Bitcoin down almost half from its highs

Bitcoin’s plunge accelerated on Thursday, as the world’s largest cryptocurrency fell more than 10% to below $66,000 in afternoon trading, a level not seen since October 2024. The moves underscore how vulnerable cryptocurrencies can be when investors turn away from risk.

The sharp drop was a reversal from late last year, when bitcoin surged to record highs above $125,000 a coin. In the four months since then, the digital currency has lost nearly half its value.

The selling comes as investors pull back from riskier assets like crypto and tech stocks, and rotate into traditional “safe haven” assets like gold.

Since bitcoin’s October peak, the gap between its performance and gold’s has widened significantly. As of Thursday afternoon, the value of bitcoin had fallen 32% since February 2025, while the value of gold has soared 70%.

This year alone, gold is up more than 14% while bitcoin is down more than 20%.

As crypto plummets, the U.S. dollar is also feeling the heat from wary investors who are rethinking where they put their assets.

Read the rest here.

Sam Bankman-Fried Gets 25 Years

Meanwhile the great crypto-con continues. As of this post, people are spending near $70,000 a piece for imaginary money called bitcoin. Stulti et pecunia eorum cito separantur. 

If I ever feel some overwhelming urge to play with fake money, I will grab the Monopoly board in the closet.

How many more times will we be conned by crypto?

Why haven’t floating rate cryptocurrencies gone the way of the Beta recorder? Fifteen years of experience have laid bare their fundamental flaws.  

They have no intrinsic value, offer little to no transparency, and anyone — priest or felon — can issue, operate or manage them. Sometimes we don’t even know who creates crypto coins. Their price is often driven by rumors on social media, and once users lose confidence, with no government oversight, the only way to realize any value is to sell before everyone else does. There is no house, car, securities, company or tangible value to liquidate at the bottom of a cryptocurrency run.  

It should not have been surprising in 2021 when economic reality momentarily replaced irrational exuberance and the price of Bitcoin dropped precipitously. That reduction in cryptocurrency value was comparable in magnitude to the crash of the stock market in the Great Depression. Billions more dollars subsequently vanished in the bankruptcies of FTX, Genesis Global Capital, Celsius, Voyager Digital, BlockFi, and Three Arrows Capital.  

Even in the face of mounting evidence exposing their flaws, cryptocurrencies have survived as crypto acolytes reflexively defend it. They dismiss pioneers like Sam Bankman-Fried (FTX) and Changpeng Zhao (Binance) as one-off anomalies who strayed from the true gospel. Investment experts rationalize a continuing financial faith in cryptocurrency because they see its decentralized transparency and it's a “neighborhood-watch” type of oversight as the future of finance. If that were true, it would defy two centuries of experience that have painted a picture of what makes complex financial systems work. 

Read the rest here.

Jamie Dimon on Crypto

“I’ve always been deeply opposed to crypto, bitcoin, et cetera,” the head of the largest U.S. bank by assets said under questioning from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) during a Senate Banking Committee hearing. “The only true use-case for it is criminals, drug traffickers … money laundering, tax avoidance.” 

“If I was the government, I’d close it down,” he added.

Source.

Gall Effrontery Temerity

Call it what you will. Today I got a spam text on behalf of the former grifter N chief complaining about political persecution and begging for money. I'm not generally a fan of coarse language but I spent ten years in the navy, so I'm not exactly unfamiliar. The response I sent back would have peeled the paint off the wall in a Marine Corps barracks.

Is Donald Trump the world's greatest con-man? Probably

If he pulls this off, former President Donald Trump will have earned his place as the most successful con artist in political history.

Who but Trump has openly turned a presidential campaign political action committee into a money machine to pay his legal bills?

Trump’s PAC reportedly started last year with $105 million. It now has less than $4 million after legal bills.

And don’t forget, before Trump was a declared candidate, he used Republican National Committee donor dollars to pay his legal bills.

This is what we call a “crass act.”

Republican voters are being hustled so effectively that they are cheering Trump on, laughing as he rips them off.

Can you compare him to Jim and Tammy Faye Baker, televangelists who made an art of taking money from old ladies sitting alone in front of the television?

Can you compare him to Bernie Madoff, who pulled in wealthy, sophisticated celebrity clients with promises of wealth beyond belief?

Can you compare him to Elizabeth Holmes, who convinced famous investors to send her millions for a mysterious “Twilight Zone” medical device?

No, you can’t. Because Trump is making them all look like small-time grifters.

“MAGA grandmas were scammed in order to pay a billionaire’s legal bills,” said Christina Pushaw, an aide to one of Trump’s rivals, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R). It’s hard to argue with her.

