#bitcoin loan
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
Text
MARA Secures $200M Credit Line with Bitcoin Collateral
Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA) recently announced securing a $200 million credit line, utilizing its substantial Bitcoin holdings as collateral. The funds aim to provide the company with enhanced liquidity and flexibility to pursue strategic growth opportunities, including expanding its mining operations and capitalizing on other corporate…
#Bitcoin#BTC#Collateral#CreditLine#DigitalAssets#GrowthOpportunities#Liquidity#MARA#Mining#bitcoin loan#credit line#crypto#Debt#finance#loan#mara#Marathon
0 notes
Text
5 things to consider when choosing a bank account
Choosing the right bank account is crucial for managing your finances effectively. With so more
#choosing a bank account#bank account#bank loan#banka#bankai#cryptocurrency news latest#btc latest news#bankmanfried#crypto latest news#bitcoin latest news#banksy#bank#tyra banks#announces
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
If $38,000 is deposited into your bank account, what will you use it for?
Bills?
Business?
A purchase of equipment or
Investment?
Our financing solutions are aimed at individuals, start-ups, scale-ups and SMEs as well as VSEs, social enterprises and cooperatives based in the euro zone.
The source of the information:
👇 Customer service available: Monday to Friday from 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
* +33 757 755-858 [Call / Whatsapp
Sincerely.
Marketing Relations
#kredit#business loan#commercial#investing#bitcoin#germany#hambourg#sports#finance#accounting#olivia cooke#indonesia#singapore#sales#irlanda#personal loans
0 notes
Text
Cryptocurrency Litigation Success: Assessing Compensatory Damages in Lieu of an Injunction for Specific Performance
London, UK – 2 July 2024 – In a significant victory for our client, Mr. Southgate, the Chancery Division of the High Court, has issued a favourable ruling in the case of Southgate v Adam Graham [2024] EWHC 1692 (Ch). Our successful litigation case centered on a dispute arising from a loan agreement involving a cryptocurrency. The initial court decision found Adam Graham in breach of the…
#Bitcoin#Breach of contract#Civil Litigation#Civil Procedural Rules#Contracts#Cryptocoin#Cryptocurrency#Cryptocurrency Dispute#Cryptocurrency Loan Dispute#damages#Ethereum#Financial Regulation#judgment#Litigation#NFTs#Specific Performance#Valuation
0 notes
Text
#cashapp#cashapp scam#cashapp bitcoin#cashapp vs venmo#venmo vs cashapp#free cashapp money#venmo fights cashapp#cashapp cashapp zelle#people who use cashapp#cash app#cash app $50#22gz cash app#cash app card#cash app scam#cash app hack#cash app loan#cash app 2024#cash app save#cash app how to#cashapphelp#cash app guide#using cash app#cash app scams#cash app fraud#cash app money#cash app loans#cash me app#zlatan cash app#credit builder accounts#cash app hack how to get $750 free money
1 note
·
View note
Text
Taking out loan
Are you considering taking out a loan? 🤔 Here are some key things to consider: be sure to research the entire process and understand your options.
Evaluate interest rates and terms, timeline, repayment schedule and fees - don't just focus on the initial quote.
Talk to trusted professionals who can guide you through the process, such as lenders and financial advisors.
Above all else, be sure that any loan you take out is within your means. Good luck and happy borrowing.
Find the best loan for your needs by comparing offers - https://www.samratfinancialbanking.com/loan
0 notes
Text
Transforming dreams into reality, one loan at a time – Your trusted partner for financial empowerment.
