Cryptocurrency mega-thread

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nobbyiscool said:
Hi all, I’m hoping for some help.

Cos of the Australian government ban on OS poker sites, I’m looking at using a VPN + crypto.

I don’t mind doing some reading, I just need someone to point me in the right direction in finding the easiest wallet + exchange for both deposits & withdrawals.

I’ve no interest in trading, I’ve no interest in alternative crypto currencies - I just need to be able to buy & sell Bitcoin quickly.
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Binance if you're happy to KYC. They have PayID/Osko so you can get instant transfers both ways, plus high liquidity and low fees.
 
ash_1050 said:
Alright on the off chance you're someone who's contemplating throwing your money away it's Zucoin deep dive time. Firstly let's take a look at Zuzak, the overarching thing that kick started Zucoin. "Zukaz is a thoroughly modern tech company spearheading a new approach for brands to connect and advertise to their customers, in a fun and challenging AR-style real-world voucher hunting app." Sounds like an app in need of a cryptocurrency, and well done to them for getting their Zuzak project up and running.

Next let's take a look at the company as a whole, starting with it's management team. View attachment 1201446

Allan is the founder, and presumably comes with a stack of experience which he'd outline in his bio, right?
View attachment 1201449

Erm, that's odd, we've got no idea who this guy, what he's done in the past, or what his credentials are. He doesn't have a LinkedIn profile either (I searched).

Not to worry, like most of his tech savvy startup founder buddies Allan has a Twitter account in which he describes himself as an "entrepreneur, litigant and thoroughbred race horse owner of (a horse called Alligator Blood)". Wait, what? Litigant? Allan is currently suing Racing Australia, Racing QLD and QLD Racing Integrity Board who apparently disqualified the horse after it's run in the 2020 Magic Millions 3yo Guineas. Never one to mix business with pleasure Allan appeared in a video in which he sports an Alligator Blood hat in the Zukaz office with a giant Zucoins logo in the background to explain why his horse, which tested positive to banned substances after the race, was the legitimate winner. Bizarrely the video is hosted on Dropbox rather than Youtube, which strikes me as odd for a guy who's playing in the tech space, as it's a very Boomer thing to do.
View attachment 1201452

But enough about Allan, let's take a look at CTO Robert Novak. Robert's bio also tells us very little, but his Twitter retweets show he's a nerd, which is what you want in a CTO. According to the Zucoin's website he's been with them since 2016.

View attachment 1201465

Which is odd, because his Linkedin says he joined the company in November 2019, and before that was a lowly web developer at a company called Coxtech, as Robert notes in the 'see more' section of his CTO description "This position started out as a client contract that grew into a bigger role." So Robert got poached by Zukaz in late 2019 to work for them full time to prevent them having to keep engaging a third party, and presumably to focus on Zucoin. Saying he was 'employed' in 2016 is a bit of a stretch when he was clearly working at another company who were contracted to do it among other projects for other companies.
View attachment 1201466

Mate Tokay and Sam Volkering are both big names in the crypto space and very good advisors to have, though it remains to be seen in what capacity they are advising Zucoins, as once again there's very little information in their bios on the Zucoins website.

So where does Aker fit into all this? His LinkedIn outlines it in his profile where he lists himself as a "Licensee Real Estate Agent" who moonlights as a "Tech Start up Zucoins" in his spare time, after he was formerly an Accredited Corporate Manager at Zuzak. So what does Aker do at Zucoins? Fecked if I know, but saying Zucoins is the "only truly P2P crypto currency ever built" is a bit rich given literally almost every cryptocurrency is a P2P cryptocurrency.

View attachment 1201475

To say Zucoin is the only true P2P cryptocurrency ever built would be misleading, and Zucoin wouldn't make any misleading statements at all, especially not in their FAQ section.
View attachment 1201485

Wait, what? The Zucoin price "should be" 20% of the Bitcoin price? Are they tied as a currency pair? No, no they're not. And with BTC currently AU$62,000 at the time of writing that makes a single Zucoin worth more than $12,000 according to their FAQ section. Which is, of course, completely false and highly misleading. Especially given in the paragraph above that they're currently selling them for $60 per Zucoin. To be fair they may have written the FAQ guide prior to November 2015, and just not updated it since, back when BTC was trading at AU$451 and therefore Zucoin should have been worth a paltry $90 using their comparison guide. Not bad for a coin that wouldn't be invented for another couple of years.

