Does the Crypto Crash Mean the Blockchain Is Over? - Freakonomics - "BUDISH: The thing I worry about is a rogue actor sends a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin to some financial institution, gets back a billion dollars worth of traditional financial assets — bonds or dollars — and then overwhelms the blockchain with computational force so that they delete that original transaction in which they sent the billion dollars worth of Bitcoin to the financial institution in the first place.
This is called a “double-spend” attack: the rogue actor in this scenario gets $1 billion in assets from the bank and keeps their original Bitcoin. Budish says the amount of computing power needed to prevent a $1 billion “double-spend” attack could cost as much as $3 trillion annually, or 4 percent of global G.D.P. Until 2140, some of this cost is covered by the issuance of new Bitcoins. But at some point, miners will have to be paid if we all want a secure and trustworthy Bitcoin ledger.
BUDISH: This is the problem to worry about with anonymous, decentralized trust is — it’s trustworthy, as long as a majority of the compute power is behaving honestly. But if you overwhelm the compute power with a larger majority, you can essentially rewrite history.
And Bitcoin has other shortcomings as a currency. At the moment, the Bitcoin blockchain can only process 7 transactions per second. The credit-card company Visa does 1,700 per second"
What Problems Does Crypto Solve, Anyway? - Freakonomics - "SCHOAR: We compare the concentration of Bitcoin ownership to the wealth inequality in the U.S. So in the U.S., about 0.1 percent of Americans control about 16 percent of all wealth. In comparison in Bitcoin, what we find is that 0.01 percent of Bitcoin owners control 26 percent of all the Bitcoins that are out there. The concentration is actually ten times even more concentrated than the wealth in the United States...
During the first two years of Bitcoin’s existence — 2009 to 2011 — the vast majority of Bitcoin was mined and collected by just 64 people. Most contemporary Bitcoin owners can be connected to those original 64 miners by a chain of just six transactions. So a relatively tiny group of people acquired and held onto Bitcoin during its meteoric rise. A recent report from the U.S. Federal Reserve reads: “Those who held cryptocurrency purely for investment purposes were disproportionately high-income, almost always had a traditional banking relationship, and typically had other retirement savings.”"
Axie Infinity Has Left Filipino Gamers Despondent + In Debt | TIME - "he plunged into Axie, doing battle with cartoon monsters for hours deep into the night. He soon began earning cryptocurrency, which he converted into pesos, allowing him to take better care of his mother and his home. At the same time, thousands of young people in the Philippines were jumping headlong into the game. For a brief moment at the peak of crypto’s astonishing 2021 boom, these young Filipino players were fulfilling a longtime dream of crypto’s most ardent evangelists: that “play-to-earn” blockchain games like Axie could lead the way to a more equitable, opportunity-rich global economy. Fourteen months later, most Filipino players, including Orias, have exited the game nursing anger and anxiety—and, in some cases, thousands of dollars down. Orias grew to hate playing the game. It was boring and stressful... “I felt fatigued all the time. I became more aggressive in every aspect of my life,” he says. The story of Orias and Axie Infinity serves as a cautionary tale for crypto and its bombastic rhetoric about changing the world. Many crypto thought leaders, when rebutting criticism about the unsavory aspects of the space, point to its impact in developing countries. But Orias and others say that Axie Infinity reinforced predatory systems and gave them false hope... as the game’s popularity increased, observers pointed out that its economic structure was unsustainable: the value of SLP necessitated new players continually buying in, much like a Ponzi scheme. Sky Mavis’ team even acknowledged in its white paper that the game was “dependent on new entrants.”... As more players entered the game and generated more and more SLP tokens, each token’s value decreased. By November, the research firm Naavik reported that average earnings for Axie scholars had dropped below the Philippines’ minimum wage... a hacker targeted the “bridge” upon which money was transferred between Sky Mavis’ blockchain Ronin and the much larger cryptocurrency Ethereum. (Bridges between chains are one of the least secure parts of blockchain ecosystems.) More than $600 million was quickly drained from the network, with two-thirds of that belonging to users themselves. While Sky Mavis returned all funds, the hack demoralized the game’s user base... Filipino scholars, who were told that blockchain games would bring radical economic change, are walking away confused and jaded. Several scholars TIME talked to said they owe hundreds or even thousands of dollars to friends or family who helped them pay the initial investment, only for their monsters to become worthless"
Founders of bankrupt crypto hedge fund Three Arrows go missing - "The co-founders of failed crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital appear to be on the run from creditors... the physical whereabouts of Zhu Su and Kyle Davies, who started Three Arrows in 2012, are “currently unknown”... Three Arrows, also known as 3AC, managed about $10 billion in assets as recently as March. On July 1, the firm filed for Chapter 15 bankruptcy protection from U.S. creditors in the Southern District of New York, after a plunge in cryptocurrencies and the collapse of the terraUSD (UST) stablecoin project wiped out its assets."
