👆 Much more likely scenario. You can say the most preposterous things about North Korea and Westerners will believe it, which makes it the easiest scapegoat.

This is because the USDT is a token on the BNB network. So you need BNB to make transactions. The other coins are not tokens but coins on their own blockchains.

Here is some Bitcoin Cash for you, the best coin there is. Download Selene wallet and just scan to claim https://selene.cash/

The easiest and cheapest way is to sign up at a regular exchange and buy Bitcoin Cash (BCH)

If you want to buy with credit card take a look at https://trocador.app/

If you want strong privacy then you can try https://retoswap.com/ but it is more difficult and expensive.

Here is some BCH to get you started the right way. Download Selene wallet and just scan to claim https://selene.cash/

Yes there is, Zappy Bird!

Here is the info on how to get started https://realbitcoin.cash/post/3726

Damn I came in ready to laugh at you coz crypto but now I am just

It's "unlikely" a U.S. strategic bitcoin reserve will be established, "but it helps get animal spirits back into the market,"

@BobGnarley
I personally haven't used a service where you mail cash to get crypto, but I talked to a guy running such a business and he says he is doing well for himself. He does it for sums to up to 5k. Apparently he spend quite some time with his lawyers to make sure its a legit job and can't be prosecuted. I'm still doubtful, but I'm not usa but a small EU country, so maybe he is right.
@AllArkDave

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Doctors deemed Kurtaj unfit to stand trial due to his severe autism so the jury was asked to determine whether or not he committed the alleged acts - not if he did so with criminal intent.

Despite having his laptop confiscated, Kurtaj managed to breach Rockstar, the company behind GTA, using an Amazon Firestick, his hotel TV and a mobile phone.

He broke into the company's internal Slack messaging system to declare "if Rockstar does not contact me on Telegram within 24 hours I will start releasing the source code".

He worked with Kurtaj and other members of Lapsus$ to hack tech giant Nvidia and phone company BT/EE and steal data before demanding a four million dollar ransom, which was not paid.

The gang - thought to mostly be teenagers - used con-man like tricks as well as computer hacking to gain access to multinational corporations such as Microsoft, the technology giant and digital banking group Revolut.

During their spree, the hackers regularly celebrated their crimes publicly and taunted victims on the social network app Telegram in English and Portuguese.

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Alternate link.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A New York jury delivered the verdict on November 2nd, concluding a trial that has seen Bankman-Fried defend himself against claims that he criminally mismanaged his crypto exchange FTX and trading firm Alameda Research.

But prosecutors charged that the operation was a fraud “from the start.” While he promoted the exchange to investors and the public as safe and secure, Bankman-Fried’s former colleagues testified that it falsified numbers and granted secret, special privileges to Alameda — including a $65 billion line of credit and a flag that let Alameda’s balance dip into the negative as it illicitly borrowed FTX customer funds.

The FTX empire collapsed after a November 2022 Coindesk article — published precisely one year before the jury’s decision — revealed the secret blurring of funds and Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao announced he would pull out of the exchange.

Originally placed under house arrest, he was sent to jail in August for violations of his bail conditions, including using a VPN to watch a football game and leaking the diary entries of his ex-girlfriend — former Alameda Research CEO Caroline Ellison, who pleaded guilty to federal charges and testified against him in trial — to The New York Times.

He denied directly supervising the damning code updates that allowed Alameda to spend FTX funds and said he had not participated in trading or questioned employees about billions of missing dollars.

His testimony was contradicted by Ellison, his former roommates Adam Yedidia and Gary Wang (the cofounder of FTX), and family friend Nishad Singh; all had worked under Bankman-Fried and later cooperated with prosecutors.

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@downdaemon
Coinbase is legit.

I don't know if it's the cheapest though

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Yesterday, during an evidentiary hearing, Bankman-Fried was repeatedly scolded by Judge Lewis Kaplan for not answering prosecutor Danielle Sassoon’s questions on cross-examination.

