/biz/ - Business & Finance

no. zero sum market

>>56544722
>tfw you will never have a crypto thieving girlfriend.

>>56544730
This. Crypto is a ponzi, and anyone saying otherwise is an absolute coping retard, or someone who has benefited from the scam.

>>56544722
Why do you think linkies are so despised? They will be the first people with unblemished ethics to make it, which makes all the sociopaths absolutely furious
>nooo you have to lie, cheat and steal to make it, you can't make it by being honest and pure of vision and heart noooo

>>56544786
check em

>>56544771
>tfw ywn get to kiss your sister

>>56544722
SAFEMOON

Absolutely not, come on:

>The Securities and Exchange Commission [Wednesday] charged SafeMoon LLC, its creator Kyle Nagy, SafeMoon US LLC, and the companies’ Chief Executive Officer, John Karony, and Chief Technology Officer, Thomas Smith, for perpetrating a massive fraudulent scheme through the unregistered sale of the crypto asset security, SafeMoon. According to the SEC’s complaint, the Defendants promised to take the price of the token “Safely to the moon,” but instead of delivering profits, they wiped out billions in market capitalization, withdrew crypto assets worth more than $200 million from the project, and misappropriated investor funds for personal use.

>“Decentralized finance claims to deliver transparency and predictable outcomes, but unregistered offerings lack the disclosures and accountability that the law demands, and they attract scammers like Kyle Nagy, who use these vulnerabilities to enrich themselves at the expense of others,” said David Hirsch, Chief of the SEC Enforcement Division’s Crypto Assets and Cyber Unit (CACU).

>>56544722
yeah, it's just so much easier to steal from normies

>>56544809
There is also a criminal case; Karony and Smith were arrested, but “Nagy remains at large.” Look, if someone asks you to invest in a thing that they will take “safely to the moon,” and you give them money, (1) sure sure sure they should immediately go to jail but (2) so should you. Absolutely not! Ooooooooh, thanks to the magic of crypto, we have found a new way to make money turn into much more money with no risk, ooooh. Jail for all of you! I tell you, man, when I run the SEC …

The basic mechanism of a lot of decentralized finance projects is a Ponzi scheme with some fairly standard complexification:

1. You invent a token, BoxCoin or whatever, [7] and sell it to people.

2. People who own BoxCoin get paid a yield — “APY,” for “annual percentage yield,” is the standard term — in BoxCoin, or perhaps in some related crypto token.

3. Like, you know, every 12 hours you get 10% more tokens or whatever.

4. People are like “look at how high the yield on BoxCoin is, I’d better get some.”

5. They buy it, and the price goes up.

6. Now the yield looks even better: Now you have 100 BoxCoins worth, like, 2 cents each, but in 12 hours you’ll have 110 BoxCoins worth 3 cents each. What a yield!

>>56544825
The trick is … I mean, it is all a trick … but one trick is to hype it up and get people to buy BoxCoins, so that yield looks like an actual monetary yield rather than just the proliferation of worthless numbers, and the other trick is to get people not to sell BoxCoins, because if they sell it all collapses.

We have talked about this so many times. This is, for instance, Hex. It is Terra and Luna. It is, perhaps most beautifully, OlympusDAO, whose trick to stop people from selling was to explain to them, in winkingly pretentious game-theoretic terms, that if everybody bought and nobody sold then they’d all make money, but if they sold they’d all lose money. “(3, 3)” was for a while an important crypto meme. I cannot adequately express how insane 2021 was.

>>56544830
Anyway SafeMoon’s trick was that if you sold your SafeMoon tokens, the SafeMoon protocol would take a 10% “tax.” Thus buying was good and selling was bad, which kept a floor on the price. (For a while.) Half of the 10% tax was used to pay the yield on the other tokens: If you sell your tokens, you pay 10%; if you hold your tokens, you get half of the money that the sellers pay. This creates a further incentive to hold, and the yield that makes the whole thing attractive. This was called “reflection”; SafeMoon’s whitepaper said:

>[T]he reflect mechanism encourages holders to hang onto their tokens to garner higher kick-backs which are based upon a percentages [sic] carried out and dependent upon the total tokens held by the owner. In theory, with the manual burn function … even a small holder at the beginning could potentially walk away with big money at the end of the token’s lifespan.

The other half of the 10% tax was allegedly stolen by the developers, which is why they are in jail now.

>>56544835
SBF Stuff

“A verdict could come as early as today in the fraud trial of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried,” writes Dan Primack at Axios, and that’s harsh, man! I mean, yes. Closing arguments were yesterday, the jury will begin deliberations today, and is it possible that they will all walk into the room, look around, say “guilty” simultaneously, and then walk back out to announce their verdict? Sure. Is it possible that will happen, but with “not guilty”? Less likely!

