Posted on 10/11/2025 1:59:41 PM PDT by delta7
I have, like so many others, been wrong about Bitcoin and crypto. But timing is not destination, and I believe one day there will be a rug-pull that will wipe trillions off the face of the crypto earth. This might happen when Bitcoin is $200,000 or $2 million, but it will happen.
For the uninitiated, a rug-pull is a coordinated effort by a concentrated group to sell their crypto holdings at a price they are content with, leaving the foolish masses with nothing but losses. It is transfer of wealth from a large to a small group. One recent and very visible example was the president’s and first lady’s meme coins.
Over $100 million was made by issuing premarket coins to insiders who captured the largest percentage of value, leading to an average investor wipeout. The coins now trade at a fraction of their issued value. Melania’s is now down 99 percent from its high. A total of 764,000 investors lost money.
Not to be daunted, the Trump family’s new company, World Liberty Financial, just started trading. Its share is in the billions, with no assets (just digital ones) outside the capital raised. Reports are that it has been hacked and is down substantially from the initial offering.
The newest craze, already in a massive crash just weeks after setting up shop, are “crypto treasury stocks.” Investors buy into companies announcing they are going to buy crypto as part of their business plan. Many are already down over 90 percent. This mirrors the 1999 insanity add-.com-to-your-name to quadruple your valuation.
Insiders are often referred to as “whales,” i.e., large holders who can affect the market. Whales decide when to pull the rug. They can execute this anytime they think it profitable, sometimes within hours of issuance like Kanye West’s YZY token where 51,000 “traders” lost $74 million while 11 made over a $ 1 million each. There are hundreds of other meme tokens with a similar story. Over 3.7 million crypto currencies have been launched since 2021 that are classified as “dead” by CoinGecko. Yet every day a new one is promoted and put to market.
The term “bubble” has been on financial lips lately. However, a bubble is usually tied to inflation of valuationof a real asset like a stock, bond, real estate, or commodity that trades above its historical norms. Analysts utilize dozens of metrics to measure the probability that future prices of an asset will fall and the bubble will deflate.
No such financial metrics exist for crypto because it inhabits the fiat world of valuations. What is the value of a Pepe the frog meme token? What is the value of the hundreds of thousands of “sh–coins” minted every day on Solana? What is the difference from one token to another, since they have zero intrinsic value?
If you want to speculate, why not buy all the Labuba, the Chinese plush doll, one can? For sure, it is harder to manufacture them than to create a digital token on the blockchain.
A recent article in Forbes was a tell for the crypto future. Pointing out that $84 trillion was going to change hands from boomers to their kin, the writer mocked the old way of making money on “land, industrial enterprise, or equities.” Voila. It was going to be built on the “decentralized rails of blockchain technology.” In other words, all this hard-earned, time-based asset appreciation was going to be speculated with. I hope the recipients of this generational largess look out below.
There is no doubt that fraud and theft are at the heart of digital currencies. Not a day goes by without an article about some scam ruining the lives of the deceived. From “pig butchering” romance scams to elaborate North Korean phishing attacks on a cold wallet.
The mighty crypto visionary kingpins, Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX infamy and Do Kwon of the Terraform fraud, once venerated by their “crypto bros,” are now in the oldest non-digital place: jail. Yet the beat goes on, with the largest Wall Street institutions doing what they do best, devising ever more opaque leveraged vehicles for their retail customers to put money into, like Perps. This casino-like financial instrument allows for 100X leveraged bets in an endless loop.
Another new game is to “tokenize” every asset. Remember how well “synthetic” debt instruments worked out?
Then there are stablecoins. The issuers’ promises make little sense unless you need to anonymously transfer millions abroad for a pallet of ecstasy. As for stablecoins’ promised transaction efficiency, my Visa card works around the globe at light speed.
One day, when we’re in a rug-pull crypto depression and everyone is demanding a bailout, we will look back at this utter folly through tears in our eyes.
Me, I’m keeping my “investments” portfolio firmly in Pet Rocks and Beanie Babies. Just because crypto involves math doesn’t make it fundamentally different from those.
Hey, if you can’t get rich quick for nothing, what’s the use of even trying?
Bitcoin - down 6%
Ether - down 9%
The No Recognizable Names - down 15%-25%
Don’t forget tulip bulbs!
You need to diversify. ;}
This is "the last fool in" phenomenon. Strip the "crypto" text above and replace with "Enron stock two days before collapse" and it comes to the same thing.
Each Ponzi scheme "is an investment scam that pays early investors with money taken from later investors to create an illusion of big profits." Little schemes.Big schemes. Schemes lasting generations, like our Social Security scheme. But at some time, "money taken from later investors to create an illusion" of success.
Until it doesn't.
Even Butler's "War is a Racket" told of the little guys who sold their war bonds at a loss for needing liquidity, which were bought up by those who could afford to wait it out.
“Crypto investor Konstantin Ganich found dead in Lamborghini amid market crash: Report”
You can’t eat or burn crypto. It is all speculation. At least the dollar is backed up by the Armed Forces of the United States.
unusual_whales
@unusual_whales
·
9h
BREAKING: Look at this.
A new crypto account was opened yesterday morning.
30 minutes BEFORE Trump’s announcement of 100% tariffs on China, it added a huge multi-million dollar levered Bitcoin short position, per YF.
The market dumped.
The trader made a profit of $192 million in two hours.
Unusual.
The tulip bulb market has been stable for 300 years. And, you can eat them!
BTC up 78% ytd
Gold up ~50%
My stock acct up ~37%
No complaints.
Carry on.
7h
It's official:
Crypto just saw its LARGEST liquidation event in history with 1.6 MILLION traders liquidated.
Over $19 BILLION worth of leveraged crypto positions were liquidated in 24 hours, 9 TIMES the previous record.
To put this into perspective:
The liquidation event we saw over the last 24 hours was ~$17 BILLION larger than the February 2025 crash.
It was more than 19 TIMES larger than the March 2020 crash and collapse of FTX.
Never in history have we seen anything even close to this.
Almost without exception every single person pushing crypto has some crypto.
That gives them a conflict of interest.
That means they should be ignored at a minimum.
Laughing and pointing is OK too.
Wait until AI attacks block chain encryption. Every encryption scheme can be unravelled.
Was reported that BlackRock ETFs bought 45,000 BTC worth $5 Billion for their clients at average price of $105,000 during the flash crash.
“Bitcoin - down 6%”
It’s trading where it was 2 weeks ago. Bitcoin is volatile. Not for the faint of heart.
I think you mean “Quantum Computer.”
So does Crypto Currency have anything backing it? As far as I can tell it doesn’t. It only exists as 1 & 0’s on a computer screen. So if the servers and data centers go down then you have exactly nothing you can cash in, it just evaporates into thin air.
Yet these Data centers use a tremendous amount of electricity and water to exist, much like the AI data centers will. As I read the other day Big Tech is using about 5% of all generated power today and growing.
Mine are Cabbage Patch Kids. / just kidding
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