Mic Drop

Engineers have long dreamed of creating a wonderful material that can revolutionize construction. In 2004, their dream came true. British scientists first created Graphene—one of the forms of nanocarbon that is only 0.3 nanometers thick—a million times thinner than a human hair, but it can withstand colossal loads! Many immediately predicted a great future for it, and a little later, scientists were given the Nobel Prize. However, mass adoption did not happen. And only now, after 15 years, the first real opportunities have appeared to use the material of the future in commercial projects. Super-substance is made from ordinary graphite, which consists only of carbon. Nevertheless, due to its special crystal lattice in the form of hexagons, graphene gains many unusual properties. For instance, it can be both a conductor and a semiconductor, which makes it sought after when creating chips with higher characteristics. But the substance gained great popularity in another area - construction. Scientists have found that graphene is 200 times stronger than steel!

Trading Platform Robinhood Announces Upcoming Launch of Cryptocurrency Wallets Noting that 1.6 million people have signed up for its crypto wallets so far, the announcement details: Robinhood also revealed that during the wallet’s alpha launch, which recently wrapped up, “a tight-knit group” of customers from the waitlist tested the company’s first crypto wallet iteration “and shared detailed design and functionality feedback.” For example, the alpha testers “requested signposting and explanations of terms like ‘network fees’ and ‘transaction ID.’” In response, the company said that it will provide more crypto articles and offer 24/7 phone support. Robinhood added: “While some say 2021 is the year that crypto went mainstream, the truth is that most people are still familiarizing themselves with the asset class and how to navigate the blockchain,” the trading platform noted. In December, Robinhood partnered with Chainalysis to leverage the blockchain data analytics firm’s “data and tools to meet compliance requirements and provide Robinhood customers with the confidence they need to trade cryptocurrency safely,” Chainalysis described.

Can’t we have programs designed to run AI and just try 24hrs a day to guess passwords?

BIP39 Seed Word Entropy visualized (odds of someone guessing private key seed phrase assuming it has randomness) The entropy of a BIP39 seed phrase is incredibly high, making it very difficult for someone to guess the private key seed phrase. The odds of someone randomly guessing the private key seed phrase are incredibly low, making it a very secure way to store your cryptocurrencies. Check out the large Bitcoin Collider. People have been running that thing since 2015 and no one has ever had a true collision. If you understand math you will understand why it will never happen, even though there is a "probability it could happen", in reality it would never happen. There are nearly as many addresses as there are atoms in the universe. One more way to look at it. The odds of winning megamillions is 1 in 300,000. The odds of finding a bip39 address is: 1 in 115792089237316195423570985008687907853269984665640564039457584007913129639936

I also heard it was one day after getting vaxxed.... found a screenshot supposedly from People magazine....

https://www.theguardian.com/business/commentisfree/2021/dec/29/inflation-price-controls-time-we-use-it Price controls, wage controls, rent controls are at the very least the beginnings of a command economy. The Soviet Union also had this idea. They were called Price Czars. Good luck with that.

Things seem to be heating up between the superpowers around the world.

The Soviets are back and trying to whitewash history (again)

COIN - Percent from ATH (Sorted by Market Cap) BTC - 32% ETH - 19% BNB - 22% SOL - 30% ADA - 59% XRP - 75% DOT - 54% MATIC - 16% LINK - 62% ALGO - 61% XLM - 69% ATOM - 51% VET - 70% SAND - 37% ICP - 97% (RIP to those who bought at the top) FTM - 57% XTZ - 53% CAKE - 71% LRC - 44% ONE - 45% Of course this is not financial advice and some coins may never reach their ATH again. Low cap coins usually suffer the most in a bear market.

BitBoy has one of the biggest crypto channels on YT (1.5 million subs) and is notorious for his moonish predictions and clickbait thumbnails. As always, DYOR and don't trust any other person's price predictions, there's not a single person in the world that can predict these things. It's your hard earned money, treat it with respect when investing. BitBoy's predictions for this year: Bitcoin (BTC): 322000$ - ⛔WRONG Ethereum (ETH): 27000$ - ⛔WRONG Cardano (ADA): 9$ - ⛔WRONG Polkadot (DOT): 326$ - ⛔WRONG Binance (BNB): 249$ - ✅CORRECT LOL Chainlink (Link): 900$ - ⛔WRONG Stellar (XLM): 6$ - ⛔WRONG Costmos (Atom): 140$ - ⛔WRONG The Graph (GRT): 10$ - ⛔WRONG Aave: 7000$ - ⛔WRONG BAT: 3$ - ⛔WRONG Hedera (HBAR): 1$ - ⛔WRONG THETA: 24$ - ⛔WRONG Thorchain (RUNE): 25$ - ⛔WRONG (but close) Please keep in mind that some exchanges may have had slightly different prices

Imagine stealing £10,000,000 from a bank, and the only punishment is a £10 fine. No, no, not give the £10,000,000 back and pay a £10 fine, but keep the £10,000,000 and pay the £10 fine. This is exactly what is happening here; absolutely sickening.