11 Companies That Hoarded Customers’ Money as Crypto Crashed - "There’s no getting around it, June was a disastrous month for cryptocurrency. Though cryptocurrency prices have trended down for the better part of 2022, investors truly had the rug pulled out from under them in the past two months"
Major Democrat donor's crypto company collapses, World Economic Forum cuts ties to it - "A cryptocurrency company led by a major Democratic donor is going bankrupt and faces a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation. FTX, run by Sam Bankman-Fried, told employees on the morning of November 8 that another company, Binance, would be coming in to buy it due to financial problems. Those were partially caused “after [FTX] was hit with roughly $5 billion worth of withdrawal requests on [November 6]”... There is at least $1 billion of client funds left unaccounted for and some customers may never get their money back, according to Reuters and CNN. “FTX paused withdrawals, though FTX US withdrawals remained unaffected,” Coindesk reported November 11. Bankman-Fried had poured tens of millions of dollars into Democratic candidates in the 2022 cycle, making him the second largest supporter of liberal causes and candidates, just behind George Soros. He gave just under $36 million in the 2022 election cycle... The World Economic Forum, which listed FTX as a “partner,” scrubbed its connections to the company, facing criticism for the way Bankman-Fried mixed funds held by FTX and a separate company he controls called Alameda Research... Bankman-Fried and his brother also donated millions of dollars to other organizations besides explicitly political ones. The FTX Foundation, the charitable arm of the company, gave millions of dollars to TOGETHER Trials, which published a study critical of the use of ivermectin as an intervention against COVID... Liberal investigative reporting company ProPublica has received $5 million from another Bankman-Friend nonprofit called Building a Stronger Future. “Over three years, the donation will support investigations into ongoing questions about the COVID-19 pandemic, biosecurity and public health preparedness”... ProPublica did not respond to a Tuesday morning media inquiry from LifeSiteNews about how it minimized conflicts of interest in its reporting due to the donation and if anyone at the organization had any concerns about the contribution."
Ben Hunt on Twitter - "Enough of this bullshit. I’m old enough to remember that Bernie Madoff - who ran a scam 100x more complex than SBF’s - was in handcuffs the same day the Feds learned he used client funds to cover fund obligations. Seriously. Enough of this bullshit."
When you have links to the US government...
Bitcoin has no future as a payments network, says FTX chief | Financial Times - "Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the digital asset exchange FTX, said the proof of work system of validating blockchain transactions, which underpins bitcoin, was not capable of scaling up to cope with the millions of transactions that would be needed to make the cryptocurrency an effective means of payment"
Oops. Just half a year before FTX's implosion
‘They couldn’t even scream any more. They were just sobbing’: the amateur investors ruined by the crypto crash - "Desperate, Roy made a string of bad bets. The value of his portfolio dwindled to €20,000, then €3,000. “It got so out of control because I saw all my chances to live a better life fading away,” he says. “So I became really desperate and eventually just completely isolated. I didn’t want to see anybody, because I thought I was a failure.” Most mornings, he would wake up shaking from alcohol withdrawal, order booze online and spend the day drinking and taking drugs. He developed stomach ulcers. “You can’t explain the pain,” he says. “I would drink and puke and drink and puke and drink and hope to keep it in, so the pain would go away. I felt like dying.” In May, jobless and broke, Roy checked into Castle Craig, one of the only centres in the world that treats cryptocurrency addiction. (He lost his job when he relapsed; his rehab fees are covered by medical insurance.) His cryptocurrency portfolio is worth about €300. Now, amid the incongruous grandeur of a Scottish stately home, he is attempting to rebuild his life – and quieten the tormenting thought that he should have pulled out his money when he had the chance... The industry’s enthusiasts and sceptics agree on one thing: they saw this coming. Perhaps they didn’t predict the precise contours of the crash, or the fact that so many seemingly reputable companies would flame out, but there was a sense that the cryptocurrency bull would run out of road. The sector was too hot, too loaded with bad-faith actors, scammers, credulous investors and amateurs feigning expertise in Telegram groups, YouTube videos and Twitter threads. When internet jokes such as PooCoin and Dogecoin surged