Are we allowed to talk about Bitcoin?

She's named in a class-action lawsuit by some idiots looking for anyone with money. It's one of my favorite lawsuits of the last decade. ... It names Naomi Osaka, Tom Brady, Gisele Bundchen, Larry David, Shaquille O’Neal, Udonis Haslem, David Ortiz, Trevor Lawrence, Shohei Ohtani, Kevin O’Leary and the Golden State Warriors, seeking to make them responsible for $11 billion in damages.

 

This is fascinating.



Terry Duffy is the head of the CME, which is the largest derivatives exchange in the world. He is a very opinionated man, not everyone's taste (mine included). ... but in fairness, he runs a fairly tight ship. The derivatives products that fall under the CME banner are highly leveraged, and their margin requirements and risk management protocols are strict. ... because the futures and options products they offer are essentially ticking time bombs if they are not well managed.

Here is the Congressional tesimony he mentions in the clip above. He is sitting right next to Sam Bankman-Fried who wanted to get the CFTC (U.S. regulator of commodities and futures trading) to modify their derivatives clearing organization license to offer a new kind of crypto margin trading to retail customers using FTX's supposed innovative methods. ... of having no intermediary to hold customer's funds!

Duffy was testifying for two reasons: 1) the changes would have affected other derivatives markets, because he was arguing you can't make special rules for just crypto and FTX (regardless, the CME offers bitcoin futures, so it would have affected that); and 2) Duffy has seen it all, there is NOTHING new or innovative about risk management, and he knew exactly how much risk people like SBF could introduce to the system, because not everyone is going to operate like the CME does.

Duffy began his testimony with, "Under false claims of innovation that are little more than cost-cutting measures, FTX is proposing a risk-management light clearing regime that would inject significant systemic risk into the U.S. financial system. The FTX model would come at the expense of proven risk mitigation practices, market integrity and ultimately financial stability."

Then he proceeded to get attacked, hounded, mocked and chastized by a bunch of idiots in Congress, half of whom have no fucking understanding about what the laws they are passing are going to regulate, and the other half of whom are corrupt sleazeballs. .. several on that committee who were in the bag for SBF who was throwing money their way.

Here is the whole hearing, but it's cued up to Ro Khanna, the populist congressman who represents Silicon Valley, who has been the pied piper of Crypto (I have no idea how much money he accepted from SBF, but it must have been significant) when he's not busy deciding how to spend other people's "fair share," as he defines it.