Bitcoin pulse, guides and news: 07/03/20

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Whale: Before the Next Bitcoin Bull Run, Expect an Altcoin “Extinction Event”

https://www.bitnewslive.net/whale-before-the-next-bitcoin-bull-run-expect-an-altcoin-extinction-event/

This Alarming Pattern Suggests Bitcoin Could Soon Crater Lower (current BTC/USD price is $9,069.53)

Latest Bitcoin News:

This Alarming Pattern Suggests Bitcoin Could Soon Crater Lower

07-04 01:45 - 'Lightning / Strike Public Beta Announcement' (self.Bitcoin) by /u/TPK001 removed from /r/Bitcoin within 2-12min

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This rollout, by Jack Mallers, will be a milestone event in the history of Bitcoin usage / on ramps. US only for now.

[[link]^²

'''

Lightning / Strike Public Beta Announcement

Go1dfish undelete link

unreddit undelete link

Author: /u/TPK001

1: medi*m**o**@JimmyM**/announ*ing-*t*i*e-public-*et*-*2*87*a79f87
2: medium.c**/@J**myM*w*announcing*st*i*e*p*bl*c*b*ta-3258*7**9f87]^^1

Unknown links are censored to prevent spreading illicit content.

[Twitter/Clubhouse/News Media?] Silicon Valley v The New York Times: Overpriced Suitcases, Insta Stories, Insular Apps and Bitcoin Bounties

Background:

What is Clubhouse?

You know all those stories of people interrupting Zoom calls by spamming the link and getting in? What if that, as a business model. It is still in private beta, has only 1500 users and somehow venture capitalists have $12 million invested at a $100 milion dollar valuation in this.

What is Away?

Hardcover suitcases that cost $225 and above. Hipsters seem to like it. "The brand is more than just luggage. It’s about travel." It is treated like a tech company by VCs for some godforsaken reason (it has raised $100 million at a $1.4 billion valuation), and the CEO uses a lot of Lean In rhetoric (female led, inclusive etc.)

How New York Times?

The New York Times has hired a reporter, Taylor Lorenz, specifically for "Internet Culture" i.e. r/HobbyDrama reporting. (No, seriously, look at the stories she gets to write. For the NYT!)

Pre-Drama Events:

In December 2019, an elaborate investigation was posted by The Verge (not the NYT, important) about the toxic work culture at Away, with the CEO, Steph Corey, calling workers brain dead and firing someone based on chat in an internal private Slack channel called #Hot-Topics "filled with LGBTQ folks and people of color" (from article).

Korey stepped down as CEO in December, with another CEO to be selected. She came back as co-CEO in January because she 'should not have fallen on the sword.'

Course of the Drama:

June 30/July 1: On an Instagram AMA, returned co-CEO Korey answered a question about "women being targeted by the media" (I presume the AMA went in that direction) by talking about media having an incentive to clickbait in the social media era that and women (like her) were targeted because women are supposed to be motherly, ambitious women like Hillary are targeted by the media, some millennial women who work in the media forgo their ethics to advance their career because old media ethics are being eroded.

The Verge investigation was done by Zoë Schiffer**,** a "millennial woman."

Incensed by this, Lorenz posts the IG pics on twitter (previous link from her) and speculates that this AMA exists because of a piece on the disgracing of the "girlboss" stereotype. To recap, neither the original story, nor the Atlantic op-ed were written by her.

Techbros start sharing the same pics of the AMA as a balanced perspective.

Until this point, #bothsides, let them fight, etc.

Enter Balaji Srinivasan. Here is a pompous bio.

He starts attacking Lorenz (again, not the writer of any of the stories). Lorenz says the guy has been obsessively attacking her for quite some time on ^Clubhouse gussied up public Webex calls (in tweets after the linked tweet).

Then anti-Lorenz sockpuppet accounts start being created to attack her.

An elaborate website is linked by the accounts, specifically to attack her. (Click the link, it is deranged as all hell.)

Taylor asks Ben Horowitz (of multi-billion dollar Andreessen Horowitz, where Balaji has worked before) to get him to stop. Gets blocked.

Then the Andreessen Horowitz batch have a conversation on ^Clubhouse Discord without texting with Lorenz. After Taylor leaves, (this part leaked to Vice, so you can go listen) Ben Horowitz' wife, Felicia says that Taylor is playing the "woman card to defend herself." Balaji implies that she may be "afraid of a brown man."

