Today in history - 50 years ago - why do I feel so
- our electronic data processing systems group had one of the first computer displays in the office - we did not really use it, but it did generate a comfortable warmth in the office - combined with the regular heating we reached tropical temperatures 
Billionaire Chamath Palihapitiya says Visa and Mastercard will be the biggest business failures in 2022, losing out to altcoin-linked projects
Shalini Nagarajan
Fri, December 31, 2021, 10:36 AM·
Billionaire investor Chamath Palihapitya has boldly predicted that Visa and Mastercard, two of the biggest payment processors, will be overthrown by emerging blockchain and DeFi projects in 2022.
- Visa and Mastercard will lose out to Web3-based payment projects in 2022, Chamath Palihapitiya said.
Both companies are a "completely contrived duopoly that doesn't need to exist," he said.
He cited Amazon's decision to ban Visa credit cards in the UK due to high transaction fees as one reason for his view.
"My biggest business loser for 2022 is Visa and MasterCard and traditional payment rails and the entire ecosystem around it," he said in an episode of the "All-In Podcast" released Wednesday.
To him, the long-standing payment systems used all over the world are a "completely contrived duopoly that doesn't need to exist."
Palihapitya, a former Facebook executive who runs the venture capital fund Social Capital, shared what he thinks will be the "most profitable spread trade" of his lifetime in the coming year.
"Be short these companies and anybody that basically lives off of this 2 or 3% (transaction) tax, and be long well-thought-out, Web3 crypto projects that are rebuilding payments infrastructure in a completely decentralized way," he said.
Without being specific, he predicted at the same time that "a lot of these scammy crypto projects will go to zero."
"If you read the whitepapers of these crypto projects, and you systematically put together a framework, I think you can be long those and you can be short Visa/MasterCard, because I think this is their peak market cap," he added.
A spread trade is a market order in which a trader simultaneously carries out a purchase of one security and sale of a related security in a single unit. Investors execute this trade to attempt to profit from the spread, or difference, between the buying and selling prices.
Palihapitya based his opinion on Amazon's decision to ban the usage of Visa credit cards in the UK, because of high transaction fees, last month.
"The canary in the coal mine here is pretty significant," he said. "Amazon is not going to do something like that, in my opinion, unless it's a test of what they can do all around the world."
"There really is no need today for all these small businesses to sit on top of Visa, MasterCard, and AmEx rails. It's unnecessary."
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/billiona ... 16853.html
'Scuse me, freaking DeFi?
Homophone alert! HORDES of computer programmers ...Decentralized finance, or “DeFi” as it's commonly referred to, is a trend in cryptocurrencies that first started gaining traction in 2020. It's been called the “Wild West” of crypto — hoards hordes of computer programmers trying to bring traditional financial products such as loans to the blockchain.
Crypto traders subject to 15% capital gains tax
Profits from cryptocurrency trading are now subject to a 15% capital gains tax, according to a source from the Finance Ministry.
PUBLISHED : 6 JAN 2022 AT 06:17
The ministry recommends investors identify their income from cryptocurrencies when filing tax this year to avoid legal penalties.
In 2022, all taxpayers who gained from cryptocurrencies, including investors and mining operators, are subject to a 15% withholding tax, while digital asset exchanges are exempt from such duties.
Akalarp Yimwilai, co-founder and chief executive of Zipmex Thailand, said many questions remain about how to calculate profits, including whether a gain from a price increase as the US dollar strengthens is considered a profit, he said.
"Tax methods and calculations should be more concise, clear and easy to understand. Many people I know want to pay taxes, but don't know how to calculate them," said Mr Akalarp.
