Who is afraid of cryptocurrencies? – POLITICO

With help from Derek Robertson

It was Google Maps that piqued my interest in Bitcoin ATMs.

In one of my ongoing conversations about cryptocurrency and California – where I cover Sacramento’s technology policy pace – someone told me about cryptocurrencies, where you could buy Bitcoin with cash and often complete anonymity. You did not need a bank account and you did not need to create a profile on an online exchange. You can just go to a gas station and buy crypto.

It seemed like a strange way to buy Bitcoin, so I turned to Google to see where I could find such machines. I started with Los Angeles, where I lived almost a decade ago. My curiosity grew when I saw that the red pins marking kiosk locations seemed to be gathering in poor neighborhoods in South Central. Still, I realized that did not tell me everything: In LA, you can not always judge a street by its neighborhood.

But when I clicked on the flags to zoom in on the street view, most of them showed pictures of gun shops, check-in points, and gas stations in malls with broken plaster strips.

Who bought Bitcoin in these places? And why?

It turns out that I was not the only person who was confused and fascinated by these machines, known as BTMs (B is for Bitcoin).

By talking to companies that operate BTM machines, to regulators and consumer advocates, BTMs began to feel symbolic of the big, passionate debate about the integrity of the crypto itself.

• For industry players and Bitcoin fans, BTMs represent the “democratization” of finance by cryptocurrency. It would be a shame to regulate them too aggressively because it could lock people out of investing in the money of the future and get the crypto markets to model Wall Street elitism.

• For consumer advocates, they are predators: marketing volatile digital currencies to people with no money left over or time to find out if they can lose their shirts by buying Bitcoin. The prevalence of BTMs in poor neighborhoods does not increase their self-confidence – instead, it makes operators look like they are following the payroll lender’s game book.

• For regulators, they are a nuanced political problem and often a headache for law enforcement. Officials do not like to repeal a business model based on bad actors – especially when they are still trying to recapture the ins and outs of the cryptocurrency industry. But BTMs have already made it far too easy for criminal and sex and drug smugglers to hide cash transactions at a time when law enforcement is already having to play with large-scale money laundering and other fraud schemes. In fact, the US Department of Justice and State Attorneys have had to close BTM networks under the radar that made a point of appealing directly to criminals.

Right now, BTMs are mostly an American phenomenon El Salvador’s Bitcoin – loving president is one great supporter. Earlier this year, two countries moved to close their machines completely – Singapore and the UK

Now Bitcoin’s recent crash and turmoil across markets can redraw the battle lines of cryptocurrency policy – and get regulators to take a heavier hand.

Read the whole story here.

Wall Street can have escape the worst of the cryptocurrency market crash. But what about the public companies that were most optimistic about it?

Take Tesla, led by Mr. “To the moonSays Elon Musk, who has taken more than $ 650 million in losses on Bitcoin alone. But it’s not even close to being the biggest hit a listed company has had: the data intelligence company MicroStrategy has lost nearly $ 1.5 billion on Bitcoin depreciation, including a more than $ 200 million backed loan it took out that now stands at risk of a margin ring, according to industry news site Blockworks. (The company continues to buy the dip.)

There is a reason why the majority of companies with large Bitcoin positions are those that have a direct connection to the crypto industry: believing in the lasting value of crypto as an asset necessarily involves a belief and a personal ownership interest in the actual adoption. Therefore, the main users outside the industry are technological gadflies like Musk and “Web5” provider Jack Dorsey – if Block (formerly Square) has also lost a solid portion of the change in the middle of the crash. – Derek Robertson

“Web3 gaming” has been pulling a lot of bad press lately, most notable in a series of hacks that left players of “play-to-earn” games as Axie Infinity robbed the crypto they earned through the game.

This makes it a bit difficult timing for the announcement of an almost impossible boost even under the most favorable circumstances: A new, independently produced and developed home video game console. Meet “Polium One”, as the creators describe as “the world’s first multi-chain game console.”

From a purely business perspective, it makes sense that entrepreneurs like them (somewhat mysterious, apparently four people) the group behind Polium wants to merge Web3 with games – an industry that made it around $ 200 billion globally in 2021, a number that is only growing). Video games such as Roblox and Minecraft have already served as proof of concept for the meta-verse, and more ambitious projects as Star Atlas has promised to marry NFTs and blockchain technology into mainstream video games, regardless of whether they are users want them or not.

But the story is full of unsuccessful attempts by outsiders to break into the capital-intensive gaming industry, from Nokia N-Gage to Kickstarter’s warning story about Ouyaen. When it comes to Polium One, things do not have a promising start: the company has already published one defensive Twitter thread responds to criticism from teasing and junk (the logo’s eerie resemblance to it to Nintendo Gamecube) to the obvious (lack of information about what actual games people might want to play on such a console.) – Derek Robertson

Stay in touch with the entire team: Ben Schreckinger ([email protected]); Derek Robertson ([email protected]); Konstantin Kakaes ([email protected]); and Heidi Vogt ([email protected]).

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