Crypto Bros getting rekt

The entire "crypto industry" is a giant scam. Even authorities and leading media still underestimate the criminal energy behind crypto and blockchain projects. Crypto snake oil salesmen have been very successful so far, but now the tide is turning. The U.S. regulators are entering the game and things are about to get spicy....

The general public, politics, media and many self-proclaimed experts still lump the terms Bitcoin and crypto together. This is a fundamental mistake, but an understandable one. After all, Bitcoin has only been around for 14 years and hardly anyone has already had the time and energy to deal with this new subject extensively.?

Due to the shady image of crypto and many very obvious scams, the image of Bitcoin is unfortunately also impacted by the "crypto industry".

But Bitcoin is something completely opposite to all other (crypto)currencies. Something mankind has never seen before, a discovery.

Bitcoin is the invention of censorship-resistant digital cash with an immutable supply of 21 million coins. It's the only digital object that cannot be copied. It's absolute mathematical scarcity. A digital commodity backed by energy and time with Bitcoin mining.

Everything is worth a part of 21 million Bitcoin, forever.

We discovered a new element in the periodic table, consisting of pure energy, without mass. Bitcoin can be sent at the speed of light, because it has no friction. It works even better as money than heavy gold, the element we have used as money until now.

Other than Bitcoin, gold exists in the physical world and therefore has a mass. So the amount of energy needed to move gold at the speed of light is much too high. As soon as humanity invented communication by radio and internet, we couldn't exchange real physical tokens at the same speed. People started making promises for money, instead of sending actual money. Promises can be manipulated, always have been and always will be.

None of the above has anything to do with the "crypto industry".

Without exception, all other cryptocurrencies than Bitcoin are Ponzi schemes, or unregistered securities issued by software companies. Behind all of these crypto/blockchain projects are central founders, teams and companies/foundations that have influence on the development of the project and coins.

Blockchain, the holy grail of the "crypto industry" is just a distributed and thus inefficient database that solves no real-world problem apart from the specific use for Bitcoin.?

Regardless, we can also just copy all of these "crypto applications" on Bitcoin. There is no reason for even a single other cryptocurrency. Every other coin is inferior money compared to absolute and verifiable scarcity. Literally everything else will forever lose value compared to Bitcoin in the long run.

These crypto projects have nothing in common with a decentralized commodity. You can't rediscover absolute and verifiable scarcity and we don't need to.

But many of those "crypto entrepreneurs" aren't stupid. What is the easiest way to acquire the largest possible amount of the scarcest money known to mankind?

How about creating worthless shitcoins out of thin air to sell those as shiny blinking blockchain/crypto/NFT/web3/DeFi/DAO/... projects to people new in the "bitcoin and crypto industry". The same applies to crypto "experts" or influencers who praise coins or describe them as useful, apart from being test networks for Bitcoin.

The people behind these coins create their own monopoly money out of thin air that they then sell to naive investors to enrich themselves. In total, there are around 25,000 cryptocurrencies. Sometimes with good marketing and sometimes with (really) bad marketing.?

But all crypto coins have one thing in common: they are superfluous and make the people behind these projects incredibly rich.

All these realizations require many hundreds or thousands of hours of research. The Bitcoin Rabbit Hole goes (much) deeper than you might suspect. But the vast majority of regulators do not seem to have invested this time yet.

However, especially in the U.S., more and more influential people seem to understand the difference between Bitcoin and crypto and are pushing for appropriate regulations. The U.S. is the largest and most important capital market in the world and sets the tone for regulations worldwide.

According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), only Bitcoin is a digital commodity. All other "cryptocurrencies" are unregistered securities issued by companies to fund the development of (unnecessary) crypto projects.

If a honest company wants to be listed on an U.S. stock exchange (i. e. Nasdaq), it must go through an elaborate regulatory process and disclose all relevant information and risks to the U.S. authorities and public.

Crypto companies are bypassing this regulatory process. That is why the SEC and the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) are starting to crack down on all crypto projects and crypto trading platforms, setting precedents and trying to discourage potential imitators.

Just to illustrate the magnitude of scams in the "crypto industry":

You may have heard about the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX in 2022. FTX CEO Sam Bankman Fried created one of the largest crypto ea changes in the world, along with its associated cryptocurrency FTT.

In the media that talks about "bitcoin and crypto", SBF was portrayed as a humble genius. The new big tech mastermind.

Sam Bankman Fried financed a big marketing campaign, from pompous FTX Superbowl ads with advertising partners like Tom Brady, Steph Curry and Giselle Bundchen, to FTX's own arena in Miami.

FTX became one of the biggest players in the "crypto industry" in a very short time and disappeared from the scene even faster. One could write a book on the massive Ponzi scheme Sam created with FTX and the FTT-Token.

Long story short: FTX was a huge scam, fueled by the completely useless FTT-token that collapsed, crashed FTX along with other crypto companies and wiped out around $9 billion in customer funds. One of the biggest scams in history. And it has nothing to do with Bitcoin. In fact, Bitcoiners like me have been warning people about these kind of scams.

FTX, however, was just the tip of the iceberg. Ethereum is the second largest "crypto project" after Bitcoin. The Ethereum Network and it's coin Ether, a "decentralized" cryptocurrency created and controlled by founders Vitalik Buterin, Joseph Lubin and the Ethereum Foundation, was valued at $500 billion at its peak.

Today, after the collapse of several crypto projects (including FTX), the market capitalization is "only" at $200 billion. But still, 200$ billion for a blockchain experiment that still does not solve any real problem after about 8 years of development.