0 notes
Text
Maximizing Your Credit Score: Secured and Unsecured Credit Cards for Bad Credit with $1,000+ Limits
Discover your options for credit cards with $1,000+ limits for bad credit. Learn about secured and unsecured cards
#how to improve your credit score#credit repair#credit score#credit to artist#virtual credit card with bitcoin#no credit check loans#improve credit score#banking#debt#financial planning#guilty of one charge linked to louth credit union robbery as co accused acquitted#loans#profit#virtual credit card with cryptocurrency
1 note
·
View note
Text
View On WordPress
#2000 notes withdrawn from circulation RBI#500; Ethereum rises up to 5%#Australian Shepherd#Baking news India#Car loan India#Cryptocurrency Prices on May 4: Bitcoin holds above $28
0 notes
Text
Rhodium Receives Court Approval for $30M or 500 Bitcoin Loan
Bankrupt Bitcoin miner Rhodium Enterprises has received court approval to secure a loan in either U.S. dollars or Bitcoin, allowing the company to choose between a $30 million loan or 500 Bitcoin from Galaxy Digital. This unique debtor-in-possession financing option comes as Rhodium faces mounting financial difficulties, having recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S. Bankruptcy…
#$30 million loan#500 Bitcoin#bankruptcy#Bitcoin#bitcoin mining#bitcoinmining#court approval#crypto#cryptocurrency#debtor-in-possession financing#finance#financing options#Galaxy Digital#Rhodium Enterprises#technology
1 note
·
View note
Text
New Canadian Crypto Giant. Read more: https://urgentkash.com/financial-news
#personal loans#bitcoin#finance#finances#investing#financial#wealth#business#ethereum#payday loans#same day payday loans#payday loans canada
0 notes
Text
How finfluencers destroyed the housing and lives of thousands of people
For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!
The crash of 2008 imparted many lessons to those of us who were only dimly aware of finance, especially the problems of complexity as a way of disguising fraud and recklessness. That was really the first lesson of 2008: "financial engineering" is mostly a way of obscuring crime behind a screen of technical jargon.
This is a vital principle to keep in mind, because obscenely well-resourced "financial engineers" are on a tireless, perennial search for opportunities to disguise fraud as innovation. As Riley Quinn says, "Any time you hear 'fintech,' substitute 'unlicensed bank'":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/01/usury/#tech-exceptionalism
But there's another important lesson to learn from the 2008 disaster, a lesson that's as old as the South Seas Bubble: "leverage" (that is, debt) is a force multiplier for fraud. Easy credit for financial speculation turns local scams into regional crime waves; it turns regional crime into national crises; it turns national crises into destabilizing global meltdowns.
When financial speculators have easy access to credit, they "lever up" their wagers. A speculator buys your house and uses it for collateral for a loan to buy another house, then they make a bet using that house as collateral and buy a third house, and so on. This is an obviously terrible practice and lenders who extend credit on this basis end up riddling the real economy with rot – a single default in the chain can ripple up and down it and take down a whole neighborhood, town or city. Any time you see this behavior in debt markets, you should batten your hatches for the coming collapse. Unsurprisingly, this is very common in crypto speculation, where it's obscured behind the bland, unpronounceable euphemism of "re-hypothecation":
https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2023/05/10/rehypothecation-may-be-common-in-traditional-finance-but-it-will-never-work-with-bitcoin/
Loose credit markets often originate with central banks. The dogma that holds that the only role the government has to play in tuning the economy is in setting interest rates at the Fed means the answer to a cooling economy is cranking down the prime rate, meaning that everyone earns less money on their savings and are therefore incentivized to go and risk their retirement playing at Wall Street's casino.
The "zero interest rate policy" shows what happens when this tactic is carried out for long enough. When the economy is built upon mountains of low-interest debt, when every business, every stick of physical plant, every car and every home is leveraged to the brim and cross-collateralized with one another, central bankers have to keep interest rates low. Raising them, even a little, could trigger waves of defaults and blow up the whole economy.
Holding interest rates at zero – or even flipping them to negative, so that your savings lose value every day you refuse to flush them into the finance casino – results in still more reckless betting, and that results in even more risk, which makes it even harder to put interest rates back up again.