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/17/jpmorgan-agrees-to-125-million-fine-for-letting-employees-use-whatsapp-to-evade-regulators.html? “While SEC officials said the $125 million penalty is its largest record-keeping fine to date, the bigger threat to JPMorgan may be reputational. By going after JPMorgan, the world’s biggest Wall Street firm by total revenue, the SEC has put the industry on notice.” $200m for 2018-2020. 2021Q3 net was $11.7b. Even if you add the other fines, the fines don’t move the needle. Executive crime wont slow down untill the fines can bankrupt the company or the executives face jailtime for breaking the law.

On may 24th CEO of one of the largest bank in the world - HSBC publicly said that crypto lacks transparency and later it's UK branch started to block payments to Binance. Yesterday same British HSBC branch has been fined £63.9m by the UK's financial regulator for money laundering! Actually, initially they were fined for £91m though since HSBC not disputed the findings and agreed to settle it was cut down to £63.9m. HSBC's failings cover a period of eight years, from 2010 to 2018, the FCA said. The FCA's report into HSBC cites examples of poor controls, including failing to spot suspicious activity on the account of a construction director who also played a leading role in a criminal gang trying to steal millions of pounds by setting up fake companies. The person pleaded guilty to VAT fraud and went to prison. HSBC also failed to detect a customer imprisoned for smuggling cigarettes into the UK and ordered to pay £1.2m by the HMRC tax office, where the bank missed "a sustained period of unusual activity," the FCA said. For those who did not know, in 2012 after an investigation by the US Department of Justice the same bank paid $1.9bn fine (£1.4bn) for laundering money of Mexican drug cartels, circumventing the rules designed to prevent dealings with Iran, Burma, North Korea and being financed by terrorists from Middle East. Let's think of this as they pay for all the sponsorships at sports venues etc.... Where are they getting the money to throw around at the athletes and sports teams?

Why is this catastrophic? Let me count the ways… Phosphorus is an element. It cannot be synthesized outside the heart of a star. When it is gone, it is gone. You can't just go whip it up in a lab when you run out. The way we apply phosphorus to our crops ensures that only 10–20% actually gets into the plants we fertilize with it. The remainder gets locked up chemically in the environment or gets washed into the watershed and down into the depths of the ocean, where we can't reach it. The waste of this limited resource is like buying 10 gallons of gas, putting 2 into your tank, and pouring the rest down the drain. The current US methods of ‘conventional’ agriculture are highly dependent on heavy applications of phosphorus to maintain yields. Since phosphorus is highly reactive, it quickly binds with things in the environment and becomes unavailable to plants. Phosphorus is usually the single most limiting factor in plant nutrition. For example, it has been found that the yield potential of corn (maize) is determined by how much Phosphorus is in the plant's tissues by the five-leaf stage. This means that the maximum amount of grain a corn plant can produce is determined by the time the plant has developed five leaves. We have already reached peak Phosphorus globally. Price increases are on a track similar to that of oil. The major difference between these two limited resources is that if you can't afford to buy gas, you don't drive. If you can't afford phosphorus, you don't eat. Once people can't afford to eat, civil unrest ensues. A whopping 75% of the world's known phosphate reserves are controlled by one man: the King of Morroco. Morocco is in a considerably unstable part of the world. The bulk of the rest of the reserves are in China and Russia, neither of which are very friendly to the US. Once we run out of our own phosphorus and are forced to pay the same prices that other countries do, you can bet that cost will be passed down to the consumer. Once again, when people can't afford to eat, civil unrest ensues. Putting too much phosphate fertilizer down on the majority of our croplands over the past 75 years has killed off the microbes that evolved to recycle phosphorus to plants and keep the soil alive. It can take 15 to 20 years to restore those microbes and to restore soil to its proper biologically active state. If we run out of phosphorus in 18 years and haven't even started the process of restoring our soil and changing how we grow our food, we will reach a food crisis that could very well be the end of our civilization as we know it. EDIT: I realize this is a bold statement, so I want to explain it a bit more. The US exports a HUGE amount of grain (wheat, soybeans, corn, etc.) to other countries. When we begin to have trouble feeding ourselves, there will be a cascade effect, since this means we will no longer have a surplus to sell. Other countries who buy from us will be unable to feed their people, too. As Marie Antoinette found out the hard way, hungry people are desperate and angry people. Wars, revolutions, mass migrations and subsequent government collapse are likely scenarios here. The likelihood of this catastrophe occurring is also very great, because while the majority of the US land mass is given over to agriculture, the majority of Americans are utterly ignorant about how their food is grown. For an in-depth look at how this type of collapse occurs, read the book Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David R. Montgomery. (Available at Amazon) Biofuels, especially ethanol made from corn feedstock, are an absolute boondoggle of the highest order. We are using two very limited resources (oil and phosphorus) to grow an extremely inefficient replacement for one of those limited resources. How does that make any sense? The US government and the Agrochemical industry are partners in subsidizing the unsustainable and environmentally damaging methods used by most farmers in the US. They are literally paying for this catastrophe in the making, when they should be rewarding farmers who are practicing regenerative agriculture.

