Shark Tank's Kevin O'Leary Calls Himself an Idiot for Investing in FTX

Former BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes says bitcoin has hit bottom. ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood says Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) doesn’t like bitcoin because he can’t control it. A European Central Bank blog post says bitcoin is nearing its end. Robert Kiyosaki says bitcoin holder will get rich when the Fed prints more money. Can bitcoin enrich our interior lives? The most interesting of these stories, to me, is the SBF connection. If you want to build a crypto exchange and you don’t like the most popular cryptocurrency because it’s impossible to control, the one thing you’d want to do is create your own cryptocurrency. That’s precisely what SBF did, and now look at the state of FTX.

SBF agrees to testify before Congress. He might as well. He’s blabbing his mouth everywhere else. Shark Tank’s Mr. Not-So-Wonderful, Kevin O’Leary, admits that he’s an idiot for investing in FTX because SBF was the only American with compliance-lawyer parents. I can’t think of any worse reason to invest in anything. Essentially, O’Leary has admitted that he’s a pro-nationalist racist. How Anglo Saxon of him. The Bahamian attorneys have requested information on FTX customers from a Delaware bankruptcy judge. News has come out suggesting that SBF used cryptocurrency to buy media influence with The Block. The more I learn about this entire FTX scandal, the more it looks like SBF is guilty of fraud. Why is he still talking? He will eventually dig a hole for himself so deep his parents won’t be able to dig him out.

Binance is under fire over transparency issues regarding proof of reserves. What do you do when your biggest competitor falls under the weight of its sin? You put on your religious garb and pretend to be morally perfect. Some Binance users have reported “abnormal activity” around altcoin trades on the platform. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao responds.

Coinbase CEO Brian Armtrong says regulation could boost USDC usage. He’s right. Coinbase wins Best Digital Asset Custodian award in Singapore. Congratulations. The U.S. Supreme Court to hear Coinbase arbitration case.

It’s no secret that Twitter’s water main has broke. Users are sliding out the back door faster than Elon Musk can insult liberal celebrities with tweets. One of the benefactors of Twitter’s expulsive leak is Mastodon, a federated Twitter alternative, whose traffic has increased by 588 percent in the last month. I would say that this is evidence that people need to be educated on decentralization, but that’s not true. These people are not leaving Twitter for fear of censorship. They actually like censorship, as long as it isn’t aimed at them. Their concern is that Twitter will become a hotbed of racism and misinformation. It may very well. These are side effects of free speech. However, Mastodon, while semi-decentralized, isn’t likely to fix their concerns. They’d be better off with a decentralized platform, like Hive, where they could have a collective power greater than they’ll ever have on Twitter or Mastodon, but liberal fascists are so afraid of freedom + immutability that they have no idea what to do with either.

On Ada Lovelace’s birthday, Cardano Cofounder Charles Hoskinson held an AMA and said that Ripple’s lawsuit with the SEC could settle on December 15.

Alibaba Cofounder Joseph Tsai has invested in Web3 video platform Shubaya.

South Korean prosecutor says Do Kwon flew to Serbia last month. I wonder if he got a good price on his ticket.

Jimmy Fallon, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Madonna are being sued for promoting Bored Ape Yacht Club NFTs. Other celebrities, such as Kevin Hart, Justin Bieber, and Serena Williams, are among those being sued. Popular marketing guru Gary Vaynerchuk says the NFT market took a beating because of oversupply, greed, and bad projects. I’m not defending celebrity endorsements, but if you buy a product—whether it be a worthless NFT or a pair of sneakers—because some celebrity promoted it, then you deserve whatever losses you incur. Do your due diligence! If you research the project first and lose your money, you have no one to blame but yourself. Quit blaming celebrities for making a dollar. That’s what they do. They get famous for something—sometimes for very little—then brands pay them to influence consumers to buy their crappy products. This is nothing new. But I’ve never heard of someone suing a celebrity for promoting an automobile after the transmission falls out. You just made a bad purchase. Learn from your mistake and do better next time.

Maple Finance is navigating a debt crisis.

6 free crypto tools you should use.

9 in 10 consumers are curious about the metaverse. One football fan tried the metaverse during an NFT game and found real life to be better.

FTX port-mortem, part 3.

Here’s a funny: PYMNTS blocked my IP address, likely because I’ve included some of their articles in my curations. For some reason, some brands don’t like curation. I don’t understand the mindset, but it’s usually large brands. Their attorneys tell them to do it. Supposedly, it protects their intellectual property (IP). Curators—good ones like me, that is—aren’t stealing IP. We highlight a news story and link to the source. And what I do is summarize the story using my own language rather than copy/paste the language from the source. I may use an image from one of the news sources and if it’s compelling, but I always give credit to the original source. This is not a violation of IP laws I’m not using the original image nor am I claiming credit for it. When a digital image is copied, it’s a facsimile of the original, sort of like taking a picture of the Mona Lisa. It amazes me that even some lawyers don’t understand that distinction. After 30 years of Internet publishing, IP laws have not been updated to account for valuable news curation practices. We are surrounded by silliness.

China arrests 63 people for laundering cryptocurrency.

Indian ecommerce brands are embracing Web3.

Blackouts in Cuba are killing crypto mining.

Bitcoin mining powers rural community in Kenya.

Snark and commentary are in italics. Inclusion of an item doesn’t mean I agree or endorse the ideas presented. Of course, it also doesn’t mean I don’t.

Cryptocracy is a decentralized newsletter published several times a week. I curate the latest news and crypto analysis from some of the brightest minds in crypto, and sometimes offer a little insightful and snarky commentary. Always fresh, always interesting, and always crypto. Original articles on Fridays.

First published at Cryptocracy. Not to be construed as financial advice. Do your own research.