Dav Phenix

[Dav Phenix @cryptoni_x]

@sonixtrader Also lost a lot on this market, which seemed so straightforward forme... Rules weren't followed, what a shame.

[Dav Phenix @cryptoni_x]

@holy_moses7 @Hivelive_ @betmoardotfun Congrats goat

[Kabuto King @KabutoKing_]

To celebrate reaching 2000 first edition fossil Kabutos, I am giving away a signed WOTC promo Gold W stamped Kabuto.

To enter:
👑 Like & Repost
👑 Follow @KabutoKing_

Good luck everyone!
Winner announced Sunday 👑

[Dav Phenix @cryptoni_x]

@bertus241_off On y croit toujours ici mais je ne stack pas au cas où... 👀

[Dav Phenix @cryptoni_x]

@bitlearn_fr Let's go 🔥

[Dav Phenix @cryptoni_x]

@PixelcoinTM

[Dav Phenix @cryptoni_x]

@PixelcoinTM Tu sais déjà à quelle heure sera le live?

[𝟑 𝐞̀𝐦𝐞 𝐎𝐞𝐢𝐥 @_3emeOeil]

🍕 #BITCOIN PIZZA DAY 🍕

Il y a exactement 14 ans aujourd'hui, le 22 mai 2010, un développeur de logiciels du nom de Laszlo Hanyecz a acheté deux pizzas pour 10 000 #BTC.

Retour sur ce moment légendaire !
🧵👇

[Dav Phenix @cryptoni_x]

@CryptoThib @MoneyMatrixApp T'es un chat noir 😅

[Dav Phenix @cryptoni_x]

New day, new airdrop 🪂
Thx to @wormhole.
3k$ 🔥

[Dav Phenix @cryptoni_x]

@t1mpa_ @0xninja_labs I put a lot of hours into it.
Small projects bring in more: fewer users and less diluted.

[Dav Phenix @cryptoni_x]

Thx to @0xninja_labs.
Easy airdrop on Injective. 🪂
Only 250k mcap now.

We are going so much higher 🔥🫡

[Dav Phenix @cryptoni_x]

ATH $BTC 🔥🚀

[Alexandre Stachtchenko @StachAlex]

There's nothing correct in this rag. Because yes it’s a rag, there are no other words. But not just any rag, a dangerous rag.

🧵👇

I. Let's start by saying that the mandate of the ECB is to manage price stability. Writing nonsense about Bitcoin does not seem to me to be part of this mandate, so I would be glad if public money didn't finance this kind of thing, especially when the main mandate has not even been achieved for quite a bit of time.

It is scandalous that the credibility, time and money of a public institution is used to hit a particular asset. I recall here that it is also on this precise point that the SEC lost its case in the United States, having shown that they were not "merit neutral", that is to say indifferent to the merits and asset qualities.

What's more, if Bitcoin is not a currency as they like to repeat, WHY ARE THEY WRITING ABOUT IT AT ALL?!

II. Let us also note that the article is seriously lacking in sources. Almost all of the assertions are unsubstantiated. When they are, for the vast majority it is a referral to opinion articles in the press.

There is only one academic source: Cong et al. (2023) whose abstract tells us "Our sample consists of 29 centralized exchanges, among which the regulated ones feature transaction patterns consistently observed in financial markets and nature.".

Oddly, the ECB paper draws a completely different conclusion: "wash trading accounts for 77.5% of the total trading volume on unregulated exchanges".

I continue with the sources to show you the immense bad faith, and in particular in the case of supposed money laundering and financing of terrorism by cryptos.

“Bitcoin remains the top choice for money laundering in the digital world, with illicit addresses transferring $23.8 billion in crypto in 2022, marking a 68.0% increase from the previous year.” The source indicated is "Chainanalysis 2024". We will overlook the fact that the company is called Chainalysis.

Source links to “2024 Crypto Crime Trends: Illicit Activity Down as Scamming and Stolen Funds Fall, But Ransomware and Darknet Markets See Growth”, January 18.”

https://t.co/WtM2xDXkAj

I don't even know if I need to continue... The title of the report is literally "Illicit Activity Down."

But let's continue anyway because it's juicy. We are told that activity is increasing even though it is decreasing. The reason is quite simple : the authors of the article take the previous reference year (2022) compared to that of even before (2021).

Why ? Because it serves their message. Between 2021 and 2022, illicit activity had increased (in value, not necessarily in proportion). Between 2022 and 2023, it has decreased. So it doesn't interest them, and they go back to the year before, despite the fact that it would obviously have been more relevant to take this year's figure rather than arbitrarily that of the previous year.

Moreover, in terms of order of magnitude, to tell us that Bitcoin is the "top choice" for laundering when it represents ~$20 billion is to mechanically assert that all other means are inferior, and consequently that there is LESS than 20 billion laundered each year in euros or dollars.