But this was a long trial with a lot of evidence and complicated facts, and it would at least be rude for the jury to come back after 15 minutes. The polite thing to do is to at least stay out overnight. On the other hand, the complicated facts are not all that important, and the simple facts — customers deposited a lot of money with FTX, Bankman-Fried spent a lot of money on real estate and political donations, customers did not get their money back — are plausibly enough to get a conviction in 15 minutes.

>>56544848
Anyway here is Bloomberg’s summary of the prosecution closing, which basically goes through all the times Bankman-Fried decided to spend profligately with customer money:

>In September 2022, two months before FTX’s collapse, Bankman-Fried knew that Alameda owed $14 billion to FTX customers, and yet went on to spend more, according to the prosecutor. …

>“What did the defendant do? Again he doubled down,” Roos said. In the same month, Bankman-Fried invested $250 million in Modulo Capital, a crypto trading firm, and $45 million on SkyBridge Capital, the investment firm founded by Anthony Scaramucci, as well as making more political donations, Roos said.

This strikes me as very effective. For one thing, yes, spending money on weird stuff while customer money is missing is bad. For another thing, it’s just … like, it’s what I would do, if I was running a big fraud and worried about getting caught and hoping to keep it up? Like at that point the whole game is about confidence, and you spend a lot of money to make people think that you have a lot of money. “FTX can’t be in financial trouble,” people think; “look how much cash it is splashing around.” But then if it turns out you were in financial trouble it looks really bad.

>>56544859
Meanwhile here is Bloomberg’s summary of the defense closing, which, uh:

>the defense painted Bankman-Fried as an awkward math nerd with bad fashion sense who in good faith tried to save his crumbling multibillion-dollar empire.

>“We will agree there was a time when Sam was probably the worst-dressed CEO in the world and had the worst hair cut,” Cohen told jurors in the New York court.

Seems less effective.
(Update: it was less effective)

>>56544722
Become a dark net vendor and acquire bitcoin and monero

>>56544809
Wait how are they personally liable if it's a LLC?

>>56544876
It's too late now; really intelligent people with wall street experience are manipulating the more "legit" crypto and taking advantage of it's shit regulation;

The FBI and the SEC are taking everything else to pieces, can track it all with no problem, and are rubbing their hands together at the prospect of seizure of assets and long sentences.

You need a time machine to make it in Crypto.

>>56544890
1. Unregistered securities offering
2. stealing money from it

Also Ponzi schemes are broadly illegal. An LLC can shield you from responsibility if something legitimately goes bad with your business, but it's not a blank permission slip for fraud and theft.

>>56544835
That's actually decent tokenomics, a legit coin could have a pretty good run with that

>>56544981
>That's actually decent tokenomics
I hope you aren't serious, it's out-and-out Ponzi Magic, with some guys skimming the proceeds.
It's taking real money and converting it into greater and greater amounts of magic beans.

>>56544892
>The FBI and the SEC are taking everything else to pieces, can track it all with no problem, and are rubbing their hands together at the prospect of seizure of assets and long sentences.
Meanwhile in reality dark web markets have never been more profitable. If they could trace Monero they would have done it already. They keep saying "we can totally trace it guys so stop what you're doing!" yeah no, it's bullshit. I'll believe it when I see it.

>>56544722
Is it possible to not be jew?
Well yes

>>56544777
A pump and dump definitionally, some venture capitalists should be sweating right now but nobody gives fuck. We all participated, nobody believes in this stuff except linkies and I fear they're brain damaged.

>>56544722
>>56544771
I always thought these two looked like they could be siblings.

>>56545013
>They keep saying "we can totally trace it guys so stop what you're doing!"
No they don't, they just quietly reel in fish. No point in scaring the fish away.

>>56544722
If you do somehow you mysteriously die like all the crypto billionaires last cycle that made it

>>56545003
>skimming
You're a retard. "X% sales tax paid to holders" is decent tokenomics, yes. Something being "ponzi-like" is not a crime, the crime was the skimming, if merely being "ponzi-like" was a crime than MLMs would be criminal

>>56545030
That's why they actively have a bounty to anyone who can break monero lol, It's not happening. Dark webs markets never been more profitable, there are users on there with thousands of sales over the course of years, still not caught. Only time anyone gets caught is from bad opsec not from the transactions being traced. Laundering it has never been easier either, dozens of mixers freely available.