Thankfully there's a crypto comparison guide that shows a more accurate reflection that as of 22/06/21 Zucoin was worth $60 and BTC was worth $41,658.98, meaning Zucoin was worth approximately 0.144% of a BTC rather than the 20% shown above. Boy I hope somebody got fired for that blunder.
View attachment 1201490

Also side note, and one I love as an investing nerd, the market cap for Zucoins is listed as $6 billion, which is technically correct. Why technically? Because the 100 million Zucoins on offer are presumed to be worth the last price paid for them, in the same way a company market cap is calculated using the formula of (last trade value * shares on issue). So if someone buys a single Zucoin for $60, straight away they get a $6b market cap. Given Zucoins cannot be sold for less than $60/coin that means they have at least a $6b market cap for as long as the company exists. Which just goes to show market caps aren't worth the keyboard strokes they're written with when it comes to startup cryptocurrencies.

They also spend 3 pages showing how chad Zucoins stack up against virgin Bitcoin, which highlights a lot of the issues with Bitcoin that myself and many others have expressed as well.

View attachment 1201499



View attachment 1201503

The note above particularly caught my eye, as they point out that if you lose your wallet file you lose your Bitcoin. Which is correct, assuming you keep your Bitcoin on a .DAT wallet file, which I think 99.99% of people stopped doing in about 2014, but I digress. Zucoin don't have this issue, they have Splitcryption hashing technology that allows users to securely backup and restore ZKZ wallets in the event you lose your wallet file. Splitcryption hashing technology sounds pretty fancy, so what is is?
View attachment 1201514

It's a private key. Splitcryption hashing technology is a private key. Which if you lose the private key you lose access to your wallet, just like Bitcoin.
View attachment 1201515

Sound familiar? Now you can lose your Zucoins in exactly the same way Bitcoin has been offering for at least the last 10 years, except Bitcoin called it a private key rather than "Splitcryption hashing technology". Now I could be wrong here and Splitcryption hashing technology could have more complexity than that, but it's not a thing in the crypto space at all and only yields a total of 4 results on Google so I've got no idea what it is or what makes it so special.

I could go on but it's been a lengthly bit of due diligence already, so let's focus on the key takeaways here. The company is run by a guy who's not a tech person and is still salty he had a horse race stripped from him after his horse was found with banned substances in its blood. Their CTO looks like a smart guy, but has done a pretty poor job of articulating any real use case for Zucoin and hasn't stopped anybody from posting misleading statements about the coin (i.e. Aker and their FAQ page). The coin itself doesn't appear to be any different from the thousands of other coins out there that aim to do the same thing, offer a P2P system for cheap and efficient payments. And they're based in Albury, which isn't known for its tech expertise.

Would I buy Zucoin? Absolutely not.
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A quick update on this one Zucoins are now available from the company that created them at $100/each (up from $60 when this original post was made). They're still not listed on any exchanges, and can't be used for purchasing anything unless you for some reason decide that you want to pay someone in Zucoins and they accept your generous offer.

This project needs to be sent to the farm ASAP.
 
Anyone up for a good conspiracy theory? I've been learning about DRW, which was founded in 1992 by a certain Don R Wilson. It is now one of the biggest HFT trading firms, is a major bitcoin market maker, and provides liquidity to the large crypto exchanges. DRW's first big move into crypto came when Silk Road was closed down. The 140,000 bitcoins held in Ross Ulbricht's wallet were auctioned off by the feds and DRW scooped up around half of them, when BTC was worth about 400 dollars each - that holding is now worth about 1.5 billion. By their own numbers, DRW traded 20 billion worth of BTC in 2020.

DRW's lawyers are Sullivan & Cromwell LLC, one of the oldest and most blue-blooded of Wall Street law firms. Sullivan & Cromwell has an interesting history. For example, in the 1930's it was heavily involved in arranging financing for the Nazi government in Germany. That activity continued until America's entry into WWII forced them to distance themselves from the goose-steppers somewhat. A partner at the time was Allen Dulles, who was later director of the CIA under Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, until the Bay of Pigs fiasco forced him into retirement. (His brother John was secretary of state under Eisenhower).

So where's the conspiracy theory? Well, we have one of the biggest bitcoin market makers being advised by a law firm which has deep and long-standing ties to a certain three-letter agency which in turn has a history of engaging in money-laundering (among other things).

No need for a Frank Nugan when you can wash whatever you want through crypto. And if you want to manipulate the price of BTC (and by extension every other crypto-currency), who better to help with that than a giant high frequency trading firm which holds a huge amount of BTC and which can turn off the crypto liquidity tap to any cex whenever it wants.

For the record, I have no intention whatsoever of committing suicide.
 

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Chief said:
Genuinely interested as to why? What makes that the magic number?
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It's a 70% fall from the previous all time high, which is about the average of the last 4-5 cycles of ATH to lowest point before the market recovered. While the market may yet have some room to fall it's at the point where it's viably oversold and out of favour, so it presents a good long term buying opportunity. This is specific to BTC and ETH mind you, not shitcoins.
 
