🟠 Immutable farts - Bitcoin’s killer use case

GM.

It’s Arsen, bringing you the 4th edition of TLDR - the newsletter that keeps you informed AND entertained.

First off, happy Sunday to 344 of you reading today.

I’m writing this a few days in advance because of a tropical storm named ‘Freddy’ heading my way.

I might not have electricity/internet by the time this email goes out.

Want to comfort me? Send me memes!

Alright, let’s get into it.

Here’s what I got for you this week:

• IRS rug pulls Celsius users

• The Dirty Side of NFTs

• Somebody farts on the blockchain

Estimated read time: 3 minutes and 14 seconds

IRS DEMANDS CELSIUS USERS’ INTEREST EARNINGS

Now we all hate taxes. But you know who hates it even more?Celsius clients with funds trapped with the now-bankrupt crypto lender.

Some background:Celsius, a crypto lender (read Ponzi scheme) founded by Alex Mashinsky, went poof after gambling away customer funds.

Some of Celsius's clients spoke to Bloomberg. It turns out you have to pay taxes on the interest you earned.

And who cares if you lost all your money? The IRS wants its Benjamins Franklins!

Poor Celsius clients.

Take Doug Stinger from San Antonio. He has $2.8M (worth $100M at its peak) frozen on the platform. And yet, he got a $67,000 tax bill for the interest income on his holdings.

Yes, the same holdings he has no access to.

That’s shitty. And what’s even shittier is that Celsius were promising 18% interest 18% - a much higher rate than ~ 0.05% traditional financial institutions offer.

And the IRS’s response?”We’re aware of the issue.”

Remember, kids: if you dont understand where the yield comes from, you are the yield.

A HUGE VOLUME OF NFT TRADING IS FAKE

It looks like instead of washing themselves, the basement dwelling NFT traders (yes, they exist) have been engaging in wash trading.

No, wash trading NFTs is not when you put your jpegs in the washing machine.

Wash trading is when one or more traders artificially pump the price of an asset by buying and selling it multiple times. This makes the assets seem more liquid than it is in reality.

Why do this?Well, young padawan, to make it seem like there is demand for that asset.

And when other NFT degens see that there’s demand, they are more likely to invest in that asset - even at higher prices.

Wash trading can get quite creative, but here’s how it usually happens:

1. A peron creates multiple wallets (wallet 1, wallet 2, wallet 3)

2. Wallet 1 buys NFT for $100 on Friday

3. Wallet 2 buys the NFT from wallet 1 for $200 on Saturday

4. Wallet 3 buys the NFT from wallet 2 for on $300 Sunday

Now, from the outside, it looks like the price has tripled, and this NFT is hot shit! 🔥

And they’re not exactly wrong: this NFT is shit, just not in the way they’re thinking.

The reality is that it’s been traded back and forth by the same person.

This is the equivalent of farting in a jar and selling it as fresh Scottish air (like this guy does).

And then, another person buys it - only to later realize they’ve been bamboozled.

This is not rare.

This kind of wash trading happens all the time. According to the team at bitsCrunch, over $368M has been wash traded in the last 30 days (yes, DAYS).

I was very shocked when I found out about this…

Jk, I wasn’t shocked lol.

This is precisely the type of thing you can expect from the degens over at the shitcoinland.

If you ever plan on spending money on NFTs, slap yourself.

If that doesn’t bring some sense into you and you still decide to do it, be careful not to buy somebody’s fart in a jar.

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BITCOIN’S KILLE USE CASE: IMMUTABLE FARTS

Speaking of farts and NFTs.

Do you ever wake up and decide to record your fart and upload it to the Bitcoin blockchain as an Ordinals NFT?Yeah, me neither

But this guy thought it would be a great idea.

But wait, it gets better: he then tried to sell it for 12.3 BTC ($280,000), according to this Reddit user.

That’s $280,000. For a fart.

If this abomination of an NFT gets sold, we can expect an increase in demand for beans and dairy products.

You might ask: why is this newsworthy?Because with over 100K Ordinals minted on Bitcoin, the network is truly being stress tested.

If bitcoin gets crippled by jpegs, how can it stand a chance against attacks from nation-states?

This is how we find out how antifragile bitcoin really is.So here I am, writing about immutable farts at 11 PM on Saturday

Rabbit Hole Reads

• A new Bitcoin Embassy in Texas. El Salvador is working with the U.S. state to aid the expansion of commercial and economic exchange projects. It looks like Pupusas are coming to Texas.

• No privacy for you, Sam. SBF’s lawyers are proposing to force him to install software on this phone to track and record his conversations. No more steamy secret conversations with Caroline (*shudders*).

• WANTED: Do Kwon. South Korean officials traveled to Serbia to find the missing mastermind behind the Luna scam. It looks like Do is equally good at ghosting authorities as he is at running Ponzi schemes.

This week in a meme

Job of the week

Zion, a peer-governed social network built on Lightning Network, is looking for a Nostr dev to build out the required infra for the new platform.

Now I do’’t know shit about software development, but I keep coming back to this scenario in my head:Girl at a bar: so, what do you do?Me: I’m a Nostr dev 😎

Now THAT sounds cool.

From the archive

This legendary debate between two thirthy bishes 🤣

Shoutouts

Shoutout to the guy who tipped me 1000 sats to my Lightning address at the bottom of this email.

You know who you are. 👑

That’s it for this one.

What’d you think of this week’s email?

Let me know in the comment section below or by responding to this email.

See you next Sunday,

Arsen

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