This is a morally and economically complicated phenomenon. On the one hand, when the government provides risk-free bonds to investors (that is, when the Fed rate is over 0%), they're providing "universal basic income for people with money." If you have money, you can park it in T-Bills (Treasury bonds) and the US government will give you more money:
https://realprogressives.org/mmp-blog-34-responses/
On the other hand, while T-Bills exist and are foundational to the borrowing picture for speculators, ZIRP creates free debt for people with money – it allows for ever-greater, ever-deadlier forms of leverage, with ever-worsening consequences for turning off the tap. As 2008 forcibly reminded us, the vast mountains of complex derivatives and other forms of exotic debt only seems like an abstraction. In reality, these exotic financial instruments are directly tethered to real things in the real economy, and when the faery gold disappears, it takes down your home, your job, your community center, your schools, and your whole country's access to cancer medication:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/08/greek-drug-shortage-worsens
Being a billionaire automatically lowers your IQ by 30 points, as you are insulated from the consequences of your follies, lapses, prejudices and superstitions. As @[email protected] says, Elon Musk is what Howard Hughes would have turned into if he hadn't been a recluse:
https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/112457199729198644
The same goes for financiers during periods of loose credit. Loose Fed money created an "everything bubble" that saw the prices of every asset explode, from housing to stocks, from wine to baseball cards. When every bet pays off, you win the game by betting on everything:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_bubble
That meant that the ZIRPocene was an era in which ever-stupider people were given ever-larger sums of money to gamble with. This was the golden age of the "finfluencer" – a Tiktok dolt with a surefire way for you to get rich by making reckless bets that endanger the livelihoods, homes and wellbeing of your neighbors.
Finfluencers are dolts, but they're also dangerous. Writing for The American Prospect, the always-amazing Maureen Tkacik describes how a small clutch of passive-income-brainworm gurus created a financial weapon of mass destruction, buying swathes of apartment buildings and then destroying them, ruining the lives of their tenants, and their investors:
https://prospect.org/infrastructure/housing/2024-05-22-hell-underwater-landlord/
Tcacik's main characters are Matt Picheny, Brent Ritchie and Koteswar “Jay” Gajavelli, who ran a scheme to flip apartment buildings, primarily in Houston, America's fastest growing metro, which also boasts some of America's weakest protections for tenants. These finance bros worked through Gajavelli's company Applesway Investment Group, which levered up his investors' money with massive loans from Arbor Realty Trust, who also originated loans to many other speculators and flippers.
For investors, the scheme was a classic heads-I-win/tails-you-lose: Gajavelli paid himself a percentage of the price of every building he bought, a percentage of monthly rental income, and a percentage of the resale price. This is typical of the "syndicating" sector, which raised $111 billion on this basis:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-housing-bust-comes-for-thousands-of-small-time-investors-3934beb3
Gajavelli and co bought up whole swathes of Houston and other cities, apartment blocks both modest and luxurious, including buildings that had already been looted by previous speculators. As interest rates crept up and the payments for the adjustable-rate loans supporting these investments exploded, Gajavell's Applesway and its subsidiary LLCs started to stiff their suppliers. Garbage collection dwindled, then ceased. Water outages became common – first weekly, then daily. Community rooms and pools shuttered. Lawns grew to waist-high gardens of weeds, fouled with mounds of fossil dogshit. Crime ran rampant, including murders. Buildings filled with rats and bedbugs. Ceilings caved in. Toilets backed up. Hallways filled with raw sewage:
https://pluralistic.net/timberridge
Meanwhile, the value of these buildings was plummeting, and not just because of their terrible condition – the whole market was cooling off, in part thanks to those same interest-rate hikes. Because the loans were daisy-chained, problems with a single building threatened every building in the portfolio – and there were problems with a lot more than one building.
This ruination wasn't limited to Gajavelli's holdings. Arbor lent to multiple finfluencer grifters, providing the leverage for every Tiktok dolt to ruin a neighborhood of their choosing. Arbor's founder, the "flamboyant" Ivan Kaufman, is associated with a long list of bizarre pop-culture and financial freak incidents. These have somehow eclipsed his scandals, involving – you guessed it – buying up apartment buildings and turning them into dangerous slums. Two of his buildings in Hyattsville, MD accumulated 2,162 violations in less than three years.
