Episode 209 - Telegram's in trouble, Libra gets ghosted, and more.

Another week, another Flagship!

This week, the CryptoBasic Avengers have assembled to talk shit about big tech. The roasting session begins with Telegram and ends with Libra, given the fact that all bullshit leads to the Big Zucc. Additionally, Epic Games is starting to get its feet wet with crypto and eToro is making... interesting strides in the world of bot trading. All of the above and more on today's episode, so tune in!

Dive into the cryptoverse with us on this week's Flagship Friday.

 

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• Rapid Fire
  • Crypto Question Added to 1040 Form for 2019.
  • $550M Worth of ETH is locked up in various DeFi Solutions at the moment
  • Satoshi is officially a word in the Oxford Dictionary
    • Oxford added 650 words to the their English dictionary and one of them was Satoshi. "The smallest monetary unit in the Bitcoin digital payment system, equal to one hundred millionth of a bitcoin.
    • Bitcoin was added in 2013.
    • Other words added were whatevs and chillax lol
  • Bitcoin Mining Revenue Jumps By $1bil in 2 months
    • Took 8 years to reach $5 billion revenue,
    • One year after that it reached $10 billion in August 2018
    • And now it's about to eclipse $15bill in early 2020.
  • Booking.com Latest Firm To Drop Out Of Libra
    • Booking.com left on Monday of this week and now 21 of it's original 28 backers are still there. Seven backers have all left within the past week.
    • Happened on the same day FB was in Geneva with all the other companies formally signing on.

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• Telegram In Hot Water With The SEC

  • SEC has formally instructed Telegram Group to halt the sales of cryptocurrency Gram
    • "filed an emergency action and obtained temporary restraining order against two offshore entities"
  • Why? - "conducting an alleged unregistered, ongoing digital token offering in the U.S. and overseas"
    • Remember they raised $1.7 billion
  • So by failing to register the sale of tokens back in Jan 2018, which are considered securities, they are in violation of the Securities Act of 1933
  • “Our emergency action today is intended to prevent Telegram from flooding the US markets with digital tokens that we allege were unlawfully sold,”
    • failed to provide investors with info regarding business operations, financial condition, risk factors, & management
  • And remember this quote from a NYT article we covered a few weeks ago on the show
    • "Telegram promised in legal documents that it would deliver Grams to investors by Oct. 31, 2019, or give back the money."
    • Making matters worse, violation of Securities Act may mean Telegram has to forfeit the $1.7b it raised
    • “We have repeatedly stated that issuers cannot avoid the federal securities laws just by labeling their product a cryptocurrency or a digital token,”
  • So what are they going to do?
    • Telegram Looks to Cut Deal With TON Blockchain Investors After SEC Order
    • They notified investors that the TON project will launch later, to April 30 2020
    • From an email to investors
      • "We disagree with the SEC’s legal position and intend to vigorously defend the lawsuit. We are proposing to extend the deadline date in order to provide additional time to resolve the SEC’s lawsuit and work with other governmental authorities in advance of the launch of the TON network.”
    • The investors (token holders) have to agree to delay, and there are two groups (2 rounds of investing)
    • 2nd round investors have till Oct 23 to sign & approve, If investors choose not to sign they can get back approximately 77% of their money. 1st round investors got different communication
    • Court hearing scheduled for Oct 24

• Libra Time! Like we said last week, I guess Libra gets its own section.

  • Booking.com has dropped out of the Libra foundation.
  • Mercado Pago drops out of the Libra foundation
  • Ebay has dropped out of the Facebook Libra foundation.
  • Stripe has dropped out of Facebook Libra foundation.
  • Visa has dropped out of Facebook Libra foundation
  • Mastercard has dropped out of Libra Foundation
  • Warren Davidson - US Senator (R)-Ohio: Facebook should drop the Libra project and Adopt Bitcoin.

• NANO has released a plugin for Unreal Engine .

  • Tons of game son this engine - Assassin's Creed, Batman games, Borderlands, literally hundreds of games.
  • I checked out the Demo, it was super cool. The game had a real time wallet transaction list. You paid to join the game in Nano, and then every monster you killed earned you nano in real time, transferred to your wallet as soon as you killed the monster.
  • Then you could spend nano to buy items in the game.
  • Imagine a Fortnite or other battle royale game where you spent a little money to join, and first place got it all.
  • A reddit user pointed out 0 spending $500 and give them their allowance there.

• CFTC Chairman gives opinion on Ether

  • CFTC Chairman Heath Tarbert has said ether is a commodity
  • Speaking to Yahoo Finance he made the following statement
    • “We’ve been very clear on bitcoin: bitcoin is a commodity. We haven’t said anything about ether – until now, It is my view as chairman of the CFTC that ether is a commodity.”
  • Concerning currencies created by hard forks
    • “It stands to reason that similar assets should be treated similarly. If the underlying asset, the original digital asset, hasn’t been determined to be a security and is therefore a commodity, most likely the forked asset will be the same. Unless the fork itself raises some securities law issues under that classic Howey Test.”

• eToro Launches a Crypto Trading Bot that is 100% Based on Twitter sentiment.

  • I hate that this thing might work.

  • It uses an AI to scrap Twitter for sentiment on crypto assets and allocates the portfolio accordingly.

  • Requires a $2k min investment.

  • It's in partnership with the TIE Data Analysis firm.

  • Current Allocations

    • DONT OPEN

      47% DASH

      25% EOS

      21% XRP

      5% IOTA

      2% ETC

  • I was a little bit disingenuous - There are only 13 monitored assets.

    BTC, ETH, XRP, IOTA, BCH, NEO, ETC, DASH, EOS, XLM, LTC, ZEC, ADA

  • They've also said they're eliminating 90% of all posts because they believe they come from bots. HOLY SHIT.

  • They also have to program the AI to figure out if EOS referrs to, say, the EOS blockchain or the EOS camera.

  • They said they know there's a ton of XRP shills out there, for instance, pushing an XRP tweetstorm every day, but they compare it to the previous day to make any decisions on allocation

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THAT'S A SCAM

• S Korea/US bust giant child porn site by following bitcoin trail (Maybe it's not a scam but thought it should go here)
  • SK man arrested, 337 others charged in global sweep
  • rescued 23 victims since march 2018
  • Jong Woo Son, 23, operated a Darknet market that accepted Bitcoin and distributed more than 1mill sexually explicit videos involving children. Serving 18 months in prison in SK. Seems low.
  • “Our agency’s ability to analyze the blockchain and de-anonymize Bitcoin transactions allowed for the identification of hundreds of predators around the world,” Fort said. “The scale of this crime is eye-popping and sickening.”
  • IRS Criminal Investigation Division also claimed credit. Don Fort, chief of the division

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• Shots Fired!
  • Tone Vays was on a Panel with CSW and he showed up wearing a shirt that said "We are all Satoshi Nakamoto - Except Craig S. Wright".
  • The panel was actually amazing they all hated each other. Watch it here.