Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

Weird. Rome has an American Pope and America has a Russian President.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

“A king is only a king if we bow down.” – Rev. William Barber

Putin must be throwing ketchup at the walls.

Disappointing to see gov. newsom with his finger to the wind.

Giving in to doom is how authoritarians win.

Republicans got rid of McCarthy. Democrats chose not to save him.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

Tide comes in. Tide goes out. You can’t explain that.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

If you cannot answer whether trump lost the 2020 election, you are unfit for office.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

Consistently wrong since 2002

Text STOP to opt out of updates on war plans.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

When you’re a Republican, they let you do it.

The gop is a fucking disgrace.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Entertaining Read: ‘All The Ways That Crypto Broke in 2022’

Entertaining Read: ‘All The Ways That Crypto Broke in 2022’

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Well, it’s entertaining as long as *you* didn’t fall for the cryptocon, I guess. The Bloomberg reporters certainly enjoyed themselves putting together this extremely interactive article!

… “Crypto winter” is the industry term for the chill that descended on the market in 2022, and contagion was the name of the game. After the collapse of the TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin, major crypto players fell like dominos: Three Arrows Capital. Voyager Digital, Celsius Network, FTX, BlockFi.

The hits kept coming, but it wasn’t all downside – at least at first. The Super Bowl, one of the largest sporting events in the US, featured splashy, celebrity-filled commercials for crypto companies including Coinbase, Crypto.com and the aforementioned FTX, which was still riding high. There were crypto conferences in the Bahamas and Miami, with sessions about the future of Bitcoin by day and glitzy parties by night. And the industry’s prominence grew in Washington, as lavish political giving and an army of lobbyists signaled its increasing influence there.

Still, crypto prices kept falling. Bitcoin – the largest token by market value – plunged more than 60%, leading a rout in digital assets that erased some $2 trillion in total market value from the highs reached in November 2021. Bankman-Fried went from being described as a modern John Pierpont Morgan to being arrested and accused of multiple crimes including fraud. And NFT prices fell back to earth…

One of the central tenets of crypto, and of the blockchain, is the idea of decentralization: that no one entity is in charge, and no one player could destabilize the rest. What 2022 showed, more than once, is that the digital-asset ecosystem is significantly more interconnected and concentrated than even its biggest participants might have realized.

The Terra ecosystem operated two major tokens: Luna, a cryptocurrency, and TerraUSD (UST), a stablecoin that tried to stay at $1 by maintaining a ratio with the amount of Luna in circulation. In May, UST began a steady decline away from its dollar peg, eventually tanking both coins to zero. Shock waves from the implosion reverberated throughout the market, setting the stage for more blowups in the weeks and months that followed…

Binance made a $3 million investment in the Terra project in 2018. The value of the tokens it received rose to as high as $1.6 billion, CEO Changpeng Zhao said, suggesting a heavy loss when Luna collapsed.

Hackers stole about $600 million from Ronin, the blockchain bridge platform connected to online game Axie Infinity. Binance invested in its creator Sky Mavis when it raised $150 million to help plug the hole.

Binance revealed a plan to sell $529 million of FTX’s FTT token in November, after a report showed that much of the balance sheet of FTX’s sister trading house Alameda Research was comprised of the token. The move caused the value of FTT to drop, while withdrawals from FTX spiked. Binance entered talks to acquire FTX’s assets that same week, but withdrew its offer shortly after…

After days of turmoil that began with Binance’s FTT announcement, FTX Group filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Nov. 11, encompassing more than 130 entities including Alameda and FTX US. It is expected to owe billions of dollars to creditors. The following month, founder Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas and charged with wire fraud and other allegations by US authorities…

The FTX fiasco ensnared some of the biggest names in finance, including hedge funds and venture capital backers that held equity stakes in the group’s entities. Firms including SoftBank Group, Sequoia Capital and Temasek wrote down the value of their FTX shareholdings to zero as FTX collapsed.

Note: This diagram does not include the multitude of firms that FTX invested in itself, typically through venture capital arms belonging to the exchange and Alameda…

Crypto CEOs, not a group that could ever be described as shy or retiring, are pointing fingers at each other and at regulators for the multiple failures that marked the year. Meanwhile retail investors – some of whom lost their life savings to market wipeouts, hacks, or potential fraud – are left holding the bag, with many wondering whether they should have gotten involved in the first place.

Is there a fix for all the ways crypto broke in 2022? Skeptics and fans alike expect more rules and more regulations, especially in the realm of consumer protection. For some, it will be too little too late.

Worth clicking over to read the whole thing — the graphics are fantasmagorical!

