes tweets) that Musk bought BTC to distract from Chinese regulators looking into quality complaints with Tesla vehicles. Burry is shorting Tesla and has called on the electric-vehicle company to issue more stock at its ridiculous price. (Business Insider)

But wait! It’s green energy!

Most of the world doesn’t realize that bitcoin uses a country’s worth of electricity. They think it’s mainly used for ransomware and by criminals to buy drugs and such, so when they learn about bitcoin’s horrendous CO2 production, they become alarmed.

As a result, bitcoiners are desperately scrambling to declare that bitcoin consumes renewable green energy. Most of what they are spouting is blithering nonsense with no facts to support their claims. They are also trying to say that bitcoin consumes less energy than the rest of the financial system, which is simply dumb, as Frances Coppola points out.

Other interesting newsy bits

Gerald Cotten may be dead and buried—or more likely, sipping cocktails on a beach somewhere—but QuadrigaCX sprung to life again! However, it turns out scammers set up an imitation Quadriga website to lure in potential victims. EY, the trustee for the failed exchange, sent out a warning notice. The website has since been taken down. (EasyDNS)

India is set to ban cryptocurrency investments completely. Investors will be given a transition period of three-to-six months after the new law goes into force to liquidate their investments. (Bloomberg Quint)

Crypto Capital money mule Reginald Fowler has three more weeks to find new counsel after he stiffed his previous attorneys. (My blog)

Dogecoin has been pumping thanks to r/wallstreetbets and Musk and others tweeting about it for the lulz. David Gerard wrote a wonderful piece on dogecoin explaining its unique history. (Foreign Policy, paywalled)

Apparently, Elon Musk was tweeting about DOGE for the lulz back in April 2019. (Financial Times)

Dogecoin creator Billy Markus said on Reddit that he sold all his dogecoin in 2015 after he got laid off. He wanted dogecoin to be a force of good, and he is disappointed to see the nonsense “pump and dumping, rampant greed, scamming, bad faith actors.”

The Sydney Morning Herald did a feature on Australian-born-and-raised Greg Dwyer, one of the founders of Bitmex, who was indicted last year for violating anti-money laundering laws, but is still at large. “As recently as July, social media posts suggested Dwyer was in Bermuda, and enjoying all it had to offer.”

Miami Mayor Francis Suarez (R) wants municipal workers to get paid in bitcoin. Aside from the legal and tax ramifications and all the difficulties in setting this up, I’m sure employees will be so happy to wake up and find their paycheck lost 30% of its value whilst they were sleeping. No, this is a terrible idea. (The NY Post)

BNY Mellon, the world’s largest custody bank, said it will hold, transfer and issue bitcoin and other crypto on behalf of its asset-management clients. The bank will begin offering these services later this year. Because they are a state-chartered bank, they can do this in NY without a BitLicense. (WSJ, Coindesk)

Mastercard is planning to support crypto natively on its network. However, it’s only going to support cryptocurrencies that meet certain requirements—including stability, privacy and compliance with anti-money laundering laws. The problem is that no cryptocurrencies meet Mastercard’s criteria. (Arstechnica, Mastercard announcement)

BitPay’s bitcoin cards can be added to Apple Wallet, giving crypto holders a new way to spend via Apple Pay. BitPay converts your bitcoin to cash, so it’s no different than selling your BTC first, and merchants won’t know the difference. (Business Insider)

This Valentines Day, consider giving that special someone a CryptoFlower! It will only set you back 4 ETH ($7,200). Each flower is genetically unique and immutable. And they don’t need water or sunlight because they live on the Ethereum blockchain. (FT)

Last but not least, the CBC QuadrigaCX documentary is coming soon! It was nearly a year ago that David Gerard and I met in Vancouver for the filming. It was also one of the last times I enjoyed a meal inside a restaurant sitting next to people.

*Update, Feb. 14—Someone on Reddit was giving me a hard time, arguing that I can’t say Cotten pulled off an exit scam unless I explain that he might actually be dead. I won’t believe he is dead until someone exhumes the body and proves it’s him. See my Quadriga timeline for details.