in popularity, it ought to have been apparent that a market correction was coming. Such stupidity cannot be sustained for long. “Was it surprising?” says Dr Larisa Yarovaya, an associate professor of finance at the University of Southampton. “I think it was quite predictable.” The Bank of England has repeatedly told cryptocurrency investors to be prepared to lose all their money. Investors bought bitcoin as a speculative punt in 2020 and 2021 because interest rates were low and many had spare cash due to lockdowns and economic stimulus packages. But when interest rates and inflation began to rise, fuelled by Covid‑affected supply chains and the war in Ukraine, institutional investors preferred to put their money into safer assets... The mania around bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies was fuelled by a social media hype machine unprecedented in the history of financial markets... Nassim Nicholas Taleb was once open-minded about the potential of cryptocurrencies. The risk engineering professor originated the theory of the “black swan”: a hard-to-predict but seismic event, such as the 2008 financial crash, that is often rationalised after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. In 2018, Taleb wrote an essay describing bitcoin as “an excellent idea” and a possible “insurance policy against an Orwellian future”. Last year, Taleb revised his position in a paper that described bitcoin’s value as “zero”. “This is the first time we’ve seen a financial bubble coupled with religious, cult‑like behaviour and an investment strategy not seen before in history”... When Taleb published his 2021 paper, he received so much abuse that he had to lock his Twitter account. “I could not believe how psychopathic bitcoin people were”... Future generations may look back at this boom as a period of mania, when money multiplied like bacteria and a collective delusion gripped financial markets. It may seem unfathomable, but it shouldn’t. After all, who doesn’t want to be rich?"
Commentary: Don’t trust the hype – Bitcoin will never be a wise investment - "over-issuance of currency is just one possible threat to emerging-market financial stability, and removing it does not suddenly make Bitcoin a reliable store of value. Quite the contrary: Bitcoin’s price volatility since its inception in 2009 has been staggering... According to a note from JPMorgan on Feb 17, its three-month realised volatility at the time was 87 per cent, compared to just 16 per cent for gold. Similarly, a recent study finds that Bitcoin’s price volatility is almost ten times higher than that of major fiat currencies (such as the US dollar against the euro and the yen). Moyo also suggests that Bitcoin could facilitate remittances to low- and middle-income countries. But this ignores the fact that Bitcoin transactions are notoriously inefficient. Because its block size is capped at one megabyte and the block-discovery process takes approximately ten minutes per block, only seven transactions can be completed per second. By contrast, Visa executes an average of 1,700 transactions per second, and could feasibly handle more than 65,000 transaction messages per second. By design, Bitcoin is simply too inefficient ever to become an effective medium of payment. Similarly, the fact that Bitcoin’s supply is fixed at 21 million units is more of a drawback than a selling point. A proper currency should be able to undergo a massive expansion in supply when circumstances demand it, such as in the case of a financial crisis or a shock to aggregate demand. There can be no lender of last resort or market maker of last resort capable of systemic rescue operations with Bitcoin and other decentralised cryptocurrencies... Bitcoin’s extremely high energy demand is another nail in its coffin... The Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index estimates annualised consumption at 139.15 terawatt-hours – more than that of Argentina. Simply put, Bitcoin and other proof-of-work cryptocurrencies are an environmental disaster. Worse, cryptocurrencies can be replicated without bound, further amplifying the environmental damage"
Bitcoin price close to new record high as analysts predict ‘permanent hike’ in 2021
From 2021. So much for that
Meme - "I Am Finally RICH - How Crypto Made Me Rich
boogie2988 1 year ago
I need your help.
boogie2988 5 days ago"
Crypto group shamed for spending $3m on ‘Dune’ book, mistakenly believing it had acquired copyright to produce NFTs - "The spice must not be flowing for members of an NFT (non-fungible token) group that spent $3m on a rare book detailing film-maker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s failed adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic science fiction novel Dune... [its] members mistakenly believed that the purchase granted them the copyright to the book, which they intended to splice and sell as NFTs before burning the physical copy."
