James Block, crypto skeptic and author of the Dirty Bubble Media newsletter, rose to prominence with a timely post predicting FTX’s insolvency. The blogger, a doctor by day, explains why he sees crypto as an unregulated morass of would-be securities and outright “Ponzi schemes.” From an early interest in Tether to connecting the dots on Celsius, Block explains why he does what he does and why almost all of crypto is just “regulatory arbitrage.”

Show highlights:

how James got into crypto and why he started writing about the space

why James chose "Dirty Bubble Media" for the name of his publication

the problems with the legitimacy of crypto projects

the reasons to be bearish on Coinbase

why the question of whether Bitcoin has intrinsic value is highly subjective

whether every token in crypto is a scam and whether regulations will hit stablecoin issuers hard

how FTX used tokens to create fictitious value worth billions of dollars 

why Celsius and FTX were closely linked, and the difference between both cases

ties James found between FTX's European subsidiary and a company doing binary options, an industry characterized by fraud

how he believes financial fraud is similar throughout history — it doesn't repeat, but it rhymes

James’s concerns around Signature Bank and its "questionable tactics"

why Genesis and DCG got into trouble and how James thinks the situation will likely play out

whether exchange tokens are securities and why he believes they have very little value

why he says BNB resembles OneCoin's pyramid scheme

James's contrarian take on the Avi Eisenberg case



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Links

Guests:
James Block:

Twitter

Substack


FTX: 
Dirty Bubble Media:

Is Alameda Research Insolvent?

FTX'ed: The Tangled Ties Of Celsius Network and Sam Bankman-Fried

FTX's European subsidiary was built on top of a binary options scam

A forgotten banking scandal suggests FTX is the tip of the crypto iceberg


DCG

Dirty Bubble Media: Digital Currency Grift 



Unchained: ​SEC Charges Gemini and Genesis With Sale of Unregistered Securities



Binance
Dirty Bubble Media: The Binance Scam Chain


Signature
Bloomberg: Binance Says Signature Sets Transaction Minimum Amid Pullback


Mango Markets


The Ballad of Risk-Free Avi - Dirty Bubble Media 


Unchained: 


Mango Markets Exploiter Arrested on Market Manipulation Charges

Solana’s Mango Markets Sees $100M Drained in DeFi Exploit


Celsius

Dirty Bubble Media: Anatomy of a (fake) Market



Unchained: NYAG Sues Celsius’s Alex Mashinsky for Defrauding Investors



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