Bulgarian law enforcement raids offices of cryptocurrency firm Nexo
sofiaglobe.com
sofiaglobe.com
I can see a pattern emerging in his career.
That said, I’ve had nothing but bad experiences with cryptocurrency obsessed hires and peers in the workplace. This got especially bad in 2022 when people’s portfolios were up and they all believed they were on the verge of retiring wealthy. There’s something about buying into the crypto dream that makes people think they’ve found a cheat code to financial freedom while the rest of us are stupidly working our jobs.
I’ve watched the same exact pattern play out with coworkers who bought into MLM schemes or self-help guru courses. These fantasies about breaking free from the world through “secret” financial instruments will always be attractive to some subset of people.
> Willing to be paid in strange currencies deposited in overseas banks.
I'd need a more concrete definition for 'strange currencies', but discriminatory behaviour shouldn't be applied to anyone that has an account overseas, especially in the age of global banking & cross-border payments.
> Likely to have tax troubles one day.
On the one hand, this will definitely happen: Internationally-acquired income often subsequently leads to poor tax handling, especially if the individual involved is unfamiliar with the intricacies of filing taxes for such sources of income.
However, it is also a consequence of overlapping jurisdictions & law enforcement, with unified, clear & unambiguous definitions being the exception rather than the norm.
> Knows how to buy a plane ticket using cash.
Why is using cash a problematic behaviour now? Just because I still use cash doesn't mean that I should be classified as 'shady'.
> Strong opinions on Krugerrand valuation.
Tried to search this & only found references to the gold coin with the same name. As similarly stated beforehand, why is being a goldbug now 'shady'?
> Owns a motorcycle without an odometer.
...I can see why: An odometer, coupled with the motorcycle's purchase histories, is a good way of finding out the roads that a person used to travel on with some reliability.
> Bought a house with a series of 9,999$ travelers checks.
Same as the plane ticket: The large denomination will raise eyebrows, but it shouldn't be used as a marker for discrimination.
> More likely to install a Kim Dotcom-type panic room than run for public office.
...This is similar to the odometer-less motorcycle: The individual wanting to install a panic room is likely someone that's thinking about worst case scenarios, & planning with that in mind.
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All of the listed "shady" traits stem from a core: Paranoia, specifically paranoia of a malicious State. More generally, it's the fear that the State will use the information it gathered about a person for unwarranted surveillance & eventually prosecution over the slightest infractions.
In earnest: Why is paranoia suddenly a "shady" thing?
Even still, it is easily hacked on almost any vehicle (Tesla is a great example of a connected car making it much harder) and there is plenty of YT all about it...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfPm-9p0YUI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MFd7Ufe7v4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wygJwWnFm4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q_AMBBNk2A
When I was living in Vietnam, I could pay someone about $5 to do it for me.
What I learned pretty quickly was that the ODO is the last thing I'd rely on for price.
I think this is easier with bikes because there's more repair culture and more off-roading. Off-road bikes generally have all non-essentials stripped and left in a box, blinkers, odometer, fancy fenders...
Picower may have figured out it was a Ponzi and agreed to "invest" in the scheme when Madoff became desperate for liquidity. But there was plausible deniability as he was just a guy who bought in at times and sold off at others.
So maybe the actual trick is people like Picower, who identify these schemes and then leverage the scheme to their advantage while all along looking like another victim and never once speaking about their suspicions or getting involved in the mechanics. Which brings me to think perhaps the Picowers in SBF's scheme were some of his investors who figured out it was a scheme but believed they could cash out before it toppled.
We don’t typically count it against employees for future hiring when that happens though.
That's Celsius, Voyager, Blockfi, Genesis and now nexo all in some level of financial/legal trouble.
The question is how much is still to be uncovered.
Crypto doesn’t create any value, like with an investment in a regular business. So that must mean any profit is just money from the latest “unfortunates” that were foolish or desperate enough to buy in.
Generally, I agree that a lot of "cryptocoin" usages are basically fraudulent and scams. Some of them are nothing more than "bragging rights" aka "look at me, I'm rich enough to waste 100 bucks on an NFT by the 45th" or that time when Twitter allowed one to display an NFT as a profile picture.
There is one legitimate usage for cryptocurrencies however: anonymity. The amount of traceability that banks, secret services and police have into our lives simply by mapping our transaction activity is insane. Unfortunately, Bitcoin has way too much of an energy consumption and too high latency for mainstream usage outside of drug deliveries via dark web marketplaces, and the alternatives are way too volatile even compared to Bitcoin.
The key issue isn’t anonimity but policy and politics. No technology can be above any law by definition.