Read the rest here.

The latest crypto-con

SEC sues entrepreneur, alleging $1 billion in unregistered crypto sales and multimillion-dollar fraud

The so-called crypto industry is a high-tech scam with a history that reads like a catalog of financial criminality. Stay away from it.

A book recommendation

Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud
If you own crypto, or are thinking of dabbling in it; I strongly reccomend reading this book.

One Year Ago, the Crypto-Con Peaked: Since then, $2 trillion has been wiped out.

A year ago this week, investors were describing bitcoin as the future of money and ethereum as the world’s most important developer tool. Non-fungible tokens were exploding, Coinbase

 was trading at a record and the NBA’s Miami Heat was just into its first full season in the newly renamed FTX Arena.

As it turns out, that was peak crypto.

In the 12 months since bitcoin topped out at over $68,000, the two largest digital currencies have lost three-quarters of their value, collapsing alongside the riskiest tech stocks. The industry, once valued at roughly $3 trillion, now sits at around $900 billion.

Rather than acting as a hedge against inflation, which is near a 40-year high, bitcoin has proven to be another speculative asset that bubbles up when the evangelists are behind it and plunges when enthusiasm melts and investors get scared.

And the $135 million that FTX spent last year for a 19-year deal with the Heat? The crypto exchange with the naming rights is poised to land in the history books alongside another brand that once had its logo on a sports facility: Enron.

Read the rest here.

Psychic Con Artists

What does it take for someone to impersonate a dead teenager to the grieving mother of the deceased? For M Lamar Keene, a prominent Tampa-based medium in the 1960s and 70s, it was a cinch – all it required was a cocktail of cunning, charisma and sheer audacity. In front of the congregation of his spiritualist church, Keene would enter a trance state and appear to speak as the deceased 17-year-old, Jack, and ask Jack’s mother, Lona, to donate thousands of dollars to the church. One day, Lona asked Jack about the secret name he used for her, to prove it was really him, and Keene was stumped – until he attended a gathering at her house and feigned a headache. While pretending to rest in her bedroom, he searched her belongings and found the name scribbled in a family Bible: “Appleonia”. He pulled it off.

Keene confessed to being a conman in his 1976 book, The Psychic Mafia. Jack and Lona’s was just one of many audacious cases he revealed in the exposé, which shook the world of spiritualism so much that it led to an attempt on his life. Someone took a shot at him on his lawn but missed, leaving a bullet in the side of his house. In the book, Keene described how mediums shared client information so that they could conduct “hot readings” based on solid facts. He recounted how they would steal jewellery from clients for a few months, only to pretend a dead family member’s spirit had made it reappear (which usually resulted in generous tips). Ultimately, he confirmed that mediums formed a vast network to fraudulently monetise people’s grief. So why did Keene – the so-called Prince of the Spiritualists – choose to blow the whistle on everyone?

Read the rest here.

China: All crypto-currency related activities are illegal

China’s central bank renewed its tough talk on bitcoin Friday, calling all digital currency activities illegal and vowing to crack down on the market.

In a Q&A posted to its website, the People’s Bank of China said services offering trading, order matching, token issuance and derivatives for virtual currencies are strictly prohibited. Overseas crypto exchanges providing services in mainland China are also illegal, the PBOC said.

“Overseas virtual currency exchanges that use the internet to offer services to domestic residents is also considered illegal financial activity,” the PBOC said, according to a CNBC translation of the comments. Workers of foreign crypto exchanges will be investigated, it added.

The PBOC said it has also improved its systems to step up monitoring of crypto-related transactions and root out speculative investing.

Read the rest here.

I'm not generally a fan of China these days but to borrow a well worn cliché, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. And they are right about this. On a related note; Bitcoin and the other major cryptos are all getting hammered.   

The Smartest Guys in the Room Call Bitcoin “Rat Poison Squared,” “a Colossal Pump-and-Dump Scheme” and “a Big Criminal Scam” but Federal Regulators Look the Other Way

Anne Goldgar wrote of the Dutch Tulip bubble in her 2007 book, Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age, that “the f1000 one might pay in January 1637 for one hypothetical Admirael van der Eyck bulb,” could have bought “a modest house in Haarlem,” or “nearly three years’ wages” of a master carpenter. Comparing that to U.S. dollars in 2007, the year her book was released, Goldgar says it would be like one Tulip bulb selling for $12,000.

Goldgar notes that as historians have looked back at this episode, the tulip mania of the 1630s in Holland has become a “byword for idiocy.”

