Veritaseum is a platform token, the purpose of which is to eliminate intermediaries, brokers, and others from the capital market's ecosystem. The platform provides investors with the opportunity to interact directly with financial mechanisms and smart contracts, manage investments and transfer funds to other users of the platform.

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Another huge victory for the crypto world & software devs. SDNY court tossed out a class action against us, deciding that the “self-driving” Uniswap protocol has primarily *lawful* use & protocol devs aren’t liable when others misuse it. The trend in courts is obvious.

Another huge victory for the crypto world & software devs.

Lmao @ Binance v. SEC #FireGensler

Court: "I want to know, are BAM assets going offshore? Is it happening or is it not? It's stunning to me that I've now asked this question to each of the SEC attorneys 5 times."

SEC: "So currently the assets are not going offshore... We're not seeing any flows of money outside the US"

---

"SEC's statement that Defendants have been 'able to commingle customer assets or divert customer assets as they please' is directly contradicted by the SEC's statements to the Court that the SEC has no evidence of that ever occurring."

I remember this behavior. The reason why they are able to behave like this is because there are never any consequences for said behavior.

I remember this behavior.

Of All The Pro-Crypto Arguments, This One is The Weakest (and Most Disturbing)

Confront any crypto-enthusiast with statistics regarding the mammoth rise in crimes facilitated by cryptocurrencies, and the response will almost always be: What About Fiat? Crimes Committed With Fiat are Far Worse Than Crime With Crypto.

This generic form of whataboutism is a desperate, flawed and anemic pivot. Whataboutism not only telegraphs a faulty and weak line of reasoning, but, as I always teach my students, whataboutism is also a surefire way to lose an argument, whether you are a lawyer advocating before a judge in a courtroom or you are a 7-year old whining in front of a teacher in a kindergarten class.

I get it, fiat fraud and financial chicanery is horrible and a problem. I should know, I spent almost 20 years investigating and charging securities frauds against some truly awful companies and nefarious human beings.

But crypto has evolved into the killer app for criminals, ushering in a crypto-crime wave of epic proportions. Ask any law enforcement official of any kind and the answer will be the same: The scale of crime in crypto is orders of magnitude greater than what it is in traditional finance.

A Killer App For Criminals

Blockchain's sole most prominent uses - crypto and DeFi - are not just an investor ruse and a horrific plague but even worse, crypto, DeFi and the rest of Web3 form the foundation of a criminal tool beyond imagination. 

For criminals, the regulatory vacuum of blockchain applications like crypto, DeFi and NFTs, enable the committing of perilous crimes like never before.

Indeed, investor carnage is not the only fallout caused by the global societal infection of crypto and Web3. Crypto’s dire externalities are even more devastating world-wide, which is perilous for everyone everywhere.

Take for example the crypto-crime of ransomware. Perpetrators of ransomware attacks demand crypto to unlock corporate IT systems and data that the attackers have surreptitiously encrypted. Collecting crypto in extortion transactions allows ransomware attackers not only to conceal their tracks and identities, but also to conduct their schemes from anywhere in the world. But for bitcoin, ransomware would not exist.

Ever see a ransomware attack demanding $5 million in cash? No, because, for reasons too myriad and too obvious to recite, it can’t be done. But ever see a ransomware attack demanding $5 million in crypto? Every day of the week.

Crypto Traceability: Don’t Believe The Hype

So why has crypto become the currency of choice for criminals, terrorists, rogue nations and so many other evil-doers in the world? Because crypto presents extraordinary challenges for law enforcement to trace and to recover.

At least for now, most criminals who use crypto to facilitate their crimes will likely never get caught and their ill-gotten crypto will likely never be recovered. That is axiomatic -- and to state otherwise is not just irresponsible, it's just plain false. Those spreading the myth that crypto-transactions are easy to trace remain sadly mistaken. This is perhaps the most frustrating and misleading of all crypto-enthusiast retort.

First off, if crypto were so easy to track, then the tens of thousands of ransomware attackers would all get caught. But the reality is that only a minuscule few are ever even identified, let alone apprehended, charged, extradited and brought to justice. Too many crypto-related tools exist to obscure, mask, disguise, camouflage and secrete crypto-transactions.

For instance, FinCEN announced in November, 2022, that US financial institutions spent nearly $1.2B on ransomware payouts in 2021 more than double from 2020, and three quarters of the 1,251 ransomware payments pertained to ransomware were apparently paid to Russian gangs. If crypto were so easy to trace, then the identities, whereabouts and details of the ransomware payment collectors would become known -- and prosecutions would follow. But that rarely, if ever, actually happens.

