REKT

Looks like '4' was a Simpsons-like prophecy for how many billions he'd have to pay to the department of justice to stay out of prison. Very cool.

End of an era

CZ just made one hell of a plea deal that will keep Binance alive, but at what cost? Ah yes well the cost was $4.3B dollars and a forced resignation. I can't say I'm really surprised, shocked, or sad about it. Honestly this was a long time coming considering that Binance blatantly allowed criminals to run rampant on the platform with zero oversight.

Is this a biased outlook?

After all many of us believe in a permissionless future of borderless infrastructure. Is it really fair to hold people accountable when all they are doing is providing infrastructure? That's certainly a valid opinion to take into consideration when assessing the pros and cons of flat architecture.

At the same time we must also acknowledge the fact that the infrastructure in question is supposed to be DECENTRALIZED. That means by definition the entire centralized exchange business model is a bit of a scam and against the tenants of what we stand for. People like CZ aren't supposed to have that much power. Without fail everyone that acquires this level of flex tends to abuse it, and Binance is certainly no exception.

Sure would be nice if the DOJ could give a shoutout to the entire Steem debacle that created Hive in the first place, but of course they won't. bigger fish to fry, as they say. In addition to allowing criminals to use Binance as a no-holds-barred one-stop-shop for shuffling crypto around, they also provided futures services to Americans, comingled assets with their sister company Binance.US, and a slew of other KYC/AML violations. And these are only the crimes in which they were caught. It's all but guaranteed that they were doing all kinds of shady stuff in the background. Tip of the iceberg.

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What's funny is that we all know for a fact that Justin Sun is a much more openly blatant criminal than CZ, and they even worked together at least once if only to hostile takeover Steem with customer assets. At the end of the day I have to assume that this lawsuit had very little to do with breaking the law and everything to do with simply pissing off the wrong people while simultaneously having great success while doing it. If CZ had been feeding the NSA data behind closed doors would the DOJ really have taken this kind of action? Maybe, maybe not. Gee I suppose the chances of that happening now as a result of this plea are much higher, wouldn't you say? Of course this is all wild conjecture based on zero evidence, but it's fun to speculate.

Number go down!

Crypto was not happy about the news today and Bitcoin dominance has gone up a bit. Alts have bled and BTC is only down less than 2% thus far. Really makes you wonder if institutions are just standing there with bags open waiting to scoop up any and all BTC that gets dumped on the market before ETF approval. A conspiracy theorist might even say the timing of these events is a little suspect, especially when coming off the heels of yet another SEC lawsuit against Kraken and friends. I won't go so far though as none of these events are particularly surprising.

"The SEC famously argues that digital asset trading platforms like Kraken can simply 'come in and register' with the agency," the company said in a blog post. "As most securities law experts know, there is not a single law on the books supporting this position."

Kraken is facing charges for failing to register along with comingling assets

In addition, the following networks have been labeled as securities.

These tokens include Cardano (ADA), Cosmos (ATOM), Dash (DASH), Filecoin (FIL), Internet Computer (ICP), Polygon (MATIC), and Solana (SOL), among others.

It's strange to see a list like this and be somewhat excited about it.

First of all I think many would agree that Ripple's XRP is more offensive than all of these tokens. Ripple already won their lawsuit. What possible chance does the SEC have of winning the fight elsewhere? Second, DASH was launched in January 2014. Isn't that just embarrassing for the SEC? What possible excuse could they have for allowing an unregistered security to operate for 10 years right under their noses? That's just comical.

Also I have a rather irrational hatred of Cardano and the poser behind it Charles Hodkinson, so it's satisfying to see that ADA made the list. I have a much more rational dislike of SOL so again I chuckle to see it made the cut. But the real point I would like to make is what happens when Hive gets onto one of these lists? How will they justify it? Who will they say is in charge? I almost want that kind of publicity to find us even though laying low is by far the superior position to be in at the moment.

Then again if I were blocktrades I'd definitely consider unloading some Hive in 2025 just to rebalance the scales a bit. Could be a liability at this point considering how outrageous regulators are becoming. From what I can tell he's at the top of the Hive list in terms potential targets of regulatory overreach. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Conclusion

I wonder who the next CEO of Binance will be. Hey maybe they'll choose Justin Sun! Wouldn't that be fabulous? lol. Seriously though I am curious. In any case we seem to be caught in a riptide of unfavorable news, but the market is handling it better than I would have expected. Honestly I feel like we should be at $34k right now or even on our way to confirming former resistance at $31k. Nope, instead we keep floating on low volume. The market doesn't seem to care.

And if the market doesn't care then I guess I don't either.
CZ got what was coming to him.
Comment if you agree.