Arbor graduated from owning slums to creating them, lending out money to grifters via a "crowdfunding" platform that rooked retail investors into the scam, taking advantage of Obama-era deregulation of "qualified investor" restrictions to sucker unsophisticated savers into handing over money that was funneled to dolts like Gajavelli. Arbor ran the loosest book in town, originating mortgages that wouldn't pass the (relatively lax) criteria of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. This created an ever-enlarging pool of apartments run by dolts, without the benefit of federal insurance. As one short-seller's report on Arbor put it, they were the origin of an epidemic of "Slumlord Millionaires":
https://viceroyresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Arbor-Slumlord-Millionaires-Jan-8-2023.pdf
The private equity grift is hard to understand from the outside, because it appears that a bunch of sober-sided, responsible institutions lose out big when PE firms default on their loans. But the story of the Slumlord Millionaires shows how such a scam could be durable over such long timescales: remember that the "syndicating" sector pays itself giant amounts of money whether it wins or loses. The consider that they finance this with investor capital from "crowdfunding" platforms that rope in naive investors. The owners of these crowdfunding platforms are conduits for the money to make the loans to make the bets – but it's not their money. Quite the contrary: they get a fee on every loan they originate, and a share of the interest payments, but they're not on the hook for loans that default. Heads they win, tails we lose.
In other words, these crooks are intermediaries – they're platforms. When you're on the customer side of the platform, it's easy to think that your misery benefits the sellers on the platform's other side. For example, it's easy to believe that as your Facebook feed becomes enshittified with ads, that advertisers are the beneficiaries of this enshittification.
But the reason you're seeing so many ads in your feed is that Facebook is also ripping off advertisers: charging them more, spending less to police ad-fraud, being sloppier with ad-targeting. If you're not paying for the product, you're the product. But if you are paying for the product? You're still the product:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/04/how-to-truth/#adfraud
In the same way: the private equity slumlord who raises your rent, loads up on junk fees, and lets your building disintegrate into a crime-riddled, sewage-tainted, rat-infested literal pile of garbage is absolutely fucking you over. But they're also fucking over their investors. They didn't buy the building with their own money, so they're not on the hook when it's condemned or when there's a forced sale. They got a share of the initial sale price, they get a percentage of your rental payments, so any upside they miss out on from a successful sale is just a little extra they're not getting. If they squeeze you hard enough, they can probably make up the difference.
The fact that this criminal playbook has wormed its way into every corner of the housing market makes it especially urgent and visible. Housing – shelter – is a human right, and no person can thrive without a stable home. The conversion of housing, from human right to speculative asset, has been a catastrophe:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/06/the-rents-too-damned-high/
Of course, that's not the only "asset class" that has been enshittified by private equity looters. They love any kind of business that you must patronize. Capitalists hate capitalism, so they love a captive audience, which is why PE took over your local nursing home and murdered your gran:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/23/acceptable-losses/#disposable-olds
Homes are the last asset of the middle class, and the grifter class know it, so they're coming for your house. Willie Sutton robbed banks because "that's where the money is" and We Buy Ugly Houses defrauds your parents out of their family home because that's where their money is:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/11/ugly-houses-ugly-truth/#homevestor
The plague of housing speculation isn't a US-only phenomenon. We have allies in Spain who are fighting our Wall Street landlords:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/24/no-puedo-pagar-no-pagara/#fuckin-aardvarks
Also in Berlin:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/16/die-miete-ist-zu-hoch/#assets-v-human-rights
The fight for decent housing is the fight for a decent world. That's why unions have joined the fight for better, de-financialized housing. When a union member spends two hours commuting every day from a black-mold-filled apartment that costs 50% of their paycheck, they suffer just as surely as if their boss cut their wage:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/13/i-want-a-roof-over-my-head/#and-bread-on-the-table
The solutions to our housing crises aren't all that complicated – they just run counter to the interests of speculators and the ruling class. Rent control, which neoliberal economists have long dismissed as an impossible, inevitable disaster, actually works very well:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/16/mortgages-are-rent-control/#housing-is-a-human-right-not-an-asset
As does public housing:
https://jacobin.com/2023/10/red-vienna-public-affordable-housing-homelessness-matthew-yglesias
There are ways to have a decent home and a decent life without being burdened with debt, and without being a pawn in someone else's highly leveraged casino bet.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/22/koteswar-jay-gajavelli/#if-you-ever-go-to-houston
Image: Boy G/Google Maps (modified) https://pluralistic.net/timberridge
#pluralistic#zirp#weaponized shelter#the rents too damned high#finfluencers#qualified investors#the bezzle#heads i win tails you lose#houston#Brent Ritchie#Matt Picheny#Koteswar Jay Gajavelli#Koteswar Gajavelli#Applesway Investment Group#maureen tkacik#Arbor Realty Trust#MF1 Capital#Benefit Street Partners#bezzle#Swapnil Agarwal#Slumlord Millionaires#KeyCity Capital#Financial Independence University#Elisa Zhang#Lane Kawaoka#Fundamental Advisors#AWC Opportunity Partners#Nitya Capital
263 notes
·
View notes
Text
Chaos Victor, my beloved, I had this particular scene for this fic written since FOREVER AGO!! It was one of the first pieces I wrote, I am SO glad I finally got to it in my story 😭😭
Excerpt from Chapter 12 of Be Nice to Me featuring Butters being Victor Chaos:
“Hey, guys,” Cartman reaches over to sit in between Kenny and Leopold when suddenly, both Clyde and Craig block him.