And then the conversations ascend:

"the entire tech press was complicit in covering up the threat of COVID-19,"

relying on the press is "outsourcing your information supply chain to folks who are disaligned with you,"

"Media corporations are not the free press, any more than chain restaurants are food. Media corporations are not the free press, any more than chain restaurants are food "

“why does press have a right to investigate private companies, let the market decide, I don’t understand who gives them that right” (Note: Probably from another conversation by some CEO)

Also something about Github, VC funding and Blockchains being a better model for journalism. (Bitconeeeect!!)

Then Vice reports on it.

Tech media rallies around Taylor [retweets on her twitter]. Glenn Greenwald pokes his nose and says otherwise, because Greenwald.

VCs support their own (along with MC Hammer?? because he's also on ^Clubhouse the conference calls you join "for fun" app? So is Oprah???), with opinions like

I’ve never met a VC more powerful than a journalist. One can block me from accessing capital. The other has controlled the narrative / perception of my entire race for decades.

And other nuclear fucking takes retweeted by Felicia Horowitz

And Balaji?

When reached for comment, Balaji claims recording it was illegal (which, idk, haven't seen the Terms of Service, only 1500 people can use ^Clubhouse the Twitch app, but you don't have video and chat has audio)

And then he announces a $1000 bounty for memes and analysis of this event.

(paid in Bitcoin, obviously, this whole scenario is a damn meme)

This gets the creator of Ruby on Rails/Basecamp to defect to the media's side

Aftermath? (This is a current story):

VCs like Paul Graham) declare that the media hates them because they are losing power

Media Twitter decides VC Twitter is trying to reanimate the corpse of #GamerGate

Steph Korey, the instigator of this spiraling nonsense? Away says she has decided to step down (redux) because an employee revolt over her IG post.

(Recap: Away sells hardcases to hypebeasts. They are worth a billion because of VCs)

Balaji, rich VC guy, has memes on his timeline?

[Elon Musk has not weighed in yet, if you are curious]

BitOffer Institute: Bitcoin options have exploded by more than $1 billion due to settlement

https://preview.redd.it/1kimouosfm851.png?width=820&format=png&auto=webp&s=f01be112f2ac790f9ded13128ed7b8d80cc04a6d

According to the options trading data from BitOffer, On June 26, with the due to settlement exceeding $1 billion, Bitcoin has experienced its largest option expiration event in history. Of which BitOffer exchanges accounted for 73%, followed by Deribit and OKEX. This is an important milestone for the digital asset space, reflecting the rapid growth of the cryptocurrency options market through 2020 and its growing influence on bitcoin price movements.

The question is this phenomenon leads to significant market volatility? This is the main concern of most investors. The price of Bitcoin continued to decline on June 26, the day it was hitting an intraday low of $8,841, which is the lowest price recently. It is worth noting that a large number of expirations mean that a new round of open options contracts will follow, and there are strong bullish expectations for bitcoin’s performance after halving. It is likely to spur a V-shaped rebound of bitcoin and breakthrough $10,000.

Lucian, the chief analyst at BitOffer exchange said that the encryption currency derivatives market has developed rapidly in 2020, especially in the options volume constantly refresh the record. At the same time, we also see the ETH options in rapid growth, at the month of ETH options being launch in BitOffer, its volume became more than $500 million. The options market is getting popular and the encryption market is gradually maturing, and likely having a better prospect versus the contract market.

https://preview.redd.it/7iqqodiufm851.png?width=1400&format=png&auto=webp&s=bdbb5139913eb6389be15d2233e85c2ad797e111

As is known to all, BitOffer is the largest bitcoin options exchange, and it has launched the world’s first American-style options of BTC, ETH, BSV, and BCH. The biggest feature of BitOffer is that no matter whether it is a bull market or a bear market, it has the opportunity to obtain up to a thousand times of excess income without any margin or handling fee. Bitoffer options provide 11 sections to choose from 2 minutes to 7 days. Besides, it is worth mentioning that the bitcoin option spot index is composed of the equivalent weights of 7 exchanges.

For example, as the price of Bitcoin was 9000 US dollars, Tom and Jerry predict that Bitcoin was expected to continue to rise, so they bought bitcoin contract and bitcoin options, respectively.