"As an exchange provider, Zipmex has been working to develop a system to help our customers calculate profits and losses, but it's very difficult. If the Revenue Department really has such an advanced data analytics system that it can precisely calculate gains from cryptocurrencies, it would be a great benefit to share it with the industry."
https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/22 ... -gains-tax
Tether is what’s come to be known in financial circles as a stablecoin—stable because one Tether is supposed to be backed by one dollar. But it’s actually more like a bank. The company that issues the currency, Tether Holdings Ltd., takes in dollars from people who want to trade crypto and credits their digital wallets with an equal amount of Tethers in return. Once they have Tethers, people can send them to cryptocurrency exchanges and use them to bet on the price of Bitcoin, Ether, or any of the thousands of other coins. And at least in theory, Tether Holdings holds on to the dollars so it can return them to anyone who wants to send in their tokens and get their money back. The convoluted mechanism became popular because real banks didn’t want to do business with crypto companies, especially foreign ones.
relates to Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Oct. 11, 2021. Subscribe now.
Photos: Tether (Devasini); Wit Olszewski/Alamy (coin); Everett Collection (Gadget); Disney (D2); and Juan Carlos Munoz/Alamy (Bahamas)
Exactly how Tether is backed, or if it’s truly backed at all, has always been a mystery. For years a persistent group of critics has argued that, despite the company’s assurances, Tether Holdings doesn’t have enough assets to maintain the 1-to-1 exchange rate, meaning its coin is essentially a fraud. But in the crypto world, where joke coins with pictures of dogs can be worth billions of dollars and scammers periodically make fortunes with preposterous-sounding schemes, Tether seemed like just another curiosity.
Then, this year, Tether Holdings started putting out a huge amount of digital coins. There are now 69 billion Tethers in circulation, 48 billion of them issued this year. That means the company supposedly holds a corresponding $69 billion in real money to back the coins—an amount that would make it one of the 50 largest banks in the U.S., if it were a U.S. bank and not an unregulated offshore company.
On Twitter, on business TV, and on hedge fund and investment bank trading floors, everyone started asking why Tether was minting so many coins and whether it really had the money it claimed to have. An anonymous anti-Tether blog post titled “The Bit Short: Inside Crypto’s Doomsday Machine” went viral, and CNBC host Jim Cramer told viewers to sell their crypto. “If Tether collapsed, well then, it’s going to gut the whole crypto ecosystem,” he warned.
As far as the regulators are concerned, the size of Tether’s supposed dollar holdings is so big that it would be dangerous even assuming the dollars are real. If enough traders asked for their dollars back at once, the company could have to liquidate its assets at a loss, setting off a run on the not-bank. The losses could cascade into the regulated financial system by crashing credit markets. If the trolls are right, and Tether is a Ponzi scheme, it would be larger than Bernie Madoff’s.
So earlier this year I set out to solve the mystery. The money trail led from Taiwan to Puerto Rico, the French Riviera, mainland China, and the Bahamas. One of Tether’s former bankers told me that its top executive had been putting its reserves at risk by investing them to earn potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of profit for himself. “It’s not a stablecoin, it’s a high-risk offshore hedge fund,” said John Betts, who ran a bank in Puerto Rico Tether used. “Even their own banking partners don’t know the extent of their holdings, or if they exist.”
At some point, in order to make a profit, the crypto has to be traded for money, and that is what gets taxed.RTH10260 wrote: ↑Thu Jan 06, 2022 9:40 pm How many taxpayer can a Finance Ministry locate when no intermediate banks are involved and trading platforms and cryptocurency exchanges are outside of their jusrisdiction? What is the underlying currency to compare to when determining loss or gain? With trading transactions happening to the thousands who determines the reference at any millisecond on the trading timeline? What when trading is cryptocurrency versus a different cryptocurrency, no national currency touched?
This reminds me of the various funding companies, supposedly backed by gold, that serviced the HYIP and Ponzi Scheme industry 20 years ago.Suranis wrote: ↑Thu Jan 13, 2022 3:26 pm This is well worth a read.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features ... oin-tether
Tether is what’s come to be known in financial circles as a stablecoin—stable because one Tether is supposed to be backed by one dollar. But it’s actually more like a bank. The company that issues the currency, Tether Holdings Ltd., takes in dollars from people who want to trade crypto and credits their digital wallets with an equal amount of Tethers in return. Once they have Tethers, people can send them to cryptocurrency exchanges and use them to bet on the price of Bitcoin, Ether, or any of the thousands of other coins. And at least in theory, Tether Holdings holds on to the dollars so it can return them to anyone who wants to send in their tokens and get their money back. The convoluted mechanism became popular because real banks didn’t want to do business with crypto companies, especially foreign ones.
relates to Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?
