Logos of Bitcoin and different cryptocurrencies – Copyright AFP Giuseppe CACACE
Crypto, particularly Bitcoin, is the third armpit of finance. Nobody ever needed it and nobody asked for it. The financial world was perfectly capable of sending itself and everyone else broke without crypto.
Even organized crime didn’t really need crypto. Thanks to deregulation and corruption, illegal money could move around easily without an entirely separate crypto system and markets.
But of course, being totally unnecessary has never been much of an argument against anything hideous in human history. Nobody “needed” the two world wars, either.
Just recently, this system fell off a cliff and halved the price of Bitcoin. It fell so much that even the short-selling contracts were themselves shorted and wiped out.
That wholesome bit of information brings us around to human trafficking and Bitcoin. Yep, crypto is the preferred medium for human trafficking. So what happened was that the crypto used to traffic humans lost half its value.
How sad. Imagine all those poor little very rich slavers might have lost their totally deregulated and usually laundered money.
The legal status of crypto is complex. In China, it’s illegal. It really depends on the local currency laws.
In many countries, it’s an “asset”, taxable if converted into currency. That’s sort of intriguing, because it’s not really a currency but the agreed terms of trade.
It’s interesting how deregulation is always in the interests of crime.
If you park your car in the wrong place, it’s an automatic ticket instantly. That’s regulation.
If you enslave thousands of people, it’s a complex legal issue that could take years or decades to resolve, if ever. That’s deregulation.
Prohibition effectively enabled and created modern crime. It wasn’t really a regulation. The process of not enforcing the law was so cumbersome and so ineffective that it made billions for organized crime. Crypto is much the same. When “call a lawyer” is the only applicable way of enforcing the law, forget it.
Even losing when trading in crypto is basically promoting it. Nobody could possibly have been too surprised when Bitcoin devalued to half of its value in record time. The Bitcoin price would be pure fiction if people didn’t keep going broke.
Watch this process. It’s simple. The price will recover, thanks to naïve investors. Big money can now buy in very low and be rewarded when the innocents and the idiots buy in.
While those slavers wait for their money to come back, what’s the situation with USA crypto, you ask, enchanted?
The Trump administration has been evangelizing crypto for quite a while. The US will be the “crypto capital of the world”.
This dribbling appellation is generally predicted to be yet another all-American disaster based on the GENIUS Act, which Trump says modestly was named after him. There’s also a related Clarity Act.
It’s so hard to care whether he or his publicists have a sense of humor lately. Maybe karma is simply setting up the shots.
A financial crash is the default prediction for this GENIUS and Clarity situation, not just the usual sunny Trump-era optimism.
This is where future idiots come from. Idiotic precedents. As law, it’s abysmal. It’s sure not regulation. Wanna be a “financial institution”? Issue a stablecoin. It’s your qualification under this legislation.
If the US financial sector survives all this brilliance, it’ll be a miracle.