Warren Buffett: Cryptocurrency 'has no value'
Cryptocurrency investing has a big gender problem - "Twice as many men as women invest in cryptocurrency, according to CNBC and Acorn's Invest in You: Next Gen Investor survey, conducted in partnership with Momentive. The crypto gender gap exceeds the existing gap within traditional investments including stocks, ETFs, mutual funds and real estate... Twice as many men as women invest in cryptocurrency (16% of men vs. 7% of women), according to CNBC and Acorn's Invest in You: Next Gen Investor survey, conducted in partnership with Momentive. Women are lagging behind men in their rates of cryptocurrency investing, just as they have historically struggled to keep pace with men in more traditional investment verticals. In fact, in the new survey data, the gender disparity in crypto matches or exceeds the gender gaps in ownership of exchange-traded funds (14% of men vs. 7% of women), individual stocks (40% of men vs. 24% of women), mutual funds (30% of men vs. 20% of women), real estate (36% of men vs. 30% of women), and bonds (14% of men vs. 11% of women)."
Of course, if women had been more into crypto than men, the crash would've hurt them more and this would've been a big gender problem
Meme - Natalie Brunell @natbrunell: "Yes this tweet called the top of #Bitcoin and yes we're all eating/working at McDonald's, but check back in with us in 4 years"
"I'm starting a weekly #Bitcoin dinner with my girlfriends who are new BTC investors! Welcome them to Team Orange! @MeghanKluth"
Meme - Mom: "Fix it. Now
This is why we don't love you
You told us to buy etherim at 4,000 now it is 1,000"
Ukrainian Put Savings Into Crypto to Avoid War Risks. Then It Crashed. - "Yuri Popovich thought it seemed like a good idea at the time... Billionaires weren't spared from the crash, either. Changpeng Zhao, the wealthy founder of the world's largest crypto exchange, Binance, joked last week that he was "poor again" after the value of Binance's holdings in luna, a sister token that has its value pegged to terra's, crashed to about $2,200 from $1.6 billion a month ago."
Crypto meltdown rings alarm bells - "Crypto assets were supposed to behave quite differently to conventional investments. It turns out that they do. In a “risk-off” environment they perform far worse. The selling points for crypto assets used to be that they weren’t correlated to other assets classes and therefore would provide diversification from conventional holdings of shares and bonds and also provide a hedge against inflation. It turns out none of those previous investor convictions has proven true. In fact cryptos have demonstrated that, as an asset class, they are highly-correlated with other risk assets but in a grossly exaggerated fashion. The market capitalisation of all crypto assets has fallen by $US1.5 trillion ($2.2 trillion) since peaking last November at about $US2.9 trillion, a fall of about 52 per cent. The value of the dominant asset, Bitcoin, has fallen from almost $US70,000 to about $US30,000, or a decline of about 57 per cent. At almost the same time that the crypto market peaked, so did technology stocks. (It took a couple more months – until January this year – for the broader market to crack)... There has been a general flight by investors to cash. It’s not just cryptos and stocks that have slumped but emerging markets’ currencies and securities, high-yield debt and even Treasury bonds. It is notable that the US dollar has strengthened even as bond yields have spiked – the flight to safety hasn’t been to the traditional safe haven of the US government bond market but to an even safer place. The drivers of the implosion in risk asset values that began in the crypto market last November are obvious. It’s the outbreak of inflation at 40-year highs and the inevitable, if belated, response by the Federal Reserve Board in the form of higher interest rates and reduced liquidity. The implications for the change in monetary policy for conventional assets is obvious. When the risk-free rate – the 10-year bond rate used to discount future corporate cash flows – rises, the net present values of those cash flows shrink. Crypto assets generally don’t have cash flows so the destruction of value occurring presumably relates to the impact of the external settings on investor psychology and the increasing aversion to risk that has developed since late last year... The fact that the downturn in the crypto market started a little earlier than the broader sell-off in riskier stocks is interesting. The “mainstreaming” of crypto last year attracted institutional money and wider use of sophisticated trading strategies, including the use of leverage and derivatives. The exodus of those relatively new investors, and the unwinding of their positions, might be another strand in the explanation for the violence of the movements in the value of crypto assets... Algorithmic stablecoin TerraUSD – which is supposed to use financial engineering to peg its value perfectly to the US dollar, fell below US70 cents this week after experiencing something akin to a “run.” Coincidentally, on Monday the Federal Reserve warned in its latest financial stability report that stablecoins were vulnerable to runs because they were backed by assets that might lose value or become illiquid during periods of stress. It noted that stablecoins are increasingly used to meet margin requirements for leveraged trading in other cryptocurrencies, which could amplify volatility and increase redemption risks."
