Bitcoin traders using up to 100-to-1 leverage driving swings in cryptocurrencies(cnbc.com)
cnbc.com
Bitcoin traders using up to 100-to-1 leverage driving swings in cryptocurrencies
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/25/bitcoin-crashes-driven-by-big-margin-bets-new-crypto-banking.html
7 comments
Oh but we don't have to worry the collateral is all backed by a 1-1 reserve of USD..err I mean Tether, right?
That always ends well.
There is an incredible amount of skullduggery going on in this space, along with an escalating social effect where anyone attempting to call shenanigans is drowned out by the "HODLers" who just want to get rich yesterday.
At first it was as simple as cloning Bitcoin, making a few parameter tweaks and pumping the resulting shitcoin until enough greater fools bought in. That worked for a while.
Now there's a newer generation of token systems that claim to represent a technical leap ahead of first-generation blockchains and promise to be the future of payments and/or smart contracts. They all have a white paper that looks legit, and the really convincing ones have a published paper. I read a lot of them and categorized almost all of them as follows:
1. Incomprehensible BS dressed up as academic research.
2. Uses recent or novel cryptography, but states assumptions that won't hold in the real world.
3. Uses recent or novel cryptography, but doesn't have significantly better properties than BTC or ETH.
4. Basically the same scaling trick as ETH2 (sharding) achieved in a slightly different way.
5. Centralized design, therefore someone out there can take your money without compromising the system.
On top of all that, you've got well-capitalized institutions who get to play in a $1.6T unregulated market full of dumb retail investors mostly looking to speculate, in cahoots with the exchanges, whose valuations depend solely on bringing the hogs to slaughter in increasing numbers.
SEC should be all over this but appears to be sleeping at the wheel.
At first it was as simple as cloning Bitcoin, making a few parameter tweaks and pumping the resulting shitcoin until enough greater fools bought in. That worked for a while.
Now there's a newer generation of token systems that claim to represent a technical leap ahead of first-generation blockchains and promise to be the future of payments and/or smart contracts. They all have a white paper that looks legit, and the really convincing ones have a published paper. I read a lot of them and categorized almost all of them as follows:
1. Incomprehensible BS dressed up as academic research.
2. Uses recent or novel cryptography, but states assumptions that won't hold in the real world.
3. Uses recent or novel cryptography, but doesn't have significantly better properties than BTC or ETH.
4. Basically the same scaling trick as ETH2 (sharding) achieved in a slightly different way.
5. Centralized design, therefore someone out there can take your money without compromising the system.
On top of all that, you've got well-capitalized institutions who get to play in a $1.6T unregulated market full of dumb retail investors mostly looking to speculate, in cahoots with the exchanges, whose valuations depend solely on bringing the hogs to slaughter in increasing numbers.
SEC should be all over this but appears to be sleeping at the wheel.
Regulatory bodies all over the world seem to be sleeping at the wheel. I have seen advertisements posted on Reddit which were aired on mass broadcast media like TV. Any such ad should contain a big red warning about the volatility but that seems to be missing.
Big tech is getting away with anything now days. I went without ad-block on YouTube for a week and all i saw were pyramid schemes and get-rich-quick crypto courses, probably targeted to early 20s males like myself. On Reddit pump-and-dump subs are even getting to the front page. These companies are happily profiting off of it. Just don't insert any views to the right of Marx and you're good to scam as many people as you like.
You know, after having experienced the 2020 stock market crash and QE4 leading to the increased speculation of cryptocurrency, we should set aside some tax dollars to create some sort of large independent agency of the United States federal government that enforces the law against market manipulation.