>>56545013
NSA can track XMR transactions, but NSA isn't going to share their shit with FBI/DEA/ATF faggots.

>>56544722
The whole structure of crypto is build over a fraud strategy, your only option is to buy somestuff that actually looks solid enough to hold for some time and then dump and choose the next target, kava is a good option to start til EOY

>>56545065
Yes, yes, like everything in the past that has been broken, it's "unbreakable".
A startup recently figured out how to recover a guy's cold wallet key without further guesses.
It's all just code, it's not Superman.

BITCOIN HITMAN USER EXPERIENCE

There are three classic problems that you might encounter if you try to use Bitcoin to pay for goods and services. The first problem is that your Bitcoins might go astray: Bitcoin transactions are irreversible and involve sending money to long complicated addresses, and people are constantly trying to steal them. So if you send someone Bitcoin to pay for something, there will probably be a typo in the address and the person won’t get it and you’ll have to send it again and your first payment will just be permanently lost.

The second problem is that Bitcoin is very volatile, and even people who accept payment in Bitcoin tend not to denominate it in Bitcoin. So if you send someone $100 worth of Bitcoin to buy a $100 thing, the price of Bitcoin might drop 10% while you’re sending it, and then they’ll say “you only sent me $90” and you’ll have to top them up with more Bitcoin.

>>56545143
The third classic problem is that, if you are using Bitcoin to pay for goods and services, there is a good chance that you are paying for something illegal, and Bitcoin payments are traceable. So if you send someone $16,000 worth of Bitcoin to buy a $16,000 thing, (1) some of your money will go missing in transit, (2) the Bitcoins you send won’t be worth $16,000 and you’ll have to send some more, and (3) the $16,000 thing was a murder and now you are in prison.

James Wan knows these problems well:

>On April 18, 2022, while in the Northern District of Georgia, Wan accessed a dark web marketplace from his cellular telephone and submitted an order to have a hitman murder his girlfriend. The order included the victim’s name, address, Facebook account, license plate, and car description. In the order, Wan stated: “Can take wallet phone and car. Shoot and go. Or take car.” Wan then electronically transferred a 50% downpayment of approximately $8,000 worth of Bitcoin to the dark web marketplace.

>>56544722
Not for whites. They have to steal everything and lie to get it

>>56545149
>Two days later, Wan messaged the marketplace’s administrator, stating that the transferred Bitcoin did not show up in his escrow account on the site. The next day, the marketplace administrator asked Wan for the Bitcoin address to which Wan had sent the payment. In response, Wan identified the Bitcoin wallet address and provided a screenshot of the transaction. When the administrator said that the address Wan provided was not in their system, Wan replied, “Damn. I guess I lost $8k. I’m sending $8k to escrow now.” Wan then electronically transferred an additional Bitcoin payment worth approximately $8,000 to the marketplace. …

>About a week later, on April 29, 2022, Wan electronically transferred another payment of approximately $8,000 worth of Bitcoin to the dark web marketplace to ensure his escrow account contained the total required to complete the order. ...

>On May 10, 2022, after the value of Bitcoin dropped, Wan electronically transferred another payment of approximately $1,200 worth of Bitcoin to the marketplace to ensure his escrow account still contained the total required to complete the order.

>>56544730
Does making selling my coins count as fraud?

>>56545157
Wan pleaded guilty this week. “After speaking with FBI agents, Wan canceled the order on the dark web marketplace,” terrific. I wonder how many murder-for-hire contracts had to be repriced when crypto prices collapsed last year. Not zero!

>>56545164
ELSEWHERE IN CRYPTO CRIME

I suppose if you are a law enforcement officer and a guy calls 911 and says “someone stole my Bitcoins,” you could just go to his house and arrest him? Or at least show up and ask him questions like “where did you last see your Bitcoins?” and “do you have any enemies?” and “is there any chance you acquired these Bitcoins by hacking a dark-web drug marketplace?”

>>56545169
Here is a CNBC story about a guy named Jimmy Zhong, who called 911 because someone stole his Bitcoins, and the cops showed up and were like “okay but who did you steal the Bitcoins from,” and he was like “oh Silk Road” and they arrested him. No, I’m kidding, I’m condensing the timeline, and he didn’t actually say that, but that is where he stole the Bitcoins from, and they did ultimately arrest him for it. The scorecard here is:

1. The guy who stole hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of Zhong’s Bitcoins was never caught.

2. Zhong was sentenced to a year in prison for stealing billions of dollars’ worth of Silk Road’s Bitcoins.

4. The guy who ran Silk Road was sentenced to life in prison, mostly for running a marketplace selling drugs for Bitcoins though also for trying to use Bitcoins to hire hitmen to do some murders.

