Crypto’s market cap was roughly $1 trillion on July 20, 2022. Four billion would represent 0.4 percent of that number. Seemed pretty insignificant to me, but then again, could you even trust that Sam’s number—or the market cap number—was real?

The account was protected by a password, but Stone grew paranoid. He couldn’t sleep for more than a few hours at a time. He’d stay up until three in the morning trading, then start again at six or seven. Years after the Bitfinex heist, a fifth of the missing Bitcoins were still unaccounted for. Roughly $70 million worth had been sent to Hydra Market, a Russian dark-web site.

Because it’s just a prediction, it’s a forecast, but China was able to build a hospital in like 10 days. And their infrastructure in general, they can snap together a subway in nine hours. And obviously the same thing is happening in China.

And as of this writing, the rally has not cooled off. Overall this chapter had some good gems, web site such as the interview with Brock Pierce and the Salvadorians. But the authors also made some unforced errors that were a real distraction, such as not knowing that there are existing conflicts of interest within U.S. banks that regulators continue to allow (post Glass-Steagall). From his home base in tax-friendly Puerto Rico, Brock maintained numerous crypto business interests and had become one of the industry’s most colorful spokespeople. I hadn’t expected to stumble upon him like that, but Brock—an insider with a sketchy past—was an ideal interview subject. Zhao himself said that Binance may eventually lose out to more nimble and harder-to-regulate DeFi, or decentralized finance, exchanges.

"The Bitcoin crimes are nothing compared to calling this shit rap," Trevor Noah said on The Daily Show. Castiglione and his colleagues asked for proof that all Tethers were paid for with actual dollars by real customers. But after some back-and-forth, one of the defense lawyers acknowledged that there had been what he called a "development." They didn’t exactly come clean.

By now, more than 90 percent of the Bitcoins that can ever exist have already been mined. That makes Bitcoin’s supply almost perfectly inelastic, a fancy word meaning it can’t grow or shrink in response to changes in price. While true this seems a bit of cherry-picking because we also have too big to fail banks that are regularly penalized for screwing their customers.

The biggest users of Tether were professional traders at hedge funds and other large firms, and I interviewed several of them too. What they explained to me was that for all the talk of peer-to-peer currency, and videos xxx puta locura the ingenuity of a way to transfer value without an intermediary, most people weren’t using cryptocurrencies to buy stuff. Instead, they were sending regular money to exchanges, where they could then bet on coin prices.