My wife hit 2000% on SPX yesterdayÂ…

Why is the BOND YIELD CURVE important?
And
What has an inverted Yield Curve proven for the last century?
Time to keep a close eye on the Feds, Why have they given no guidance?
Here’s some actual data. I dont expect many to appreciate it since its not doom and gloom psycho-babble. However , for the real ones here’s some telling info:

Cliffs:



All of the demand and increasing inventory can't beat this one thing called

Inflation

The damage has been done.

There is no going back to those (2019-) prices.

Prices will drop but you know what else has dropped your purchasing power.

In certain markets it can happen but for the majority you will never see that price again.

Even if it does interest rates will eat up the deal.

Hmm. Let me think about this. I know I need high quality for things entertainment related. That's all I know.

Ethereum (ETH) competitor Cosmos (ATOM) is booming as crypto markets stage a comeback led by the leading digital a*set Bitcoin (BTC) and a handful of Metaverse tokens.
Cosmos, a Layer 1 Blockchain rose to $16.54 from a seven-day low of $11.67 on September 6, a stunning 41.7% rise.

ATOM has since stabilized and is changing hands for $16.09 at the time of writing, up 21% over the past day. Metaverse tokens are also riding the rising crypto wave, as ApeCoin (APE), the native token of the Bored Ape Yacht Club community, surged almost 15% on the day.

APE surged from a weekly low of $4.21 on Sept. 6 to a high of $5.26, up 25%. APE has since declined and is hovering around $5.10 at the time of writing.

Other coin The smart contract platform is on the rise Flow (FLOW)which last month announced a partnership with social media giant Meta to create non-fungible tokens (NFTs) to the photo-sharing platform Instagram.

Flow also surged from its weekly low of $1.75 on Sept. 6 to a high of $2.15, up 23%.

The Ethereum challenger is down slightly and is now valued at $2.13.

The gaming altcoin Axie Infinity (AXS) is also recovering as it is up 7.3% over the past 24 hours. AXS is trading at $14.89 at the time of writing. Although the token is seeing green, it is down a whopping 80% from its 2022 peak of $71.44 set in March.

 https://crypto-trading.ne .. =631b8f4b7246e

The networkÂ’s 13th and final shadow fork executed today with no apparent issues, say Ethereum core devs.

In the frenzied build-up to EthereumÂ’s much-anticipated merge, the networkÂ’s developers have deployed test after test to make sure everything goes smoothly when the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization transitions to proof of stake sometime next week.

Ethereum today successfully completed what its developers say is the absolute final dress rehearsal for the historic and massive upgrade, which is likely to occur between September 13 and 15.

The Ethereum mainnetÂ’s 13th shadow fork went live earlier today, apparently without a hitch. Shadow forks are focused trial runs of aspects of the merge, which test for potential issues and simulate the act of shifting the Ethereum mainnetÂ’s underlying mechanism from the current, proof-of-work mining model to proof of stake, which will end the practice of mining on the network.


EthereumÂ’s developers chalked up the snag to a lack of preparedness from a number of node operators who had yet to update their clients to the proper merge-ready software. Node operators are the individuals and organizations that keep the backend infrastructure of the Ethereum network operating.

At the time of the Bellatrix upgrade, 25.2% of EthereumÂ’s nodes still had yet to upgrade their software. As of writing, that figure has lowered to 15.4%, per Ethernodes.

Terence Tsao, an Ethereum core developer, told Decrypt that today’s shadow fork tested this missed block rate issue, and found it to be functioning “basically perfectly.”

The networkÂ’s developers have been running dress rehearsals of the merge almost weekly for the last few months, attempting to game out any scenarios that could potentially derail or delay its execution. With tens of billions of dollars worth of digital a*sets, apps, and decentralized finance instruments built atop the Ethereum network, there is essentially no margin for error.

Ethereum’s developers have continually signaled a*suredness that the merge will go exactly as planned. Nonetheless, the test runs have continued—perhaps, more than anything else, to offer developers some peace of mind.

“It’s just sanity checking at this point,” said Van Der Wijden.

