Read the SEC Complaint against Ripple. It’s bad for XRP and for all crypto, except BTC. It’s bad for XRP because it alleges all XRP are *at this very moment* securities in the US, not just the XRP Ripple allegedly bundled into an investment contract. 1/n
More from Crypto
1/ Bitcoin: a bold new world.
Satoshi published the white paper on 10/31/2008. Right at the moment of peak despair during the 2008 financial crisis. Trust had been lost in a world that ran on trust.
2/ But why October 31st? It certainly wasn’t because Satoshi was a fan of halloween, it must have had a deeper meaning. With all of his actions, he demonstrated a careful precision.
He had been working on Bitcoin for at least a year and a half before publishing the white paper.
3/ “I believe I've worked through all those little details over the last year and a half while coding it, and there were a lot of them. The functional details are not covered in the paper, but the sourcecode is coming soon” - Satoshi Nakamoto
4/ On August 18, 2008 Satoshi registers registers https://t.co/rMWwiEwtxT through https://t.co/Uj8lMr10kB.
Satoshi was ready and waiting to hit the send button throughout 2008. What was so special about October 31st?
5/ I believe that Satoshi published the Bitcoin white paper on 10/31 as a hat tip to the ancient Gaelic festival of “Samhain” which was also the date in which Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to a church door. Both represent an end of the old and the beginning of the new.
Satoshi published the white paper on 10/31/2008. Right at the moment of peak despair during the 2008 financial crisis. Trust had been lost in a world that ran on trust.
2/ But why October 31st? It certainly wasn’t because Satoshi was a fan of halloween, it must have had a deeper meaning. With all of his actions, he demonstrated a careful precision.
He had been working on Bitcoin for at least a year and a half before publishing the white paper.
3/ “I believe I've worked through all those little details over the last year and a half while coding it, and there were a lot of them. The functional details are not covered in the paper, but the sourcecode is coming soon” - Satoshi Nakamoto
4/ On August 18, 2008 Satoshi registers registers https://t.co/rMWwiEwtxT through https://t.co/Uj8lMr10kB.
Satoshi was ready and waiting to hit the send button throughout 2008. What was so special about October 31st?
5/ I believe that Satoshi published the Bitcoin white paper on 10/31 as a hat tip to the ancient Gaelic festival of “Samhain” which was also the date in which Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to a church door. Both represent an end of the old and the beginning of the new.
So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.
The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.
This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.
The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."
This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.
If everyone was holding bitcoin on the old x86 in their parents basement, we would be finding a price bottom. The problem is the risk is all pooled at a few brokerages and a network of rotten exchanges with counter party risk that makes AIG circa 2008 look like a good credit.
— Greg Wester (@gwestr) November 25, 2018
The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.
This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.
The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."
This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.
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