‘I lost my life savings’: Terra Luna cryptocurrency collapses 98% overnight - "The price of the Terra (LUNA) cryptocurrency has fallen by more than 99 per cent, wiping out the fortunes of crypto investors. Terra, which ranked among the top 10 most valuable cryptocurrencies, dropped below $1 on Wednesday, having peaked close to $120 last month. Other coins also appear to be in trouble amid a market-wide downturn."
Crypto’s steep decline has investors worried. What do celebrity boosters say? - "In a flashy advertising campaign for Crypto.com, Hollywood star Matt Damon told potential cryptocurrency investors that “fortune favors the brave.” But after the price of bitcoin plunged this week, erasing more than $200 billion in wealth in just 24 hours, Damon and nine other high-profile celebrities who have publicly endorsed digital currencies evidently were not brave enough to comment on the apparent market crash. NBC News contacted representatives for Damon, as well as Larry David, Charli D’Amelio, Jamie Foxx, Paris Hilton, LeBron James, Kim Kardashian, Ashton Kutcher, Gwyneth Paltrow and Reese Witherspoon. Their spokespeople did not respond to emails sent Thursday morning; Kardashian's publicist declined to comment. Damon, David and James each appeared in eye-catching crypto commercials that aired during the Super Bowl in February. The star of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” showed up in a cheeky ad for the FTX exchange, making it seem like crypto deniers would be judged as harshly by history as those who opposed silverware or the wheel... Witherspoon, for example, tweeted in December that “crypto is here to stay" and encouraged more women to get involved."
Meme - "My money was losing 8.5% a year due to inflation so I decided to invest in crypto. Now I've lost 50% in a few months"
Bill Gates Explains Why He Doesn’t Own Any Cryptocurrency - "“I like investing in things that have valuable output. The value of companies is based on how they make great products. The value of crypto is just what some other person decides someone else will pay for it so not adding to society like other investments”... On whether billionaires should pay more in taxes, Gates, who has previously said he would pay more tax, warned that going too high could lead to more tax dodgers. “Getting marginal rates above 60% often leads to a lot of complex avoidance if your system allows for that. It is strange to have the capital gain rate below the ordinary income rate. An estate tax could go somewhat above 60%—it is amazing how few countries have those”"
Salvadoran President Bukele's Latest Bitcoin Venture Is Another Distraction - "Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s experiment in making Bitcoin an official national currency alongside the U.S. dollar, which has been the currency since 2001, has not gone well. But when a con artist’s grift starts to fall apart, he knows to move onto the next one fast. The same goes for fast-talking presidents. More than 91 percent of Salvadorans want dollars, not bitcoins. The official Chivo payment system was unreliable at launch in September—the kiss of death for a new system. Users joined for the $30 signup bonus, spent it or cashed it out, then didn’t use Chivo again. The system completely failed to check new users’ photos, relying solely on their national identity card number and date of birth; massive identity fraud to steal signup bonuses ensued. Bitcoin’s ridiculously volatile price was appreciated only by aspiring day traders. Large street protests against compulsory Bitcoin implementation continued through October. The government stopped promoting Chivo on radio, TV, and social media. Chivo buses and vans were seen with plastic taped over the company’s logo... The other $500 million raised from bond sales will theoretically be used to start construction on Bitcoin City, a charter city in a special economic zone. Bitcoin City would have no income, property, contract, or city tax. The only tax would be value-added tax, or VAT, half of the proceeds from which would be used to fund the city, and half to pay back the bonds... Shortly after Bukele’s June announcement that Bitcoin would be legal tender in El Salvador, he tweeted that the country would mine its own bitcoins via the existing LaGeo plant in Berlín, Usulután, and a 95-megawatt well that had just been opened. A shipping container of bitcoin mining rigs was set up at the Berlín plant on Sept. 29. The trouble is that mining bitcoins in El Salvador makes no economic sense. Bitcoin mining is a process of competitively wasting electricity to guess a winning number every 10 minutes or so. Your business input is electricity; so miners are in direct competition with every other miner in the world, and go wherever reliable electricity is cheapest and the government is willing to turn a blind eye to the whole enterprise—a pressing issue since China kicked cryptocurrency miners out in May. The world’s average price for bitcoin mining is around five cents per kilowatt-hour; but industrial rates in El Salvador are 13 to 15 cents per kilowatt-hour. In one four-day period, the Berlín operation mined $269 of Bitcoin—and was estimated to have spent at least $4,672 worth of electricity doing so... The bitcoin mining and Bitcoin City proposals are ultimately just yet more splashy distractions from Bukele’s economic woes... a national economy really can’t run on a volatile and manipulated speculative commodity that’s unusable as a currency."