DOCTOR BITCOIN, JAILED FOR SELLING P2P, WARNS OTHERS THEYÂ’LL BE NEXT
Bitcoin educational persona Doctor Bitcoin explains his recent arrest for selling BTC and warns that the government wonÂ’t stop with him.

In 2011, journalist and tech entrepreneur Mark Hopkins shared dinner with a longtime friend who offered to pay for his half of the meal by sending Hopkins some newly-minted bitcoin, which the friend had mined himself on his laptop. In a recent telephone interview with Bitcoin Magazine, Hopkins quipped that he had never heard of the world’s first peer-to-peer cryptocurrency before, but “being a good nerd myself,” he had his laptop with him and downloaded the needed hardware to accept the offer (about half a bitcoin to cover a coffeehouse meal — “13 or 14 bucks’” worth of magic internet money — if you were wondering).

That transaction began a years-long journey down the Bitcoin rabbit hole for Hopkins, launching an “O.G.” path which included adopting the online teaching persona of Doctor Bitcoin, becoming vice president of Geosyn Mining (based in Fort Worth, Texas) and selling his personally-mined bitcoin for many years to interested parties, in person for cash or through completely above-board bank wires.

Hopkins said that his interest in selling bitcoin was “mostly to meet people” for networking purposes, and that he rarely bothered to profit except on the largest deals, but instead focused on turning higher-net-worth buyers into long-term clients for his marketing company.

Hopkins noted that at the time, there was “no federal guidance at all” regarding bitcoin sales, so he regularly sought counsel from Texas lawmakers, who a*sured him (and published 2017’ Memorandum 1037 stating) that they would not be requiring licenses or regulating the sale of bitcoin in the state. In fact, they encouraged Hopkins and others to “bring innovation to Texas,” Hopkins said.

Yet on September 5, Hopkins announced via his Twitter account that he would be reporting to the Beaumont Federal Correctional Institute “for the crime of selling #Bitcoin a few years ago.”

“A KINGPIN IN A LOTTERY SCAM”
The arrest raised questions about what crime Hopkins had committed, exactly, particularly if he had obtained a*surance from Texas lawmakers that he was operating within the law.

In 2019, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a federal bureau of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, published 18 USC 1960, which requires that the now well-known “money transmitters’ license” be obtained by those who wish to sell bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies to the public, with a suggested penalty of up to five years’ imprisonment for selling bitcoin without obtaining the license. This is the crime that Hopkins said he is now serving time for, but selling bitcoin is not the activity that originally caught the attention of federal law enforcement.

Hopkins reports that one of his past clients was under observation for suspected participation in a Nigerian lottery scam. The buyer originally told Hopkins that she was buying bitcoin “for her husband’s electronic repair business” (he believed her at the time), although she later told investigators that she was herself “being catfished by a Nigerian,” according to Hopkins.

Charitably described by Hopkins as “an unsophisticated user,” he not only sold bitcoin to this client on around 20 separate occasions, he also patiently aided and educated her in best custody practices, as well as how to not “trigger” banking problems by using specific terms which could result in closure of her bank account (which is a fairly common occurrence and known concern for Bitcoin enthusiasts, particularly at that time). According to Hopkins, Prosecutors later disingenuously charged him with teaching this woman “how to commit bank fraud.”

On suspicion of Hopkins somehow being “a kingpin in a lottery scam” because of the amounts of money “flowing to” him, Hopkins’ family home was subjected to a raid by “15 armed agents, who waved guns and search warrants…” and who confiscated over $60,000 worth of his personal property, Hopkins said.

Being cooperative and “fully transparent” during the raid, Hopkins said that he informed the federal agents of his public Doctor Bitcoin and professional LinkedIn profile, and he shared details of his past consulting work with multiple U.S. governmental agencies (including the Federal Reserve) on bitcoin and blockchain technology. Hopkins claimed that he even explained in person to the raiding agents some best practices for using bitcoin wallets (e.g., auto-generating new addresses at random with every new use), finding himself quite surprised that agents of this white-collar crime division were not already well-versed in such tech.

Based on his credentials and nature of his work (and especially his professed innocence of the lottery scam that was actually under investigation), Hopkins was certain that these agents would soon come to understand that they “definitely have the wrong guy” and would even apologize.