“Woah, dude, hold up,” Clyde warns.
“Yeah, man, trust me, you do not want to do that,” Craig slowly shakes his head no.
“Here, man, sit here,” Clyde scooches over, making some room between himself and Leopold.
“Uuuh,” he skeptically looks around, confused, but ultimately concedes, “yeah, sure.” He takes a seat and asks, “Soooo… what the fuck was that?”
Kyle sits across from him.
“It’s a long story,” Craig dismisses, getting back to his lunch.
“I guess we should catch him up to speed on it, huh?” Leopold suggests.
“On what?” Cartman arches an eyebrow.
"Well, for one thing, Leo," Kyle pointedly sends a glare at the seemingly innocent blonde's direction, Leo shrinks a bit at the stare. He nervously laughs while Kyle continues, "got really into crypto. So into it, in fact, that he ended up making his own coin. The buttcoin."
Kenny giggles at the name. It gets him everytime.
"E-everyone in town kept i-investing in it. It became quite the b-bi-b-bi-big ordeal," Jimmy adds.
"Our idiot parents even got seriously crippling loans to buy into it," Stan scoffs, recalling the stupidity of his father and the disappointment of his mother.
"Mine put out a loan on our car and house." Clyde dejectedly frowns.
"Mine their mansion," Tolkien sighs.
"All of them did, th-they're all m-mm-m-morons," Jimmy quips.
"We were all gonna end up homeless thanks to Leo," Craig blankly points.
Cartman’s eyes widen. “Holy shit, really?” He’s honestly impressed. He didn’t know Butters had it in him.
"Aw, I said I was real sorry, fellas." He meekly looks down at his knuckles, tapping them together.
"Kenny even threatened to tell his parents he was Victor Chaos, the guy that made Buttcoin, but his parents were happy to find out their kid was a billionaire and didn't ground him for it," Stan adds.
"We had to hire Bitcoin scammers from Russia to hack into Leo's account and return everyone's money," Kyle summarizes.
"Yeah and he got hella grounded after that," Clyde laughs while pointing at Leopold.
"Yeah," Leo looks down, "my parents were awful sore with me."
"Pfft, no way dude, that's so weak," Cartman taunts, but then wonders, “okay, but how does that have anything to do with what just happened?”
"So before that Kenny had this whole big fight with him, right?” Clyde keeps going.
Kenny avoids eye contact, still embarrassed about what happened.
“He threatened that he wouldn't be his friend anymore if he kept selling Buttcoin, and the Asian girls saw it and drew a bunch of dramatic yaoi art about it.”
"Yeah, my parents were real upset about me being gay when they found out," Leo pouts.
"My dad wasn't too happy about it either …" Kenny mutters, his eyes seemingly pensive.
"Yeah but then everyone started giving him money and he became pretty pushy about it," Stan reminds him. Kenny looks down at his food, seemingly deep in thought.