· 1. Tom choose to purchase a Bitcoin contract which cost $9000

· 2. Jerry choose to buy a bitcoin option which costs about $5

As they wish, after Tom and Jerry placed the orders, the bitcoin price rose sharply, which less than an hour, from 9,000 US dollars to 9,500 US dollars.

By comparison, Tom and Jerry get the same benefits, but the cost gap is very large.

· 1. Tom spent $9,000 and earned $ 500, which is a 5.5% return on the cost.

· 2. Jerry spent $5 and earned $500, which is calculated as 10,000% of the income.

Conversely, if bitcoin fell from 9,000 US dollars to 8,500 US dollars in one hour, Tom will be lost 500 dollars, and Jerry only lost the option fee, which would be 5 dollars.

Which means Jerry can get an interest in BTC for a very low price. This is what we say Limited losses and Unlimited gains.

Since the price of Bitcoin has been very volatile, more and more investors have started to use options to hedge the downside risk of the spot, to realize a stable progressive investment.

For example, the current price of Bitcoin is $10,000:

If the price rises to $11,000, the spot profit will be $1,000
If the price falls to $9000, the spot loss will be $1000

The cost is only about $20 if you buy a put option for hedging on BitOffer. Once the bitcoin drops from $10,000 to $9,000, the spot loss will be $1,000 and the put option will make $1,000 without loss.

As the risk is completely washed out, when you start hedging, you could make money when the price goes up, and you could save the cost when it goes down. This is the hedge between options and spots, besides, many investors using options to hedge contracts as well.

𝟏𝟖𝟒𝟒𝟗𝟎𝟕𝟎𝟓𝟖𝟑 @@ Binance Customer Care Number | Customer Service Phone Number

Binance support number 1844*907*0583 CEO Changpeng "CZ" Zhao really doesn't want to tell you where his firm's headquarters is located.

To kick off ConsenSys' Ethereal Summit on Thursday, Unchained Podcast host Laura Shin held a cozy fireside chat with Zhao who, to mark the occasion, was wearing a personalized football shirt emblazoned with the Binance support number 1844*907*0583 brand. 1844*907*0583

Scheduled for 45 minutes, Zhao spent most of it explaining how libra and China's digital yuan were unlikely to be competitors to existing stablecoin providers; how Binance support number 1800-561-8025's smart chain wouldn't tread on Ethereum's toes – "that depends on the definition of competing," he said – and how Binance support number 1844*907*0583had an incentive to keep its newly acquired CoinMarketCap independent from the exchange.

There were only five minutes left on the clock. Zhao was looking confident; he had just batted away a thorny question about an ongoing lawsuit. It was looking like the home stretch.

Then it hit. Shin asked the one question Zhao really didn't want to have to answer, but many want to know: Where is Binance support number 1844*907*0583 headquarters?

This seemingly simple question is actually more complex. Until February, Binance support number 1844*907*0583 was considered to be based in Malta. That changed when the island European nation announced that, no, Binance support number 1844*907*0583 is not under its jurisdiction. Since then Binance support number 1844*907*0583 has not said just where, exactly, it is now headquartered.

Little wonder that when asked Zhao reddened; he stammered. He looked off-camera, possibly to an aide. "Well, I think what this is is the beauty of the blockchain, right, so you don't have to ... like where's the Bitcoin office, because Bitcoin doesn't have an office," he said.

The line trailed off, then inspiration hit. "What kind of horse is a car?" Zhao asked. Binance support number 1844*907*0583 has loads of offices, he continued, with staff in 50 countries. It was a new type of organization that doesn't need registered bank accounts and postal addresses.

"Wherever I sit, is going to be the Binance support number 1844*907*0583 office. Wherever I need somebody, is going to be the Binance support number 1844*907*0583 office," he said.

Zhao may have been hoping the host would move onto something easier. But Shin wasn't finished: "But even to do things like to handle, you know, taxes for your employees, like, I think you need a registered business entity, so like why are you obfuscating it, why not just be open about it like, you know, the headquarters is registered in this place, why not just say that?"

Zhao glanced away again, possibly at the person behind the camera. Their program had less than two minutes remaining. "It's not that we don't want to admit it, it's not that we want to obfuscate it or we want to kind of hide it. We're not hiding, we're in the open," he said.