(It sure sounds like Binance will be the next domino to fall, but its CEO says it’s all jealousy and aversion to centralization.)

As one specialist — Mike Masnick? — said: This year has been a speedrun through the history of why banking regulation is so important.

Reader Interactions

115Comments

  1. 1.

    Roger Moore

    The hits kept coming, but it wasn’t all downside – at least at first. The Super Bowl, one of the largest sporting events in the US, featured splashy, celebrity-filled commercials for crypto companies including Coinbase, Crypto.com and the aforementioned FTX, which was still riding high.

    This should have been a flashing warning sign. When the bubble is taking out big, expensive adds searching for greater fools, there isn’t much time left before the collapse.

  2. 2.

    Chetan Murthy

    SBF’s bail conditions: This piece of shit completely gamed the system: https://www.coindesk.com/consensus-magazine/2022/12/23/bankman-frieds-incredible-shrinking-250-million-bond/

    In this case, Bankman-Fried was not required to post a conventional bail bond. Instead, Bankman-Fried was simply released from custody on something called a personal recognizance bond. The personal recognizance bond contains Bankman-Fried’s solemn promise (and his parents’ promise) to pay the court $250 million if he fails to show up for trial at the appointed time.

    Yes, you read that right. Bankman-Fried walked out of court essentially a free man by signing a piece of paper where he promised to pay the court $250 million if he decides to flee to another country with no extradition. This, of course, is totally absurd.

    I had read somewhere else that some third party had signed up to pay most of the $250m if SBF didn’t show up on time. But no, it was SBF himself. This is a farce!

  3. 3.

    Alison Rose

    “Crypto Winter” sounds like a Tom Cruise movie about a hedge fund dude who is also an assassin who is also a double agent being paid in Bitcoin to take out crypto bros but then another crypto bro is paid to take HIM out and then somehow a sex scene in a cold storage room with Emily Blunt happens and it turns out she’s also trying to take him out and then they team up instead and end up faking their own deaths while jetting off to Fiji and sipping fruity drinks on a beach but then the server walks away and we see it’s Tom Cruise’s original hedge fund boss and he gets an evil smile on his face and in the background we see Tom and Emily choking and gasping and writhing in pain on the sand.

    Where’s my fuckin Oscar.

  4. 4.

    lowtechcyclist

    A whole bunch of fake currency, the value of which was backed by nothing in particular – who’d have ever guessed this house of cards would come tumbling down?

  5. 5.

    Stuart Frasier

    @Roger Moore: The Super Bowl ads were a tell.  It took about the same time (almost to the day!) for FTX to file bankruptcy as Pets.com did after their Super Bowl ad back in 2001.

  6. 6.

    Shalimar

    The while point of crypto was the lack of rules and regulations.  Why even bother if it has to fixed?  Oh yeah, still need a currency to buy weed.

  8. 8.

    Glidwrith

    I’m not of the fine vintage age of many Juicers, but I’m too old for this shit and refuse to yield any neurons to knowing more.

    Bah, humbug.

  10. 10.

    sdhays

    I really hope government doesn’t intervene to create “more rules and regulations”. A need for regulations just means that it’s an incredibly wasteful and expensive absolute failure.

    Let it die. Or ban it. But don’t try to save it with regulation.

  11. 11.

    ian

    @Chetan Murthy:

    from the article you linked too

    Instead, Bankman-Fried’s parents promised to pledge as collateral their Palo Alto, California, home, where he’ll also be staying under house arrest. The Palo Alto home is rumored to be worth $4 million. And that is the full extent of the collateral pledged to guarantee the $250 million bond.

    I fail to see the problem here.  If he doesn’t show up to trial his parents lose their house.  He might flee the country, but if prosecutors thought he was a flight risk, they could have asked to detain him under those conditions.

    SBF is a smarmy scammer, not a serial killer.  Putting him in pre-trial detention serves little valid purpose.

  15. 15.

    Chetan Murthy

    @ian: His parents’ Palo Alto house is worth $4m.  So rather than $250m bail, he really got $4m bail.  Don’t you think that’s rather low for such a massive criminal whose frauds were all committed while running business that facilitates money-laundering and capital  flight?

  16. 16.

    Another Scott

    @Chetan Murthy: Popehat crushes our desire to eat the un-convicted rich and grind their bones to make our bread.

    Greetings, listeners. Serious Trouble will return in podcast form in January, but we thought the surprising news that Sam Bankman-Fried was released on bail shortly after he agreed to be extradited back to the United States deserved a swift lawsplainer.

