Today in the House Financial Services Committee hearing, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Missouri) said crypto currency should be renamed “creepy dough.”
I still like “libertarian masturbation.” I want to make that a thing.
I’m pretty sure they used U.S. dollars. There’s a reason 80% of the world’s $100 bills are located outside of the United States at any given time.
If your own currency is unstable, then use a stable currency instead. If the dollar were to collapse, people wouldn’t move to gold or crypto - they’d move to euros or renminbi.
I am friends with some exceptionally wealthy Zimbabweans who did switch to crypto - as risky as it is, it was still safer than the ZW$ during the currency crisis.
I think it is illegal for an individual to own gold in ZW, but I am not certain of how much would constitute a crime. A wedding ring? Probably OK. Several ingots? Probably pushing the limits.
- edit: even my children, age 5 and 7, do not consider the ZW$ I still have in insanely high notation values as “real money”… which is apt.
I think it is more complex than that. In Venezuela the government has imposed a 3% tax on any transactions using US dollars. In Argentina the government restricts the amount of money someone can convert to $200/month. This, of course, has led to a black market for exchanging money but the cost is about twice as expensive as the official exchange rates.
Right, but the hypothetical situation we’re talking about here, where crypto is supposed to shine, is not just the collapse of the economy but also the collapse of government, which means no restrictions on exchanging money. If crypto is backed by the government and other currencies are forbidden, that makes crypto just another fiat currency.
I think we can see from these examples collapse of an economy is sufficient to make crypto an attractive alternative. It does not mean crypto is good…more it is just less bad than the local currency.
Any currency not prohibited by the government is an attractive alternative. I don’t see what advantage crypto has over any other permitted currency, and plenty of disadvantages.
What about crypto that was one of those giant novelty chocolate coins covered in gold colored aluminum foil?
Good chocolate, not the crappy American stuff that smells like puke.
Clearly the people in these countries with collapsing currencies do see an advantage. And it is an advantage they will have discerned through use and trying other alternatives and settling on crypto as the least bad choice they have.
A quick video (less than 10 minutes long) from Coffeezilla again, explaining the evidence against SBF. Keep in mind that FTX was one of the biggest exchanges in the world for cryptocurrency so this is huge. It was basically #2. And funny enough, I saw its biggest competitor (Coinbase) advertising on TV during a football game (I can’t remember which one) which in a roundabout way was crowing about how it is not FTX. Things like how they are fully US-based, and so on. I can’t remember all of the details. But they were clearly dancing on FTX’s grave. It’s as if Coca-Cola was found to be laced with arsenic and was shut down by the FDA, and its executives were arrested, and the company folded. Then Pepsi puts out an ad about their “100% Aresenic-Free” soda a day later.
Anyway, here is the video, and it has a brief cameo by LegalEagle as well to explain the charges. (SBF might face 20 years in jail though that’s early speculation.)
The funniest part for me was the revelation that a multibillion dollar company was managing its finances using QuickBooks. 
Maybe he’s trying to go for a defense of incompetence over malfeasance, as seen in one of my favorite breaking bad clips (For context Skyler White who is actually a highly competent accountant who normally dresses conservatively is trying to help her boss who has been engaging it tax fraud to save his company).
Holy crap, you are right. I forgot about that bit from Breaking Bad. It’s life imitating art for sure. (And for the record, in some ways I think Skylar was perfect for Walter, but that’s neither here nor there.)
I don’t think it’s working though. They are coming down on SBF and associates hard here.
Well, that settles it. I’m moving all my crypto holdings into Trump NFT cards:
Rep. Cleaver: I wonder if you would support a resolution that I’ve been thinking about introducing: changing the name of crypto currency to “creepy dough” currency. I’m going to discuss it with my colleagues; I think it’s an appropriate name. I just wanted to know whether you would support changing it to “creepy dough.”
Mr. Ray: Uh, I’ll, I’ll leave that skill set to the committee.
All I can think of there is:
I love that scene! Thanks for posting it. I really need to rewatch BB.
Are they really better off? To take the most prominent example, is El Salvador better off with bitcoin than the US dollar? The Fed and US Treasury Department have, among other things, the task of keeping dollars stable. This works out functionally to looking out for the welfare of people using dollars. A dollar is a dollar whether it’s being used in the US or El Salvador. I just don’t get how a stable currency being managed by responsible people is a worse alternative than something like bitcoin.
Because there is a cost to exchange the money to dollars. As noted above, Argentina limits the amount of money a person can exchange. So, there is a black market to exchange money which is about twice as expensive. Venezuela taxes the use of US dollars. For poor people this extra cost matters…a lot. Even the wealthy care. A poster above noted that wealthy people in Zimbabwe also opted for crypto.
If your arguments in favour of crypto currencies are El Salvador, Venezuela, Argentina and Zimbabwe your chances of convincing me are dim. Maybe if I was a Zimbabwean (or Salvadoreño, or Venezuelan or Argentinian) I would grasp at every straw. But living in an affluent Western European country I will admit that I arrived late to the speculation party and that I have not figured out how to shorten Binance.