The good, bad and weird of Bitcoin

There are interesting figures around the Bitcoin community and we will look into a few and find the good, bad and weird ones.

Bitcoin, The good one

The one and only fact about the good one of Bitcoin is, was and should be Satoshi Nakamoto. It is still not clear who he or she really was and there are different kind of rumors, but at the end the whitepaper of Bitcoin and the Blockchain itself are still after a decade the base for a new way how to do finance. If we look into a few facts about Satoshi Nakamoto;

• Satoshi Nakamoto wrote the Bitcoin Whitepaper and started based on it the Bitcoin Blockchain
• Satoshi Nakamoto mined in total about 1.1M BTC at the beginning and never touched the wallets again. The current value of these coins are about $17.6B.
• There are a few persons who claim to be the "real Satoshi" but it still not clear and nobody was able until now to prove that they control the wallets from Nakamoto

The good ones for Bitcoins are also persons who either lost their private key or are not able anymore to access their wallets. It is maybe a tragic for each individual, but in total having burned Bitcoins which are not anymore circulated, are good for the ecosystem.

In general if you look at the price trends for each years beginning and end, we can see that we have a steady growth on the marketcap.

It does also mean that the price volatility is still very high compared to the ATH (all time high) price.

Bitcoin, The bad one

Recently, the worst one for the Bitcoin ecosystem was Sam Bankmann-Fried, who has adversely affected the whole cryptocurrency world, even if it is not directly related to Bitcoin. The FTX meltdown was so big, that even Dokwon from the Luna-Terra debacle and Su Zhu from 3AC (3AC eventually filed for a Chapter 15 bankruptcy on July first)are leveraging the case to recover their social reputation and start again to twitter or show themselves on social media.

The problem is that what Sam Bankman did with FTX was not based on Bitcoin's decentralization and the possibility of a financial replacement, but only financial fraud using cryptocurrency. His exact move has been covered in numerous articles, but the big problems are as followed.

• FTT token, which is an exchange token, was minted pumped and loans had been taken based on the value.
• Continuously repeated the above and began to misappropriate funds through Alameda Research.
• Alameda Research is excluded from liquidation at FTX's derivate market and contributes to the full-fledged collapse of the Luna-Terra ecosystem
• Alameda Research's shortfall funds are replaced by customer assets from FTX after the Luna-Terra crisis attack
• Start to invest aggressively and  lobbying in the U.S. with generated funds
• Successful lobbying activities in the U.S. can be verified based on the fact that FTX was among the only large exchange that could offer stock based tokens. (Binance also issued stock based tokens but stopped their operation within a few months and Coinbase was rejected in from the start)
• The start of the CZ-to-SBF war was the official liquidiation tweet from CZ of FTT on Twitter. It butterflied to a tweet from the CEO of Alameda Research to buy of the FTT over the counter at $22 and resulted at the end into a full collapse and bank run of FTX.
• Since then, due to the butterfly effect, FTX related investment companies have been damaged, Genesis Capital restricted withdrawals, and various EARN products of DeFi and CeFi have been directly or indirectly affected.
• In addition, there is a report that SBF converts customer funds in FTX into withdrawals and current BTCs under pressure from Bahama.

We could imagine that the FTX scheme would not have collapsed if the market would be still in the bull phase. But every cycle does not move only up and will come to an end. And a fragile structure like FTX is unfortunately doomed to collapse based on the smallest push (a tweet from CZ) from outside.

Bitcoin, The weird one

As a born marketer, he does have different names following him in the crypto scene, as an example "Agari-sun" in Korea, which means something like "talk the talk Sun". But nobody can deny his current position in the blockchain community with as somebody with an influence that spreads around a lot of major projects. If it would be only about the money, Justin Sun would not need to work nor involve in any kind of project, as his estimated net worth is already based only on some public wallets over $3 Billion dollars. Let's look into his trails and what he did the last few years.

• Launching of Tron ($4.6B)—Initially planned as a Media solution but now mainly used as an alternative Layer 1 soluBittorrent
• $4.6 million for a meal with Warren Buffet. Gifted Buffet with a phone containing one Bitcoin. (Buffet rumored to have donated it again.)
• After acquiring Steemit Inc., the Steem blockchain foundation, a hard fork between Steem and Hive happened. Since then, Justin Sun was not that active on Steem (market capitalization of $65M), but it the Blockchain continued to be supported by the Tron Foundation.
• Launch of SUN token ($43M market capitalization), JST ($180M market capitalization), USDJ ($15M) during DeFi Summer
• Launch of the Tron chain with EVM compatibility on BitTorrent Chain — TVL currently about $8.6M
• UST collapsed shortly after the release of its rival USDD from Justin Sun. Currently, USDD is trading around 0.98 with a warning message that the actual mortgage rate is around 50 (market capitalization of $717 million)
• Played an important role in acquiring Huobi Exchange and became an HT token (market capitalization - $656 million) whale.
• Ambassador of Grenada

Justin is somebody who can use any noise on the market to promote either himself or one of his projects. He does have his enemies and they don't like what he is doing. Nobody can say that everything he is touching is changing to gold, but if you review his projects, they did all had their ATH moments and are still available on the market. Especially if you look into getting assets moved from one CEX to another, Tron is a fast and low-cost alternative, as it is listed in numerous exchanges.