    How, you may ask, does a dude who is so clearly impervious to reality, who had to be arrested in the Bahamas, and who is accused of billions of dollars in fraud, get out on bail? Fair question.

    […]

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  17. 17.

    Roger Moore

    @sdhays:

    Regulating it is the same thing as killing it. The primary purpose of crypto was to create an unregulated financial system, so imposing regulations put it firmly in the “why bother” category.

  18. 18.

    ian

    @Chetan Murthy: I doubt he is a flight risk.  The prosecutors didn’t seem to think so either.

    I don’t generally believe in locking people up before they have had a trial.  I can see the need for it if they are deemed to be a violent threat or a flight risk.  This dude is a financial huckster.  He can serve his time after he has been convicted of a crime.

    What do you think the appropriate amount of bail should have been?

  19. 19.

    Cameron

    Better regulation?  Better regulation of what?  This is straight-up fraud.  Exactly what goods/services does the crypto-industry provide?  No wonder all the shaky finance whiz kids/hedge funders/private equitors/etc.  who produce zero for society are so attracted to this shit.  “Money For Nothing?”  No, “Money From Nothing.”

  20. 20.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Another Scott:

    Is the magistrate judge wrong? No. Remember, the question is “would any combination of conditions assure this person appears at trial and isn’t a danger to the community?” FTX is in new hands, Bankman-Fried has no control over it, and these conditions should prevent new scams so it’s very plausible to think he won’t be a danger to the community. The home detention and ankle monitor and intensive supervision and prospect of completely bankrupting his parents and taking their home plausibly means he’ll appear at trial.

    His business was facilitating money-laundering and capital flight.  The idea that he doesn’t have gazillions secreted overseas in secret accounts is naive.  So this comes down to “can he elude the ankle-monitor (or find someone to  help him do so).”  Like, y’know, Fat Leonard did ( https://news.usni.org/2022/09/06/new-details-revealed-in-fat-leonard-escape-detention-as-manhunt-continues )

  22. 22.

    Chetan Murthy

    @ian: For starters, the guarantors of his $250m bail should have been made to actually guarantee they had that level of assets, and those guarantors should not have included SBF.

  23. 23.

    Gvg

    It needs some energy regulation. Of all the fool waste of fossil fuels, block chain creation is right up there.

    We can create regulations that prevent trustees of regulated investments like pension funds from putting any funds in it and make it impossible for law abiding entries like banks to sell them without people signing that they understand there is no protection from fraud and the government can’t protect them, plus statements that using crypto itself may be taken as evidence you intend to engage in money laundering. I worry about my state pension. Some people who should be smarter don’t seem to have a clue. I wouldn’t touch this stuff with any money I have directly, but don’t want surprises either. I also don’t want it touching the economy, though so far it’s not that big.

  26. 26.

    Ken

    There’s a widespread belief that no new regulations would be needed. The SEC could simply say “these are securities” based on the principle that “if it looks like a duck” — substituting “asset that is primarily bought in the expectation that it will earn income and can be sold later at a profit” for “duck”.

    There’s also a widespread belief, including among the crypto enthusiasts, that such regulation would destroy the industry, or at least reduce it to a tiny fraction of its current activity. Of course the crashing dominos are already having that effect.

  27. 27.

    Wyatt Salamanca

    Back in May, Cole posted about Molly White, a leading crypto skeptic

    https://balloon-juice.com/2022/05/30/speaking-of-crypto/

    NPR aired a good segment with another crypto skeptic

    Cryptocurrency expert slams NFT hype

    https://www.npr.org/2022/02/13/1080210427/cryptocurrency-expert-slams-nft-hype

    Two long videos on Crypto:

    Computer Security 161 Cryptocurrency Lecture

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9nv0Ol-R5Q

    h/t MattF

    https://balloon-juice.com/2022/05/30/if-you-think-cryptocurrency-is-just-for-ruining-the-environment-and-bankrupting-nerds-read-this/#comment-8518459

     

    Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g

    Video cited in the NPR segment

    Martin Shkreli offers advice for Sam Bankman-Fried:

    “Sam isn’t exactly going to be somebody that fits into prison,” said Shkreli, offering advice that included “shaving his head” to remove his recognizable voluminous curly hair and “deepening his voice,” because prison was “a very testosterone-filled, masculine place.”

    Bankman-Fried would “have a lot of issues,” Shkreli explained, “because he’s a bit of an effeminate guy,” and has an “autistic sort of sense, or sensibility,” which was “not something that goes over well in prison.”

    “He also doesn’t know anything about the streets and sort of criminal culture,” he continued, and he needed to “pick those things up as quickly as he can.”