In his 1841 classic on market bubbles, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, the Scottish journalist Charles Mackay wrote this about the Tulip bubble: “The rage among the Dutch to possess them was so great that the ordinary industry of the country was neglected…”

Four centuries have apparently not cured the propensity toward idiocy when the lure of riches beckons. The market cap of Bitcoin is now in excess of $1 trillion, despite the fact that it is backed by absolutely nothing.

No amount of disdain toward Bitcoin by the smartest guys in the room can stop the creature’s incessant climb. Bitcoin has multiplied more than five-fold since September, trading yesterday at over $56,000.

Bitcoin has been thoroughly discredited by some of the smartest people in the investment community and global finance, but that hasn’t stopped the oldest futures exchange in the U.S., CME Group, from offering futures and options trading on Bitcoin. CME Group’s federal regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), explains in this podcast that all that CME Group had to do to launch its Bitcoin futures was to “self-certify” its plan with its regulator, the CFTC. The self-certified plan may be just fine – it’s the underlying product based on nothing that the regulator seems to have ignored.

(We’re thinking of submitting a self-certified plan with the CFTC to trade futures on spinning straw into gold. We’re toying with calling it the RumpelstiltskinCoin.)

The CME Group has exchanges that provide for futures trading based on real things: like milk, wheat, soy beans, oil, gasoline, ethanol and so forth. These are real things that fuel economic growth in the United States and/or feed a nation of 331 million people.

To paraphrase Mackay in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds to sum up today’s Bitcoin craze in the U.S.: The rage among speculators to trade Bitcoin was so great that the harm this would do in the long-term to the reputation of integrity in U.S. markets was simply ignored by Congress and regulators.

One of the most respected investors in America, Warren Buffet, summed up Bitcoin like this in May 2018: Bitcoin is “probably rat poison squared.” In January of the same year, Buffet told CNBC in an interview that “In terms of cryptocurrencies, generally, I can say with almost certainty that they will come to a bad ending.”

Also in 2018, Bill Harris, the former CEO of Intuit and PayPal, wrote a detailed critique of Bitcoin for Vox, under the headline: “Bitcoin is the greatest scam in history.”

Read the rest here.

Phone company rips off US servicemen

Army Sgt. Richard Corder and his unit were headed to Iraq in May when their military charter made a refueling stop in Leipzig, Germany. It was Corder's third tour in Iraq. His unit had lost 28 soldiers during a previous deployment, so his family was especially worried.

"Both my kids, they were in tears. Wife was in tears when we left,” he said. “I just wanted them to know that everything was going to be fine, that I was going to come home.”

So Corder decided to make a quick call home, using a bank of pay phones inside the secure area at the Leipzig-Halle Airport where the troops hang out, and paying with his debit card. He didn’t reach his wife, so he left a 3-second message: “Hey honey it’s just me. I’m trying to call you. All right, love you. Bye.”

Then came the bill – for $41. Corder felt ripped off.

“It’s terrible that they would do that to us,” Corder said. “I mean we volunteer to serve our country. … We fight for their freedom. And they're going to scam us, take our money, rip us off?”

Now Corder and his wife, Dharma, are suing a U.S. company they allege is responsible for gouging thousands of troops for phone calls to loved ones while headed to and from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Read the rest here.

Breaking With Scientology

CLEARWATER, Fla. — Raised as Scientologists, Christie King Collbran and her husband, Chris, were recruited as teenagers to work for the elite corps of staff members who keep the Church of Scientology running, known as the Sea Organization, or Sea Org.

They signed a contract for a billion years — in keeping with the church’s belief that Scientologists are immortal. They worked seven days a week, often on little sleep, for sporadic paychecks of $50 a week, at most.

But after 13 years and growing disillusionment, the Collbrans decided to leave the Sea Org, setting off on a Kafkaesque journey that they said required them to sign false confessions about their personal lives and their work, pay the church thousands of dollars it said they owed for courses and counseling, and accept the consequences as their parents, siblings and friends who are church members cut off all communication with them.

“Why did we work so hard for this organization,” Ms. Collbran said, “and why did it feel so wrong in the end? We just didn’t understand.”

They soon discovered others who felt the same. Searching for Web sites about Scientology that are not sponsored by the church (an activity prohibited when they were in the Sea Org), they discovered that hundreds of other Scientologists were also defecting — including high-ranking executives who had served for decades.

Read the rest here.

I have just one question. Why are the leaders of this cult/scam not in jail?

Scientology On Trial For Fraud

The Church of Scientology in France will be tried in court for "organised fraud", according to legal sources.

From the BBC