Remember that the Pandora Papers ALONE are $11,000 billion in perfectly fiat currency. The few articles that investigated the subject of illicit activities pointed to a proportion of around 1% of the GDP of the euro zone in 2010, or 110 billion (15 years ago).

https://t.co/vRcOWNThxb

Bad faith is evident to the point of ONLY selecting the years that interest them on graphs which do provide more exhaustive data. At this stage, we are on the edge of pure and simple lies, and, in any case, it is plain and conscious disinformation. I say conscious because they THEMSELVES cite the 2024 Chainalysis article, and so they have seen and read it! They do not ignore this information.

III. Beyond the opinion-based sources, the ambient bad faith, the disinformation, and the fact that the authors are not experts and are in full conflict of interest (one of the authors works specifically on the digital euro in addition... .), we obviously find a pile of false assertions, all debunked, or opinions presented as facts:

1) “Today, Bitcoin transactions are still inconvenient, slow, and costly.”

Compared to what ? A SEPA transfer that takes 5 working days? An international transfer that costs on average between 5 and 10% of the transaction?

Remember that if we compare Bitcoin with payment cards, we are comparing apples and pears. VISA & Mastercard do not do transactions, they do authorizations. And so we have to compare this upper layer to the Lightning Network which perfectly sustains comparison.

2) "Outside the darknet, the hidden part of the internet used for criminal activities, it is hardly used for payments at all."

False, completely false, documented, and admitted by the police or intelligence services. Whether it is the FBI which is delighted that criminals use cryptos, or the gendarmerie or even TracFin in France, it is now admitted, including among detractors, that it is not mainly used for criminal activities.

In the National Money Laudering Risk Assessment 2022 from the US Department of the Treasury, we can read "the use of virtual assets for money laundering remains far below that of fiat currency and more traditional methods" or even "the size and scope of drug proceeds generated on the darknet and laundered via virtual assets remain low in comparison to cash-based retail street sales. Worldwide sales on major darknet markets appear to have remained modest when compared to overall illicit drug sales. For example, during 2017–2020, drug-related darknet market sales amounted to approximately $315 million annually, or about 0.2 percent of the combined estimated illicit annual retail drug sales in the United States and European Union."

https://t.co/7NGQ0Zk9tR

I would add that in 2022, the Bitcoin network processed more transaction value than VISA (+$10,000 billion), which is not bad for something supposed to have failed.

3) “Bitcoin is still not suitable as an investment.”

It's just the best performing asset in 15 years.

4) “the mining of Bitcoin using the proof of work mechanism continues to pollute the environment on the same scale as entire countries”

The authors have not opened the latest academic publications: You et al. (Cornell), Ibanez et al. (University College London), Bruno et al. (University of North Carolina), etc. which ALL points to the opportunity to use Bitcoin to green electricity grids and reduce methane emissions. I guess they also didn't ask those who have already tried, i.e. the Texas grid operator, ERCOT, whose ex-CEO Brad Jones called Bitcoin a blessing for the stability of its network and an incentive to increase the ENR mix.

No, the authors prefer evoking the famous “evidence of its huge negative environmental impact.” Which ones? We won't know, since the assertion, although serious, is simply not sourced.

As we suspect, the authors probably preferred to give credibility to the famous Digiconomist, a person who has no expertise and has been wrong by major orders of magnitude for more than 5 years on everything he says on this subject, who lies (he declares in the Cell Reports paper that he has no conflict of interest, which is obviously false since he works in a central bank), and who moreover is not even researcher, since he has not finished his doctorate. This seems to be a better pedigree than Fengqi You (mentioned), from the renowned Cornell University, whose research specialties include computer science and energy transition, the two areas that interest us here, and which since 2010 has been honored with fifteen awards recognizing the quality of his research work.

To tell the truth, the authors probably don't care at all about the environment, but it gives them a practical angle of attack to attack an object that competes with them.

IV. Finally, I add that the article alone is a mountain of contradictions.

1) The value of Bitcoin would be zero because it does not produce "cash flow (unlike real estate) or dividends (stocks), cannot be used productively (commodities), and offers no social benefit (gold jewelry) or subjective appreciation based on outstanding abilities (works of art)."

Does the euro produce cash flows? No
Does the euro produce dividends? No
Can the euro be “used productively”? No
Does the euro offer “social benefits” like jewelry? No
Is the euro subject to subjective appreciation based on extraordinary qualities? No

So we understand that the euro is worth zero?

2) Bitcoin, as we have seen, is supposed to be the “top choice” for money laundering & terrorism.

Yet further in the article, the authors rebel against regulatory fatalism, and bring out the killer argument to encourage legislators not to sit idly by: “But Bitcoin transactions offer pseudonymity rather than complete anonymity, as each transaction is linked to a unique address on the public blockchain. Therefore, Bitcoin has been a cursed tool for anonymity, facilitating illicit activities and leading to legal action against offenders by the tracing of transactions".