**Update, Feb. 15—The unidentified tether customer in Luca Land’s diagram turns out to be FTX.

Posted on by Amy Castor 3

Nouriel Roubini: ‘Tether is a criminal enterprise,’ SEC should probe Elon Musk’s bitcoin tweets

Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, thinks Tether is issuing fake money. And that nothing short of an audit will prove the $30 billion in USDT the BVI-registered company has spewed out into the crypto markets thus far are even 74% backed. (Stuart Hoegner, the firm’s general counsel, claimed they were three-quarters backed in April 2019 court documents.)

Tether is a “criminal enterprise,” he bluntly told reporters on Coindesk TV. In a 10-minute interview, Roubini predicted Tether’s looming demise, called for the SEC to look into Elon Musk’s bitcoin tweets, and claimed that central bank digital currencies will spell the end for crypto.

Dr. Doom, as Roubini is called, talks quickly, doesn’t mince words, and his face barely changes expression. He has a reputation as a perpetual pessimist. Ask him a question, and he will give you a straightforward, often bleak, answer. Though he might argue, he is simply being a realist.

I am not sure why Coindesk had him on their program. Roubini hates bitcoin and his responses elicited laughter—though it wouldn’t be the first time. Roubini “sounded like a madman in 2006,” when he stood before economists at the International Monetary Fund and announced a crisis of solvency was brewing, IMF economist Prakash Loungani told the NYT in August 2008. “He was a prophet when he returned in 2007.”

Anyhow, I transcribed the talk only because I thought Roubini’s points made sense. He was interviewed by Coindesk’s Lawrence Lewitinn, Christine Lee, and Emily Parker.

Lee: The narrative on bitcoin has shifted from a means of payment to a store of value for some. It is not so much used as a currency as a digital gold. Institutions and public companies are buying this thesis and we are seeing bitcoin hit records as a result. What do you make of this institutional and corporate interest in bitcoin, underlined by Tesla’s $1.5 billion bitcoin investment on Monday? 

Roubini: As you suggested, bitcoin and crypto is not a means of payment. It is not a currency. It is not a unit of account. Is not a scalable means of payment. It is not a single numeraire. Now, people say it is an asset. But think of it. What are assets? Assets like stocks, bonds and real estate give you income or give you some use, like real estate. And, therefore, they give you capital gain. Gold does not give you income but it has other uses,—industrial activity and jewelry—and therefore, has some value. It used to be used as a means of payment. 

In the case of bitcoin, it does not have any income. It doesn’t have any use. It doesn’t have any utility. So the value of it based on what? Based on no intrinsic value and purely a speculative bubble. That is why I argue that bitcoin, like all the other shitcoins, are worth zero. [Coindesk reporters giggle.] 

Actually, negative given the hogging of energy and the environmental cost. If there was a carbon tax on crypto, the value of these assets would be negative. 

So what is the fundamental value? What is the use? What is the utility that justifies the capital gain? None. It is a speculative bubble that is based on pump-and-dump, spoofing, wash trading and manipulation by Tether, which is a total scam. [More giggling from Coindesk crew.]

So, for institutional investors, saying we are going to invest in crypto doesn’t make any sense. You have a failing company that had a flat stock market like MicroStrategy for a decade, and its head was a coke addict who decided to bet the entire house on bitcoin. [CoinDesk crew really losing it.] That is irresponsible behavior. It is not gonna be any corporate head that is going to put his cash, as you point out, into something that is so volatile. You put your cash into something that is stable. 

And for someone like Elon Musk who knows he has a market impact to manipulate to first, take an individual position to bitcoin, pump the price up, and then say that Tesla is invested. And Tesla doesn’t make money yet. It is also irresponsible and it is market manipulation. [Note: Musk was tweeting about BTC, pushing up the price, before Telsa announced it had purchased $1.5 billion worth.]