"Leo's dad sent him away to some anti-gay all boy boarding school again and Kenny felt kinda guilty so we decided to help break him out. Apparently, the boarding place was experimenting on kids, trying to make them all super powered gays to use in the army or something. We let one out and they blew the place up," Kyle nonchalantly explains.
"Yeah, kind of a dick move to not wait until we were fully out. I mean, we did save him after all," Stan fusses, still miffed about it.
"How did we survive the blast again?" Leopold tries to remember but for the life of him can’t.
"I shielded you guys…" Kenny answers under his breath, barely audible, his chin resting on the palm of his hand.
"What was that, Ken?" Leo asks.
“Actually, Kenny, where did you go after the explosion? I can't remember,” Kyle curiously asks.
Kenny takes a deep breath in before letting it out, centering himself. "I was just knocked out for a bit," he lies.
“You were?” Stan questions, still unable to properly remember.
“I'm here now so it doesn't matter, continue on with what happened,” he motions with his hand to continue, seemingly not in the best of moods.
“Huh, well,” Stan notices but decides it’s best to drop it and keep telling the story, “Leopold’s dad was just happy to see his son alive and decided to accept him no matter how gay he was.”
"Which I'm not! The stupid Asian girls made me," Butters protests with a huff.
"Now you know how we felt," Craig says.
"Yeah, but you guys are, like, actually a thing now so…" Stan gestures at the two.
"Yeah, you can't complain, I mean, look at you," Tolkien points at Craig who has his arm around Tweek while Tweek's resting his head on top of his shoulder.
"W-well, that may be true, but we can still complain about how it happened!" Tweek tugs on his crew neck.
"But Kenny loves tits… and pussy! Like, to an unhealthy extent," Cartman stares at the two blonds, dumbfounded at the turns of events that took place in his absence.
Kenny shrugs, simply continuing to eat his lunch.
“.... My dad did tell me that everyone’s at least a little bit gay once,” Stan states, glancing a bit at Tolkien while speaking.
“Yeah but your dad’s dumb as fuck, dude,” Kyle casually remarks.
“Hey, he can be right sometimes! … On occasion,” Stan looks down at his lunch tray, not fully believing what he’s saying himself.
“Yeah, I think my dad said that once, too,” Tolkien tries to casually agree, also averting eye contact.
Stan lightly blushes.
“No, you guys are just f-f-fa-fa-fags,” Jimmy smiles.
_______
I really used the whole ass roster for this one lmaoo 💀💀 I love writing when all the main kids are together
#kyman#bunny#south park#eric cartman#kyle broflovski#kenny mccormick#butters stotch#leopold butters stotch#be nice to me#kyman fanfic#kyman fanfiction#chaos victor#victor chaos
21 notes
·
View notes
Text
The price of bitcoin went over $100,000 for a few hours on Dec. 5, peaking at $103,400. The financial press can’t resist constructing a hand-waving story of market forces, so bitcoin going past $100,000 has been attributed to a market reaction to President-elect Donald Trump’s lining up a slate of pro-cryptocurrency cabinet, advisory, and regulatory picks after the crypto industry put more money into funding Republican candidates in this last election cycle than anyone had previously put into an election in history.
But crypto trading is thin and almost entirely unregulated—perfect conditions for commodity market manipulation. The public image of cryptocurrency is still shaped by the 2023 trial of Sam Bankman-Fried of the failed FTX crypto exchange, culminating in his conviction—and not to mention the hangover from the NFT fiasco. Crypto is seen as the domain of cheap scammers. Ordinary people are not flocking into crypto.
Coincident with the bitcoin price news was the collapse of the Hawk Tuah crypto token. Haliey Welch, who told an oral sex joke that went viral on YouTube, leveraged her momentary fame into a career as an influencer and podcaster. This culminated in the meme-coin cryptocurrency $HAWK, marketed entirely on amusement value, which crashed on launch in what looked very like a pump-and-dump—tokens were dumped on ordinary buyers soon after launch, crashing the price.
Welch denied that insiders had dumped her token and blamed automated snipers who bought the token the moment it was released, then dumped immediately. The Hawk Tuah-token fiasco only strengthened crypto’s image as a place where fools lose their money being foolish.
