Levine on SBF testifying:
By all accounts the cross examination is (predictably) going very badly for him.
I kind of get the sense that literally everyone who has made tens of millions/billions in crypto is doing all the crimes, and it’s just the ones who go belly-up that get caught.
That’s just a joke right? That can’t be real. It looks a little like her it looks nearly nothing like him lol.
I think the sketch of Caroline Ellison is real but the SBF one is not
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I guess SBF (shit bag fucker)’s testimony couldn’t have gone much worse. Most reports are saying he came across like a petulant child that got caught wrecking his dad’s porsche.
With a name that is probably itself a crime who would have thunk it?
I mean the name is literally guaranteeing crazy returns.
Literally every company involved in crypto is a criminal enterprise. Every single one of them.
because the main utility of crypto is crime. anyone that tells you otherwise is foolish, misinformed, or delusional.
The fact that a bitcoin atm can’t work in less than an hour without insane juice means this is not a currency that’s going to have any utility for a normal person probably any time soon if at all. the nature of how it works almost makes it impossible to do so, and the few attempts like FTX have been, well, what they are.
crime is a great utility for something to have, dont get me wrong, it means it’ll never be worth nothing. but people that fool themselves into thinking blockchain is something revolutionary and world changing simply dont understand the math or the fact that it’s been around for a very long ass time and all we have is shiny imaginary mafia coins. cool, but not world changing. especially when you get into what an enormous net energy waste it is. idiotic idea.
nft’s are cool though, I can’t wait to get an ape
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Is it really all that useful for crime in 2023? It’s increasingly difficult to turn illicit bitcoin into real money; the legitimization of crypto means that banks and even halfway legitimate exchanges have to follow KYC regulations. Like if you recall that millennial couple (Razzlekhan!) that stole millions from Bitfinex (which eventually became worth billions), they were not able to turn that into an extravagant lifestyle iirc; they struggled to cash very much of it out, and even as relatively sophisticated actors still ended up getting caught!
Stealing bitcoin may be harder, but using for illegal purposes (but then cashing out bitcoin that isn’t stolen) shouldn’t be too much harder, no?
The problem with using bitcoin for crime is that there’s a permanent ledger of every transaction ever made with it. So even if you get away with it now, at some point they will likely be able to tie your identity to that transaction and then you’re done.
It used to be good for crime. There aren’t very many industries more faddish than money laundering. Sure you can always clean money through cash businesses (bars, strip clubs, and restaurants are all amazing), but there’s an upper limit to that if you’re actually stuck denominating bales of dirty money by the stash house.
I’m sure the big money launderers are onto some new thing post crypto that we’ll find out about in 6 months after they’ve already left.
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So the people still making ransomware demands in crypto rather than dollars are dumb?
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Seem to remember reading couple articles about governments being able to retrieve (hack?) the crypto ransom payments back from a high profile one or two. Not sure if that a common outcome though
The ledger can only tell you what addresses transactions went to - unless there is an identity tied to those wallets/addresses, which isn’t very hard to set up so there isn’t, it’s perfectly easy to move crypto around for illegal purposes. There are also washing services galore. don’t think it’s a big problem for criminals unless you need to move a truly huge sum that may draw attention, but I also dont move any crypto so idk.
Read “Number goes up” to see that crypto is great for crime – crimes that don’t work without crypto. Including enslaving people in Cambodia to scam people to send crypto. Tether is the key to the schemes in the book because it pays criminals lots of US dollars and Tether doesn’t care about anything.
Guilty on all counts.
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