When everything is becoming digital and easily tracked, when your crypto accounts are easily scanned and assets can be blocked, when many stablecoins can be frozen, #Monero is the only cryptocurrency that really supports your rights and your privacy.
There are so many young, unqualified people in the crypto industry giving financial advice. They think they are smart just because they bought into Bitcoin early and made some money. But they are also too young to know the old saying, "don't confuse brains with a bull market."
We're celebrating our 12th birthday today! 🎉
A happy Moneroversary to all, to many more years of Monero being at the forefront of privacy, keeping your transactions and holdings private and secure!
IMO: Three possible outcomes to the Iran war:
Option 1
The war ends right away.
Iran gets some of what it wants (repayment for damage done), US army bases out of Middle East, assurances it will never be attacked again.
Fed cuts rates. Banks loosen, markets recover back to the way they were.
The USD will survive but be weaker than it was.
However Iran and Russia will still sell oil to BRICS nations in yuan, Saudi Arabia will still buy gold through Switzerland etc. the world will be different the dollar will not be a hegemony.
Option 2
The war goes on longer (a month or more)
Hormus stays closed longer.
Things start to break.
Foreign holders of US Treasuries have to sell to buy energy and food.
Credit crisis like 2008.
Job layoffs. Stock market drops.
Option 3
War drags on even longer
The big print aka yield curve control.
The Fed has to intervene or the Bond market collapses taking down the western world with it.
However, we have never seen a QE big print with oil at $100+. It’s always happened with cheap oil.
Nobody knows what the outcome will be some believe stagflation.
Printing money with cheap oil increases asset prices. Printing money with expensive oil is called hyperinflation.
@ryan_hanigan Nominal rates don't matter. It's real rates that count. As inflation soars and the Fed remains on hold, real interest rates will collapse. That's very bullish for gold.
The Monero black pill:
Ever since $XMR got delisted from the largest exchanges like Binance and Coinbase, there has been a chokehold.
Majority of volume and liquidity now comes from the only 2 exchanges left (KuCoin and HTX).
But majority of XMR holders don’t use KuCoin/HTX directly because the AML requirements as a retail user is almost impossible to pass. You will certainly get your account locked if you use it long enough.
I won’t even mention MEXC since that’s such a clear trap that is now an open secret of scamming their customers.
Instant swap services have corporate accounts on either KuCoin or HTX, although majority is actually on KuCoin.
So when you swap on Trocador or any other service, your XMR is most likely being sourced from KuCoin since most services don’t have their own liquidity.
The ones that do have their own liquidity have terrible rates and very low XMR inventory to facilitate big swaps.
The problem here is that you go through a barrier when using instant swap exchanges:
The instant swap exchange needs to make sure that when they deposit your funds to KuCoin and buy XMR for you, your funds have no illicit links at all.
Therefore they will steer to the side of caution when it comes to your wallet risk score.
Even if THEY think that your funds are clean and the link to illicit funds is very speculative, they will still freeze your transaction because of the concern that KuCoin will freeze their deposit, leaving them with a loss by facilitating your swap.
After all, imagine if your swap goes through and FF gives you XMR in exchange for ETH but KuCoin decides not to accept their ETH deposit, freezing THEM instead?
It gets even worse because other swap services are essentially wrappers of the big swap services.
So the smaller swap services take a quote from the larger swap service who does have an institutional account with KuCoin/HTX and take an extra fee on top of that, pretending to have their own route.
That’s the big problem.
You can’t even blame the instant swap services for conducting business this way, it’s the centralized exchanges that have this chokehold over them.
The majority of $XMR inventory from KuCoin/HTX comes from institutional miners who have corporate accounts setup with them as well, where they can reasonably prove that the coins deposited in are freshly mined.
They have long lasting relationships with each other since the mining market on $XMR is far smaller than on $BTC for example, giving them incentives in fees rebates to deposit/trade.
Now think what that does to the price action of $XMR.
Some buys (particularly in high size) get prevented from order flow due to the frozen swaps whereas freshly mined $XMR inventory continuously gets dumped onto the market.
Monero’s price discovery has a natural trend of running against the wind as a result, it takes MORE (attempted) buys to cover the mined coins entering the market.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Since Wagyu routes everything through Hyperliquid (a DEX), there is no chance of your funds being frozen.
It’s truly P2P, the concept of no retail or institutional accounts doesn’t exist.
We have miners already depositing directly onto Hyperliquid without needing long standing relationships with a centralized exchange to prevent them doing business.
When people ask me where does Wagyu’s XMR comes from, the only answer to that is OTHER PEOPLE.
Underneath Wagyu’s instant swaps is an order book exchange where anyone can deposit/withdraw XMR, secured by Hyperliquid infrastructure.
