Last week, the @WSJ published an article claiming about $90 million worth of crypto was used to fund Hamas — a serious claim that gained significant attention.
In response to the article, anti-Bitcoin politicians directly linked the WSJ article as evidence in a letter to the White House and Treasury “to address the serious national security threats posed by crypto’s use to finance terrorism.”
Later, it was confirmed that the article was patently false. It was straight up fake news. This was confirmed by @chainalysis, which ran the numbers.
Turns out the authors of the article mistakenly counted an entire exchanges’s trading volume ($82 million) for a terrorist group’s address. Rookie move! The actual funds that went to known terrorist-linked addresses was substantially less.
“Of the roughly $82 million in cryptocurrency received by this address, about $450,000 worth of funds were transferred from the known terror-affiliated wallet. Given the activity of this address, the person or group of people controlling it is likely not the same person that controls the terror-affiliated wallet, but is rather a service provider that knowingly or unknowingly facilitated the terror financing activity.”
So the WSJ’s figure for crypto use in financing Hamas was off by over 99%!
My question is…where is your retraction article @WSJ? Where is the article describing why your reporters were blatantly wrong about this?
If you don’t retract it, politicians with an agenda will likely continue to use this fake news as evidence to attack an industry they have a personal vendetta against. Fix this please.
So let's take a trip down memory lane to see what these entities used to say about #Bitcoin, as retail investors ignored them and kept on accumulating.
"Good things might come to those who wait, not for those who wait too late." - Bill Withers
First up - BlackRock (~$9 trillion AUM)
In 2017, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink called Bitcoin an "index of money laundering" and stated, “That’s all it is.” cnbc.com/2017/10/13/bla…
Then, in June 2018, @NikoJilch interviewed Larry Fink in Austria, where Fink called Bitcoin a "fraud," and said that it's "going to zero" and "going to fail." (oof)
The IMF recently presented a "new" blueprint for a cross-border CBDC system in a paper, but this isn't new.
It's the same CBDC system that the Bank of International Settlements has been designing since 2020.
One ledger. One rulebook. Controlled by unelected central bankers.🧵
The IMF wants you to believe this is blueprint represents a new system and that this system was proposed in September. But this couldn't be further from the truth.
In fact, in the IMF paper itself, the authors admit that they are just expanding on the work of the Bank of International Settlements Innovation Hub.
One aspect of Binance that drives me up a wall is its false marketing around its BNB Chain and BNB token.
They claim both are decentralized and that they don't have any control of it, but that's nothing more than a boldfaced lie. 🧵
Binance origins begin with an Initial Coin Offering (ICO). ICOs are now synonymous with fraud as a majority of them have proven to be little more than pump-and-dump schemes and blatant scams.
However, CZ timed it right, and raised $15 million by launching his own token, BNB.
Like a lot of ICOs at that time, 40% of the tokens were allocated directly to the founding team themselves for further developments and marketing efforts.
$6,000,000 to the founding team. Just. Like. That.
"While the crypto contagion didn't affect the broader financial system, thank God, we saw glimpses of the damage it could have done had crypto migrated into the banking system." - Senator Sherrod Brown
"Contrary to crypto evangelists' claims of democratizing finance, it's not the early adopters or big money investors left holding the bags. When it comes to crypto, it turns out fortune doesn't favor the brave, it favors wealthy insiders." - Senator Sherrod Brown