“If the American economy were in dire straits, the Fed might impose a negative interest rate on people’s savings, forcing us to spend.
The currencies would be a ‘useful policy tool’ for casually annihilating the savings of every wage-worker in the country if they don’t spend them fast enough.
CBDCs are a perversion […] of the founding principles and protocols of cryptocurrency—a cryptofascist currency, an evil twin entered into the ledgers on Opposite Day, expressly designed to deny its users the basic ownership of their money and to install the State at the mediating center of every transaction.”
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“There’s a downside to SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s preference for an exchange-traded fund focused on bitcoin futures. But it’s unlikely to deter investors.
“Contango bleed” refers to fund underperformance that could theoretically occur because longer-dated futures contracts are trading at higher prices than shorter-dated contracts. In the bitcoin market, contango mainly results from bullish price expectations.
Several futures ETF proposals are due for regulatory approval in the coming weeks, of which the ProShares’ product is widely expected to receive accreditation on Oct. 18. Investors who pile into these new funds could get hit with “contango bleed,” where they might get lower returns than if they had simply bought bitcoin directly.
The dynamic shows one potential downside from the SEC’s preference for an ETF based on bitcoin futures over one that buys bitcoin directly.
The futures-based ETF, if approved, will be an inefficient product. Because bitcoin’s futures curve is typically in contango, the fund is going to suffer from a negative rollover. I am expecting the average negative yield to be at around 5%-10% on the CME bitcoin futures curve.
In plain English, if the price of bitcoin doubles in the next 12 months, the ETF would underperform by at least 5%-10%. Unhedged investors would still benefit from any underlying gains in bitcoin’s price – just not as much. According to experts, the prospect of a futures ETF underperforming bitcoin is unlikely to deter investors from pouring money into the product.
Investors simply want exposure to the asset class and will look the other way if there is a slight roll charge. In our view, the only way the roll charge will prevent investor interest in a BTC ETF is for the forward market to be in very steep contango.
If contango steepens, fund managers could change strategy and hold more than just the front-month futures contract.”
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“There are many nuanced, detailed arguments for the inevitability of cryptocurrency and blockchain’s growth and adoption – advantages of efficiency, trust, privacy and autonomy that are already proving out at a global scale. But interest in cryptocurrency is driven perhaps most of all by something more elemental and emotional, a deep intuition that has been rising around the world for decades: that the people in charge cannot, and should not, be trusted.
That sense of rising distrust was validated yet again with the Oct. 3 release of the so-called Pandora Papers, a trove of almost 12 million leaked documents from law firms and other organizations around the world. The documents unmask the previously unknown owners of 29,000 offshore companies hiding billions of dollars in assets from taxation or oversight. The owners include political leaders, celebrities and underworld figures from more than 200 nations.
By one estimate, as much as $32 trillion in assets worldwide may be in offshore tax havens, and much of it amounts to theft by world leaders from their own citizens.
That certainly drives home the absurdity of global regulators’ relentless focus on cryptocurrency systems as vectors for money laundering and tax evasion. Regulators, it seems, find it easier to punch downward at an emerging technology than to challenge the legalized corruption of the legacy banking system, or the hegemony of their bosses.
It’s unclear whether cryptocurrency provides a substantive answer to this rampant elite corruption. But the Pandora Papers at least explain much of the emotional drive behind crypto adoption: the simple desire to quit a system that is rotten to its absolute core.”
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“An investor deck shows Paradigm is in the process of raising what would be one of the VC world’s largest crypto-focused funds.
The revamped war chest could place Paradigm near the top of the pack as venture capital flows into the crypto sector with unprecedented velocity. VCs have placed $17 billion in crypto investments in the first half of 2021, “dwarfing” the $5.5 billion from the same period last year.
Earlier this year, VC powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) announced it had raised $2.2 billion for its third crypto fund, making it the industry’s largest ever.”
See Also: ConsenSys Holds Funding Round Talks With $3B Valuation
“We announced our vision for StarkNet at the beginning of the year: to bring massive scalability to Ethereum while preserving L1 security, permissionless interactions, and decentralization.
StarkNet Alpha 2 now supports composable smart contracts of general computation in an Ethereum-like state, with the ability for L1 and L2 contracts to interact with each other. StarkNet Alpha is launching on Mainnet Ethereum by November.”
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“The current laws in China that make commercial activities involving crypto illegal cannot be applied, and so the government needs the judiciary to interpret them.
Virtually all crypto trading was outlawed in China last month, when the exchange of one crypto for another was banned. Caijing Magazine has suggested that the withdrawal of exchanges could see the criminal activities involved becoming more concealed.”
See Also: US lawmaker is most concerned about Treasury’s response to crypto
See Also: Chinese blockchain project BSN expands to Turkey and Uzbekistan
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“The Gambling Commission is looking into whether Sorare should be required to have a gambling license or if its services don’t actually constitute gambling.
While the company doesn’t offer any traditional forms of sports gambling, the speculative nature of their digital trading cards – whose values are largely driven by player performance – skirt the line of categorization.
Sorare said it is ‘very confident [it] does not offer any forms of regulated gambling.'”
The Disrupt 