Shin interjected: "What are you saying that you're already some kind of DAO [decentralized autonomous organization]? I mean what are you saying? Because it's not the old way [having a headquarters], it's actually the current way ... I actually don't know what you are or what you're claiming to be."

Zhao said Binance support number 1844*907*0583 isn't a traditional company, more a large team of people "that works together for a common goal." He added: "To be honest, if we classified as a DAO, then there's going to be a lot of debate about why we're not a DAO. So I don't want to go there, either."

"I mean nobody would call you guys a DAO," Shin said, likely disappointed that this wasn't the interview where Zhao made his big reveal.

Time was up. For an easy question to close, Shin asked where Zhao was working from during the coronavirus pandemic.

"I'm in Asia," Zhao said. The blank white wall behind him didn't provide any clues about where in Asia he might be. Shin asked if he could say which country – after all, it's the Earth's largest continent.

"I prefer not to disclose that. I think that's my own privacy," he cut in, ending the interview.

It was a provocative way to start the biggest cryptocurrency and blockchain event of the year.

In the opening session of Consensus: Distributed this week, Lawrence Summers was asked by my co-host Naomi Brockwell about protecting people’s privacy once currencies go digital. His answer: “I think the problems we have now with money involve too much privacy.”

President Clinton’s former Treasury secretary, now President Emeritus at Harvard, referenced the 500-euro note, which bore the nickname “The Bin Laden,” to argue the un-traceability of cash empowers wealthy criminals to finance themselves. “Of all the important freedoms,” he continued, “the ability to possess, transfer and do business with multi-million dollar sums of money anonymously seems to me to be one of the least important.” Summers ended the segment by saying that “if I have provoked others, I will have served my purpose.”

You’re reading Money Reimagined, a weekly look at the technological, economic and social events and trends that are redefining our relationship with money and transforming the global financial system. You can subscribe to this and all of CoinDesk’s newsletters here.

That he did. Among the more than 20,000 registered for the weeklong virtual experience was a large contingent of libertarian-minded folks who see state-backed monitoring of their money as an affront to their property rights.

But with due respect to a man who has had prodigious influence on international economic policymaking, it’s not wealthy bitcoiners for whom privacy matters. It matters for all humanity and, most importantly, for the poor.

Now, as the world grapples with how to collect and disseminate public health information in a way that both saves lives and preserves civil liberties, the principle of privacy deserves to be elevated in importance.

Just this week, the U.S. Senate voted to extend the 9/11-era Patriot Act and failed to pass a proposed amendment to prevent the Federal Bureau of Investigation from monitoring our online browsing without a warrant. Meanwhile, our heightened dependence on online social connections during COVID-19 isolation has further empowered a handful of internet platforms that are incorporating troves of our personal data into sophisticated predictive behavior models. This process of hidden control is happening right now, not in some future "Westworld"-like existence.

Digital currencies will only worsen this situation. If they are added to this comprehensive surveillance infrastructure, it could well spell the end of the civil liberties that underpin Western civilization.

Yes, freedom matters

Please don’t read this, Secretary Summers, as some privileged anti-taxation take or a self-interested what’s-mine-is-mine demand that “the government stay away from my money.”

Money is just the instrument here. What matters is whether our transactions, our exchanges of goods and services and the source of our economic and social value, should be monitored and manipulated by government and corporate owners of centralized databases. It’s why critics of China’s digital currency plans rightly worry about a “panopticon” and why, in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, there was an initial backlash against Facebook launching its libra currency.

Writers such as Shoshana Zuboff and Jared Lanier have passionately argued that our subservience to the hidden algorithms of what I like to call “GoogAzonBook” is diminishing our free will. Resisting that is important, not just to preserve the ideal of “the self” but also to protect the very functioning of society.

Markets, for one, are pointless without free will. In optimizing resource allocation, they presume autonomy among those who make up the market. Free will, which I’ll define as the ability to lawfully transact on my own terms without knowingly or unknowingly acting in someone else’s interests to my detriment, is a bedrock of market democracies. Without a sufficient right to privacy, it disintegrates – and in the digital age, that can happen very rapidly.

Also, as I’ve argued elsewhere, losing privacy undermines the fungibility of money. Each digital dollar should be substitutable for another. If our transactions carry a history and authorities can target specific notes or tokens for seizure because of their past involvement in illicit activity, then some dollars become less valuable than other dollars.