Second, while crypto payments (if not obscured or properly laundered) might in some instances provide a glimpse into the chain of where crypto is going, the chain does not identify who the crypto is going to.

Finally, even in the best cases of crypto-tracking (which are rare, take a lot of effort and only work in some instances), the identity of the actual holder is typically found using subpoenas, search warrants, arrest, etc. Not an easy task when the individuals and entities reside in countries outside the U.S., who will not only fight U.S. law enforcement efforts but will go so far as to refuse to accept delivery of service. (See e.g. SEC/Terraform case, where Terraform and its founder continue to fight SEC subpoenas despite a detailed ruling compelling them to do so.) https://t.co/nIjZ1cuop9

Other Crimes

Just like with ransomware, try to raise $10 million in cash for a terrorist attack; to pay $1 million in cash for a suitcase of heroin or to transfer $5,000 in cash to the dark web to download child pornography. You can’t do it without a strong likelihood of getting caught. But crypto easily facilitates these crimes and many others, dramatically reducing any chance at all of even getting identified, let alone apprehended, prosecuted and convicted.

Along these lines, traditional crimes have also increased exponentially because of crypto, including: drug-dealing, terrorism financing; human sex trafficking; money laundering; sanction evasion by countries like Russia, North Korea and Iran, who use crypto to transfer funds outside financial systems; assassins and other killers seeking payment for murder-for-hire services; and a slew of other financial crimes.

North Korea is a particularly egregious criminal application of crypto. North Korea's crypto hackers are paving the road to nuclear Armageddon. North Korea has quietly become a cryptocurrency superpower. It has stolen billions in bitcoin and ether and is funneling profits to its nuclear weapons program.

Meanwhile, U.S. law enforcement is often helpless to investigate, let alone, prosecute, crypto-related crimes. Along these lines, U.S. DOJ recently reported that criminals use crypto internationally for their innovation, claims of decentralization and anonymizing features. The cross-border nature of digital asset technologies therefore requires collaboration with foreign law enforcement, which presents extraordinarily complex and sometimes impossible challenges for the identifying, arresting, extraditing and prosecuting crypto-criminals.

US DOJ and Crypto-Tracing Challenges

It would be somewhat naïve to conclude from the celebrated DOJ prosecutions involving lya Lichtenstein, his wife, Heather Morgan (who conspired to launder the proceeds of 119,754 bitcoin that were stolen from Bitfinex’s platform) or the seizure of over 50,676 bitcoin hidden in the home of Silk Road defendant James Zhong, that tracing and recovering crypto assets is always easy — or even always possible. Both cases are the exception, not the rule, of crypto-investigations.

In Zhong: While blockchain tracing may have allowed law enforcement to go back years to track and trace the flow of Zhong's funds, what was critical was the 10+ years of police work that followed (such as search warrants and other legal processes), together with a lot of luck, which allowed DOJ, IRS and others to piece together a decade of money laundering.

In Lichtenstein and Morgan: 1) US DOJ took six years of investigating before making any arrests; 2) The investigation required massive coordination of resources, engaging an alphabet soup of federal agencies (DHS; FBI; DOJ-Criminal Division; DOJ-CCIPs; DOJ-OIA; US Attorney’s Offices in DC, EDPa. and SDNY; and even the Ansbach Police Department in Germany); and 3) The defendants were living as crypto-celebrities in plain view in New York City splashing their activities all over social media. Had the defendants been residing outside of the United States, the outcome would likely have been very different.

Even with the latest blockchain analytics, investigations will typically take years (even a decade) to complete. As one former DOJ prosecutor, Duke Law Professor Shane Stansbury, testified so eloquently:

"Frequently, the hardest part of a cyber-related prosecution is demonstrating what investigators sometimes refer to as “hands on the keyboard.” Digital breadcrumbs left by criminals can prove invaluable to investigators. But ultimately prosecutors must demonstrate that an identifiable person is behind the criminal activity. And in a criminal case, that identity must be established beyond a reasonable doubt. That is, of course, as it should be, but in cryptocurrency-related cases prosecutors will often have the distinctive challenge of relying on a very complex series of digital patterns and transactions to meet their burden.

That crucial connection of a criminal’s identity to their criminal conduct is one of the main challenges posed by cryptocurrency. A public blockchain can be helpful, but often it can get one only so far. Prosecutors can spend years trying to penetrate the layers of obfuscation by savvy criminals. Even if they succeed, they may still face obstacles due to the current state of the cryptocurrency market."