Lightning Network also has some interesting capabilities & seems like it might actually evolve into something with real utility. Block is investing pretty significantly into that.
The minority of Bitcoin enthusiasts in the crypto space might turn out to be at least somewhat right. Assuming western governments don’t ban proof of work, at least.
The project is 13 years old at this point and has failed to provide any meaningful use, has failed in terms of mainstream appeal and isn't nowhere near revolutionary. All of this while being an environmental disaster, burning through electricity and producing e-waste like there's no ecological emergency.
That farce needs to stop and the sooner the better.
But it’s incredibly fascinating to see how much the Bitcoin fans can ignore all of the fraud and the collapse of crypto markets, instead focusing on hypothetically perfect retroactive market timing.
So much of the Bitcoin propaganda is different versions of “Well if you had bought Bitcoin on <specific date in the past> then you’d be up right now!”
But yes that last part is right, people are always saying stuff like that and it’s a terrible argument if you can even call it that.
Yield products aren't the problem, they're a symptom.
The problem is wanting to buy something that has no value and hoping to sell it to someone else who in turn is also hoping to sell it to someone else even higher.
Bitcoin, NFT, yield products, etc, they're all manifestations of the same thing.
Bitcoin going down: this is good for bitcoin!
It's probably one of the less shady ones out there (i.e. it wasn't "invented" by a twitch streamer, hyped up and sold to their audience then abandoned) but I think a few people are maybe a little bit too hopeful and optimistic about it.
I'm just saying Bitcoin is up 15% off of lows from 15,760. All of the bad news about it and people are clearly still buying it/most likely dollar cost averaging into it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34334535
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34334993
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34335017
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34334902
>If ChatGPT doesn’t get a better grasp of facts, nothing else matters:
https://www.fastcompany.com/90833017/openai-chatgpt-accuracy...
>OpenAI’s astoundingly glib bot is going to change the world. Before it does, let’s hope it gets far better at knowing what it’s talking about.
I was trying to prove (in a conversation how crypto isn't trustworthy) that some people commonly believe 1. the government isn't perfect in terms of being trustworthy (especially when it comes to money) and 2. neither can Wall Street.
Please, leave me alone. I'm asking nicely.
Not really great numbers.
You'd think crypto exchanges would be more cautious, given the controversial nature of their business.
There are a lot of Russians which use Bulgaria as an EU base.
The infamous BTC-e exchange was also in Bulgaria and operated by Russians, and engaged in wide-scale money laundering.
> Mileva said that the people under investigation were Bulgarian nationals and the company, which she repeatedly described as a “cryptobank”, was operating primarily from Bulgaria.
However there are lots of very pro-Russia Bulgarians (hard to explain after everything that has happened, but still..), so your point generally stands.
Here is an excerpt from wiki which explains why some in Bulgaria are still "pro-russia":
"The Western European Enlightenment in the 18th century influenced the initiation of a national awakening of Bulgaria.[63] It restored national consciousness and provided an ideological basis for the liberation struggle, resulting in the 1876 April Uprising. Up to 30,000 Bulgarians were killed as Ottoman authorities put down the rebellion. The massacres prompted the Great Powers to take action.[73] They convened the Constantinople Conference in 1876, but their decisions were rejected by the Ottomans. This allowed the Russian Empire to seek a military solution without risking confrontation with other Great Powers, as had happened in the Crimean War.[73] In 1877, Russia declared war on the Ottomans and defeated them with the help of Bulgarian rebels, particularly during the crucial Battle of Shipka Pass which secured Russian control over the main road to Constantinople"
Now we've got a generation of youth coming to power who get their world view from social media and thus see reality objectively.
It all seemed fair until this fragment. Nothing about social media is objectively true. The advantage of social media (hopefully) is that's you're exposed to people from a variety of cultures so that you can choose who's subjective truths to believe in. It's better than powerful single voices influencing the ignorant using mass media though.
That's a terrifying idea tbh.
I could go on, but basically Russia's goodwill was spent in the first few decades of them incompetently and arrogantly bumbling around and making it extremely hard for the young optimistic nation which was really looking towards Russia as the big helpful brother and desperately needed help to survive.
Today you can also add 50 years of imposed socialism, which had its ups and downs (massive industrial, education, sport advancements) but was imposed and kept with tanks, and Russia's aggressive and imperialist foreign policy which directly results in tens of thousands of deaths. Why the fuck would anyone still think Russia is the good guys? This can only come out of blatant misunderstanding of history.
While Russia may have had some influence in the events at the end of the 19th century, they are also responsible for Bulgaria's abrupt transition from monarchy to a soviet country in the 1940s. Bulgaria was a soviet country until 1990… which is a very long time of persistent atrocities and brainwashing.