Bankman-Fried did not define what he expected the time period to be on this estimate, but arguably 20 percent was a much higher chance of success than FTX would enjoy once Alameda dipped into the customer deposits.

As a result, at one point the risk engine got stuck in a catastrophic feedback loop that would have created losses in the “trillions of dollars,” Bankman-Fried testified.

Bankman-Fried handed the company off to Caroline Ellison and Sam Trabucco, who immediately after being named co-CEO promptly drifted away to early retirement.

Yeah, so it was a totally innocent thing where what actually happened was that Bankman-Fried thought it was appropriate that Alameda take the position as a backstop liquidity provider, that’s all.

Remember that testimony Adam Yedidia gave about a conversation with Bankman-Fried in August 2022 about the enormous amount of money Alameda owed FTX?

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i already wrote it once smh

That's just the way markets work.

COPE HARDER :LIB:

sure, this might sound good in abstract, but it didn't work out to be useful. almost no one actually uses it as a currency, they hold onto it as a pseudo-asset which fluctuates wildly in "value". you can't do anything with it except buy drugs. you can't use bitcoin to pay for rent or groceries. some stores experimented with taking it as payment several years ago and they all quit because it was a pain in the ass and transactions took too long to clear.

a big reason why people say crypto is bad is because it has an enormous environmental impact and the main thing it's known for is as a vehicle for normal people to be tricked out of their money and left holding the bag as its "value" evaporates. i don't think you can really blame this on opportunists taking advantage of a "neutral technology". i think it would inevitably happen with any so-called "money" or "asset" that has no inherit value and nothing backing it up institutionally.

it becomes a problem when your currency is treated as an asset. if your money will put on gains year-after-year without having to do anything, it's deflationary and that means no one will want to spend it, causing a retraction of money supply. of course no one wants to lose their money's value to inflation, but the deflationary aspect of bitcoin ensures that people will hoard it instead of using it to buy things. if the whole economy was like this, you'd be looking at something akin to the conditions of the Great Depression.

Ah, it's always in the small-text (Note [2] at the bottom of https://www.paypal.com/us/digital-wallet/manage-money/crypto/pyusd):

PayPal Balance account required to access cryptocurrency. When you buy or sell cryptocurrency, including when you check out with crypto, we will disclose an exchange rate and any fees you will be charged for that transaction. For currencies other than PYUSD, the exchange rate includes a spread that PayPal earns on each purchase and sale. Learn more about cryptocurrency fees.

So, it is not clear to me whether you would be able to exchange monero for PYUSD in some non-KYC exchange, but from this I gather that the only way to actually pay a vendor using PYUSD would be to have a PayPal account that is tied to your identity.

Furthermore, their smart contract has a built-in "asstProtectionRole" that allows them to uni-laterally freeze the balance in any account.

You can find the read-me in their github project here: https://github.com/paxosglobal/pyusd-contract

Here is an excerpt:

Asset Protection Role

Paxos Trust Company is regulated by the New York Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). As required by the regulator, Paxos must have a role for asset protection to freeze or seize the assets of a criminal party when required to do so by law, including by court order or other legal process.

The assetProtectionRole can freeze and unfreeze the PYUSD balance of any address on chain. It can also wipe the balance of an address after it is frozen to allow the appropriate authorities to seize the backing assets.

Freezing is something that Paxos will not do on its own accord, and as such we expect to happen extremely rarely. The list of frozen addresses is available in isFrozen(address who).

You can see the actual function here.

I don't see this as much of an improvement over using PayPal and a bank. Maybe it can be useful if you want to move crypto into an asset that you can pay with in regular online purchases without going through an exchange. But PayPal will still play the role of the intermediary that knows you. Storing value in an asset that can be frozen by PayPal is absolutely not desirable. So I think that this coin is kind of a gimmick.

But it could have a positive influence in that online vendors might become more accustomed to accepting crypto payments, and it could help adoption in the long run. Let's hope.

You can do a credit/debit system, which is basically a form of escrow, or you can use a little fancier solution, like Superfluid, which is technically still an escrow, but they just have some nice APIs around it.