The excluded

But to fully comprehend the harm done by encroachments into financial privacy, look to the world’s poor.

An estimated 1.7 billion adults are denied a bank account because they can’t furnish the information that banks’ anti-money laundering (AML) officers need, either because their government’s identity infrastructure is untrusted or because of the danger to them of furnishing such information to kleptocratic regimes. Unable to let banks monitor them, they’re excluded from the global economy’s dominant payment and savings system – victims of a system that prioritizes surveillance over privacy.

Misplaced priorities also contribute to the “derisking” problem faced by Caribbean and Latin American countries, where investment inflows have slowed and financial costs have risen in the past decade. America’s gatekeeping correspondent banks, fearful of heavy fines like the one imposed on HSBC for its involvement in a money laundering scandal, have raised the bar on the kind of personal information that regional banks must obtain from their local clients.

And where’s the payoff? Despite this surveillance system, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime estimates that between $800 billion and $2 trillion, or 2%-5% of global gross domestic product, is laundered annually worldwide. The Panama Papers case shows how the rich and powerful easily use lawyers, shell companies, tax havens and transaction obfuscation to get around surveillance. The poor are just excluded from the system.

Caring about privacy

Solutions are coming that wouldn’t require abandoning law enforcement efforts. Self-sovereign identity models and zero-knowledge proofs, for example, grant control over data to the individuals who generate it, allowing them to provide sufficient proof of a clean record without revealing sensitive personal information. But such innovations aren’t getting nearly enough attention.

Few officials inside developed country regulatory agencies seem to acknowledge the cost of cutting off 1.7 billion poor from the financial system. Yet, their actions foster poverty and create fertile conditions for terrorism and drug-running, the very crimes they seek to contain. The reaction to evidence of persistent money laundering is nearly always to make bank secrecy laws even more demanding. Exhibit A: Europe’s new AML 5 directive.

To be sure, in the Consensus discussion that followed the Summers interview, it was pleasing to hear another former U.S. official take a more accommodative view of privacy. Former Commodities and Futures Trading Commission Chairman Christopher Giancarlo said that “getting the privacy balance right” is a “design imperative” for the digital dollar concept he is actively promoting.

But to hold both governments and corporations to account on that design, we need an aware, informed public that recognizes the risks of ceding their civil liberties to governments or to GoogAzonBook.

Let’s talk about this, people.

A missing asterisk

Control for all variables. At the end of the day, the dollar’s standing as the world’s reserve currency ultimately comes down to how much the rest of the world trusts the United States to continue its de facto leadership of the world economy. In the past, that assessment was based on how well the U.S. militarily or otherwise dealt with human- and state-led threats to international commerce such as Soviet expansionism or terrorism. But in the COVID-19 era only one thing matters: how well it is leading the fight against the pandemic.

So if you’ve already seen the charts below and you’re wondering what they’re doing in a newsletter about the battle for the future of money, that’s why. They were inspired by a staged White House lawn photo-op Tuesday, where President Trump was flanked by a huge banner that dealt quite literally with a question of American leadership. It read, “America Leads the World in Testing.” That’s a claim that’s technically correct, but one that surely demands a big red asterisk. When you’re the third-largest country by population – not to mention the richest – having the highest number of tests is not itself much of an achievement. The claim demands a per capita adjustment. Here’s how things look, first in absolute terms, then adjusted for tests per million inhabitants.

Binance support number 1844*907*0583 has frozen funds linked to Upbit’s prior $50 million data breach after the hackers tried to liquidate a part of the gains. In a recent tweet, Whale Alert warned Binance support number 1844*907*0583 that a transaction of 137 ETH (about $28,000) had moved from an address linked to the Upbit hacker group to its wallets.

Less than an hour after the transaction was flagged, Changpeng Zhao, the CEO of Binance support number 1844*907*0583 announced that the exchange had frozen the funds. He also added that Binance support number 1844*907*0583 is getting in touch with Upbit to investigate the transaction. In November 2019, Upbit suffered an attack in which hackers stole 342,000 ETH, accounting for approximately $50 million. The hackers managed to take the funds by transferring the ETH from Upbit’s hot wallet to an anonymous crypto address.

CALL On @ 𝟏𝟖𝟒𝟒𝟗𝟎𝟕𝟎𝟓𝟖𝟑 @@ Binance Customer Care Number | Customer Service Phone Number