From December 2021
An Entire Country Switched to Bitcoin and Now Its Economy Is Floundering - "Months after El Salvador announced that it would accept bitcoin as legal tender, the country has found itself on the verge of economic collapse yet again... forcing your nation’s banks and stores to accept a currency large swaths of the population are unfamiliar with and don’t trust is a good way to tank your economy... the country’s sovereign bond dropped from 75 cents to 63 cents overnight and is now at 36 cents. In the past five months since it officially adopted bitcoin as legal tender, experts have estimated that El Salvador’s sovereign credit got four times worse than it was before the move. Bitcoin’s extreme volatility has also been on full display, as its price was hovering around $60,000 at the time of Bukele’s big announcements, but has now crashed to the mid-$40,000s... A Central American University survey conducted last September found that nine out of 10 citizens in the country didn’t know what bitcoin was, and eight out of 10 said they had little to no confidence in the digital cash. Bukele also sold the legislation on the idea that bitcoin would make remittances — money sent to Salvadorans from friends and family members working abroad — cheaper. However, the opposite was often true. This is because citizens would typically turn the bitcoin into cash after receiving it, Fortune reports. To do that, they needed to travel to an ATM, which takes a substantial cut of the money withdrawn. Exchange platforms like Coinbase also take anywhere from two to four percent of the money as well. Hanke believes that that winds up being nearly four times as expensive as traditional remittances."
From January 2022
Analysis-Crypto crash leaves El Salvador with no easy exit from worsening crisis - "Bitcoin has fallen 45 per cent since El Salvador officially adopted it in early September, and 26 per cent from its May high as crypto assets have been swept up in a risk-off investing environment. The combined market value of all cryptocurrencies recently fell to $1.2 trillion, less than half of where it was last November"
Bitcoin As an Inflation Hedge Challenged by Sell-Off After CPI Data - "With its fixed supply of 21 million bitcoin, the cryptocurrency is meant to protect against reckless central bank policy and helicopter money distributed by governments during the pandemic."
Dogecoin Creator Jackson Palmer Criticizes Cryptocurrencies - "“After years of studying it, I believe that cryptocurrency is an inherently right-wing, hyper-capitalistic technology built primarily to amplify the wealth of its proponents through a combination of tax avoidance, diminished regulatory oversight and artificially enforced scarcity”... One of the many awful traits of the crypto community that Palmer points out is that “even the most modest critique of cryptocurrency will draw smears from the powerful figures in control of the industry,” not to mention the ire of everyday investors terrified of losing it all. Just something worth remembering when those figures inevitably fart out some bad-faith tweets saying Palmer’s just jealous he never cashed in when he had the chance."
Crypto Traders Loved Big Leveraged Bets Until Inexplicable Crash - Bloomberg - "“It was a major, major amount of money for me that died, even though I predicted everything properly,” he said from Calgary. “Given my situation, that was my one shot at retirement and now that’s pretty much all gone.”"
And this was 2021
From Crypto to Offshore Accounts: Tactics Used to Get Cash Out of China - Bloomberg - "Right now, it’s all about peer-to-peer and cryptocurrencies rather than cash in a suitcase."
