Aug. 12, 2023
This is a corrected version of an email I sent a few minutes ago, timestamped 9:44 pm. I mistakenly referred to Molly White, editor of Web3 is Going Just Great, as “Molly Brown.” (The “unsinkable” Molly Brown was a famous survivor of the Titanic disaster). This is the corrected version: Molly White, in Web3 is Going Just Great, estimates that crypto firms have scammed investors out of more than $67 billion dollars to date. When are you going to stop it? Anybody who wants to speculate in bitcoin can do it easily without any help from the likes of ARK Invest, Blackrock, Fidelity or Wisdomtree. No necessary service is being provided. These firms just see money flowing from mark to con artist and figure if people are being conned anyway, they might as well divert a little bit of that flow to themselves. The history of crypto is a never-ending history of frauds and scams. Sam Bankman-Fried is just the latest in a parade of con artists putting up fronts of respectability. It is not a few bad actors, it is crypto itself. Nobody is buying Starbucks lattes with bitcoin. It is all speculation on price movements. They are all securities. And crypto markets are all being manipulated. Approving a bitcoin ETF would boost crypto. Don’t do it. Do your job. Protect investors.