The consequences of moral bankruptcy (a cryptocurrency tale)

On March 28, 2024, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Caplan sentenced Sam Bankman-Fried to 25 years in prison. Mr. Bankman-Fried defrauded FTX cryptocurrency platform speculators and lenders of over $11 billion, using the stolen money to fund his lavish lifestyle, buy expensive real estate, make illegal political donations, and bribe Chinese officials.

Ethical investing – cryptocurrency “mining” #3

Almost one year ago, on September 1, 2021, we wrote about the risks associated with leveraged cryptocurrency plays (see Ethical investing – cryptocurrency “mining”), referring to the example of an unnamed publicly traded “miner” that at the time was trading at $10.26 (September 1, 2021 market close).

Beheading the Hydra

Much like Hercules in Greek mythology, German police have scored an impressive victory against Russian criminal organization Hydra, formerly the world’s largest darknet marketplace. In the process of shutting down Hydra, police seized the website’s servers along with Bitcoin valued at €23 million. 17 million users of the website, along with 19,000 seller accounts, are now known to police.

Ethical investing – cryptocurrency “mining” #2

Cryptocurrency “mining” uses quite astounding and shamefully wasteful quantities of electricity, estimated by Cambridge University, for Bitcoin alone, to be 121.36 TWh annually. To put it in perspective, that is more electricity than Argentina, a country of nearly 46 million residents, uses in a year! And that is not accounting for the impact of carbon emissions and global warming. But it doesn’t stop there.

Ethical investing – cryptocurrency “mining”

There’s a whole lot more to life than money, the most important elements likely being love and health. That being said, money is a very important reality in our lives, and we should have (or develop) a positive mindset about it.

Yet another blow to cryptocurrencies #2

Poly Network, a so-called decentralized finance platform, announced yesterday (August 10, 2021) that it has been hacked, with about US$600 million of digital tokens stolen. Cryptocurrency theft has been ramping up in the past few years, with several others in the hundreds of millions of dollars.