I didn’t even bother trying to scan the QR code.
I give them credit for the idea. But they shouldn’t have been surprised if 2 million people tried to login at the same time.
You did not even have to scan their code in real time. You could just go to their link later.
But boy was that ad way too long. I guess it did work to put their name out there for mainstream people. On the other hand, I imagine handing out $15 to millions of people made that ad quite a bit more expensive than they planned too.
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IIRC, some folks here are involved with “BlockFI”. Noticed this on another board:
SEC findings
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yep party is over for high interest (+>5%) there. I still get intro 3.5% CB CC, but it was nice to get interest too. Existing balances are good… for now. and CEO said they would develop something that would comply with SEC. Hope that’s soon.
They have big backers like Fido and great CS for the CC. I hope they’ll thrive. I believe that crypto is the gold rush and I’d rather be/invest with the miner supply co.
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Except gold was used as a store of value / financial reserves at that time, so it had actual value, not just a cost / price. That is to say the gold rush could’ve been more easily justified.
So that’d be NVDA, AMD, and whoever else makes / sells specialized ASICs and mining rigs 
.
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Curious to see what Celsius, voyager, etc do. Voyager is already publicly traded, so they may be further along in the process to be doing this in compliance with SEC guidelines.
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I saw a good joke on Twitter by someone saying that people have been telling us that crypto is money but you don’t need TV ads for money.
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Yes I think BlockFi is canary for sure. CEO seemed reasonable on TV and CSRs have been great. Apparently CoinB backed down and others seem to take a wait/see attitude.
I still don’t get how they were able to pay 9% interest on stable coins. (the rest I didn’t want to take “currency” risk) for so long. I guess the SEC didn’t either. Regulators generally are traditional (myself included)
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Could Putin be exploring cryptocurrencies to bypass western sanctions?
As many people do when discussing the complex world of cryptocurrencies, Vladimir Putin kept it simple: “Of course, we also have certain competitive advantages here, especially in the so-called mining.” After events this weekend, when Russia was hit by severe financial sanctions, the Russian president might be considering capitalising on those advantages.
Putin was speaking in January, days after the country’s central bank proposed a blanket ban on cryptocurrency trading and mining. In the case of bitcoin, the cornerstone cryptocurrency, mining is the energy-intensive process by which computers verify new bitcoin transactions – putting them on a virtual ledger known as a blockchain – and generate new bitcoins as a reward for that work.
The Bank of Russia was emphatic in its warning, saying that cryptocurrency mining entailed “significant risks for the economy and financial stability.”. One week later, Putin appeared to be less sure, pointing that Russia had advantages in cryptocurrency mining due to its huge energy wealth and expertise in the field.
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i wonder if there will be more crypto crackdowns if he does. this isn’t drug dealers using crypto, this is world’s biggest thug.
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I’ll put my crypto/blockchain ignorance on full display. Where is this “virtual ledger” held? My question relates to whether an executive order to exclude Russian IPs/computers from crypto would do any harm to the existing blockchains?
the “virtual ledger” is everywhere, in the matrix!
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I was thinking exactly the same thing. If half the world makes all cryptocurrency operations illegal (mining, staking, buying, selling, etc?) for all unstable cryptocurrencies, that’ll probably make them useless, and therefore worthless.
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The bitcoin ledger is almost 400GB now. You can get it on your computer if you run the right software. It grows a little bit with each transaction. The more transactions – the faster it grows. Everyone who runs the right software gets a full copy and regular (instant?) updates (though there may be other modes or other software that don’t, and if you use an exchange to do anything, you don’t need your own copy). That’s the basics of how I understand it.
You won’t be able to do much by excluding Russian IPs, firstly cause it’s all open source and not under the control of any country, and secondly they could just VPN to another jurisdiction so you wouldn’t know where they are. I don’t think you could block it technologically, because it was made to avoid such a fate. But a country could easily just make it illegal and start prosecuting violators. The smart ones would be hard to find, because VPN, but that really won’t be necessary as it’ll drive all legit investment away from it and crush the price.
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Thank you for the answer, and the explanation. It answered my question thoroughly. In the infamous words of Emily Litella, never mind. 
The word “easily” sure is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence.
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As “easily” as they cut off SWIFT?
I’m not following.
I think you were implying that it’s not easy to make cryptocoin operations illegal.
I’m saying cutting banks out of SWIFT was also not easy.
Not technologically but legally, in both cases.
They can make it so with a stroke of a pen.
I am pretty sure he was implying that actually enforcing that ban is the hard part.
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