The price of bitcoin has recovered since the November 2021 peak of the last bubble—but actual-dollar retail trading volumes have not. Coinbase’s retail trading volumes are $127 billion so far in 2024—much better than 2023’s $75 billion, but nothing like the 2021 bubble’s $545 billion.
Bitcoin remains a strangely useless asset that doesn’t do anything. All you can do with it is buy, sell, or hold. The only use for cryptocurrency other than pure zero-sum speculation is bitcoin’s original use case: evading regulations, most often for illegal purchases, money laundering, or dodging sanctions. One might be justified in evading some regulations in some cases—but most are there for good reason.
The largest actual-U.S.-dollar crypto exchange is Coinbase. But price discovery takes place at the venue with the largest trading volume: the offshore exchange Binance. This exchange admitted a string of money laundering offenses in 2023, was fined over $4 billion, and was placed under stringent compliance monitoring by the U.S. Department of Justice and FinCEN.
But the Binance trading floor itself remains an unregulated free-for-all as long as U.S. entities are not caught trading there. Every market manipulation that would be illegal in the United States happens at Binance and similar unregulated, offshore floating crypto casinos—wash trading, flash crashes, delayed settlements, spoofing, and the exchange trading against its own customers.
Bitcoin trading volume is substantially against two dubious U.S.-dollar stablecoins: tether and FDUSD. These are minted in round billions at a time. It is frankly not plausible that anyone put billions of U.S. dollars into tethers or FDUSD to buy bitcoins on an offshore exchange with above-board intentions. They could have just used the money to buy bitcoins directly at a U.S.-dollar crypto exchange or, safest of all, to buy bitcoin ETF shares from any securities broker. The purpose of buying billions of tethers is to manipulate the price of bitcoin.
Each stablecoin is supposedly backed by a U.S. dollar held in a bank account—except when it isn’t. Tether Inc. has long created tethers out of thin air as loans, with the listed backing asset being the loan itself. Banks do this, too, but banks are regulated. Eighteen billion tethers have been created just since Trump’s election on Nov. 5, bringing the total issuance to 135 billion. How far could you pump the price of bitcoin with 18 billion instant pseudo-dollars?
The other use case for tethers is crime. Zeke Faux’s Number Go Up details the value of tethers as a dollar substitute for those too crooked to get dollars—it’s the favored currency for “pig-butchering” romance scams run by human traffickers. The U.K. National Crime Authority and the U.S. Treasury recently cracked an international money-laundering ring that used tethers to serve drug dealers, ransomware groups, Russian espionage operations, and sanctioned entities; the NCA called tether, not bitcoin, the “cryptocurrency du jour.” The news of the bust came out just before bitcoin hit $100,000. Tether-fueled bitcoin pumps seem to coincide with bad news mentioning tethers.
Tether Inc. is sensitive to the criminal use case for its coin and frequently freezes tainted tethers on the requests of the Office of Foreign Assets Control and FinCEN—but only after the fact. This requires Tether Inc.’s operations to be much more organized than they have been previously—such as during the years when the reserve was tracked, not in proper accounts but in a shared spreadsheet that was often out of date. Despite its compliance efforts, Tether Inc. is the subject of an ongoing federal criminal investigation by the Manhattan office of the Southern District of New York into possible anti-money-laundering and sanctions failures.
Tether Inc. has worked to mend its reputation in the corridors of power. The company does not operate in the United States, but it does keep much of the cash portion of its reserve in U.S. Treasury bills. These are custodied by Cantor Fitzgerald, whose CEO, Howard Lutnick, wanted to become Trump’s new Treasury secretary and will be brought in for commerce. Cantor Fitzgerald recently bought a share in Tether Inc.
After the crypto industry’s success with directing unheard-of quantities of campaign funding to the cause of electing Trump, we should anticipate further such attempts to curry favor. The Trump family’s own crypto project, World Liberty Financial, was set to fail until crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun, proprietor of offshore crypto exchange HTX, dived in and bought $30 million of its WLFI coin—taking World Liberty over the threshold so Trump would get a $15 million payout from the project.
