With a few pilfered billions, FTX bought off enough politicians to sway the US balance of power far enough that the return on investment for Democrat looters through Buydem giveaways would be astronomic. At the same time, SBF's parents write the legislation that will effectively eliminate Bitcoin along with the cryptocurrency copycats, and thereby gain even more control over otherwise independent producers.

I looked into Bitcoin back in 2011... interesting, but there was essentially 'nothing there' -- perhaps just a nice Ph.D dissertation having been implemented. As for what is an investment, I keep it simple: land, gold, silver. Sometimes these three move around -- buying silver at $4, selling at $35, buy land, sell land at 3x, buy more silver, arbitrage in gold, silver and the ratio. It can look like speculation; but underneath it all, is physical reality: land, gold, silver.

As for FTX and these 'exchanges' - in particular this SBF character -- I saw a shifty schlub, lacking in self-awareness. Even more -- I saw a raft of lazy, mathematically-illiterate 'investors' ... does the word due-diligence mean anything to these louts? Fools and their money are soon parted. I hope some lessons were learned.

As for why do so many people consider CC to be an investment?
1. Most folks would like to identify as 'investors' instead of 'speculators' -- or 'gamblers.'
2. They want to convince themselves that they hold 'something' instead of the distillate of 'hopium.'
3. In reality, they are simply gambling to the extent of wishing for a Win instead of earning it.
4. They want 'something for nothing' -- convince other schlubs to 'get in or miss the win' -- then, they liquidate their position to buy a lambo [at least that is both the hope and intention -- and to 'look smart'.]

SBF is essentially a useful idiot... you know, he might have gotten away with it had he really been 'smart' -- and sold out a significant stake and vanished near the FTX high water mark. But no, his overwhelming messiah complex ('effective altruism' indeed), inflated by other schlubs (magazine publishers, celebrities, politicians, speculation shills...) guaranteed his downfall -- and the fall continues. This quickly unfolding disaster has been interesting to observe.

Both are probably true. Web of Science is the digital access point for accessing the journal literature. While there are a couple of alternatives, they are far less complete. The databases that Web of Science archives are hosted by the publishers themselves, rather than a Google's copy.

Are the people at Web of Science not in on it? Or is it just no one cares because that's a website only used by scientists?

Yep. I had a guy who worked for me at a shipyard a while ago (was a Cambodian navy captain before Khmer Rouge). He used to describe everything in . $1 was about one hamburger. It was illuminating to consider that metric. Could eat a long time on silly program waste.

He was a cool guy. He wanted to leave. Another captain friend was going to stay. The each had ships, met in the middle of the ocean. Whoever wanted to stay, when to his friends ship. Whoever wanted to leave went to my buddies ship. His friend sailed back. He sailed to the Philippines, called back to Cambodia, and said: "Your ship is here. Come and get it." He eventually got to the US, and became an excellent electrical engineer. He had the distinction of being the youngest graduate ever from the Cambodian Naval Academy.

Coincidentally, my brother's wife's father was the ambassador from Cambodia to the US before the Khmer Rouge took over. He just stayed here. Also an electrical engineer.

I guess so!

Now there's a good question. I suppose it has a value according to what buyers and sellers believe it has. I remember when $0.19 dollar could buy a loaf of bread so a dollar was worth about 5 loaves of bread. I was just in a store about an hour ago and saw a loaf of bread set at 4 bucks (I was shocked and called the missus over to see!) so now a dollar will buy about 1/4 loaf of bread - at least THAT bread. So it seems a dollar is still worth something even if it ain't much. I expect it's going to get a lot worse.

Yes, Firefox got so bad on my laptop I had to scrap it. Not having a problem with it on my desktop. Of course, my desktop is an older model and will not run the latest OS, so maybe that has some protection.

Too late

The Central Banks (CB) have been at war with crypto currency since the creation of Bitcoin. Now, they want to run their own scam by crashing the competition. If crypto is as bad as the CB makes it out to be, why would we trust their version?

Other than the few fools who listened to the rich fat cats, Most of these big investors were chasing a "Get Rich Quick" scheme and deserve to lose.
In this world of today we can't even trust our real cash deposited in our banks because the government can freeze it at will. If we all notice that our 401K investments have decreased by a minimum of 30-35% since this asswipe took office then ask yourselves where exactly did all that money disappear to? If you had $100K back when Trump left office I bet it is closer to $60K today. I call that the RAPE of the American citizen doing his/her best to be OK in retirement. The Democrats see that as a piggy bank like SS investments they now call Government funded entitlements like welfare.

What real value does a dollar have?

The attraction of crypto seems to be to avoid the wanton printing of us dollars, and to avoid being tracked by IRS. The people who are trying to avoid these things by putting money in another unbacked monetary system kind of deserve what happened.

The dollar has no backing, so its not a store of value, but neither is crypto. I am not sure which is going to collapse first, but both will eventually become a disaster.

Lenin said it best when he was asked how to bring doen capitalist societies- he said to destroy their money. He was right.

great comparison mhubb.

To those who "invested" with Scam Bankrupt-Fraud:

"A fool and his money are soon parted."

It wasn't just Google, but Firefox, too.

Somehow I'm not surprised at this. Did you try an alternative search engine?

Google is becoming worse than malware. I've tried scrubbing all Google items off my Apple laptop and it still bogs down my system. I run "Activity Monitor" to determine what tasks are active and there are times there are multiple versions of "GoogleSoftwareUpdate" burning up CPU time. I have NOT been able to find WTH schedules it to run so I can turn it off. I suspect other Google invasive theft-and-spy-ware is also running, but not leaving evidence and may be hiding behind something legitimate. I may be paranoid, but my laptop is suffering the slows and no apparent reason for it. My Apple desktop does not have this problem.

Oh look here is some more FTX news
NEW - Sam Bankman-Fried, his parents, and FTX top execs built a $121 million property empire in the Bahamas over the past two years.

There were quite literally 20-30 such articles. All had ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine in the title. The only way I could access them anymore was through Web of Science. Google completely scrubbed them, even after I had found several of them via Google.

ThanQ sir.

"From the start of the Russian actions in Ukraine, I stated it was the deep states money laundering hub." Yes, you did, and more and more information is coming to the surface to back that up. DNN rules!

Peer reviewed publications that I had quoted in a patent application just disappeared from the Internet due to FTX, Fauci, et al.

That and many little arrows to further the take down of humanity. As I said this story will continue to expose the evil and give illumination to their tactics . From this afternoon
FTX Funded $18 Million Towards Research that Claimed that Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine Didn’t Work Against COVID
By Joe Hoft
Published November 21, 2022 at 1:30pm

I would write the headline a little differently…
FTX steals account owners money to fund the killing of as many humans as possible during the PlanDEMic

Let a word to the wise be sufficient.
Never trust a fat vegan.