US DOJ Executive Order Response

The difficulty for law enforcement in tracing crypto is also recently highlighted in U.S. DOJ's response to President Biden's March 9, 2022, Executive Order, which called for certain U.S. government agencies to examine the risks and benefits of cryptocurrency assets and report back.

Per DOJ's response:

"Criminals continue to use cryptocurrency and other digital assets for money laundering, facilitating tax evasion, and evading sanctions. Criminals have developed increasingly sophisticated obfuscation techniques— complex and rapid transactions, “chain- hopping” by converting funds from one cryptocurrency into another, use of AECs, and other measures—designed to make tracing difficult and to place stolen funds beyond recovery. Criminals can also use mixers and tumblers, including automated services that employ smart contracts22 to combine multiple users’ coins together before sending out unrelated coins to each user’s designated recipient, to obfuscate their transactions.

These techniques are made easier by the fact that many digital asset exchanges and platforms make little or no effort to comply with anti-money laundering regulations, such as know-your-customer (KYC) requirements, or operate in jurisdictions without anti-money- laundering and countering-the-financing- of-terrorism (AML/CFT) requirements in line with the international standards."

Along the same lines, from ransomware payments demanded in crypto to state actors using digital assets to circumvent sanctions and other restrictions, US DOJ is raising the alert that crypto is expanding into every area the agency is exploring.

Acknowledging that U.S. DOJ has seen a tremendous increase in crypto related crime over the past several years, DOJ’s director of National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET), Eun Young Choi recently stated:

"We are seeing cryptocurrency and digital assets really touch every aspect of criminal activity we investigate . . . By its very nature the technology is built in order to not rely on intermediaries, cross-border transactions that are immutable and irreversible. Law enforcement can freeze conventional transactions, but they can’t do that with digital asset transactions."

Looking Ahead

For the most part, financial pioneers have made our lives better, by supporting transformative technologies like the Internet, mobile phones and cloud computing — and they deserve their 10x profits. But blockchain and crypto are not innovations or anything else of such dramatic importance.

Some blockchain enthusiasts distance themselves from crypto, chiding critics for conflating the two i.e. crypto is merely one application of blockchain, and blockchain should not be judged by one mere application. But given that blockchain has no uses that anyone can articulate without plunging into a vague aspirational vortex, that is a misguided deflection.

Both crypto and blockchain remain faulty solutions of commutative mathematical blather that solve no U.S. problem, but have initiated an era of digital mayhem beyond imagination, wreaking havoc and turning victims into victimizers. And for what?

Crypto has two primary beneficiaries: Grifters, who shill crypto to lure in investors, especially if those investors are the downtrodden, injecting a predatory element of affinity fraud into their schemes (just like check-cashing services and payday loans do) and Criminals, who exploit the pseudonymity of crypto to orchestrate globally a vast array of devastating crimes.

No amount of whataboutism can counter this stark reality.
https://t.co/mD72iXCS7J

I read this detailed indictment of the crypto industry by this ex-SEC staffer, then shook my head in disappointment. The amount & level of false facts & strawman argument was quite disconcerting. Discriminatory mindset based upon the tech is rampant. Allow me to spit facts below!

I read this detailed indictment of the crypto industry by this ex-SEC staffer, then shook my head in disappointment.

BlackRock is a major shareholder in 4 of the 5 largest Bitcoin miners

Veritaseum twitter news 29 August 2023 17:30

BRICS Real GDP Slice With Reggie Middleton

Join us in the #LIVECHAT on the #Premier tonight at 7pm CST/8pm EST! @ReggieMiddleton gives us the real GDP slice on #BRICS https://t.co/DUAZjcdyoc @Veritaseuminc

Join us in the #LIVECHAT on the #Premier tonight at 7pm CST/8pm EST.

This is Epic 🔥 Man gets grilled at the Bank for asking 𝙏𝙤 𝙏𝙖𝙠𝙚 𝙃𝙞𝙨 𝙊𝙬𝙣 𝘾𝙖𝙨𝙝 𝙊𝙪𝙩...They give him the 20 Questions so he dishes up some 𝙊𝙡𝙙 𝙎𝙠𝙤𝙤𝙡 𝙏𝙧𝙪𝙩𝙝 𝘽𝙤𝙢𝙗𝙨 🔥 This is how you play their Game 🔥

I'll admit. I laughed a little.

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