However, Hopkins states now that “what likely happened” was that “they spent so many resources rolling out 15 agents to a guy’s house to solve a major crime and came up empty, so they had to find something that I was guilty of” to avoid egg on their faces, and that his named crime became “operating a money transmitters’ business without a license, based on some vague guidance given by FinCEN … about a year earlier.”

As the case progressed, Hopkins says “they decided to not come just after me, but my wife because she was on my bank account” threatening them both “not just with the money transmitter offense” but for the bank-related advice given to his client, which could result in 35 years’ imprisonment for both Mr. and Mrs. Hopkins.

“THE GOVERNMENT f*ghtS IT HAND, TOOTH AND NAIL”
Hopkins now believes the agents are guilty of “prosecutorial misconduct or extortion, depending upon how you want to look at it” for offering to leave his wife and three children out of the proceedings if he agreed to plead guilty to selling bitcoin without the required money transmitters’ license. But he added that, despite defending what’s right or wrong, “I can’t leave my family (or) take a gambit like that; my family comes first regardless of what my principles are.” And so he accepted the plea deal.

In the wake of his sentencing, Hopkins is using his Twitter account and media interviews to warn others of “the encroaching state war on privacy, and the general brokenness of the criminal justice system.”

“I mean start with Ross (Ulbricht); start with (Julian) a*sange; start with (Edward) Snowden. Look at what’s going on with the Tornado Cash developer (Alexey Pertsev), the delisting of Monero from various exchanges (and) every attempt to enhance privacy — and not just in cryptocurrency — but cryptography in general the last 20 to 30 years. The government f*ghts it hand, tooth and nail. It’s frankly getting old, because people like us … get caught in the crossfire.”

Calling for “separation of money and state,” Hopkins warned that because the Bitcoin blockchain is a permanent record, more government forces (including the newly-staffed Internal Revenue Service) will be coming for many more Bitcoiners based on old transaction history if they do not contact their legislators and “hold their feet to the fire” to protect existing First Amendment principles and privacy laws. He warned that 18 USC 1960 (the money transmitters’ license requirement) is an “existential threat... It is there every time someone transacts peer-to-peer … such as buying a truck with bitcoin, or if I split dinner with you and you pay for your half with bitcoin, you’re committing a federal crime.”

“You can see very clearly there’s an uptick” in prosecuting 18 USC 1960 cryptocurrency-related crimes, he said. And the targeting of those to charge or prosecute is “moving away from major case crimes. The Department of Justice,” Hopkins maintained, holds “clinics on how to apply the law more liberally.”

In addition to highlighting his own case, Hopkins is now actively involved with FreeRossDAO (working to free Ulbricht, who founded early Bitcoin darknet marketplace Silk Road, from prison). Hopkins said that Ulbricht is “a martyr,” whose legal situation far outweighs his own, saying, “I sold some bitcoin, I used money in a way that government didn’t like. My life is crappy today but … it’ll be better in a year. But Ross will still be in prison.”

“If we … do not demand from our government that they change this law and the application of it, given time they can come after every one of us,” Hopkins added.

HopkinsÂ’ son will be maintaining his fatherÂ’s Twitter account while Hopkins serves his sentence.
 bitcoinmagazine

The firm filed with the SEC to sell up to $500 million in Class A stock. Guess what it may want to spend the proceeds on.


Publicly traded software company MicroStategy (MSTR) is already the single largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, with over 129,000 BTC in its coffers. Now, just one month after its bombastic CEO Michael Saylor stepped down and one week after the Washington D.C. Attorney General sued the company and Saylor for alleged tax fraud, the company wants to buy more.

In a prospectus filed with the SEC on Friday, MicroStrategy said he firm has entered an agreement with investment bank Cowen to sell up to $500 million in shares of its Class A common stock.

"We may use the net proceeds from this offering to purchase additional Bitcoin," the company said in the filing. The firm warned of Bitcoin's volatility and wild price swings that saw the largest cryptocurrency by market cap trade below $20,000 earlier this week, down from an all-time-high of $68,789 in November 2021, according to CoinMarketCap data.

"Future fluctuations in Bitcoin trading prices may result in our converting Bitcoin purchased with the net proceeds from this offering into cash with a value substantially below the net proceeds from this offering," the company said.