    “He should be listening to as much rap music as possible. He should be trying to learn everything there is to know about gangs, about the tough neighborhoods in every city,” Shkreli said. “This sounds funny, but this could save your life.”

    Other advice included suggesting that Bankman-Fried try to “rebrand” or “reinvent” his background, even if other prisoners knew it was a lie, so he could be “from Oakland” instead of a “rich white kid” from Stanford. Shkreli cited his own hometown of Brooklyn helping him connect with other prisoners from New York City.

    h/t https://www.mediaite.com/crime/pharma-bro-martin-shkreli-offers-advice-for-sbf-on-surviving-prison-shave-your-head-and-study-rap-music/

     

  28. 28.

    Another Scott

    @Chetan Murthy: Fat Leonard’s approach works once.  SBF won’t be as successful if he tries.

    The feds will be watching him like a red-tailed hawk.  SBF’s antics are notorious.  They’re going to make sure that he appears in court.

    We’ll see!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  29. 29.

    Chetan Murthy

    @Omnes Omnibus: Indeed: it’s to give the released accused person an incentive to appear at trial.  If my incentive to appear at trial is that if I don’t appear, then I *personally* will have to pay $250m isn’t much incentive, when my entire business was founded on money-laundering and capital flight.

  32. 32.

    different-church-lady

    that no one entity is in charge, and no one player could destabilize the rest.

    Anyone who has ever been beaten up on a playground knows how that works in reality.

  34. 34.

    Anne Laurie

    @Chetan Murthy: His business was facilitating money-laundering and capital flight. The idea that he doesn’t have gazillions secreted overseas in secret accounts is naive. So this comes down to “can he elude the ankle-monitor (or find someone to help him do so).” Like, y’know, Fat Leonard did…

    It was to the advantage of many very rich, powerful people whom Fat Leonard had assisted that he  *not* be required to provide more details about his crimes to the government.

    SBF, on the other hand, ‘helped’ many rich, powerful people — some of them said to be less than scrupulous about their reputation — to flush their hard-earned money down a series of untraceable rabbit holes.

    There’s a ‘joke’ that the Feds didn’t want to held responsible if SBF was found dead in a cell.  Be that as it may, IMO, he’s smart enough to understand that he’s safer being monitored at his parents’ very nice estate than he would be trying to elude bounty hunters in some low-social-trust foreign country.

  35. 35.

    Ken

    @Wyatt Salamanca: Molly White has a couple of blogs, including web3isgoinggreat.com with short posts of crypto failures, and newsletter.mollywhite.net with longer analysis pieces.

    I see today’s web3isgoinggreat update has three thefts by hacker, an arrest, and an (alleged) attempted “rug-pull” (where a company steals the customers’ money).

  36. 36.

    Anoniminous

    @Wyatt Salamanca: ​
     
    SBF was arrested by the Feds. He’s a non-violent white collar criminal so he’ll serve his sentence, should he be sentenced, at Club Fed in Danbury Connecticut.

  39. 39.

    PaulB

    @Chetan Murthy:  The idea that he doesn’t have gazillions secreted overseas in secret accounts is naive.

    You are assuming that he is smart and that he had a reasonable amount of common sense and foresight. The evidence to date suggests otherwise. From what I’ve read, he was truly an unintelligent individual who didn’t understand … well … anything. I would actually be surprised to find that he has anything stashed away.

  42. 42.

    sab

    So why exactly am I supposed to feel sorry for any of the  idiots involved in this scheme.? Even the best of them were tax dodging idiots, and the worst of them were outright thieving or (much) worse crooks ( arms traders, sex traffickers, druglords.)

  43. 43.

    PaulB

    @Gin & Tonic:  He has a BS in physics from MIT. That requires something approximating intelligence.

    Perhaps, but there is also a well-known phenomenon of someone who is smart in one field, particularly a STEM field, and woefully ignorant (and unaware that they are so) in just about every other field. And even if he is actually intelligent, there is still the matter of common sense and foresight, which a college education, alas, does not grant.

    We’ll see, but I’m still of the opinion that he never thought the house of cards would fall and that he never prepared for it to do so.

  46. 46.

    James E Powell

    @SpaceUnit:

    I’m with you. I understand the idea that a thing – anything – can have value if everyone agrees it has value. Like the pieces of paper with presidents & famous people on them. What I don’t get is the whole “blockchain changes everything” part of it. And it’s been explained to me six or seven times.

  50. 50.

    Ken

    @James E Powell: What I don’t get is the whole “blockchain changes everything” part of it.