As can be concluded from several video recordings from the early days of Ethereum, the heads behind this project have deliberately circumvented U.S. security laws by issuing the cryptocurrency Ether out of thin air. It is estimated, that Co-Founder Joseph Lubin gave himself about 10% of the entire Ether supply.

To this day, the Ethereum guys regularly sell their own coins to "investors" and use the money to pay developer and to finance lobbying in the U.S. and EU Parliament to promote positive regulations for the "crypto industry".

It is probably only a matter of time before Vitalik and his friends are dragged into court for creating maybe the biggest scam in history. Bad for them, as well as everyone who "invested" in Ether.

The founders behind the cryptocurrency Ripple (XRP) are using the money made with naive "investors" for funding the "Change the Code" smear campaign, along with Greenpeace USA, spreading misinformation about Bitcoin to portray their own XRP coin more positively.?

The "XRP Army" indirectly paid for this smear campaign that portrays Bitcoin as an environmental killer, which is at the very least a reckless misrepresentation of the facts. Bitcoin is arguably the greenest industry in the world because Bitcoin mining promotes renewable energy and can even be the first industry to become CO2 negative.

The self-proclaimed "King Spam", aka Richard Heart has just been sued by the SEC. He allegedly raised more than $1 billion through the sale of unregistered securities named Hex Token, PulseChain and PulseX. Most of the money he made went in luxury purchases like a 555-carat diamond and many expensive sports cars to pose on social media and promote his get-rich-quick-scheme.

The people behind these crypto projects will face hefty penalties, possibly imprisonment. Their "coin" may no longer be sold in the U.S. without securities registration and the myth that there are other decentralized cryptocurrencies besides Bitcoin will also disappear.

At the same time, the U.S. authorities are taking action against the world's largest crypto exchanges such as Binance and Coinbase. Bitcoin only companies are spared, while platforms that sell other cryptocurrencies are targeted by the SEC and CFTC.

The U.S. seems to be the first industrialized nation to start understanding what is really behind Bitcoin. Gary Gensler, head of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, who had already given lectures on Bitcoin, blockchain and money at the MIT in 2018, said more than 2 years ago:

"In that work, I came to believe that, though there was a lot of hype masquerading as reality in the crypto field, Nakamoto’s [anonymous creator of Bitcoin] innovation is real. Further, it has been and could continue to be a catalyst for change in the fields of finance and money."

At the same time, the few banks that worked with crypto companies were being closed or weren't rescued in the wake of the current banking crisis. This additionally dries up liquidity in the crypto market and removes on-ramps for "crypto investors".

Bitcoin is also playing an important role in the U.S. presidential election. Several candidates, from both the Democratic and Republican party, are speaking positively in favor of Bitcoin and against crypto. Some are already proposing to back the U.S. dollar with Bitcoin and to remove all taxes on it. This would effectively make Bitcoin official currency in the USA.

The idea of backing the U.S. dollar with Bitcoin is something other Bitcoiners and I have been discussing for years. Should the price of the fiat currency fall, every government holds gold in order to dump those gold reserves on the market and sell them against its own fiat currency in order to stabilize the price.?

Bitcoin is objectively a better store of value / money than gold, because it has no mass and is pure information. Also, everything, including gold is relatively scarce. The supply can be expanded.

Only Bitcoin is absolute scarcity, a savings technology. The only real property which you can send over the internet just like a WhatsApp message. No one can take Bitcoin away from you without your consent.

A few days after the announcement of the SEC court case against the crypto exchanges Binance and Coinbase, the world's largest asset managers such as BlackRock, Fidelity, VanEck & Co. filed applications for Bitcoin Spot ETFs. Unlike the already approved Bitcoin Futures ETFs, a Spot ETF involves the purchase and deposit of real Bitcoin from the market.

The chances of this Spot ETF application being approved by the SEC and thus the beginning of the institutional adoption of Bitcoin seems quite likely in my opinion.

If the Bitcoin Spot ETFs are approved, the powerful asset managers behind them will also be interested in pushing Bitcoin education and improving Bitcoin's image. After all, these companies have a monetary benefit for doing so, just like states that back their fiat currency with Bitcoin.

Of course, no person should have their Bitcoin managed by another person or company. Anyone who does not hold their own 12 or 24 words, the access to their Bitcoin, does not own any at all. Not your keys, not your Bitcoin.

Nevertheless, such a Bitcoin Spot ETF is a first point of contact for companies, pension funds and other institutions that have hardly dealt with Bitcoin so far, but are interested in this "number go up" technology.

While the U.S. crypto-crackdown is very bad for crypto scammers and people "invested" in this scams, it's at the same time a very positive signal for Bitcoin. In the future, it will hopefully be less and less necessary to explain to newcomers the difference between Bitcoin and Crypto.

Bitcoin, as a censorship-resistant digital cash and savings technology, is an important human right for everyone in the world.

Crypto snake oil salesmen are still making a lot of money from newcomers to the Bitcoin space. By creating and promoting the "crypto industry" that thrives like a parasite on Bitcoin's success, these scammers have negatively impacted the understanding of Bitcoin, delaying the spread of this important freedom technology for many years.

Study Bitcoin, not shitcoins.

If you've been scammed, get over it and don't start hating the toxic and religious Bitcoin maxis. Reconsider.

And get off zero.

Anyone holding 0% Bitcoin assumes that absolute scarcity will prevail with a chance of 0%. And that is an absurd thesis from my understanding.