Under Saylor, the enterprise software company has accrued a sizable Bitcoin treasury of 129,699 BTC, today worth over $2.7 billion, which the company says it plans to hold for the long term.

Last month, MicroStrategy reported a non-cash digital impairment charge of $917.8 million in the second quarter of 2022, that same month, Saylor stepped down as CEO, transitioning to executive chairman.

In the prospectus, MicroStategy added that it has no plans to engage in trading or enter into derivative contracts with its Bitcoin holding, but may sell Bitcoin as needed to generate cash for "treasury management and other general corporate purposes."

"We have not targeted any specific amount of Bitcoin holdings," the firm said. "We will continue to monitor market conditions in determining whether to conduct debt or equity financings to purchase additional Bitcoin."

 https://decrypt.co/109410 .. n-more-bitcoin

Seeing on zillow cutting prices from 20k to 100k on some houses i check in dallas area.


 https://www.cnbc.com/2022 .. me-values.html

Cliffs:

First minute of the video from the start

They can check your personal event/ big life events to determine your borrowing power or if you get a loan at all.

A tragedy has just struck the home good retailer which is f*ghting for its survival.

Things are not looking up for Bed, Bath & Beyond (BBBY) - Get Bed Bath & Beyond Inc. Report.

While the home good retailer is struggling not to disappear, tragedy has struck: its Chief Financial Officer (CFO) had allegedly just committed suicide.

According to the New York Post, a man jumped to his death from a new skyscraper known as the “Jenga Building" in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan. It is Gustavo Arnal, 52, who allegedly jumped from the 18th floor of this building on September 2, says the newspaper citing police sources.

Bed, Bath & Beyond has not yet commented on this information. The company didn't immediately respond to a request from TheStreet.

On the company's website, Arnal has the title of "Executive Vice President, Chief Financial Officer."

"Mr. Arnal joins the company in 2020 from Avon, a leading direct-selling beauty company where he helped lead a successful business turnaround effort," his biography said. "Prior to Avon, Mr. Arnal was CFO, International Divisions and Global Functions at Walgreens Boots Alliance."

Boxden we made it!


Some of you already know that I started a hot sauce brand a few years ago that was featured on Hot Ones. Everyone on this site has been super supportive (so for real, thank you all for that because it genuinely means a lot to me).

The sauce is now in 1,000 Food Lion locations and at a much cheaper price - so if anyone was ordering on Amazon or the website before but has a Food Lion, Harris Teeter, ShopRite, or Price Rite near them it's way cheaper in stores if you can find it!

Lastly, I've seen other entrepreneurs on the site and I always find it super inspiring when others are going out and doing something unique. It's not an easy journey at all - I started Sauce Bae right before turning 27 (now 31) and decided to move back in with the fam last year just so I could continue putting all my money towards the business. I still have a long ways to go because getting on the shelf is only half the battle, but I'm going to keep chipping away at it day by day.

Good luck to all my fellow BX Entrepreneurs - let's keep inspiring one another.




______________________

Update: Wow all of you are the best

I appreciate all the love and support so much. I'll be on tonight to reply to all the questions and comments, and to give thanks - happy to be a part of the BX community for all these years!

There has been no shortage of crypto casualties this summer.

On August 8, Singapore’s Hodlnaut joined fellow lenders Vauld and Celsius and Singaporean exchange Zipmex in suspending user crypto withdrawals because of “recent market conditions.”

The measure was ostensibly taken to “stabilize liquidity,” a phrase also used in Celsius’ withdrawal freeze announcement.

With little warning, investors were hit with the news that the bulk of their digital wealth had been effectively seized while firms hashed out a recovery plan. Many have been affected in varying degrees of severity and the human cost is often harrowing to read.

Left high and dry, the recent liquidity crisis has reminded many of the industry’s sage words: Not your keys, not your coins. And new evidence now shows that many are taking these words to heart this time around.

While crypto companies are filing for bankruptcy or receiving bailouts; while Coinbase, Gemini, and blockchain.com have all announced mass layoffs; while Solana and Nomad are left reeling after another multimillion-dollar attack, one subsector is flourishing: hardware wallets.