XRP court case update:

The date for filing statements on undisputed facts and motion for summary judgment is September 13, 2022. The last date to file oppositions for the motions for summary judgment and responses is by October 18, 2022. The replies to the oppositions must be filed by November 15, 2022.
 

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Chief said:
So no actual market news? Just charting?
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News is priced in as soon as it's released given the pervasiveness of social media. The only way to benefit from news is to have access before others.

Charts and sentiment are the most reliable means of predicting price movement for plebs. The pi indicator has consistently measured cycle tops and bottoms in the past.

The main opposing argument that crypto hasn't been tested by a worldwide recession before is valid too. Regardless, there's very little doubt in my mind that we'll see far higher prices for BTC and ETH within the next 3-4 years.
 
ETH and BTC both seem to track each other almost directly, so I can't see that one or the other has anything unique about it's price. When I see that I think the price is completely separate from need for the item. The people at the top need to make money off it so I am guessing they will apply pressure and try to talk it up like those American senator crooks.
 
Kram said:
Do you think it will be eventually totally worthless or not?
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I think it will be manipulated so the people who own and mine the most make money off he long tail of investors, so they can leverage it for real money, use it to substitue real money in their minimum asset requiremens and so on. People will continue to buy and sell drugs and traficked humans with it. Basically scammers and crooks will keep it afloat.
 
Chief said:
I think it will be manipulated so the people who own and mine the most make money off he long tail of investors, so they can leverage it for real money, use it to substitue real money in their minimum asset requiremens and so on. People will continue to buy and sell drugs and traficked humans with it. Basically scammers and crooks will keep it afloat.
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"The majority of cryptocurrency is not used for criminal activity. According to an excerpt from Chainalysis’ 2021 report, in 2019, criminal activity represented 2.1% of all cryptocurrency transaction volume (roughly $21.4 billion worth of transfers). In 2020, the criminal share of all cryptocurrency activity fell to just 0.34% ($10.0 billion in transaction volume).

According to the UN, it is estimated that between 2% and 5% of global GDP ($1.6 to $4 trillion) annually is connected with money laundering and illicit activity. This means that criminal activity using cryptocurrency transactions is much smaller than fiat currency and its use is going down year by year."
www.forbes.com

The False Narrative Of Bitcoin’s Role In Illicit Activity

The majority of cryptocurrency is not used for criminal activity. According to an excerpt from Chainalysis’ 2021 report, in 2020, criminal activity only represented .34% of all cryptocurrency transaction volume.
www.forbes.com www.forbes.com
 
Does this include the NFT scams? The thefts by North Korea?

As I've said, it seems to fail as a currency, fail as a store of wealth, fail as a medium of exchange for everyday use. It's a gimmick that big money has glommed onto to extract cash out of rubes.
 
Chief said:
ETH and BTC both seem to track each other almost directly, so I can't see that one or the other has anything unique about it's price. When I see that I think the price is completely separate from need for the item. The people at the top need to make money off it so I am guessing they will apply pressure and try to talk it up like those American senator crooks.
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Markets move together. When the price of property in Toorak goes up, Frankston is likely to go up over the same timeframe.

ETH and BTC don't track directly. ETH has increased 100% over the past 6 weeks while BTC has increased $36%. Going back to the property example, the same could be true with different increases in property prices across suburbs.
 
Chief said:
Does this include the NFT scams? The thefts by North Korea?

As I've said, it seems to fail as a currency, fail as a store of wealth, fail as a medium of exchange for everyday use. It's a gimmick that big money has glommed onto to extract cash out of rubes.
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It's common sense that most illegal forms of currency transfer are in fiat. When you get a discount for paying a tradie, you pay cash. When you buy drugs, you pay cash. When you have a cash job, it's easy to avoid tax payments. Good luck avoiding tax if you're paid in BTC.

Crypto transfers aren't private like cash payments. The ATO is all over crypto exchanges because of that, and plenty of other illegal activity has been caught because of the immutability of the blockchain. Cash payments are a different matter entirely.

I disagree that crypto has failed in any of those facets.
-Stablecoins are probably the quickest and easiest way to transfer funds across the globe using a single currency.
-Store of value, maybe not. Increased value, yes. BTC has outperformed gold, shares, bonds, USD, and property consistently over a long term timeframe.
-Adoption will enable crypto to be used as a medium of exchange in everyday use. I've made plenty of payments using crypto.
-A gimmick that's been around over a decade now, and continues to grow?
 
Chief said:
Sending hundreds of mil internationally is a matter of carrying a USB to Saudi Arabia. Cash is nowhere near as concealable. And chucking money through a washer seems piss easy.
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Do you have examples of that happening in the real world?
 

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