    If it’s any consolation, a lot of large companies are struggling with finding a business case. “It’s like what Visa and Amex do, except much slower, and absolutely everyone in the world can see your credit card transactions” is difficult to sell.

  51. 51.

    SixStringFanatic

    @Wyatt Salamanca: Martin Shkreli did his time in a low-security federal prison.  He doesn’t know the first fucking thing about “surviving prison”.  I would bet that nobody knows this better than Shkreli himself and he trolled the fuck out of that podcaster.

  53. 53.

    Carlo Graziani

    @NotMax: This is essentially the view that I heard Adam Tooze express on the Ones and Tooze podcast a few weeks ago, when the FTX fiasco was getting underway, and it makes complete sense.

    Tooze’s view of the crypto ecosystem is as a sort of casino, where people  can indulge in a sort of specialized gambling, and that there’s no point in moralizing about it any more than we moralize over other forms of legal gambling. The only potential danger is financial contagion, which could only occur if financial institutions become highly leveraged in order to invest in crypto assets. The financial regulators prevented that from occurring, as was their duty.

    Other than that, they obliged the cryptomaniacs in their very decided (and obtusely libertarian) opposition to financial regulation, figuring that the sector was to small to do any real damage if it crashed anyway.  Now the same maniacs would like to blame the regulators for not making the interventions that they opposed at full spittle not two months ago.  I imagine that officials at the Fed, SEC, FDIC, OCC, etc. are all breaking out the marshmallows…

  56. 56.

    Randal Sexton

    @Chetan Murthy: Funny thing about Palo Alto, 4M is probably an ok house.  Not a mansion or anything. Its the dirt under the house, and there are many old Victorian houses in so-so condition in Palo Alto worth 4M.  Location , location , … as they say.

  58. 58.

    Aussie Sheila

    @James E Powell: Except we agree fiat currency has value because the entity issuing it can tax its  population and has an army. It’s called a ‘nation state’, and its state capacity for enforcement gives those bits of paper value we can all agree with. 😉😎

  60. 60.

    GrannyMC

    From the first minute Bitcoin vomited up out of the Void,  it should have been obvious that crypto had no instrinsic value except to tax dodgers, drug dealers, money launderers, kiddie porn peddlers, and terrorists. Nobody knew who created it, which right there should have set off alarms. It was backed by nothing except some vague hand-waving that it was safe precisely because it was backed by nothing. It was deliberately designed to make the early adopters rich and the cost of mining increasingly expensive for everyone else. Its “value” depended entirely on ever-expanding adoption, despite the fact that at some point the cost of mining was going to exceed any reasonable market value. The environmental cost has been enormous, and there were other damaging side effects, such as driving the price of computer graphics cards through the roof for non-miners who desperately needed home computers when covid hit. Almost all of this could be seen or easily deduced or predicted. It is first and foremost and massive regulatory failure by governments everywhere. And it looks like some politicos and regulatory bodies still don’t get it.

  62. 62.

    mrmoshpotato

    @SpaceUnit:

    I think when you try to make sense of it all you’re unwittingly buying into the bullshit. Just walk away. 

    Agreed!  Fuck this cryptocrap, and the Apartheid Bitchboy.

  63. 63.

    SpaceUnit

    @mrmoshpotato:

    Seriously.

    How much time and resources should one put into deeply investigating the “restorative properties” of some snake oil that some smarmy dipshit is selling out of the back of his covered wagon?  Christ.

  65. 65.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @James E Powell:

    What I don’t get is the whole “blockchain changes everything” part of it.

    Oh, THAT.  It doesn’t.  You don’t understand the explanations because they’re bullshit.  They operate on goldbug and libertarian logic.  Because it’s in the hands of the PEOPLE, man!  Everything it could be used for MUST be new or better!  You’re being told A + 3 = Fish, so if you’re going “That makes no sense,” you are processing the logic correctly.

  66. 66.

    Marc

    @Randal Sexton: In this particular case, the dirt under the house is actually owned by Stanford as it’s on campus. The land is leased to the owners with the stipulation that the land (and therefore the house) can only be transferred to Stanford faculty and senior administrators.  The market for such houses can be rather limited.

  67. 67.

    RepubAnon

    @SpaceUnit: It was always currency speculation – sort of like betting the Euro will rise /fall against the dollar.  The difference was that the crypto coins were non-government issued currency.  The only backing was Tinkerbell-style belief: stop clapping, and it dies.

  68. 68.

    Mr. Bemused Senior

    @GrannyMC:  Yes, truly a speculative bubble for the modern age, based on pure mumbo-jumbo bullshit (to borrow John Warnock’s description of Bill Gates’ justification for TrueType).