Featured in Bloomberg Businessweek, Oct. 11, 2021. Subscribe now.
Photos: Tether (Devasini); Wit Olszewski/Alamy (coin); Everett Collection (Gadget); Disney (D2); and Juan Carlos Munoz/Alamy (Bahamas)
Exactly how Tether is backed, or if it’s truly backed at all, has always been a mystery. For years a persistent group of critics has argued that, despite the company’s assurances, Tether Holdings doesn’t have enough assets to maintain the 1-to-1 exchange rate, meaning its coin is essentially a fraud. But in the crypto world, where joke coins with pictures of dogs can be worth billions of dollars and scammers periodically make fortunes with preposterous-sounding schemes, Tether seemed like just another curiosity.
Then, this year, Tether Holdings started putting out a huge amount of digital coins. There are now 69 billion Tethers in circulation, 48 billion of them issued this year. That means the company supposedly holds a corresponding $69 billion in real money to back the coins—an amount that would make it one of the 50 largest banks in the U.S., if it were a U.S. bank and not an unregulated offshore company.
On Twitter, on business TV, and on hedge fund and investment bank trading floors, everyone started asking why Tether was minting so many coins and whether it really had the money it claimed to have. An anonymous anti-Tether blog post titled “The Bit Short: Inside Crypto’s Doomsday Machine” went viral, and CNBC host Jim Cramer told viewers to sell their crypto. “If Tether collapsed, well then, it’s going to gut the whole crypto ecosystem,” he warned.
As far as the regulators are concerned, the size of Tether’s supposed dollar holdings is so big that it would be dangerous even assuming the dollars are real. If enough traders asked for their dollars back at once, the company could have to liquidate its assets at a loss, setting off a run on the not-bank. The losses could cascade into the regulated financial system by crashing credit markets. If the trolls are right, and Tether is a Ponzi scheme, it would be larger than Bernie Madoff’s.
So earlier this year I set out to solve the mystery. The money trail led from Taiwan to Puerto Rico, the French Riviera, mainland China, and the Bahamas. One of Tether’s former bankers told me that its top executive had been putting its reserves at risk by investing them to earn potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of profit for himself. “It’s not a stablecoin, it’s a high-risk offshore hedge fund,” said John Betts, who ran a bank in Puerto Rico Tether used. “Even their own banking partners don’t know the extent of their holdings, or if they exist.”
In a "Phuck it, let it burn" kind of way.
Given how often I have had to listen to crypto-bros brag about how much money they have made in their 'investment' and how we are just authoritarian jew loving luddite loosers who are just butthurt at not making money like them, I will happily hand them a match and can of petrol.
Something I have found fascinating from my time working in tech, over the years the community has become more and more anti-education.. it gets esp comical around the word 'engineer' where people want the status associated with the word but bristle at the idea of it having something like a degree or a certification behind it.
Investors sue Kim Kardashian and Floyd Mayweather Jr over crypto scheme
Class action lawsuit alleges celebrities and EthereumMax executives made ‘false and misleading statements’
Rob Davies
Thu 13 Jan 2022 11.44 GMT
The reality TV star Kim Kardashian and boxing champion Floyd Mayweather Jr are among celebrities being sued over their promotion of an alleged “pump and dump” cryptocurrency scheme that investors say caused them to lose money.
According to a class action lawsuit filed in a California court, executives of EthereumMax, in collaboration with Kardashian, Mayweather Jr and the basketball player Paul Pierce, sought to enrich themselves by making “false and misleading” statements to investors.
Promotions by the company included an Instagram post to Kardashian’s 250 million followers that the head of the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority, Charles Randell, said may have had “the single biggest audience reach in history” for a financial product.
