10th October 2024 > > Scams & miners.

tl;dr

A deep-dive into giveaway scams by AVG. We revisit BTC miners.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

BTC back to levels we saw a week ago. This ever-extending sideways chop shows no sign of abating.

Occasional Series – Bridget Phillipson

Education Secretary, Bridget Class Warrior Phillipson, has partly justified putting 20% VAT on private school fees by stating on X “Our students need careers advice more than private schools need AstroTurf pitches”.

Just hours before that heartfelt, and sincerely insightful post, Phillipson had been playing hockey, a true passion of hers though it is only rarely encouraged outside of private or grammar schools, on an AstroTurf pitch at a “prominent private school”, and not for the first time.

Greed and double standards course through the veins of every politician of any hue.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – Scams

One particularly successful scam is the promise of crypto giveaways purportedly by famous people. These started simply enough with a promise on a website with an image of say Elon Musk to double any crypto you send to a specific wallet. Obviously, that would be the last you would see of that cash, but it fooled a lot of people, leveraging as it did off trust and greed.

These types of scams are far more complex these days. AVG has provided a deep-dive into the latest iterations. The feral scammers do put in a lot of work. It’s a shame that this knowledge, energy, and enthusiasm can’t be put to better use. Give this is a read, it is most interesting:

https://decoded.avast.io/martinchlumecky1/cryptocore-unmasking-the-sophisticated-cryptocurrency-scam-operations/?cid=421440854.1707496981

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – BTC miners

We love a bit of BTC miner action here at CC Towers.

Miners behave like a leveraged bet on the price of BTC – gains and losses are both amplified – but without the risk of liquidation, which frequently causes so many leveraged players so much pain, known as rekt in crypto parlance.

Ecoinometrics has published a piece about Marathon, a miner with an MSTR BTC accumulation strategy. Marathon is leveraging its balance sheet to buy more BTC to make its stock performance turbocharged (up and down) with respect to the price of BTC.

But as that research is behind a paywall, I cannot in all good conscience give you the details of the commentary. But what I can share is this graphic, which shows that all the miners are underpriced relative to BTC:

Currently the CC Treasury has exposure to Iris, TeraWulf, Argo, CleanSpark, Marathon, and perennial favourite of ours Riot, which interestingly is the laggard here.

The total market cap of the miners is but a fraction of the total market cap of BTC. Miners have the advantage of being easily tradeable, liquid stocks, mostly on the Nasdaq I believe, but your online broking firm is platform agnostic.

And for those of us in the UK, personal investments can go into an ISA wrapper making all capital gains tax free. That is going to become even more valuable after the budget at the end of this month.

Make no mistake, if you think buying BTC is risky – which it is – then buying miners is doubly or more so. But I just can’t help myself.can now sleep a little easier at night.