The SEC should be looking at people that have a market impact that manipulate the price of assets. That is also criminal behavior. It is totally a criminal enterprise. Tether is a criminal enterprise, and a bunch of whales and insiders are manipulating the price of bitcoins and other shitcoins day in and day out. That is a fact.

Lewitinn: Dr. Roubini, always a ray of sunshine, of course. The question about Tether is this: We have known for a while now that it has been backed entirely by dollars. It is something like 70-some-odd percent. That came out a while ago. There have been questions about its backing for some time, for several years. Yet it is still trading on par with the US dollar. Conceivably, they have enough assets at least for a while to keep the peg going with the dollar. How much of a real worry is it for crypto if there is even a small run on tether?

Roubini: First of all, we don’t know if it is backed 70% or not. Their lawyer says 70% but we have no idea. It doesn’t mean any[thing] absolute independent audit of it. [A bit garbled here, but he is saying, outside of a third-party audit, which Tether has never had, there is no way of knowing what’s backing tethers.]

We also know they are really issuing, literally, at an exponential rate, new tethers. In the last year alone, something like 25 billion. And in the last few weeks, a billion per week. So it looks like they are getting desperate, and it is a typical Ponzi scheme, in which you maintain the value of something by issuing more of it and more of it and so on. 

Lewitinn: How different is that from what is going on right now from the money printing happening in Washington? 

Roubini: The money printing in Washington is happening at a rate that is much less than the issuance of fiat by Tether and other shitcoins. If you look at the chart of it, literally, the case of Tether is exponential. Second, central banks, if you know, their assets are matching their liabilities. For every dollar of currency in excess of reserves that are in the central bank balance sheet there is an asset, foreign reserve, or gold or treasury assets. 

So the idea that fiat currencies are not backed by anything is utterly false. If you look at the balance sheet of any central bank, there are assets and there are liabilities. And actually, there is a positive net worth most of the time. But in the case of Tether there is nothing backing it. Again, even 70% is not true. And we know that every fixed exchange rate that is based on not-full-backing and not fully collateralized eventually collapses. 

The entire monetary history, every fixed exchange that is not backed has collapsed. It is only a matter of time. And the trigger is gonna be when the indictments of Tether and Bitfinex are going to occur, and it is only a matter of time this year. Because we know that there are investigations occurring. 

Parker: Let’s move to central bank digital currencies for a moment. We know that China is moving quite rapidly in this area. Do you think that the US dollar will remain the world reserve currency?

Roubini: I think that the Chinese are going to go ahead. [Sweden’s] Riksbank bank is going to go ahead. The [European Central Bank] is going to go ahead. And until now the US was behind the curve, but they realize that the Chinese had a plan to dominate the global financial system. It’s their e-commerce. It is their own platform of private payment systems like AliPay and WeChat Pay and that is going to be the e-RNB. And it is only a matter of time before we are going to phase out cash all over the world. And if the US wants to maintain the role of the US dollar as a major global reserve currency, they will have to move to an e-dollar. 

The problem with that is that people get excited in the crypto world when central banks end up talking about a central bank digital currency. A CBDC, first of all, has nothing to do with blockchain. It is going to be private. It is going to be centralized. It is going to be permissioned. And it is going to be based on a bunch of trusted authority verifying transactions.

It has nothing to do with blockchain. It has nothing to do with crypto. And as a payment system, it is going to dominate, not only crypto, which has absolutely no payment services, but also any private form of payment system that is digital, from credit cards to bank deposits to AliPay to WeChat pay to Venmo to Square to PayPal, and so on. Because it is going to be cheap, it is going to be instantaneous clearing and settlement. It is going to be a system that is going to dominate any form of private money

If and when a central bank currency is going to be introduced, the problem is going to be that any form of private digital payment system is going to be crowded out, starting with crypto, which doesn’t have any payment service in the first place. 

Lee: Dr. Roubini, it sounds like you believe that the technology underlying bitcoin is at least sound and that governments and central banks around the world will adopt it, and if that is the case, what happens to privacy? And you also mentioned something about negative rates becoming the norm. Tell us about that?

