Not a very good store of wealth when everyone can track your every movement...
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Trump administration ends Polymarket investigations without charges
Two federal investigations of the online prediction betting site Polymarket have been closed with no charges filed against the cryptocurrency-based marketplace, a person familiar with the matter told CNBC on Tuesday.
- The Justice Department and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission have ended their investigations of online prediction betting site Polymarket without bringing any charges.
- The conclusion of the probes is the latest example of the Trump administration dropping actions initiated under the Biden administration against crypto companies or online betting markets.
- The Justice Department and CFTC had been investigating whether Polymarket was accepting bets from people in the United States
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If anything I'll find some Monero.
It seems like there's a growing risk of Monero being 51%-attacked soon. What does this mean for Monero and PoW coins in general, including Bitcoin?
Both absolute and relative security budgets (the amount paid to miners) must be high enough. Bitcoin's absolute daily security budget is $50M per day, while it's only $150k for Monero. Sounds good for Bitcoin? Hold on. When you compare these values to the total asset value (market cap), they become just 0.002% for both!
How does Qubic operate? Not going into deep details, they just pay miners some extra using a pump-and-dump scheme with their own token. Their goal seems to be to attack Monero for marketing reasons? Or just for fun? It really doesn't matter. What matters is, it takes a very small amount of money to attack. You need to pay 51% of the miners, say, a 10% premium (not sure what they pay exactly) to make them switch to an attacking pool. That would be just 0.51 * 0.10 * $150k = $7.65k per day. Well, plus some initial costs. Not that much! I guess even a small short position would cover that (one can short Monero on Kraken).
As for Bitcoin, obviously, the absolute cost of a similar attack will be much higher for two reasons: a higher total security budget and a higher premium that must be paid to miners because of the PoW algo.
Monero's RandomX (ASIC-resistant algo) has its advantages and disadvantages over Bitcoin's SHA-256 (dominated by ASICs). RandomX is more decentralized in nature: ordinary CPUs are needed to mine it. But this has a security downside. If a 51% attack dooms Monero, these CPUs will be usable elsewhere. That can't be said about ASICs: if Bitcoin is doomed, it's a huge loss of capital investment into hardware: you can't use it anywhere else. A 10% bribe won't make ASIC holders happy.
So, Bitcoin can't be attacked by a small entity such as Qubic, but it's plausible to assess that it might be attacked by bigger players (governments) for bigger reasons (definitely not for fun, more like for freezing non-compliant parties). Remember the 0.002% figure? Relatively, Bitcoin has the very same problem, just at a different level.
The solution for Monero? Increased adoption. 0.6 XMR per block might not be enough. There needs to be a stable fee revenue, which currently isn't really large enough with only 30k transactions per day. There are other options such as switching to PoS. But still, the main idea is that a cryptocurrency must be actually used to stay secure.
The solution for Bitcoin? Increase the block size ASAP for the same reason: it needs increased adoption (more on-chain transactions paying fees to miners).
Do you think Monero will get attacked? Let's see what happens.
The bear case is that by stitching Bitcoin so tightly into our financial infrastructure, we’re effectively creating an Achilles’ heel. If the protocol fails — whether through technical failure, regulatory choke-off, or security breach — it could spark a systemic liquidity crisis. And because Bitcoin is now widely held by institutions, pensions, and retail investors alike, the contagion wouldn’t stay in the crypto corner; it would ripple out into the broader economy.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spoiled the dreams of Bitcoiners worldwide Thursday, stating outright that the federal government will not be purchasing additional Bitcoin to supplement its existing supply of the cryptocurrency.
“We’re not going to be buying that,” Bessent said during a Thursday morning appearance on Fox Business.
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