Essentially, what FinCEN wants is to require banks, cryptocurrency exchanges, and other money services businesses (MSB) to collect identifying data about anyone who wants to transfer $3,000 or more to or from an “unhosted” wallet.
In a Twitter thread, Ari Paul said he believes a separate ecosystem for “clean” coins will soon emerge where digital assets can be traced to a regulated institution. This could pave the way for a murky underworld where laundering ill-gotten crypto becomes big business.
The lead academic in that (in)famous study postulating that Bitcoin prices were manipulated by Tether updated it with this added doozey: a single “whale” was behind most of it, trading large amounts of bitcoin against tether on Bitfinex, Tether’s sister company.
On February 2, Modern Consensus broke the story that mobile pay startup Circle would be acquiring Poloniex. It was a big scoop, the kind that can put an upstart publication like Modern Consensus on the map. Twitter immediately lit up with talk of the deal and questions about how our little publication had broken such an important story. Predictably, some of that speculation immediately turned first to skepticism and then to outright insults. Ari Paul, the CIO of Block Tower Capital, first tweeted the story to his 95,000 followers. And then he immediately posted a cloying, virtue-signaling apology: I just posted a link to an article asserting that Circle was acquiring Poloniex. Someone helpfully…
