Bitcoin investors in Philadelphia an optimistic year after the crypto crash

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At 73, Yoav Zohar is an exception among millennials and Gen Z who make up the bulk of the cryptocurrency community.

While many were still in elementary school, Zohar learned about the ups and downs of new technology during the dot-com boom of the early 2000s.

So when it comes to crypto digital money that is not tied to a central bank, Zohar will not hold more than $5.

I don’t want to invest in this because I think my money is more important than experimenting, laughed Zohar at DeFi Philly, a meeting for decentralized finance enthusiasts at Northern Liberties.

If 2022 was any indicator, its caution paid off.

It was a particularly brutal year for Bitcoin, whose valuation ballooned last spring before plummeting in May. What was to follow was blow after blow for the highly volatile industry.

The Bitcoin price fell over 60% and around $2 trillion disappeared from the market as a whole as wealthy investors retreated while the little guy was left in the red. Then came high-profile scandals, including the fall of the FTX stock exchange and its billionaire CEO-turned-fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried. In a domino effect, crypto hedge funds shut down and the administration of President Joe Bidens, which had been reluctant to get involved, launched a sweeping attempt to regulate the industry.

The fall in cryptos particularly affected black and brown Americans who, feeling excluded from traditional financial markets, were more likely to invest and ultimately lose.

Zohar read the headlines. So he comes to DeFi mostly for pizza, drinks, and heated discussions about what may have prematurely crowned the future of finance.

Among the fifteen other participants, this conservative attitude was rare. While some agreed Bitcoin had had its day for now, there was a sense that something bigger and better was on the horizon.

PolyDoge is the one that jumped out at me, said a member who asked to go through Tom T-Bytes so employers wouldn’t know about his investments.

He is talking about an altcoin, there are thousands of cryptocurrencies besides bitcoin which is worth $0.000000008299. It’s an offshoot of Dogecoin, the widely meme crypto that periodically resurfaces from Twitter owner Elon Musk.

DeFi Philly member Yoav Zohar is hesitant to invest in crypto, but enjoys the tech discussions and community that come with the monthly tech meet…..Read MorePhiladelphia Inquirer

T-Bytes claimed that it made a profit on this risky investment and is now turning to other coins. But not all of his investments have ballooned.

Wearing a purple tie-dye shirt, T-Bytes isn’t the only member to admit to taking losses after last year’s downturn (they’re hesitant to call it a crash).

Kaseem Dodson became crypto curious at the start of last year, just before prices fell. But Dodson, 33, sees bitcoin hibernation as another bear market. Rumor of an upcoming rebound keeps him invested in the industry.

Dodson also likes that crypto has, thus far, resisted government regulation. But this feature has led to myriad peddlers taking advantage of pink-eyed investors with little knowledge of how crypto works.

Just this month, the US Department of Justice has scooped up more than $112 million from pork butcher schemes, where scammers contact victims via messaging apps with tempting offers on high-yield investments . Once the Bitcoin is transferred, you can guess what happens next.

And in Philadelphia, it remains to be seen whether victims of VBit Technologies will ever see the $11 million and more frozen in their virtual accounts after the Washington Avenue-based company closed last summer. After VBits lawyers dropped the troubled company this month, citing the silence of its elusive CEO, the results of the mounting federal lawsuits against it are hazy.

These are the scams. Other initiatives, while above all else, have yet to fully turn Philly into a crypto transmission hotspot like Miami or San Francisco.

Shortly after announcing a plan to integrate crypto into city funding, city hall rejected the idea. Meanwhile, dozens of collectible NFTs from regional names like Wawa and the 76ers remain unsold or are being sold for ridiculous sums. And while a West Philadelphia house advertising an integrated crypto-miner initially caused a stir, a publicly available ledger shows that today it only rakes in around $14 a month.

None of this fazes 30-year-old computer engineer and DeFis leader Michael Ghen, though he is frustrated by the public’s perception of crypto as a secondary market. Sympathetic to stories of losses from fraudsters, he created a guide for newcomers that outlines the mechanics behind popular scams.

Beware of its buyer, Ghen said.

Minimizing public risk is a Herculean task, exemplified by the nearly 100 Bitcoin ATMs dotted around those in Philadelphia that law enforcement says are highly effective vehicles for fraud, often in low-income communities.

Ghen said foreign hackers are giving crypto a bad name. Yet the industry is grappling with the recklessness of former darlings like Bankman-Fried, who was arrested and faces multiple charges of mishandling client funds after his Bahamas-based trading company implosed. in November.

A group came up with an idea by printing the 31-year-old’s disgraced face on toilet paper at a recent crypto conference.

It’s unclear how big financial institutions, including Pennsylvania billionaire Jeff Yass and his Bala Cynwyd-based international group Susquehanna, handle their crypto hedging, though the trend of big players pulling out of the market is on the rise. rise.

Like the statue of Don Quixote which dominates the avenue Girard, perhaps we should believe it. It is a block away from where Ghen and DeFi Philly keep faith.

It’s also near where tech entrepreneur Thomas Jay Rush led a talk called What the Mennonites Can Teach us About Blockchains, a reference to systems that record crypto transactions.

That the Neo-Luddite cousins ​​of the Amish are invested in Bitcoin has never been mentioned. Instead, Rush praised their ability to stick together and quickly raise a barn, a metaphor for how decentralized finance can navigate the future.

All communities come together, Rush said with all the optimism of a Crypto.com Super Bowl ad circa 2022. They do things that individuals cannot.

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