Fun thread to reread

Congrats to all btc holders!!

Who are the guys at the top?

You could apply that same thinking to the stock market if like with your comment on BTC you have no idea what you're talking about.

Big day!

Microsoft shareholders vote on BTC adoption,,,


Could be a Kodak moment,,,,,

Back to 100k

106,491 new high

I found this interesting as it pertains to firearms, bitcoin, FBI, political ideologies.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/debanki...507083?reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Darn...appears you need a subscription to read the article

Thats what reader mode on Firefox is for...

Debanking and the Return of Operation Choke Point


Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen made waves last month when he told podcaster Joe Rogan he’s aware of 30 tech entrepreneurs who have been “debanked in the last four years.” Andrew Torba, founder of the right-wing social network Gab, tweeted a cancellation notice from his bank.

Others followed with their own debanking stories. Melania Trump wrote in her recent memoir that a bank with which she had a longstanding financial relationship canceled her account without explanation in 2021 and denied an application by her son, Barron.

Don’t blame the banks, which are merely acting under government pressure. The Bank Policy Institute last week shared a primer on the “secret enforcement regime” by which a bank examiner’s “mandate that a bank designate a client as ‘high risk’ generally forces the bank to close the account.” Here’s how it works.

The Bank Secrecy Act requires banks to build profiles on customers, monitor their activity, and file Suspicious Activity Reports, or SARs, with the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network if they suspect illicit activity. Such “know your customer” rules are intended to prevent money laundering.

Banks have a strong incentive to file reports if there’s any unusual transaction, given that inadvertent lapses can result in sanctions, including heavy fines. Last year banks filed 4.6 million SARs. Compiling these reports is a nuisance and rarely exposes illicit activity since criminals tend to circumvent the banking system, where they know their activity will be monitored.

The overbreadth in bank reporting is a plus for the government, since it gives the Federal Bureau of Investigation a trove of reports to scour without a warrant. The more info it has on more bank customers, the better, even if most haven’t committed a crime. Regulators prohibit banks from notifying customers if they have filed a SAR.

“Once multiple SARs have been filed, examiners generally expect the account to be closed,” the Bank Policy Institute explains. Examiners may also covertly require banks to designate certain accounts as “high risk.” Such designations impose hefty compliance burdens that effectively force banks to close accounts. The group adds that “failing to close an account or terminate a customer relationship with high illicit finance risk, even only with the benefit of hindsight, has led to penalties of hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars against banks.”

This is how the Obama administration cut off banking access to politically disfavored businesses such as firearm dealers, payday lenders and pawn shops in its Operation Choke Point. The Justice Department and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. between 2013 and 2017 identified certain industries as high-risk and then pressured banks to terminate their accounts.

After House Republicans began investigating the debanking scheme, Chairman Martin Gruenberg claimed the FDIC was merely concerned with “the proper management of the banks’ relationships with their customers, particularly those engaged in higher-risk activities, and not underlying activities that are permissible under state and federal law.”



That was untrue, and Mr. Gruenberg seems to be at it again. Recent supervisory letters obtained by crypto exchange Coinbase via Freedom of Information Act requests suggest that the FDIC has used a pressure campaign to debank crypto. The Blockchain Association, a crypto trade group, says it has identified “more than 30 concrete cases of denied applications or debanking” owing to their “involvement in the digital asset industry.”

Signature Bank was an anomaly in welcoming crypto deposits until regulators squeezed it. During the regional bank turmoil in the spring of 2023, noncrypto Signature depositors ran for the hills, worried that regulators would shut it down to debank crypto businesses. That’s essentially what happened, according to former Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, who co-authored the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act.

Mr. Frank, a Signature board member, alleged that the FDIC seized Signature “to send a message to get people away from crypto.” New York Community Bancorp’s Flagstar Bank subsequently assumed all of Signature’s cash deposits except for those of crypto companies, some of which had to set up accounts offshore. How does this help prevent money laundering?

While this helps explain the debanking of crypto companies, why did Mrs. Trump and others get canceled? Clues lie in a House Judiciary Committee report released this month, which details how FBI officials suggested banks file SARs on “suspicious” people so the bureau could have more financial data to investigate the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

When government makes a suggestion, it’s an order. As a result, banks may have felt compelled to close accounts—without being able to inform customers of their reason for doing so. All the while, the mainstream media obsessed about Mr. Trump’s supposed danger to democracy

107,846 for an intraday high.

108,357.

The bigger story for the last 12 months is ripple. Up over 800 percent in the last 13 months