Roubini: First of all, I said the opposite of the technology. The central bank digital currencies will not be based on blockchain. They are going to be private, not public. They are going to be centralized, not decentralized. They are going to be permissioned, not permissionless. They are going to be a bunch of central banks and private banks that are trusted verifiers of the transaction, rather than being trustless. So the technology is not going to be blockchain. It is not going to be crypto. That is my point. 

Secondly, the advantage of having a central bank digital currency is that right now, if there is a very severe economic recession, central banks cannot go very negative with the policy rates. That is why they do quantitative easing. They do credit easing. Because if you go lower than, say, 75 basis points, people are going to switch their excess reserves into cash if there is a nominal zero interest rate. So they are not going to pay the tax. 

However, if you phase out cash, then you have no option than to keep your money in the digital form. And then the negative policy rate in a severe recession or depression can go to minus one, minus two, minus three, minus four, minus five, whatever you want it to be. So if and when that happens, and if there is a recession that is severe enough, central bank digital currencies are going to allow you to have much more [of an] easing monetary policy with much more negative policy rates. That is the direction we are going to go. 

Lee: Is there anything that can happen that would change your mind about bitcoin? 

Roubini: So far, no. As they say, it is not a unit of account. It is not a means of payment. It is not a single numeraire. It is not a stable store of value. And with proof-of-work, you get five transactions per second. And if it was to be adopted as a means of payment, you would have deflation. Because the quantity of it is limited in the long run. If you want to create a digital currency that actually works as a means of payment, its growth has to be the growth of nominal GDP, so that the demand can be satisfied by supply that increases as much as nominal GDP, meaning the inflation target plus the growth of the economy. Otherwise, you are going to get permanent deflation on every price in goods and services, so it’s fundamentally flawed even from that point of view. 

Update: In an earlier version of this story, I mentioned Musk had deleted some of his BTC tweets. So far, I haven’t found any hard evidence of that, so I removed my comment.

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Posted on by Amy Castor 0

Nocoiner predictions: 2021 will be a year of comedy gold

The last year has been particularly annoying for nocoiners—those of us who don’t hold crypto and view bitcoin as a Ponzi, like a Ponzi, or something more complex.

We have had to endure Tether minting tethers with abandon ($17 billion worth in 2020 alone) and bitcoiners obnoxiously cheering bitcoin’s new all-time highs, the latest being $33,000. Considering bitcoin began 2020 at around $7,500, that is a long way up. (Things went full crazy in March.) But we believe 2021 will be a year of comedy gold when this giant hill of dung all comes tumbling down.

I’ve spoken with several notable bitcoin skeptics, gathered their thoughts, and compiled a list of new year predictions. They shared their prophecies on Tether (a stablecoin issuer that has so far minted $21 billion in dubiously backed assets to pump the crypto markets), new regulations and the future of bitcoin. 

Here is what they had to say:

Nicholas Weaver: T’will be the year the music stops

“This is the year the music stops,” Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, told me. 

Weaver has been following bitcoin since 2011. His work is largely funded by the National Science Foundation. He believes the bitcoin ecosystem is running low on cash. (This is the fate of all Ponzi schemes. Ultimately, they run out of new investors and when that happens, the scheme collapses.) In the case of bitcoin, he believes real dollars in the system are rapidly being replaced by fake ones in the form of tethers.

“Tether has been squeezing every dollar out of the system, and there aren’t enough suckers,” he said, meaning there aren’t enough folks waiting in line to buy bitcoin at its ever increasing prices. “When the dollar stock goes to zero, the system will collapse completely because you get a mining death spiral.”

Miners reap 900 newly minted bitcoin per day in the form of block rewards. If they can’t sell those for enough fiat money to pay their monstrous power bills, it makes no sense for them to stay in business. And since their job is to secure the bitcoin network, bitcoin will become vulnerable to repeated attacks.

Also, governments are finally waking up, said Weaver, alluding to new global efforts to clamp down on money laundering, capital outflows, and the financing of terrorism via cryptocurrencies. 

