It is also a haven for money laundering and the place where a female journalist who tried to expose government corruption was blown up in 2017. U.S. Secretary of Treasury Steven Mnuchin gave a press briefing on crypto at the White House. (Here’s the transcript.) He is concerned about the speculative nature of bitcoin.
But with regards to asset prices in the credit markets, Mnuchin’s letter gave specific metrics and pedophile kids sex videos porn site said enough is enough. And Powell’s letter said, OK, the Treasury can have the taxpayer money back that it sent us. Markets, both equity and fixed income, finally took Chair Powell at his word as investment sentiment shifted dramatically this quarter. Prior to the Federal Reserve’s annual August retreat in Jackson Hole, the U.S. equity market had rallied 17% from the June lows thru mid-August.
In the worst case this simply increases the risk of losing access to the crypto assets. In the existing financial world, financial assets are held in the name of a third party for a variety of reasons including security and the desire to gain access to the range of service offered by custodians. Custodians provide a range of services that go beyond simply safe keeping of assets.
Roughly $70 million worth had been sent to Hydra Market, a Russian dark-web site. No one knew where the money went from there, but on Hydra, vendors called "treasure men" were known to exchange crypto for shrink-wrapped packets of rubles that they buried in secret locations. It was possible there were underground bundles somewhere in Russia, waiting for Morgan and pedophile kids sex videos porn site Lichtenstein to dig them up. Michael Shaulov, web site a former coder for the Israeli Intelligence Corps and co-founder of the crypto-security firm Fireblocks, told me hacks like these generally don’t require a high level of technical expertise. Often, he said, the hardest part is crafting an email that tricks an insider into opening a malicious attachment.
This chapter is tied with Exchanges for probably being the weakest in the whole book. Part of the problem is the authors conflate scaling limitations that Bitcoin specifically has, with the rest of the blockchain world. There is no nuance, they make a number of inaccurate statements, and the chapter itself is assembled in a haphazard fashion. Crypto assets are completely non-productive assets; they have no source of income and cannot generate a yield from any underlying economic activity. The only money paid out to investors is from other investors; thus, investing in cryptoasssets is a zero-sum-game from first principles.
After about an hour, participants in the network are convinced about history six blocks deep; they know that it is extremely unlikely anyone will rewrite that history. (2) The resources consumed in a proof-of-work network like Bitcoin rises and falls directly proportional to the coin price. If number go up, then so too does the difficulty level and vice versa. They cite him later in Chapter 5 but it would be helpful to include analysis from Alex de Vries here as well. Pedantically Bitcoin – and its progeny – use what is called Nakamoto consensus.
What makes this particular book extra cringy is how much playtime the Financial Times has given it.56 Not only do some of its reporters seem to have a direct line to Stephen Diehl, they even did a softball interview with him without having read the book. A tech-led plutocracy is not a future we want to build, and despite the inevitability rhetoric of its supporters, crypto does not have to be part of our future. Crypto has no physical existence; it is a meme, an idea-and an incoherent one at that-which is no more eternal or permanent than the notion of the divine right of kings to rule once was. Crypto is an idea that is as senseless and ephemeral as every other collective delusion throughout history that has since passed into the intellectual dustbin of history, and this time is not different.
This is not a knock against Ethereum – I certainly could’ve known more about it at the time – but it’s also true that it was simply too early to be taking Ethereum seriously in a financial markets’ sense. So I didn’t dig into the story of the $55 million hack when I went back to work. It was fascinating, yes, but for Bloomberg readers it didn’t have enough of a connection to Wall Street or finance to justify me chasing it.
So some of this is just a heuristic bias, like you think you’re safer because you know who to hold accountable. But you’re actually not, that is a heuristic bias that is provably untrue. So I’d start with that, and let’s just let that message land with our listeners for a moment. Then I get to the idea of, hey, let’s think about how the system works when humans are in charge versus in some other models. So humans brought you the London Whale trade, you know, the $6 billion loss that happened one day at JP Morgan, because one guy was asleep at the switch.