Islamic Leaders Bless Bitcoin — 3 To The Moon, 3 Rekt
We’re back on our bullshit with a little three up, three down. The weekend was kind to people who care a lot about prices, which I’m guessing is still most of the crypto-loving universe.
Speaking of the crypto-loving universe, it seems to be growing. Exciting times ahead!
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To The Moon
Impossible to overstate this development. It’s not smart to speculate what caused this weekend’s price spike, but let’s do it anyway. This definitely could be the thing, since a whole lot of potential adopters of crypto just got a thumbs-up from a key authority. When religious leaders are weighing in and making decrees about crypto, it’s probably not Just A Bubble. For a ton of people, this is the kind of cultural normalization that we may look back on as a tipping point. Because so much of the hasty and downright lazy negative press about crypto has been its disproportionately overstated connection to the criminal underworld, any authority that can point to crypto’s legality and acceptability is a significant and potentially watershed milestone.
Honestly this is kind of stupid, and the reason that Draper appeared on Fox News — splitting California into three different states — is one of those ideas where I don’t even need to listen to the reasons to know it’s stupid, but as someone who has recently started exploring Reddit for the first time, I can’t help but be fascinated by Reddit flipping out about something so utterly meaningless. In less than two weeks, I got into a pissing contest with a Bitcoin Cash shill, got accused of being a spammer, and had a question deflected by Mark Karpeles. I guess what I’m saying is, Crypto Reddit is freaking weird and I’m here for it.
Frankly, the crypto community shouldn’t look for regulators who are evangelists, just pragmatists. I think that’s ultimately what Giancarlo is, and that’s a good thing. Evangelists take the principles of crypto a little too far in my experience. Someone with a practical and thoughtful approach to digital currency is more likely to be effective at integrating crypto into the world we know in a positive way. Just as we need to take lazily reported bad news with heavy doses of salt, we should look at future outings of supposed crypto champions with equally tempered excitement.
Rekt
For fuck’s sake. What an absurd headline, first of all. Second of all, Russia lauding Venezuela’s corrupt crypto play (sorry Vladislav Ginzburg) is just infuriating. The level of public, brazen crookedness makes the coverage look so frustratingly timid and the response from many in the crypto community look pathetic. Apparently people can get fired up about injustice, freedom, the pursuit of happiness and all this other great stuff when Twitter temporarily disables @Bitcoin — an account that we all agree is just a living, breathing ad for Bitcoin Cash — but no one can work up any vitriol for bad guys scratching each others’ backs and keeping desperate people starving and sick.
Look, Coinbase can do what it wants, but this is a trend to watch. Crypto companies becoming acquisitive can lead to them looking a lot like banks, as if some of them didn’t already (looking at you, Ripple). This fits a pattern of Coinbase looking more like a traditional financial entity than an enabler of the revolution, and that’s fine in a vacuum, but I sure would appreciate it if Coinbase stopped acting like it gave a damn about the future of cryptocurrency and its potetial to shake stuff up in the world. This is a for-profit business of an ilk that we’ve seen many times over and shouldn’t be looked at in any other light.
Speaking of Ripple, I’m starting to think that Brad Garlinghouse and the bunch are just double agents from Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and the rest of the financial cartel working to infiltrate crypto and make it horrible. I mean, the company has a “head of regulatory relations.” I’m pro-regulation when it comes to exchanges because it keeps them honest, but when a company that’s rumored to have offered de facto bribes for exchange listings shows such an emphasis on shaping regulation, you get the sense that they may have their own motives that differ from, say, Satoshi’s.