He foresees Tether getting the Liberty Reserve treatment any day now. He also thinks China will decide “screw it, bitcoin is evading capital controls as a primary purpose, let’s cut off the subsidized electricity.”

Without cheap electricity, bitcoin miners—most of whom are in China—may find it difficult to stay afloat. Already bitcoin miners in Inner Mongolia no longer receive electricity at subsidized rates. 

Jorge Stolfi: I can’t make price predictions

A computer science professor in Brazil, Jorge Stolfi wants to avoid making predictions on bitcoin’s price. He’s been following bitcoin since 2013—and has seen it through two prior bubbles—so he knows too well that anything can happen.

“I really don’t know how far the insanity can go. The crypto market is 100% irrational, sustained entirely by ignorance and misinformation,” he said. “How can anyone make predictions about that?” 

Stolfi is a denizen of r/Buttcoin, a subreddit that makes fun of bitcoin, where he painstakingly explains the finer points of crypto nonsense to the unenlightened. In 2016, he submitted a letter to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission warning against the risks of a bitcoin exchange-traded fund and comparing bitcoin to a Ponzi scheme. (The SEC has shot down every bitcoin ETF proposal to date on the basis that bitcoin’s price is too easy to manipulate.)

“And since price determines everything else in the crypto space, I can’t make predictions on pretty much everything else,” Stolfi continued. “For example, If the price were to crash below $10,000, I bet that we would have a lot of comedy gold coming from MicroStrategy.” 

Over the last several months, the Virginia-based enterprise software company has funneled $1.2 billion of its funds into bitcoin. As a result, Michael Saylor, the company’s CEO, now spends most of his time on Twitter shilling bitcoin. In September, Saylor compared bitcoin to “a swarm of cyber hornets serving the goddess of wisdom, feeding on the fire of truth, exponentially growing ever smarter, faster, and stronger behind a wall of encrypted energy.”

Stolfi also thinks that we will probably forget about several coins that were big in the past, like Bitcoin SV (BSV) and IOTA, maybe even bitcoin cash (BCH). “And we will also forget about blockchain technology.”

Frances Coppola: Crypto exchanges will become like licensed banks 

Over the last week, Frances Coppola has been battling an army of bitcoin trolls and sock puppets on Twitter after suggesting that bitcoin is not scarce in any meaningful sense. 

Scarcity is a key part of the myth bitcoiners perpetuate to make people think bitcoin is valuable in the same way gold is and to create a sense of buying urgency—quick, grab some before it’s all gone!—so naturally, bitcoiners responded by dog piling on her. She isn’t happy about it. 

“I hope bitcoin crashes and burns because I am so bloody furious, but I think it will be a while yet before it does—maybe about June,” she said. 

Coppola is a UK-based freelance writer, who spent 17 years in the banking industry. She wrote the book, “The Case For People’s Quantitative Easing,” and has 58,000 Twitter followers.

The cause of bitcoin’s upcoming crash, she believes, will be an epic battle between the Wild West of crypto and regulators, a topic she covered in a recent Coindesk article.

If the regulators win, crypto exchanges will become like licensed banks and have to comply with things like the Dodd-Frank Act, a sweeping law that reined in mortgage practices and derivatives trading after the 2008 financial crash, she said. On the other hand, if the regulators lose, she believes their next move will be to protect retail investors.

“We’d see drastic restrictions on what interactions banks can have with crypto, perhaps a total ban on retail deposit-takers having crypto exchanges and stablecoins as clients,” she said. 

“We might also see something akin to a Glass-Steagall Act for crypto exchanges and stablecoins, so that retail deposits are fully segregated by law from trading activity.” By that, she means exchanges won’t be able to lend retail deposits to margin traders or use them to fund speculative positions in crypto derivatives. 

David Gerard: Bitcoiners will get their big boy wish

After years of begging for bitcoin to be taken seriously as a form of money, bitcoiners will be getting exactly what they asked for, said David Gerard, a bitcoin skeptic and author of “Libra Shrugged,” a book on Facebook’s attempt to take over the money. 

