Unironically, yes. I watched a dude manipulate Tron markets from his phone with about ten thousand dollars' worth of capital in 2017. He was drunk, we were doing other things, and it was just that easy. Wall Street is shady enough. There's plenty of scams out there. But there's at least an "eyes open, no guaranteed performance, there was a minimum bar of financial feasibility that this product managed to clear, the reasons you will lose all your money are clear to anyone with patience and a magnifying glass" level of due diligence on traditional financial products that crypto sorely lacks. And because crypto sorely lacks those safeguards, it is a market filled with sharks and scammers. I mean so's Wall Street obviously but Wall Street sharks and scammers at least have to do a little dance and sign some papers and open their books for auditors and stuff. Binance and FTX are huge because they constantly skate ahead of litigation. You can't put institutional money into Binance as a consequence - if you trade in New York, you need to trade with someone with a Bitlicense which, practically, means Coinbase, Gemini and RobinHood. Coinbase sucks, Robinhood sucks hard and Gemini kinda sucks (and is tiny). But if they can do it, anybody ethical can do it. As a Washington State resident I've been in a slightly harsher boat since 2017 and all three exchanges meet WA's standards. Your crypto doesn't have to be secured in any way but your cash is in a bank, and anything that touches cash has to touch it bank-like, and that shouldn't seem like a major step? I, personally, think that Bitcoin's utility is limited to that of a bearer instrument. Bearer instruments are also usually crime-adjacent but that doesn't mean every government hates them. Their popularity has been decreasing since before Hans Gruber grabbed a bunch out of the basement of Nakatomi Plaza but they still have their place. And that place tends to be where large corporations need to do something shady, but not so shady that they can't do it. I don't know what value that gives Bitcoin, but I know that value is non-zero, and I know that bearer instruments have value because we say they do. The stronger that consensus the more value the instrument and regulation, of any kind, is consensus.
I think he was arrested right about the time the SEC and SDNY determined that he wasn't live-tweeting anything they hadn't already heard. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake, after all. That whole "Let's just go ahead and call this chat group 'wire fraud'" thing was probably where the Final Jeopardy music started playing, and the UnusualWhales interview devoid of any new information was the curtain call. I think his parents aren't amphetamine-addled attention whores accustomed to a consequence-free life, which is one of the reasons I have yet to see a picture of them. I'm also utterly unconvinced they did anything illegal. Immoral? Unethical? Christian Holmes IV was a VP at Enron. What kind of VP? NOBODY KNOWS apparently so obviously he had absolutely nothing to do with anything bad. Did he face any charges? Nope. Did he deliberately move next door to Tim Draper? We'll never know. I mean, the kids probably just liked each other and Elizabeth ended up meeting Silicon Valley over barbecues in a purely organic fashion. Dude's a senior consultant at BCG and nothing's going to change that. Because, after all, some people are better at criming than others.
