bit¢oin$

no URLs. no usernames without the URL. no bypassing restrictions on URLs (like writing example dot com). no posting images with usernames in them.

free speech! pic.twitter.com/S3ZnwxkvSQ

— Molly White (@molly0xFFF) December 18, 2022

sry wrong thread

#onethread

ah look at that

Global Drug Conspiracy Used Binance To Launder Millions In Crypto, DEA Investigation Finds.

Good job Binance. 😂 https://t.co/iNSd6fekQl

— Bitfinex’ed 🔥🐧 Κασσάνδρα 🏺 (@Bitfinexed) December 20, 2022

“This is actually an example of where the transparency of blockchain transactions works against criminal actors,” Price told Forbes. “The bad guys are leaving a permanent record of what they're doing.

i mean it prob wouldve worked if they didnt buy the bitcoins from a fed in the first place

Only programmers would decide to use the internet to arrange their illegal transactions instead of a network of scary guys keeping ledgers in a shoebox

there was a super long and interesting New Yorker article a year or two back abt the feds using blockchain analysis to bust people, not gonna go into details but bad people

yeah its a good way to extract money from cyber crimes but besides that better to do it the old fashioned way

🚨 BREAKING: The SEC has officially charged Caroline Ellison & Gary Wang with defrauding FTX investors. https://t.co/r1dLYLuxRw

— Tiffany Fong (@TiffanyFong_) December 22, 2022

🚨 BREAKING: Caroline Ellison & Gary Wang have plead guilty to fraud & are cooperating with prosecutors.

— Tiffany Fong (@TiffanyFong_) December 22, 2022

hope some vcs go down with this

welp that's why Caroline and Gary were so quiet

Statement of U.S. Attorney Damian Williams on U.S. v. Samuel Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, and Gary Wang pic.twitter.com/u1y4cs3Koz

— US Attorney SDNY (@SDNYnews) December 22, 2022

credit where credit’s due, thank you feds and bahamas

that plea deal must have been sweet to roll over so quickly, or people really hate paying lawyers

hope some vcs go down with this

DOJ and SEC often don’t file charging docs until they already have the plea.

the vcs are how the sec has jurisdiction here, unfortunately
― 龜, Wednesday, December 21, 2022 10:02 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

they can still be guilty of crimes right

i mean, yeah, but what would you charge them with?

pumping n dumping shitcoins

but just generally there seems to be a ton of collusion between the various crypto whales were some of them vcs do any of the cooperators know anything about that, and even outside of ftx seems like industry wide were going to have a lot of telling happening soon, its probably happening now tbf

my intuition is that your general traditional VC type firms like a16z or sequioa did not run crypto prop trading desks, but who knows

nor would you need to to be involved in a conspiracy

as weve seen absolutely all of the big crypto players who face any scrutiny end up being dirty, and most of the big money flowing into crypto during this last boom was from vcs, im sure they would like you to believe that theyre just innocent investors, but that of course is not at all how they operate, theyre all up in the business, andreessen horowitz for instance has been intimately involved in building a bunch of these difi etc companies promoting their weird coins which they get at a discount and so forth, theyre totally in it

i know a16z had a big crypto fund (down 40%), but didn't know they were also promoting coins?

they invest in companies that produce coins and then they talk about the coins, im not going to write that abbreviation i hate it so much andyhorys whole schtick throughout the late stage of the crypto boom was to have companies theyve invested in whether they were originally crypto or not produce a coin of which they get a bunch at a nice presale price, they were printing money off this shit its much easier to make a coin than an actual good company, the whole thing looks extremely pump n dumpy, idk of course whether it meets the legal definition, but so far everything thats come to light ends up being actually way more criminal than it even looks

yeah man, i hear you a lot of shady shit went down, i just dunno if your big traditional VC types were actually pumping and dumping coins

it does look exactly like they were

guess well find out soon enough tho

https://archive.ph/NgRtb

looks like there already are (private) lawsuits alleging this

pumpy dumpy

yeah theres no doubt that these companies that they built allowed rampant fraud and they knew about it and profited from it, which is bad enough on its own, but then the further question would be if they also did the fraud themselves, seems like it would be pretty temping to have some coins and a pump n dump machine at your fingertips, and also the entire industry is built on pumping and dumping

or they couldve also outsourced it to some coconspirator just by sending a text or whatever

ftx executives are flipping on bankman f so then who does he flip on whos upstream from him, tether is the obvious one, but also maybe vcs, other crypto whales idk

pic.twitter.com/UWpoXhJzvl

— Sean Morrow (@snmrrw) December 22, 2022

Marc andreessen going to jail bc of crypto would be pretty sweet, though that seems pretty unlikely

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/YB0AAOSwaadiZVo0/s-l500.jpg

ftx executives are flipping on bankman f so then who does he flip on whos upstream from him, tether is the obvious one, but also maybe vcs, other crypto whales idk

― lag∞n, Thursday, 22 December 2022 17:13 (yesterday) link

I'm skeptical they would cut SBF a break to get to some VC or whale. SBF is already a cartoon villain now, they need to take him down hardcore, dope on the table.

I mean to be clear, he deserves it. But I would be shocked if they give him a deal to some more powerful and less publicly known person.

its not like they have to let him off more of a tell us what you know as part of your guilty plea and well tell the judge you were forthcoming then maybe he doesnt get the max

i suspect itll all come out regardless, everyone involved is just so flagrantly doing crimes

i mean he might just tell them if they ask

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/crypto/north-dimension-ftx-bankman-fried-rcna63175

crypto put a nice twist on wash trading instead of doing it to dump which requires someone to actually buy you can just borrow against your pumped token and use the money to buy other stuff

"By being on both sides of the transaction, Eisenberg artificially inflated the price of MNGO relative to USDC, allowing him to borrow and then withdraw $110 million of different cryptocurrencies..." https://t.co/IzigqgZ8Dw

— Matt Novak (@paleofuture) December 28, 2022

I kinda feel like if you loan someone millions of dollars with their cryptocurrency as collateral, you deserve to get ripped off

I suspect the Fed would agree

I believe all of our actions were legal open market actions, using the protocol as designed, even if the development team did not fully anticipate all the consequences of setting parameters the way they are.

— Avraham Eisenberg (@avi_eisen) October 15, 2022

criminal mastermind pic.twitter.com/O2QBBu84l1

— web3 is going just great (@web3isgreat) December 28, 2022

I feel like these dudes might actually believe their own bullshit?

they really do lol

def some industry wide feeling that it was a crimes are legal zone, but really the feds were just slow to get to work

*fake Matt Levine voice* If someone exploited a vulnerability in the Charles Schwab website to execute a nine figure trade with other people’s money and then tweeted that they believed their actions were using the protocol as designed, the FBI might be busy laughing for the few crucial minutes necessary for you to board your flight for Venezuela.

lol