This year will see more regulation of crypto, as coiners discover to their dismay just how incredibly regulated real-world finance is, he said. “Just wait until someone sits them down and explains regulatory real-time compliance feeds.”

What does Gerard think about Tether? “I could predict the guillotine will finally fall on Tether, but I predicted that for December 2017, and these guys are just amazing in their ability to dodge the blade just one more day,” he said.

Since 2018, the New York Attorney General has been investigating Tether and its sister company, crypto exchange Bitfinex, for fraud. Over the summer, the New York Supreme Court ruled that the companies need to hand over their financial records to show once and for all just how much money really is underlying the tethers they keep printing. The NYAG said Bitfinex/Tether have agreed to do so by Jan. 15.

Gerard also foresees that there will continue to be no use cases for crypto that absolutely anything else does better. “Everything the Buttcoin Foundation was talking about in 2011 is still dumb and broken,” he said.

Trolly McTrollface: Crypto will go to Mars

Elon Musk says he is “highly confident” that his company SpaceX will be sending humans to Mars in six years. Naturally, Musk wants to set up a self-sustaining city on the red planet. And, come to think of it, the city will need its own crypto, something like Dogecoin or Marscoin. Otherwise, how else will its citizens pay for things?

Pseudonymous crypto blogger Trolly McTrollface has this prophecy for 2021: “Elon Musk creates its own cryptocurrency, and adds it to the $TSLA balance sheet. It ends the year in the top 10 crypto list by market cap.”

Nouriel Roubini: Bitcoin’s bubble will explode

Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, doesn’t mince words when it comes to crypto predictions. He simply told me: “The Bitcoin bubble will burst in 2021. Triggers will be reg/law enforcement action.” 

There is good reason to take him seriously. Roubini famously warned of the 2008 financial crisis, a prophecy that earned him the moniker “Dr. Doom.” He is also known for his parties, which leads a few of us nocoiners to believe that bitcoiners’ are fundamentally driven by bitterness over the fact that we have better soirées.

David Golumbia: The insanity will continue—unless it stops

If the past is any prediction of the future, bitcoin and other crypto promoters will continue to deceive the public with outright lies about “investing” in tokens until the big tokens collapse. That’s the view held by David Golumbia, known for writing about the cult of bitcoin. He is the author of “The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism,” and teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University. 

“I tend to agree with other critics that regulators and law enforcement are going to squeeze the space, especially Tether, at some point,” he said. “And that when this happens the whole thing will deflate. But as anyone with experience in investing knows, predicting and identifying bubbles is a fool’s game.”

What Golumbia finds most interesting is that the rising price of bitcoin and other tokens sustains the lies. “I have to imagine that when the tokens collapse, the motivation to keep lying will go away as well,” he said. 

Examples of those lies include: bitcoin offers an alternative finance system to the real one, bitcoin’s price movement is due to technology, the regular financial system rips people off and bitcoin doesn’t, and so on. 

He continued: “Though who knows—the whole story of bitcoin and blockchain includes the worldwide embrace of conspiratorial thinking that parallels QAnon, antivax, COVID-19 denialism, climate change denialism, flat earth ‘theory,’ etc. 

“None of these seem to collapse no matter what the facts do. But then again, the promoters of these theories often profit only indirectly from them, whereas cryptocurrency promoters usually have a direct vested stake in ‘number go up.’ So maybe there will be a positive development for a more realistic relationship to the world if/when prices collapse.”  

My prediction: Only fools will be left hodling

As for my own predictions, I think bitcoin is on the brink of a stupendous crash. Whales and the Tether/Bitfinex triad are working over time to push the price up higher and higher. As more fake dollars flood the system, real dollars are being siphoned out by the big players.

At some point, as Weaver stated, there won’t be enough suckers left in the wings waiting to buy bitcoin—and when that happens, bitcoin holders will learn the hard way that price charts and market caps are meaningless. 

