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Bitcoin
Matt Levine (who is consistently brilliant) focuses on the aspect of this that troubles me the most (I'm used to dirty cops).
The jury that convicted Dread Pirate Roberts wasn't told of ANY of the shenanigans that form the basis of this indictment. And those shenanigans clearly played a role in the overt acts of which DPR was convicted.
I think he has promising grounds for an appeal here.
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Bitcoin
This Sand Hill Exchange story is hilarious.
A month earlier, we were app developers with an idea. Everyone’s calling a tech bubble. Let’s make a game for crowdsourcing predictions on startups. We wanted a stock-market type of experience, where people could throw pocket change on valuation wagers.
Facebook says, “Move Fast and Break Things.” Without any outside investment, we built Sand Hill Exchange. We moved fast. And boy, did we break things.
We listed sixty pre-IPO companies and signed our friends up as beta testers. Early orders sat unmatched in the order book. Nobody wants to play in a market with zero users, we realized. So we gave participants the illusion of liquidity.
We created bots to trade against incoming orders. They were like my friends. I even named them! My favorite was the “Jesse Livermore” bot. Opportunistic to a fault.
The bots would run every day and place orders against each other so the market looked like it was exhibiting lots of price movement and volume. For added credibility, we randomly generated trading histories for each company going all the way back to last year. So we had historical price and volume in addition to streaming quotes for chart data.
We pasted descriptive text cribbed from the websites of banks and registered exchanges to make our website look like a serious business. The Sand Hill Exchange Twitter account broadcasted information about market activity and stats. Our CEO relayed this to influential accounts, including a public discourse with Mark Cuban.
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Bitcoin
Matt Levine finally weighs in on Sand Hill, because the SEC finally published its enforcement action. Fun stuff.
Meanwhile, Sand Hill itself is back up as a no-money fantasy startup site, including a mea culpa from the founder that still doesn't seem to acknowledge that setting up a derivatives exchange and fabricating trade data is not innovation, it's fraud.
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Bitcoin
Not exactly bitcoin, but who could have guessed that a firm claiming to hold bullion for goldbugs would be a scam?Sam Painter of Augusta, Ga., said he became a Bullion Direct customer after reading “The Creature from Jekyll Island,” a book that blames the Federal Reserve for everything from economic policy failures to wars. “It really opened my eyes,” he said. “The dollar is just out there without anything to support it. You believe it’s worth a dollar, and I believe it’s a dollar. But it’s really just paper.”
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Bitcoin
Basically it's a company that makes Raspberry Pi-alikes with embedded bitcoin mining software/hardware and sells them for $400 to idiots. And it's all wrapped up in the usual "if we say blockchain enough people will think they're changing the world" bollocks.
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Bitcoin
Oh, wow, the SEC didn't mention this bit in the press release.On or about September 11, 2014, GAW Miners announced the creation of the limited edition “Remember” Hashlet with the logo of “9/11” to commemorate those whose lives were lost in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Garza announced that GAW Miners would only sell 500 Remember Hashlets, and would donate all of the proceeds (approximately $10,000) to “the 9/11 memorial fund.” He specified that “GAW will in no way be profiting from any sales related to the cause.” After selling approximately 2,290 Remember Hashlets for a total of approximately $48,000, GAW Miners donated only $10,000 to a 9/11 related charity.
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