It’s truly P2P, you are trading against other people and market makers providing you competitive rates who don’t have to worry about their $XMR inventory worth $1m suddenly being held hostage by a CEX.
Yes, Wagyu is not fully decentralized right now, but it’s FAR MORE decentralized than the other alternatives right now who have a chokehold on $XMR.
Wagyu offers an alternative route with its own liquidity, allowing you to go straight to the source for $XMR at the same rates as a CEX.
People who think that Bitcoin is going to zero are likely mistaken. The design is robust enough that it will continue to exist in perpetuity, barring some currently unforeseen breakdown in cryptography or a surprise 51% attack (even then, a fork would carry on I would imagine).
What is can do, though, is decline to a price consistent with hobbyist tinkering. Because it is a complete failure as a currency, as a store of value, etc., it isn't going to become the dominant money of the future. So I'd suggest a 2050 price target of under $10,000 in today's dollars. Possibly much lower.
It sounds great, but it doesn't work in practice. And the crypto market itself, including #Bitcoin (Ponzi-scheme), is even more centralized than traditional global finance.
Crypto and tokenization will be a great equalizer, giving billions a level playing field to pursue wealth creation.
Equality of opportunity is worth pursuing. Equality of outcomes leads to very dark places.
I reread and further studied #ClarityAct – the only correct option is to prohibit direct yield through classic stablecoins, but allow yield from #DeFi funding and lending mechs. If financiers can finally understand this, crypto and other financial markets will be able to recover.
The real story about Bitcoin isn’t its 50% decline, but that the biggest financial mania in history is likely over. What’s most amazing is how the scheme's promoters convinced the mainstream financial media, Wall Street banks, and elected government officials to embrace it.
Tokenized gold has proven itself to be a better way to hold value than #Bitcoin. Monero $XMR has also surpassed BTC in real utility. Other L1s are also better as a payment platform. If $BTC doesn't recover right now, - this Ponzi scheme is finished.
🚨 BREAKING
HERE’S WHY BITCOIN IS DUMPING RIGHT NOW:
BINANCE SOLD 11,930 BTC
KRAKEN SOLD 14,000 BTC
COINBASE SOLD 7,083 BTC
WINTERMUTE SOLD 6,669 BTC
INSIDERS SOLD 5,335 BTC
THEY JUST DUMPED $2.8B DURING LOW-LIQUIDITY HOURS ON THE WEEKEND.
THIS IS COORDINATED MANIPULATION!!
Shitflix, Shitwood and other popular English-language media are brainwashing everyone on the planet. Semantic influence. Meanwhile, Asian countries are taking control of the world with real technologies and cheap goods. The woke agenda versus real goods (technology). Interesting.
Why Western countries have succeeded globally is because they have the most developed media infrastructure, capable of promoting any topic anywhere on the planet. This is precisely why every truly sovereign country simply needs its own social media and messaging apps.
John McAfee: "The mainstream media has been using a technology called neuro-linguistic programming for more than fifteen years. And that neuro-linguistic programming makes you think and believe things which are not true."
Jamie Dimon $JPM is one of the smartest people in global finance, and he's worth listening to. Armstrong's $COIN vision is highly likely to lead to a new global crisis.
They will fight like dogs.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon reportedly told Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong that he was "full of shit" during a tense encounter at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week.
The confrontation stemmed from ongoing clashes over a major Senate crypto market structure bill (aimed at regulating digital assets, stablecoins, tokenized assets, and more). Armstrong has been actively lobbying against the current draft, arguing it contains "too many giveaways to TradFi" (traditional finance) including restrictions on stablecoin rewards (like interest-like yields on USDC holdings), limits on tokenized equities, and advantages that protect big banks' turf at the expense of crypto innovation and competition.
Key details from reports (primarily WSJ, echoed by CoinDesk, and circulating widely on X):
Armstrong approached Wall Street leaders, including Dimon, to discuss the bill and push back on what he sees as bank lobbying to kneecap crypto features (e.g., stablecoins offering higher yields than traditional bank savings accounts, which could draw deposits away).
Dimon a longtime crypto skeptic who has called Bitcoin a "fraud" in the past reportedly responded bluntly, telling Armstrong directly: "You are full of shit." This happened in a private or semi-private setting amid the Davos meetings.
The exchange highlights deepening friction between legacy banks and the crypto industry, especially as the bill faces delays after Coinbase withdrew support, contributing to a postponed Senate committee markup.
Every country is currently experiencing economic problems, and buying gold at current levels is the stupidest thing possible. It's pointless in terms of GDP growth. Either this is just classic $GOLD FOMO, or the world is seriously preparing for WW3.
There's a lot of news about many countries buying gold, but at current levels (4500+), gold already looks very overbought and pointless. Something similar is observed at the peak of the cryptocurrency market, the same FOMO, only not among retailers, but among large institutions.