When the price crashes, dropping back to early 2020 levels—or possibly even lower, the people who will get most hurt will be the retail investors who have been duped into believing they can buy bitcoin and get rich. And that, in turn, will provide justification for tighter regulations that make it difficult for exchanges to list any crypto at all.  

I also believe at some point this year, Tether’s operators will be indicted, although it is hard to say when. As Gerard says, we all thought this nonsense was going to come to a grinding halt in December 2017, but here we are three years later. 

The fact that Bitcoin is getting pushed to ATHs, should be a signal that the end is near for Tether, and the crooks are doing their final looting.  

If you own any bitcoin, you would be best to sell what you can now, or at the very least, sell enough to get back your initial investment. Remember, two thirds of bitcoin investors in the 2017 bubble didn’t get around to getting any of the money back that they had put in—don’t be one of those guys. 

Update Jan. 2: An earlier version of this story stated that bitcoin started 2020 at around $3,000. It started at $7,500.

Update Jan. 4: Edited to clarify that a state supreme court ruled that iFinex should turn over records, not the Supreme Court.

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News: Bitcoin tops $24,000, Ledger’s gift to SIM swappers, Pornhub only accepts crypto now, FinCEN’s new rule

The price of bitcoin keeps hitting new all-time highs, recently topping $24,000, which means things are getting a little nutty. The coiners want bitcoin to shoot to the moon. And the no-coiners want Tether to get taken down and the nonsense to end, like it should have three years ago after the 2017 bubble.

I’ve now got hundreds of new Twitter followers, most of them bitcoiners repeating the same boilerplate phrases like “have fun staying poor,” “gold is a Ponzi too” (it’s not) and proclaiming me the U.S. dollar is going to collapse, which would be a shame as bitcoin is mainly traded in dollars.

Caught up in the whirlwind, Mike Novogratz, CEO of Galaxy Digital, has gotten a tattoo—a large moon and a rocket with the letter “B” on it. Fortunately, the “B” is relatively small, so he can easily get that part lasered or covered up if bitcoin crashes, which it will, because that is the fate of all Ponzi schemes.

Here is the news:

Ledger creates a target list for SIM swappers

In July 2020, hardware wallet provider Ledger was hacked, with the hackers gaining access to its customer database. The database has been circulating for five months now, and the hacker has just dumped it on RaidForums, a site dedicated to sharing hacked databases, for the whole world to access—at no charge.

“The first confirmed price I saw for this database was 5 BTC,” the hacker wrote. “Today you can get it for free.”  

The database contains the emails, physical addresses, and phone numbers of 272,000 Ledger buyers along with emails of 1 million additional users.

Essentially, Ledger, a company dedicated to security, has given hackers access to a massive target list for SIM swappers and phishing campaigns. Ledger is very, very sorry for the leak. 

Coinbase plans to go public

Coinbase, the most valuable U.S. crypto firm, has filed confidentially for an IPO with the SEC. When the crypto exchange last raised private funding in 2018, it was valued at $8 billion. It is probably worth plenty more now, with investors going mad over tech stocks. 

The San Francisco company has tapped Goldman Sachs to bring it to market, meaning that that the bank will lead the syndicate of banks underwriting the deal. (Cointelegraph)

Several VCs have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into Coinbase, and it makes sense that at some point they want to realize the returns on their investment, probably before this bubble blows.

According to Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, the IPO “is entirely about a16z and the other VCs unloading their ownership-bags, not cryptocurrency bags, before the space implodes because Tether finally gets killed.”

FinCEN to impose new rules on exchanges

The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network has unveiled new rules aimed at closing anti-money laundering loopholes for regulated cryptocurrency transactions. The rules call for additional customer verification and more reporting.

According to the proposed rule, if a user makes a deposit or a withdrawal of over $3,000 involving a non-custodial wallet, exchanges have to record the name and physical location of the wallet owner. Crypto exchanges also have to report to the U.S. Department of Treasury any deposit or withdrawal over $10,000. 

