Friday Finance 4/29/2022: FUD, Fidelity, and Covid Funds
It is time again for another Finance Friday/Friday Finance. This is a series I started where I talk about random bits of financial stuff that I have seen, gathered, or experienced during the week. I hope as a reader you find it informational, entertaining, or both. I also hope it can generate some good discussion and edify the Leo community.
Holy cow! So much to talk about this week. I know at least one of the topics I was going to cover has already been talked about by a couple of fellow Hive users. That means I get to share their posts with you which I am pretty excited about. Beyond that engagement has been at the top of my mind a lot lately. My last two posts are some good evidence of that.
I thought it was just me, but I noticed the other day that more people are getting a little annoyed with this dance that BTC seems to be doing between $38K and $42K. Wake me up when something exciting happens will ya? I've seen television sitcom romances draw out shorter than this. Give me some action!
Fund your retirement with crypto
The problem with posting this series on Friday is the fact that many people beat you to the punch if the story comes out earlier in the week. I am a sucker for alliteration though, so moving this recap post to a different day just wouldn't work for me.
As you probably know, earlier this week Fidelity announced that you will soon be able to hold a certain portion of your retirement portfolio in cryptocurrency. It sounds like right now the only token you can invest in is BTC, and as @cryptoandcoffee mentioned, they get to decide the percentage of your portfolio that is invested in it.
I think this is a pretty cool idea and I am glad that someone finally brought it to the mainstream. Sure, you could always do it on your own, but with most of the career type jobs offering some form of 401K these days, it's pretty rare that you get so much control over your retirement savings.
I know if I were in a different position I would gladly take 20% interest on something like HBD versus the 7% I get from my other investments.
Check out the posts that @cryptoandcoffee and @cryptictruth wrote about this news:
"Drugs, Drugs, and more Drugs"
I was a bit disappointed when I saw this article from Coindesk talking about crypto on the dark web. The title alone is full of so much click-bait that any well respected crypto enthusiast would get their blood boiling over it.
Before we go any further, some critical perspective: By any measure, illicit activity is only a tiny slice of the overall crypto pie. According to the most recent crime report from Chainalysis, transactions involving illicit addresses accounted for just 0.15% of all cryptocurrency volume in 2021, which is down from 0.6% in 2020 and 3.4% in 2019. That’s consistent with other findings. “Bitcoin transactions linked to illicit activity are below 1% of total transactions and have been for some time,” Jess Symington, research lead at Elliptic, wrote me in an email. “We have seen a clear downward trend in the overall proportion of illicit activity as mainstream acceptance of crypto-assets has rapidly increased.”
It’s also true that cryptocurrency is generally easier to trace than cash (more on that in a bit), which means that when people use bitcoin for shady purposes, law enforcement is more likely to catch them. Saying “crypto is for crooks” is one of the oldest misconceptions in the space. This has long been debunked. It’s classic “FUD.”
All of that is true.
About a quarter of the way down the article you find that couple of paragraphs. I'm sorry, but if you clearly know those things to be facts, why spread your own FUD with the title of your article. It was clearly meant to be inflammatory, and as I said before click-bait.
You might say "well they clearly fooled you into clicking it", and while that is true, I often click on articles I know are FUD just so I can keep up on the utter BS that people are spreading about cryptocurrencies in general.
Beyond that, it wasn't a horrible article. The author tries to give themselves some "street cred" by claiming they own BTC. Most likely purchased and held on the RobinHood app in hopes of getting rich, not because they really care about it.
I just think the sensational headline could have been kept out of it. What do you think?
I'll pay you back tomorrow...
This last one had me laughing pretty hard. So I read this other article where they were talking about a Japanese household that got a huge sum of money. Apparently, instead of sending some Covid relief money to all residents of a town, the full sum of about $360,000 got sent to a single household.
The officials/authorities reached out to the family and they got this response:
"The money has already been moved elsewhere and can’t be returned. I’m not going to run and I’m willing to pay for my wrongdoing,”
I don't know about you, but to me that screams: I put the money into a cryptocurrency that has an insanely high time locked interest rate and as soon as that time is up I will gladly pay you back all the money (and keep the interest for myself).
There's no other information to the contrary, but I bet you dollars to doughnuts that is exactly what they did. Either that or they have a killer trip to Vegas planned!
What do you think?
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