    And, as with all such speculative frenzies, a few people walk off with full pockets while many many lose their savings and regulators are slow to catch up.

  70. 70.

    Sister Golden Bear

    @Origuy: Four bedroom. Dunno the square footage, but it’s on a 1-acre lot (huge by local standard, per the NY Post video, and being next to Stanford puts it in a pricey neighborhood. So $4 million is entirely plausible.

  74. 74.

    TheOtherHank

    I worked at Stanford for a while some years ago. It was explained to me that quite a few of the neighborhoods adjacent to campus were built on land that belonged to Standford. The residents might own the house, but they don’t own the dirt. I’d be interested to know if the 2 Stanford profs have a house close to campus.

  75. 75.

    Xavier

    The basic problem with Bitcoin is that it confuses scarcity with value. The only thing anyone ever needed to know about Bitcoin was when to get out.

  76. 76.

    sab

    I remember when I worked at whatever tiny accounting firm I worked for that year, and we had an employee staff meeting, and one of the new hires (who used to be a plumber and was hired for his plumber contacts although his actuual intellect was in doubt) expressed concern that the employee 401k was not investing in tech stocks and the boss screamed at him that as boss he had a fiduciary duty to not invest his employees in stupid stuff.

  77. 77.

    Mai Naem mobile

    SBF’s parents will probably pay for one of those ex-felon white collar consultants to figure out the prison system and which would be the most lax and safe for him.

  78. 78.

    sab

    @sab: I have had better bosses and worked with better employees, but those two took the cake for idiot boss idiot employee sweepstakes.

  79. 79.

    CaseyL

    Anything that appeals to glibertarians is ipso facto a fraud.  The minute I saw crypto touted as a currency outside of government oversight and regulation, the word “FRAUD” appeared in bright neon letters. NFTs? I couldn’t believe anyone could be dumb enough to get into those, but…

    Anything that the brother of a longtime friend of mine gets involved in is a fraud. He’s never been involved in anything honest, and he got into both crypto and NFT during their “attract upper middle class investors who are idiots” phase.  He has made a lot of money over his all-scams-all-the-time career – but “only” millions, because he deals with the middle quintile of people with some money and no sense. (And, yes, he’s also been sued, charged, fined, and forbidden to invest in various things. He always finds a new scam.  And, oh yeah, he’s also been shot a couple of times.)

  80. 80.

    ColoradoGuy

    Galt’s Gulch is on fire? And [surprised face] there’s no fire department, because Ayn Rand said that was Communism?

    So NOW they want the nasty, corrupt, woke Federal Government, led by a Democrat no less, to put out the fire? Why?

    Maybe they should ask Apartheid Clyde to rescue them. With Tesla stock.

  81. 81.

    Kent

    Bitcoin – the largest token by market value – plunged more than 60%, leading a rout in digital assets that erased some $2 trillion in total market value from the highs reached in November 2021.

    The amazing thing is that Tesla did even worse than Bitcoin in 2022.  It is down about 70% since the beginning of the year.

    It seems a whole lot of blue state EV shoppers are deciding that they don’t want to pay $60,000 for a big sign in their driveway or parking lot at work that says “I’m an Elon fanboy”

  83. 83.

    David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch

    There’s nothing unique about this [stock market bubble of 1929]. It is something which happens every 20 or 30 years because that is about the length of the financial memory. It’s about the length of time that it requires for a new set of suckers, if you will, a new set of people capable of wonderful self-delusion to come in and imagine that they have a new and wonderful fix on the future.

    ~ John Kenneth Galbraith

  85. 85.

    Citizen Alan

    @Wyatt Salamanca: That can’t be real. Surely Sasha Baron Cohen did an interview with someone and successfully persuaded some idiot reporter that he was actually Martin Skrelli.

  86. 86.

    Barbara

    If SEC regulation destroys the value of your investment then its value basically depends on deceiving new investors. Even highly speculative tech stocks can manage to clear the relatively low bar of SEC disclosure requirements.

  87. 87.

    Geminid

    @Kent: I’m not sure that the alienation of liberals you describe has affected Tesla sales yet. You are likely right that it will. And there is a broader group of buyers who may not be so political;  they want to buy Elon Musk’s car because he’s “such a genius” and they want to be identified with him. His reputational damage could affect demand for his cars among this group.

    We’re talking stock price here though, and that’s where the “Musk effect” has been very pronounced. Tesla stock rose to a level unsupported by conventional means of valuation such as price-to-earnings ratio.

