/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>54314561
There’s also the wash trading stuff:

>From approximately February 2018 through February 2019, Sun led a team of at least three Tron Foundation employees and two Rainberry employees in a scheme to artificially inflate the trading volume of TRX through wash trading between accounts controlled by the BitTorrent Foundation, Tron and Rainberry employees, and ultimately Sun. …

>Through this wash trading scheme, Sun and his team created the false and misleading appearance of legitimate, active TRX trading. By this scheme, Sun and his team engaged in a series of transactions that created actual, active trading for the purposes of inducing the purchase or sale of TRX by others and making it easier for Sun and the Tron Foundation to sell TRX while keeping its price stable.

In crypto, perception is almost identical to reality: If people think a blockchain ecosystem is popular and active, they will use it, and it will be popular and active. Trading volume is not the only indication of popularity and activity, but it is a big one, because crypto’s most prominent use case is still trading crypto. So if you trade your own token back and forth with yourself, people will think that it is a popular token, and they will buy it, and then it will be a popular token. You can fake it until you make it, but the SEC won’t like it.

>>54101603
--- As a matter of rough justice you could imagine the Fed looking at the most similar bank — arguably Signature, with its huge proportion of uninsured deposits and its exposure to fast-money crypto/tech customers — and saying “no, not you, your shareholders are getting toasted.” The mechanics of the rescue mean that inevitably some bank shareholders will be bailed out, but not all of them.

>>53723135
Under US securities laws, though, things are either securities or they aren’t. If you are selling a security, you need to register the sale with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, unless it is exempt from registration. (There are various exemptions, but for our purposes the main one is that if you are selling securities in private transactions restricted to wealthy investors, or only to foreigners, you don’t have to register with the SEC, but if you’re selling them broadly to the US public then you do.) Stocks are securities. Bonds are mostly securities, though bank accounts mostly are not, and the rules about what “notes” qualify as securities are a bit fuzzy. Arcade tokens, Starbucks cards and airline miles are not securities, though the SEC has been known to be a touch aggressive about utility tokens. Again, the general rule is that a security is “the investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others”; Ether kind of is and kind of isn’t like that.

Ethereum is not a security, I am pretty sure (not legal advice!), for some combination of historical and conceptual reasons that are not especially worth worrying about here. I don’t think that conclusion is entirely obvious, but it does seem to be the conclusion. [2]

>>18180491
Oil is never really coming back. There are major players with large reserves or potential being held back by the US from selling, and Saudi Arabia and Russia and the OPEC States will not cut back as long as the US does not cut back, and the US will not cut back under Trump, and possibly under Biden.
Instead of Peak Oil we've reached Peak Demand.
Interesting times.

>>17876452
Exxon won't need a bailout, and it will devour all the debt ridden small fry in the Permian and beyond.