The rule is devastating to regulated crypto exchanges. In a lengthy Twitter thread last month, when he first learned of the new rule coming down the pipes, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong publicly attacked the new regulation. He knows serious KYC requirements will kill a lot of his business.

Nouriel Roubini responded by bashing Armstrong as a contemporary Gordon Gekko—a character in the 1987 Oliver Stone movie “Wall Street”—putting his profits ahead of the need to enforce regulations to stop the financial activities of criminals, tax evaders, terrorists, drug dealers and human traffickers.

Coming soon: Mt. Gox bitcoins

Tokyo bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox went bankrupt in early 2014, and its former users are still waiting to get some portion of their funds back. Their long wait may soon be over. Recently, the Mt. Gox trustee submitted a draft plan for the rehabilitation of creditors. 

If the Tokyo District Court gives the plan a thumbs up, that means 140,000 bitcoin may soon flood the market. The price of BTC has gone up substantially since 2014, so no doubt claimants will want to sell as quickly as possible—and that could create a bear market, pushing down the price of BTC. (Coindesk)

Unless there’s enough real cash left in the system—which is unlikely, because if there was, we wouldn’t need 20 billion tethers—Tether will need to issue an additional 2.5 billion tethers to absorb those bitcoin. 

Tether surpasses $20 billion

Tether has now crossed $20 billion worth of tethers in circulation. Paolo Ardoino, Bitfinex and Tether CTO, bragged about it on social media. He tweeted: “#tether $USDt 20 BILLION!”

Patrick McKenzie, the software engineer who last year wrote this brilliant article explaining Tether, says all he wants for Christmas is for “Tether to unwind explosively.”

As Tether keeps issuing more and more tethers to pump bitcoin’s price, remember that the whole point in all this is to lure real dollars into the system. Look, the price keeps going up! You too can get rich! Buy bitcoin!

As David Gerard explained in a recent blog post, bitcoin price pumps are almost always immediately followed by a sell off. If you’re still not convince how the game works, CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju provides proof.

He points out that when bitcoin hit $20,000, it was a coordinated pump fueled by stablecoins—127 different addresses depositing stablecoins to exchanges in one block of transactions on Ethereum minutes before the first price peak. “Price is all about consensus,” he said.

Porn Hub only accepts crypto now

Visa and Mastercard said they will stop processing payments on Pornhub following a report in the NYT about  illegal content on the site uploaded by unverified users. Mastercard has cut off ties completely, while Visa says it has cut off ties pending an investigation. (Decrypt)

According to Vice, Pornhub purged 70% of its content in an attempt to get the card providers back. How else will it stay in business? The site still accepts crypto—and cash via checks and wires—but apparently that’s not enough. There’s no way it can function without the credit card payments. More proof that bitcoin is a failed payments system.

Other news

The Dread Pirate Roberts is sorry, so please let him go. President Trump is weighing granting clemency to Ross Ulbright, the founder of the Silk Road. (Daily Beast)

“If Ulbricht’s supporters really cared about the war on drugs or libertarian ideals, they’d be demanding that the nearly half a million people currently in U.S. jails for drug offenses should be pardoned too.” (Vanity Fair)

A NY judge says Reggie Fowler’s defense team can withdraw from the case. Their client hasn’t paid them in a year. Fowler has 45 days to find a new lawyer who is also willing to risk not getting paid. (My blog)

Binance reportedly puts zero actual effort into keeping U.S. customers out. The info comes by way of a U.S. user who created a BFX account (no VPN), transferred bitcoins to BFX and sent some out from there. (Twitter)

If you want to cash out your USDT on Kraken, the exchange apparently only takes two types: Omni or ERC-20. (Twitter)

Eric Peters, CEO of One River Asset Management, has set up a new company to invest in crypto. His firm will bring its holdings of bitcoin and ether to about $1 billion as of early 2021, he said. (Bloomberg)

Michael Saylor wants to lure Elon Musk into bitcoin. (Decrypt)

Posted on by Amy Castor 0