Speaking of ETH as a security... check this out:

A very reputable news channel in India (NDTV) got hold of a cabinet note ahead of the proposed crypto regulation bill. This is a huge concern for Indian citizens. The note also reportedly highlights that citizens will need to declare their crypto assets and keep them on Indian exchanges. They will no longer be allowed to keep crypto on foreign exchanges or in private wallets. If BTC or any other crypto is held on Indian exchanges, how do we invest in NFT's or metaverse? What if exchanges get hacked? It's like creating a monopoly. Exchanges in India have very little liquidity, and they already function in an extremely poor manner. e.g. we cant deposit funds sometimes (especially during the dips). The system crashes. Most of the Indians use exchanges based in foreign countries What are your thoughts on this? Full Article: https://www.businessinsider.in/cryptocurrency/news/

Without doxxing myself, I've been a CPA (specifically, a tax accountant) in the US for about 10 years. Recently at my firm, I've been included in a small group of professionals forming a network of crypto tax consultants and specialists. As I truly love the crypto community, the best contribution to this sub I can think of is to try to 1) put together a few tax tidbits and 2) to answer every tax question that I can in the comments. Reading alot of comments and posts in the sub, I'm a bit concerned that my fellow crypto enthusiasts are going to put themselves at risk of the IRS by not fully understanding the extent of their activities. Now before I start answering, I'll add that anything I say should be used as a guide to either do further research on your own to understand your tax situation as it relates to crypto, or to acknowledge that your tax situation may be over your head and you should seek out a tax professional. There are tax resources such as koinly, and while I don't use them personally, I believe they are worth the investment - but I also want people to understand their own tax situation to make sure any paid service is handling your situation correctly. Without further adieu, here are a few items of general knowledge and feel free to ask questions below and I'll try to answer everything (I'm operating under the assumption this post will generate probably 25 comments, so if for some reason it blows up, be patient and I'll try to get to everything). This will also be entirely US specific, anyone outside of the US, I'm sorry but I'm in no position to give tax opinions. Your exchange, wallet, etc will likely not issue you a 1099-B for your trading activity, so don't count on getting any help from them, other than your transaction details. This won't be required for a few years and was part of the infrastructure bill. Every crypto you swap, exchange, convert, sell, earn lending/bonding reward, mine, earn staking rewards, receive airdrops on is a taxable event in the current year. To emphasize the point above, this includes MOONS. Yes, all of those MOONS you receive via karma distribution should be picked up on your tax return. Same as BAT rewards by using Brave. The value you pick up on any rewards, mining, staking, airdrops, faucets is the fair market value at the time of receipt. You should be tracking this on your own or using a service. The amount you pick up into income is now your basis. Basis is "cost". Mining is considered self-employment income and should be reported on Schedule C, which differs from staking which would be picked up as other income, along with the other items not including selling, swapping, exchanging. Sending a crypto from one wallet or exchange to another is not a taxable event - though you should track your transaction fees to include in your basis. NFTs are treated the same way as everything above. Keep good records. If you do not maintain good records or lose them and are not able to substantiate your cost basis, the IRS could make it $0, which would increase taxes you owe. Holding period can give tax benefits. If you sell something you've held for a year, it's a long term capital gain and is taxed at preferential rates. Less than a year is at ordinary rates. You are supposed to report the date purchased, date sold, cost, and sales proceeds of EVERY sell (exchange, sell, swap). Even if this results in $0 gain or loss. Wash sale rules don't apply, however, selling something and immediately buying it back for tax loss harvesting could violate economic substance rules and on audit, the loss could be disallowed (it would likely be incorporated back into your basis). Monero won't save you from paying taxes. Nor will boating accidents. You can trade crypto using crypto/bitcoin IRAs and the gains are tax free, but you can't pull out until retirement. I don't utilize these services, but they exist. That's what I can think of for the time being, I'll make an edit if anything else important pops into my head. I hope this and any questions provide some useful information to people in this sub. Best of luck to all! TLDR: Taxes are hard, if you don't have your arms around it, seek a professional and bite the bullet and pay. Feel free to ask tax questions below and I'll answer what I can. Source

Twitter suspended this account... Who knows what it said now? Sigh... censorship and link rot..... sorry.

Ethereum should be treated as a regulated security.

Bitcoin appreicates at 200%/year on average. Are you comfortable getting 206.5% while giving up custody of your wealth?