    It was a bubble, and Musk’s outsized reputation was the gas that filled it. Investors now look at the stock in a new light, a harsh light that shows more clearly the market fundamentals that will condition the price of Tesla stock going forward.

  90. 90.

    Geminid

    @HeartlandLiberal: At least you can eat a tulip bulb. Dutch people ate plenty in the cold winter of 1944-45. Conditions were especially rough because the Germans basically placed the country on lockdown after Field Marshal Montgomery’s wildcat Arnheim offensive, described in Cornelius Ryan’s book A Bridge Too Far. The Dutch, Ryan wrote, had a very low opinion of Montgomery after that.

  91. 91.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Another Scott: ​
     

    Popehat crushes our desire to eat the un-convicted rich and grind their bones to make our bread.

    As Popehat said (bolding mine):

    For some crimes there’s a rebuttable presumption that you’re a flight risk and a danger — mostly drug crimes, violent crimes, and sex crimes, but not (as one might expect) white collar crimes involving vast amounts of money.

    And:

    The federal bail system’s presumption of release makes it better and more humane than most state systems. But you can still see the impact of wealth.

    So Popehat’s pointing out that there’s this hole in the law relating to those the law protects but doesn’t bind, at least not as thoroughly. I would say there absolutely should be a rebuttable presumption that persons charged with “white collar crimes involving vast amounts of money” are a flight risk: IOW, the burden should be on them to prove they’re not a flight risk.

    Having an ankle bracelet and having surrendered his passport might well be sufficient rebuttal, as it were, but at least the burden would be on the appropriate party. Obviously it’s a lot more difficult to get out of the country without a passport than with one, but people get into the country without passports all the time, so it can certainly be done. I’m a total ignoramus wrt electronic ankle bracelets, so I have no idea whether there’s any remotely realistic prospect of his defeating one.

  92. 92.

    AM in NC

    @lowtechcyclist:  Inorite?  Never understood the appeal of an “alternate money system” with no regulations whatsoever and no backing of anything (like the US govt., eg.) to maintain its value.  But I’m not a human trafficker, or a wannabe techbro so . . . .

  93. 93.

    J R in WV

    From the post:

    Binance made a $3 million investment in the Terra project in 2018. The value of the tokens it received rose to as high as $1.6 billion, CEO Changpeng Zhao said, suggesting a heavy loss when Luna collapsed.

    This CEO appears to believe that a $3 million investment, which on paper went to $1.6 billion, could then suffer a loss of $1.6 billion. To me, the most that firm could have lost was $3 million since that’s all the real money invested.

    So sorry, your South Pacific Tulip billions were not real billions… very amusing, though!

  94. 94.

    Geminid

    @AM in NC:I’m guessing you live in North Carolina. In following the Moore County substation attacks, I came across an interesting local news source. Public education advocate Cheryl Christy-Bowman has been reporting as a citizen journalist on the radicalization of her county’s Republican leadership and since 2018 has been reporting on a blog, MooreCountyVoices. She also tweets @moorevoicesnc.

    The substation attacks prompted her to start a five- part series, and last week she released “Timeline of Terror: Part 1.” It covers the period 2014-18. Later installments will bring her narrative up to the power station attacks and their aftermath.

    Ms. Christy-Bowman is an efficient writer and her Part 1 is very good, I think. She points out that the phenomena she observes are common to many other rural counties and I think she is right.

  95. 95.

    Soprano2

    @PaulB: there is also a well-known phenomenon of someone who is smart in one field, particularly a STEM field, and woefully ignorant (and unaware that they are so) in just about every other field.

    Boy this is the truth. People in these fields are often lauded as “super-smart” because they understand things many people have a hard time understanding, so it goes to their heads and they think they know everything about everything! For some reason people who are smart about science and/or math are seen as “smarter” than everyone else, even though they may be woefully ignorant about everything except their chosen field.

  97. 97.

    sdhays

    @Geminid: Just to add – it seems that Elmu’s shenanigans finally has started to affect sales, which is why Tesla is laying off 10% of its workforce in the coming weeks.

    Although I sort of wonder if all of that’s not just Elmu – the cars are horribly unreliable, difficult to impossible to fix, are death traps if something goes wrong, and, oh yeah, “Autopilot” will never deliver on its promises. Apartheid Clyde’s reputation implosion comes at a particularly bad time since he no longer has this glow that distracts people from these facts.

  98. 98.

    catclub

    @sdhays: ​
     

    A need for regulations just means that it’s an incredibly wasteful and expensive absolute failure.

    ummmm, this is a description of the present banking system.

  100. 100.