Crypto security takes center stage
Hardware wallets are often touted as the ideal option for storing crypto long-term.

They keep users’ private keys stored securely offline. Unlike software wallets, they're mostly immune to online attacks, though they have been targeted by phishing attacks, the most recent of which happened this year when a Mailchimp newsletter database containing the emails of Trezor users was compromised.

So, they’re not invulnerable, but if you’re careful and hawk-eyed, hardware wallets can be a much better alternative than their software counterparts.

The top models from Ledger or Trezor are also resistant to physical tampering, making them a safe bet for anyone looking for long-term digital a*set storage.

An exploit in Slope mobile wallet applications, for example, led to Solana users’ private keys being “inadvertently transmitted” to a “third party,” according to Solana’s developers. The attacker made off with $4.5 million in SOL and USDC.

Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao later tweeted that those who were concerned could send their funds to a hardware wallet.


Amid the wave of insolvencies, freezes, and hacks, hardware wallet sales have spiked.

A Ledger representative tells Decrypt people were always eventually going to think about security. At the Ledger Op3n conference in June, the company announced it had sold over 5 million units. "Recent issues with lenders, bridge hacks, the Solana wallet exploits, etc. have only increased demand and sales.”

He told Decrypt that Ledger sales jumped “4.5x” after Celsius’s bankruptcy.

Ledger isn’t alone, either. Trezor and SafePal have also posted a hefty rise in sales of late.

Users are ‘waking up’
Decrypt emailed representatives from Ledger, Trezor, and Singapore-based hardware wallet manufacturer SafePal to ask if they’ve seen an increase in sales during the latest crypto winter, and all three unanimously affirmed it.

SafePal replied that it had seen “substantial growth” in both product and a*set management scales, attributing it “to the collapse of centralized financial institutions and the liquidity crises affecting the crypto industry.”

SafePal didn’t offer specific sales information, but CEO Veronica Wong said that her firm believes “the growth will continue” as crypto continues to gain traction among newcomers.

A representative from Trezor also confirmed it has seen “increased interest in self-custody solutions over the past few months, although the effects of the ongoing bear market are also being felt.”

The company said that crypto users are “waking up to the fact that they could lose access to their a*sets at any time,” adding, “We believe this is a good development that should ensure that user losses are not as widespread and large as they were in the recent cascade of bankruptcies.”

The Ledger representative iterated this sentiment, telling Decrypt that “this almost had to happen for people to realize how important security is for storing people’s a*sets.”

On the day of the Solana wallet exploits, sales of Ledger hardware wallets had “more than tripled” before Ledger announced the“MOVESOL2LEDGER” discount code, which ran till August 7, offering new buyers 10% off the Nano X and the Nano S Plus models.

Ledger reported “a bigger increase” after the announcement and said both models “are seeing a similar interest.”

“While it’s really disappointing and sad for a lot of people that they lost out, something like this was going to happen. I think people are now realizing why they need to have more of a focus on security, and I think we’ve seen that reflected in the sales,” the Ledger representative.

Unfortunate and inevitable sacrifices have been made, say experts, but clearly, the spotlight is turning from yield farming and meme coins. Now, crypto security is taking center stage.

Creators and designers need new tools to build the evolving metaverse—like Caduceus, the first open blockchain dedicated to metaverse development.

The metaverse is coming, and itÂ’s set to revolutionize the way we work, play and interact with each other.

A persistent digital world, the metaverse has already attracted billions of dollars of investment from tech giants like Meta (née Facebook) and Microsoft. But efforts by legacy players to shape the direction of the metaverse could fall flat; indeed, anyone who claims to know with any degree of certainty exactly what the metaverse is or will be… doesn’t.

“They may be right, they may be wrong, but it’s important to realize that no one knows for sure,” said Matt McGuire, CTO of Caduceus, the first open blockchain dedicated to metaverse development.

A few things are certain, though; as the metaverse evolves, a lot is going to change over the next few years. And creators and designers will need new tools to help usher it into being.

Changing perceptions
Right now, weÂ’re in the metaverseÂ’s innovation phase, McGuire said.

Companies like Caduceus are creating the technology and laying the foundations that developers will build upon to create the next generation of the metaverse—the one that will achieve mainstream adoption.

