The Bucket's Den

So this is very funny, to me, for two reasons. One is that now, if a crypto-bro wants to not commit a felony, they have to un-anonymize their wallet, so they can no longer trade as an anon. They would be trading under their name (assuming they're trading $10,000 or more, per year i believe if i read right). This defeats some of the major uses of cryptocurrency, especially as it was being used to launder money, and it means your identity on the blockchain would now become knowledge people would have access to, and track all future and past trades you have made on the blockchain.

the second and funnier thing is what this does to NFTs. a cash asset is any asset which can be easily converted into cash within three months. according to this new regulation, you available cash assets would now include your NFTs (assuming they're valuable enough etc. etc.), and you would be expected to borrow and pay obligations based off of that information. so if a collector came to make good on their loan to you, they would be considering your NFT as a cash asset that can be used to pay them, but of course *selling NFTs is a fucking scam*. They're *not* cash assets, because outside of very specific circumstances, those $50,000 NFTs are not bought up again for the same or higher value.

many (it's hard to know exactly how many, but this exact thing i'm about to describe has been documented a bunch of times in this space) NFTs have their values inflated purely through insider trading, in a scam that goes (in its simplest form) something like: person 1 makes an NFT, and person 1 sells the NFT to person 2 for a very high amount of crypto, some amount of which is given back to person 2 in another, altered form so as to not be traceable as just trading money back and forth. this causes the NFT to become "worth" that amount of money that was paid for it (this is also how most of the real world art market works too!). Do this to like 5 of an artist's NFTs, and suddenly it looks like that artist's work is worth X amount of money, despite no one having actually *paid* that much for it really, but now that the value of their work appears to be high, it can be sold to rubes for that high amount for real now.

which is all a way to say that, if you are said rube, and you just bought a shitty picture of a monkey smoking a joint for $75,000, that is now considered cash you can access within three months when it comes to paying debtors (or anything else that involves how much cash and assets you have on hand, including how much you pay in taxes), even though, if you tried to sell it, no one would buy it for that much. so people will be expecting you to have money you do not actually have the ability to access. Not only that, but you would have had to un-anonymize you wallet's identity on the blockchain to buy the monkey, so everyone knows who the rube is.

So I go down to the basement, which is well-lit and finished and indeed there are more pepsi but also in the fridge is a massive tortise. This animal was the dimensions of a desktop computer and probably outweighed a labrador. It’s not moving, and is set in the middle of a plastic tray so it’s apparently supposed to be there. I go back upstairs.

“Hey Andrew.” I say, nonchalantly. “So is the tortise in the fridge down there for soup or what?”

“The what?” says the other member of the group project. I don’t remember her name, just that she always wore her hair in pigtails with butterfly clips that were based on real butterflies and she had at least a dozen species.

“Oh! No, that’s Andrew Too.” he says. “His species hibernates so he stays in the fridge for the holidays.”

“You named your tortise after you?” I ask.

“No, uh- Well, my grandfather got him in Egypt or somewhere while he was on leave during the war and He was named Andrew, so he thought it would be funny to name him ‘Andrew Too’. …Then Mom named me after him so Gandpa left me Andrew Too in his will. He’s pretty cool when he’s awake. Lets us dress him up for summer holidays, doesn’t bark.”

“Oh!” Said Butterflies. “My dad served in the Gulf War too! What unit was he in?”

The kestrel shuffle! Gotta keep them eggs warm!