Great, so in the same article, Bitcoin manages to be the best way to carry out illicit activities, but also a “cursed” way which allows “legal actions against offenders” because we can trace the transactions.

In. The. Same. Article.

V. Finally, the authors wonder why Bitcoin is not yet banned (“it seems wrong that Bitcoin should not be subject to strong regulatory intervention, up to practically forbidding it”), and come to suggest actions to legislator (Reminder, this has no place here, since it does not fall under the mandate of price stability).

What are these actions?

"The Bitcoin network has a governance structure in which roles are assigned to identified individuals. Authorities could decide that these should be prosecuted in view of the large scale of illegal payments using Bitcoin."

First, Bitcoin governance does not have roles assigned to individuals. There are roles, yes, but the individuals who participate in them are interchangeable. They are also not necessarily identified, see solo miners.

Among those roles, there are core devs, miners, nodes, exchange platforms etc. Everyone has their little power, but no one controls Bitcoin alone. Let us incidentally recall for example that a few years ago, during the Blocksize Wars, miners & exchange platforms lost their battle against nodes.

So what does the authors’ not-at-all-innocent little phrase mean?

That we're going to take the core devs from their homes and put them in jail? For which motive ? Because they wrote code?

Should Einstein have been put in jail for opening the way to work on nuclear power?

Someone who sells a kitchen knife has to go to jail because a buyer committed a crime with it?

All this on the basis of a “large scale of illegal payments” which is false, and which they themselves debunked in their own article.

I'm sorry, but where is this going ?

I reiterate that Bitcoin is a test for democracies, and that in Europe we are failing every step of the test. What is happening is serious.

Let's stop the liberticidal delusions and authoritarian or even totalitarian excesses now. It's a political fight.

[intern @intern]

2023 Crypto Year in Review

[Esprit Cryptique @_Cryptique]

Cet écosystème représente simplement notre société.

Le fait d'aspirer à un monde meilleur passe aujourd'hui par l'argent et par plus grand chose d'autre, du gros poisson jusqu'au petit.

La valeur argent domine la valeur morale pour une raison simple : les gains apportés par le fait de faire de l'un sa priorité sont supérieurs aux pertes causées par le fait de transgresser l'autre.

C'est de la théorie des jeux pure et dure, une question de coût d'opportunité.

Le fait est que notre société ne récompense pas les comportements les plus vertueux, et nous en sommes tous responsables.

[Dav Phenix @cryptoni_x]

@CryptoThib Super thread 👍

[Dav Phenix @cryptoni_x]

Thank you for everything you've done. 💪
Legend.

[CZ 🔶 BNB @cz_binance]

Today, I stepped down as CEO of Binance. Admittedly, it was not easy to let go emotionally. But I know it is the right thing to do. I made mistakes, and I must take responsibility. This is best for our community, for Binance, and for myself.

Binance is no longer a baby. It is time for me to let it walk and run. I know Binance will continue to grow and excel with the deep bench it has.

I’m pleased to announce that @_RichardTeng, our now former Global Head of Regional Markets, has been named the new CEO of Binance today.

Richard is a highly qualified leader and, with over three decades of financial services and regulatory experience, he will navigate the company through its next period of growth. He will ensure Binance delivers on our next phase of security, transparency, compliance, and growth.

Prior to joining Binance, Richard was CEO of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority at Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM); Chief Regulatory Officer of the Singapore Exchange (SGX); and Director of Corporate Finance in the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

With Richard and the entire team, I’m confident that the best days for @Binance and the crypto industry lay ahead.

As a shareholder and former CEO with historical knowledge of our company, I will remain available to the team to consult as needed, consistent with the framework set out in our U.S. agency resolutions.

What’s next for me?

I will take a break first. I have not had a single day of real (phone off) break for the last 6 and half years.

After that, my current thinking is I will probably do some passive investing, being a minority token/shareholder in startups in areas of blockchain/Web3/DeFi, AI and biotech. I am happy that I will finally have more time to spend looking at DeFi.

I can’t see myself being a CEO driving a startup again. I am content being an one-shot (lucky) entrepreneur. Should there be listeners, I may be open to being a coach/mentor to a small number of upcoming entrepreneurs, privately. If for nothing else, I can at least tell them what not to do.

On that note, I am proud to point out that in our resolutions with the U.S. agencies they:

- do not allege that Binance misappropriated any user funds, and
- do not allege that Binance engaged in any market manipulation.

Funds are SAFU!

With that, I look forward to seeing the new leadership take the reins. Please join me in congratulating Richard on his well-deserved promotion.

Onwards!

CZ

[WIZZ🥷 ( beware scammers ) @CryptoWizardd]

Cz has done more for this entire space then all those influencers combined. Yet some think they are relevant.

Sit your ass.

[Gordon 🐂 @GordonGekko]

When you take HODL to seriously https://t.co/yA17vhys1x