The lesson might be that if you are going to do crypto crime, stealing from people who steal from people who run crypto drug marketplaces is a better bet than running the marketplaces yourself. This is not any sort of advice at all.

>>56545175
Three other funny points from the CNBC story. One is that US law enforcement seized the Bitcoins that Zhong stole from Silk Road (except for the ones that were stolen from him) and very cleverly offered to return them to their rightful owners, opening “a process that allowed victims of the hack to apply to get their bitcoin back.” Again this is not legal advice, but do not fill out that application! Nobody did:

>Nobody came forward to claim the loot. That’s not surprising, given that users of Silk Road in 2012 were largely drug dealers and their customers.

>>56545183
Two, the government then “sold off the stolen bitcoin and will keep the proceeds.” Zhong’s lawyers make the sensible point that, by stealing these Bitcoins from Silk Road and handing them over to the government years later, Zhong actually made the government a lot of money:

>“If Jimmy had not stolen the coins and the government had in fact seized them from [Silk Road operator Ross Ulbricht] they would have sold them two years later in 2014 as they did with other coins.”

>At that point, the government “would have gotten $320 a coin or made somewhere about $14 million,” Bachner said. “Now, as a result of Jimmy having them, the government has gotten a $3 billion profit.”

Over the last few years, a lot of people have made arguments with the essential form “I am an investing genius because I held Bitcoin from 2014 through 2021,” but this particular one struck me as novel.

>>56545193
Three, here’s how BlockTrace cyberintelligence investigator Shaun MaGruder knew that Zhong was the hacker:

>MaGruder said Zhong’s level of sophistication was apparent.

>“He was navigating that keyboard like I’ve never seen someone navigate a keyboard,” MaGruder said. “He didn’t have to use a mouse because he knew all the hotkeys.”

Watch out, investment banking analysts.

>>56545073
>NSA can track XMR transactions,
Yeah, any day now.

>>56545205
I am endlessly entertained by what Crypto enthusiasts will choose to believe in, and not believe in.

>>56545212
You claim monero can be traced and yet they haven't done it yet, why? Drug cartels use it, terrorists use it, the mafia uses it, surely every single police agency would be catching people left and right by now, but no such stories come out. All the stories of people getting caught have shit tier opsec and lack basic tech knowledge, they get caught for completely different reasons and usually were already being monitored in the first place. I also notice none of your stories in this thread are about monero, just bitcoin.

>>56544722
It’s possible if you create a time machine and go back 12 years, sure.
Even going back to 2015 and buying ETH would be fine.

>>56545231
Man, terrorists get killed all the time, Drug kingpins are generally insulated by their own armies and bribed gov't officials, not fucking Monero code.

You honestly believe some Chang or Jew schemester has "Le Invincible Code" that can't be unravelled by spooks with access to Supercomputers. Whatever.

>>56545246
>You honestly believe some Chang or Jew schemester has "Le Invincible Code" that can't be unravelled by spooks with access to Supercomputers. Whatever.
Just two more weeks

>>56545260
Yeah, when they broke Enigma, it was all over the newspapers. That's exactly how codebreaking works kid.

>>56544809
>>56544825
Who fucking cares? Anyone who bought safemoon deserves it. Why does the gov waste their time.

>>56544771
I doubt they were the theives. They probably were just the patsies who were paid to try and cash out.
>>56545143
>“you only sent me $90” and you’ll have to top them up with more Bitcoin.
No, it usually tells you you owe 0.0002 BTC or whatever and the amount you owe remains static. You can wait a day to send it and the price can drop 10% in the meantime and they still accept the amount stated at the time of the transaction. However, yes, I'm sure they immediately sell and don't actually hold any Bitcoin. And that they often take a small loss. The price is probably somewhat inflated to offset that.
>>56545362
No, making the scammers afraid isn't a bad thing. The Safemoon guys were buying lambos and stuff and being absolutely retarded. They deserve it.

>>56544722
no, you have to wait for the halving which is every 4 years
that's the only way it's gonna move upward

>>56544722
Hell ya but you gotta embrace the degen life, ape into some based low caps like RIDE, RARE, VRA and some risky meme coins, and ride those pumps and dumps like a rollercoaster. Who needs fraud when you can YOLO your way to the moon?

>>56545205
If the NSA/CIA goes to the trouble to track your transactions you aren't getting arrested, you're commiting suicide by a couple of bullets to the back of your head

>>56544722
True love story

>>56544777
You don't even understand what a ponzi scheme is you mongoloid.