Sun is given to flashy stunts, like purchasing Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana artwork Comedian (with cryptocurrency) and then eating the banana on stage. These give the media something to talk about other than Sun’s legal and regulatory issues, most recently the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s ongoing suit against Sun for securities violations. Sun looks forward to a more “friendly” U.S. crypto market under the new administration, with the pro-crypto Paul Atkins as Trump’s planned SEC chair.
One of the greatest channels for payback to his crypto allies may be Trump’s proposal at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in June for a U.S. strategic bitcoin reserve, apparently on the basis that the nation needs a store of this speculative commodity largely used for crime. Trump originally proposed that the government hold onto bitcoins that had been seized as proceeds of crime, rather than sell them off.
The current proposal to bolster crypto is Senator Cynthia Lummis’ Bitcoin Act of 2024, in which the Treasury and the Federal Reserve would buy 200,000 bitcoins each year for five years. The U.S. government would become the bitcoin holder of last resort, and the beneficiaries would be the crypto industry—and not ordinary Americans.
The incoming U.S. administration wants to clear “experts” from the bureaucracy. If the incoming executive branch wants crypto to operate freely, it will do its best to force crypto through and remove all possible impediments. Crypto’s perennial issues with fraud and impoverishing retail investors, and regulator’s fears of the risk of contagion from crypto to the wider economy, are likely to be glossed over so as to ensure market opportunities for administration insiders.
But in the end, gravity still works, and a balloon can be inflated only so much. The bitcoin bubble is an artifact of market manipulation and has no more economic substance than the Hawk Tuah coin does. The U.S. government may be ripe for plunder, but other nations need to take steps to shield themselves from the impact of rug-pulling on a global scale.
11 notes
·
View notes
Text
Excerpt from this story from Canary Media:
Texas has become an all-around clean energy juggernaut, thanks to its lax permitting regime, fast grid-interconnection process, competitive energy market, and ample amount of solar- and wind-friendly land.
Its plans for the next year and a half underscore that status. As of July, the state intended to build 35 gigawatts of clean energy over 18 months, more than the next nine states combined, according to a Cleanview analysis of U.S. Energy Information Agency data.
Texas has long been the biggest player in U.S. wind energy. But in recent years, energy developers have raced to build solar in Texas too. Five years ago, the state had connected just 2.4 gigawatts of utility-scale solar to its grid; as of this past June, it had installed almost 22 GW of solar, per an American Clean Power report released this week. That’s nearly 10 times as much as back in 2019, and enough to propel Texas past California for large-scale solar installations.
Now Texas is writing its next chapter on clean energy: The state has become the nation’s hottest market for grid batteries as energy developers chase after its cheap solar and wind energy.
Given its staggering construction plans, Texas is set to only further solidify its place at the top of the clean energy leaderboard. But the rapid rise of the state’s clean energy sector has not yet yielded an outright energy transition, as the writer Ketan Joshi points out.
Though Texas has built more large-scale clean energy than any other state in absolute terms, it lags behind California — and plenty others — in terms of how clean its grid actually is. The Golden State met over half its electricity needs with renewables in 2023, per Ember data, while clean sources generated just 28 percent of Texas’ power. Electricity produced in the Lone Star State remains slightly more carbon intensive compared with the U.S. average.
Part of the story here is that, largely thanks to data centers and bitcoin mines, Texas is seeing some of the fastest growth in electricity demand of any state. That means much of the new solar, wind, and battery storage it’s building is just meeting new demand and not necessarily booting dirty energy off the grid.
The other hurdle preventing Texas from cleaning up its grid faster is the entrenchment of the fossil fuel industry in its local politics. Last year, the state passed a law creating a taxpayer-funded program to give energy developers billions of dollars in low-interest loans to build several gigawatts’ worth of new fossil-gas power plants.
In other words, the Lone Star state’s fossil fuel buildout isn’t ending even as its clean energy sector takes off. For Texas to be considered a true leader on decarbonizing the power sector — and not just a state that builds lots of everything — that will need to change.
11 notes
·
View notes
Text
▶️ Watch this reel
Striving for your success, we offer more than loans – we provide solutions that elevate your financial journey.
0 notes