But to get there, and to attract traditional businesses to the space, the market needs to get educated about the value of blockchain, including its speed and efficiency, said Caduceus CEO Tim Bullman.

“We’ve spent too long with crypto and blockchain being viewed as mechanisms to support nefarious activities,” Bullman told Decrypt. “Over the next two years, we’re going to start seeing more people really understand the benefits.”

Gotta look good
But beyond evangelizing, the best way to change perceptions is to perform.

Nearly every phase of the internetÂ’s development has been about helping people to communicate in richer, more engaging ways, from email to instant messaging to social networking, Slack and Zoom.

As to how the metaverse will change the way we communicate, “We’re not claiming to know the answer,” McGuire said. “But we are willing to bet that people will continue looking for new, modern ways to interact, and that it will probably require high computational processing, decentralized edge rendering and a scalable blockchain network.”

"WeÂ’re giving designers and creators the tools to do what they do."

—Matt McGuire
These new technologies are the key pillars that will support the future metaverse. In order to create experiences that are interactive and realistic enough to connect with mainstream audiences, developers need technology that allows them to rapidly transmit large amounts of data at super-low latency.

Basically, itÂ’s got to look good and feel immersive, whether that means a 3D environment peopled with realistic avatars, or tens of thousands of people interacting in cyberspace, or some kind of mixed reality version of Instagram.



Decentralized edge rendering, in which processing of graphical data is distributed to the fringes of the network rather than in centralized servers, enables increased graphical fidelity and reduced latency for users, without requiring them to invest in expensive graphical hardware. That means designers can get on with the business of creating a realistic metaverse, without worrying about whether, or how, users will be able to access it.

“We’re giving designers and creators the tools to do what they do,” McGuire said. “We’re the enablers of what’s to come.”

Those creators and designers are already making use of Caduceus' tools. Hollywood film producer Ivan Atkinson, whose company One Van Films produced features including Aladdin, The Gentlemen and Wrath of Man, has teamed up with 3D metaverse platform Light Cycle to launch a new NFT and DAO project in the Caduceus ecosystem.

The project will enable film fans to own tokenized moments from films and interact with films as they watch them, for example by choosing a different outcome for the narrative.

Coming soon
And what’s to come—a truly decentralized metaverse—will only materialize when the underlying infrastructure is robust enough to support the sort of experiences that can attract and retain mainstream users and appeal to traditional businesses.

And for that to happen, three things are necessary: the development of a decentralized network, multi-chain interaction and the ability for people to own their own information.

“That way it’s not all about these giant big tech companies that control your data and profile you,” McGuire said. “People will have access to their data and be able to revoke that access, which goes hand in hand with the concept of a decentralized network.”



This all has to happen seamlessly, though, and without onerous gas fees. The metaverse isnÂ’t going to take off if people have to pay every time they want to perform a function on the blockchain.

“You need the transactional costs to be comparable to a web API, which doesn’t cost the user anything,” McGuire said. “If not, why would anybody use blockchain?”

And we are getting close, he said.

“Over the next 18 months, we’re going to see rapid progress through the early adopters phase as all of this starts to hit the early majority,” McGuire said. “Two years from now, you’ll see somewhere between 10% and 18% of companies with some form of blockchain-related project happening.”

From merge to metaverse miners
Sooner than that, though, thereÂ’s a big question mark on the horizon for Ethereum miners in the leadup to the network's much-anticipated merge.

The change from a proof-of-work consensus mechanism to proof-of-stake is set to make Ethereum miners redundant. That will free up their expensive GPU mining rigs for new applications—like powering Caduceus’ decentralized crowd rendering network.


“There’s a lot of revenue potential there for them,” McGuire said. Miners receive Caduceus Metaverse Protocol (CMP) tokens in exchange for the use of their computational resources to support everything from raw graphics processing for video to games engine processing.

Part of the jigsaw
That network of miners is key to Caduceus’ vision of a decentralized metaverse—something that’s vital if the metaverse is to avoid the same fate as Web2, where big tech giants harvest user data for their own ends.

“We’ll have to see how this all plays out, but I think we’re going to end up with a shared data experience,” McGuire said. “And that’s down to the creators—to the people who bring the vision to life.”