Not Just FTX: One Skeptic’s Take on Why Crypto Is a Scam - Ep. 446

Unchained

James Block, crypto skeptic and author of the Dirty Bubble Media newsletter, rose to prominence with a timely post predicting FTX’s insolvency. The blogger, a doctor by day, explains why he sees crypto as an unregulated morass of would-be securities and outright “Ponzi schemes.” From an early interest in Tether to connecting the dots on Celsius, Block explains why he does what he does and why almost all of crypto is just “regulatory arbitrage.”

Show highlights:

• how James got into crypto and why he started writing about the space
• why James chose "Dirty Bubble Media" for the name of his publication
• the problems with the legitimacy of crypto projects
• the reasons to be bearish on Coinbase
• why the question of whether Bitcoin has intrinsic value is highly subjective
• whether every token in crypto is a scam and whether regulations will hit stablecoin issuers hard
• how FTX used tokens to create fictitious value worth billions of dollars
• why Celsius and FTX were closely linked, and the difference between both cases
• ties James found between FTX's European subsidiary and a company doing binary options, an industry characterized by fraud
• how he believes financial fraud is similar throughout history — it doesn't repeat, but it rhymes
• James’s concerns around Signature Bank and its "questionable tactics"
• why Genesis and DCG got into trouble and how James thinks the situation will likely play out
• whether exchange tokens are securities and why he believes they have very little value
• why he says BNB resembles OneCoin's pyramid scheme
• James's contrarian take on the Avi Eisenberg case

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Links

Guests:

James Block:

• Twitter
• Substack

FTX:

Dirty Bubble Media:

• Is Alameda Research Insolvent?
• FTX'ed: The Tangled Ties Of Celsius Network and Sam Bankman-Fried
• FTX's European subsidiary was built on top of a binary options scam
• A forgotten banking scandal suggests FTX is the tip of the crypto iceberg

DCG

• Dirty Bubble Media: Digital Currency Grift
• Unchained: ​SEC Charges Gemini and Genesis With Sale of Unregistered Securities

Binance

• Dirty Bubble Media: The Binance Scam Chain

Signature

• Bloomberg: Binance Says Signature Sets Transaction Minimum Amid Pullback

Mango Markets

• The Ballad of Risk-Free Avi - Dirty Bubble Media
• Unchained:
• Mango Markets Exploiter Arrested on Market Manipulation Charges
• Solana’s Mango Markets Sees $100M Drained in DeFi Exploit

Celsius

• Dirty Bubble Media: Anatomy of a (fake) Market
• Unchained: NYAG Sues Celsius’s Alex Mashinsky for Defrauding Investors

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