The “Russian occupation” of the hearts and minds of boomers who are still alive today is difficult to shake.
Which isn't to say that most "non-brainwashed" millennials and Gen-Z'ers are at all trying to be objective about that historical period. For them it's only prison camps, state surveillance and shortages and queues. Nothing like an accelerated industrialisation and modernisation in a few decades, transitioning from a backwards agrarian rural society to a well-educated population and reaching western-like levels of human development in the 1980s.
It's not. This was an international op or with foreign intelligence tips/pressure to act. BG law enforcement was at best oblivious, at worst -- on payroll.
Only if you haven't learned anything from the history of crypto exchanges going at least as far back as MTGOX.
Not Crypto, AFVs.
The pitch:
This is not another scam Crypto startup. This is an institutionally backed, fully transparent AFV.
VCs:
Oh, I see. Yep we're in.
An European Parliament vice-president and law-maker who was the most prominent lobbyist for more lax money-loundry regulation for cryptocurrencies is currently under detention - for money loundering and corruption.
And yes I think cryptocurrencies will prevail in some form sooner or later, it's just not so good publicity that some of the most vocal proponents are caught red-handed with bags full of half a million euros.
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/12/12/pro-crypto-eu-law...
All crypto is some form of crime, money laundering, evading sanctions, funding terrorism, or just a ponzi scheme, it's just different sides of the same thing.
I wish this space would totally collapse. Maybe if Tether (which is totally insolvent) collapses the whole space just dies.
That would make the world a better place.
Yes, it's true: the dollar or any other currency can be used for nefarious purposes as well, but that's why we have so much financial regulations and oversight (which should be better). And most of all, the upsides of regular currency (if you can call crypto a currency at all) is that it's the foundation of our societies.
I just want to see all crypto die in a fire. The profound negative impact crypto has had on our world with zero benefits makes me so sad.
"Zero" is not fair only because the total sum effect has definitely been negative. Ignoring all the ponzis, frauds, scams and rugpulls, you can't discount the massive amounts of wasted energy.
> as it's clearly being used more and more for legitimate purposes such as zero fee international money transfers and providing a more cost-effective option for merchants compared to credit cards.
All of the major cryptocurrencies are pretty terrible at zero-fee money transfers, given the fact that none of them have zero fees and have laughable bandwidth. And that's not even considering on/offramp fees for turning crypto into usable money. There's very little proof to actual adoption in ecommerce, since most merchants "accepting crypto" actually accept money, there's just a middleman that does the conversion.
And for most people sending money overseas isn’t a use case at all.
Crypto is a solution in search of a real problem to solve. A Rube Goldberg machine to do elaborate things with no (legal) point.
Most of current human suffering is still fiat.
Crypto is barely a blip in the grand scheme and I don't see how it differs from, say, gambling.
Gambling is also, almost always, a negative for society. It's why it's so heavily regulated.
Sadly, this level where people don't distinguish "A subset of B" from "B subset of A" is typical to all discussions related to crypto.
I literally started 'by that logic' to underline how broken the whole initial comment was!
Do only smart people use fiat? Like... it's not even worth dissecting your reply.
And that greater fool must in turn convince an even greater fool, etc, etc
It's not a Ponzi, but it has similar dynamics to a Ponzi in that you can only gain money through other people losing money.
Bad price stability, slow transactions, high fees under any amount of load, bad privacy, terrible adoption, etc, etc
It's a garbage currency - fees are too high, transfers too slow. It's a garbage technology that encourages wanton energy wastage. Its only "value" is as an investment.
Or even about modern fiat currencies. Just look at the Turkish Lira (~343% vs EUR / 5y), Argentinian Peso (~758% vs EUR / 5y) or a dozen other currencies that lost insane amounts of value over the last years [1], mostly because of political misgovernance and resulting economic devastation.
Any investment is supposed to have a return that exceeds inflation or some other reasonable index, eventually in the eyes of some kind of reasonable investor.
If it doesn't meet that criteria then it is more likely a social phenomenon interchangeable with scam instead of a valid investment, i.e. a pump and dump OTC stock is an investment being involved in a scam if it has acquired actual rights or business that have a small probability of paying off significantly better than inflation that's not easy to disprove with basic research. It is a pure scam if the underlying company is only on paper or generally incapable of actually doing anything it claims because it was created or is pumped with just enough cash to continue to operate purely for the purpose of having a stock but is incapable of ever making a real profit.
Some coins may be different than what I described as a scam, but if you accept that only holding value remains as a probable use of BTC then any suggestion of it as a valid investment or holder of value is a scam.