    Nukular Biskits

    @PaulB:

    Perhaps, but there is also a well-known phenomenon of someone who is smart in one field, particularly a STEM field, and woefully ignorant (and unaware that they are so) in just about every other field.

    I work with folks like that, people who are quite knowledgeable in their niche but assume that specialized knowledge/skillset enables them to pontificate with authority upon areas in which they have no actual working knowledge or experience at all.

    Some of the stuff I’ve heard from the cube next to mine often threatens to erode the very foundations of reality.  In fact, I have actually heard the following:  “I don’t know anything about that, but here’s what I think …”

  101. 101.

    Starfish

    @Chetan Murthy: There have been others that have worked like this. “Agree to give us a small portion of your ill-gotten gains.”

    Here is a video of someone who started scamming people on minecraft before he turned to crypto, and he did it all while under 18.

  102. 102.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @Randal Sexton: for the longest time there was this busted old shack on some rancher’s land next to Highway 101 south of San Jose that has spray painted on it “For Sale $500K” and then under it “SOLD!”

  103. 103.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    @sdhays: Just to add – it seems that Elmu’s shenanigans finally has started to affect sales, which is why Tesla is laying off 10% of its workforce in the coming weeks.

    Tesla was desperate to hire people right up until the announcement. I suspect that layoff is more of Musk trying to keep the stock price up.

  104. 104.

    Geminid

    @lowtechcyclist: People can cut off ankle monitoring bracelets. That’s what “Fat Leonard” did and he wasn’t the first. Someone who does this needs a very sound escape plan though, because once they do it they’ll never get out on bail again.

  105. 105.

    Geminid

    @sdhays: Yeah, for the first few years Teslas had a reputation for manufacturing quality that has eroded since they scaled up production.

    Part of the pullback in sales could also be attributed to softening in the broader EV and conventional car market. But when Tesla comes out of this slower period they will finally face real competition from experienced auto makers. They will no longer have the EV market more or less to themselves, and critical car buyers will see no reason to pay a premium for a Tesla. Then, the Tesla might go the way of the BlackBerry.

  106. 106.

    Alce_e _ ardillo

    @Cameron: Not nothing– most of the remaining old growth forest, oil reserves and coal, being used to run weapons grade server farms to generate these “coins”.  The sooner it dies the better, and if the tech bros lose their collective shirts, all the better.

  107. 107.

    Barbara

    @sdhays: ​I just want to say for the record that I have owned a Tesla for nine years and it has not been “horribly” (or even somewhat) unreliable, and the deathtrap potential relates mostly to autopilot, which no one has to use (and which Musk should stop misrepresenting — that really is criminal, IMO).However, it’s shocking to me that Musk has so little awareness of who his most likely customers are — hint: they don’t tend to be MAGA types. Something inside Musk has broken — I don’t know what it is but my own view is that anyone who centers their existence around Twitter has lost the plot.​​

    @Geminid: ​Yes, I agree quality appears to have declined. I also think people who don’t own EVs don’t realize how Tesla has a serious advantage because of its proprietary charger network. Other manufacturers are relying on third party resources to create a network similar to gas stations, but it isn’t there yet. I would still be more likely to buy a new Tesla than another EV until the charging situation improves.​

  108. 108.

    Kosh III

     financial crooks, (Enron, Wells Fargo, BofA  etc etc)  should be given harsh sentences starting at the top of the organization.  Solitary confinement, chain-gangs, max-security prisons and more.  It’s supposed to be about deterrence and the only thing that would make these crooks think twice is being bunkmate to Donkeydick Bubba on Devil’s Island.
    No sympathy at all for those who lost money, especially those who have more money than morals.
    I never quite understood how this worked but I DID know it was a con game.
    Lock-em up!

  112. 112.

    Barbara

    @Another Scott: ​Yes, agreed, the availability of public chargers should improve, HOWEVER, it’s not just charger availability it is time to charge and advanced charging technology. Tesla isn’t the only one working on this, but most EV manufacturers are not.

  113. 113.

    Barbara

    @GibberJack: ​ Ideally, bail is set at a high enough rate to deter the alternative of not showing up, but not so high that it cannot be met. For someone whose assets have become illiquid, $4 million seems like a high amount. I think what most people focusing on this just want the guy to be denied bail or not be able to make it.

  114. 114.

    Kosh III

    ” I think what most people focusing on this just want the guy to be denied bail or not be able to make it.”

    Yes.  He needs to serve some time upfront because the trial will be months or years from now, then appeals and more appeals and MAYBE he’ll get punished but I’m not holding my breath.

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