The value of the company’s EMAX tokens increased by as much as 1,370% after the media marketing blitz before crashing to an all-time low, the suit claims.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... thereummax
Bit coin aka Bitcoin is one of several cryptocurrencies. Others are not so much restricted by using different algorithms to calculate the blockchain they live on. They were constructed based on the initial experience and limitations of the firstcomer, the Bitcoin. They lean more to the side of "unlited". The limiting factor will be the cost at mining them. Very comparable to mining prescious physical ore. Though I still have to wait to see cats run with cryptocurrency plating rather than platinumGregg wrote: ↑Fri Jan 14, 2022 4:38 pm I've seen the gold comparison as well but I'm one of those who questions gold, now that you bring it up. The world financial system divorced gold 90 years ago and finally split the property 50 years ago and I've been scoffing at gold bugs most of my adult life.
Bit coin is limited to a finite supply but I think a better comparison is to Federal Reserve Notes, Euros and Pounds Sterling. "Old School" money does not limit supply beyond a very long term theory that will never really happen*. Unlike Bitcoin or any crypto currency though, there are responsible grown ups for the most part controlling the expansion of the money supply and doing their best to align new money creation to value added wealth creation.
*Okay, if you buy the idea of only creating new money when you have seen creation of new wealth, eventually all the wealth of the world will be expended and you can't create any new money. But don't worry about it, the Professor told us, we'll all be dead anyway.
Dogecoin value soars after Elon Musk says it will be accepted for Tesla goods
Cryptocurrency with shiba inu dog meme rises 15% after billionaire’s tweet about merchandise
Rupert Neate and agency
Fri 14 Jan 2022 12.26 GMT
Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency with a shiba inu dog meme, soared in value by 15% on Friday after the billionaire Elon Musk said it could be used to buy Tesla merchandise.
Dogecoin rose to $0.20 after Musk’s tweet early on Friday, and has soared by 5,859% over the past 12 months, according to data from the Coinbase website.
Payments in dogecoin went live on Tesla’s website soon after, with items such as an electric quad bike for kids priced at 12,020 doge ($2,368; £1,735) for those with more modest budgets a “Giga Texas Belt Buckle,” for 835 doge ($156) or a whistle for 300 doge ($57).
Musk, who frequently writes about cryptocurrencies on Twitter and has previously described dogecoin as “the people’s crypto”, had said in December that Tesla would soon test accepting dogecoin as payment for some merchandise.
However, he had called dogecoin a “hustle” during his guest-host spot on Saturday Night Live in May 2021. On the show, Musk appeared as “the Dogefather” and when asked to explain “what is dogecoin?”, he replied: “Yeah, it’s a hustle.”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... esla-goods
Fools and their money...a “Giga Texas Belt Buckle,” for 835 doge ($156) or a whistle for 300 doge ($57).
Serious question thiough, what if you put 10% down in DogE and then the next day the price of the coin drops 50% because Elon says its garbage, and because you don't transfer your fake money directly but through a third party processor and they don't make the transfer you initiated Friday until Monday, where does the change in value of that transaction land?
So, the way it generally works is place do not actually accept crypto directly, but instead work through a payment processor. That processor gets a quote from the merchant for USD, then tells the customer how much of their selected coin to transfer with a time limit. So everything gets locked in to the time of purchase and the clock starts ticking otherwise the transaction gets invalidated.Gregg wrote: ↑Sat Jan 15, 2022 9:40 pm Serious question thiough, what if you put 10% down in DogE and then the next day the price of the coin drops 50% because Elon says its garbage, and because you don't transfer your fake money directly but through a third party processor and they don't make the transfer you initiated Friday until Monday, where does the change in value of that transaction land?
Other side, say you put down the same 10%, Elon goes on Cramer and says its the neatest thing ever, and somewhere after you hit send but before you get your receipt, that 10% in coins is now enough to actually pay for the whole car. Have you paid for the whole car?
