Bernard Madoff died on April 14 at the age of 82.
Since being imprisoned in 2009, Madoff has spent nearly twelve years in prison. Mastermind of the largest Ponzi scheme in history, a symbol of Wall Street greed and one of the most popular stockbrokers in high finance.
Madoff's life was full of legends and embarrassing. He gained wealth and fame with his wisdom and hard work, but he ruined all of them with a shocking scam.
Madoff was born into a Jewish family in New York. In 1960, after graduating from Hofstra University Law School in New York, he founded Bernard Madoff Investments with $5,000 he earned by using summer jobs as a lifeguard and installing garden sprinklers. Securities companies engaged in securities brokerage business. In 1991, Madoff became the chairman of the Nasdaq board of directors. Under his leadership, Nasdaq became a stock exchange capable of rivaling the New York Stock Exchange, and made great contributions to the listing of Apple, Cisco, Google and other companies on Nasdaq in the future.
In 2000, Bernard Madoff had about $300 million in assets. In 2001, Madoff Company was known as one of the three brokerage companies providing listing consultation in the Nasdaq stock market and the third largest brokerage company in the New York Stock Exchange.
However, Madoff is not satisfied with this. In order to pursue greater profits, his company promises an annual return rate of 18%-20% to attract investment funds. When the financial crisis hit in 2008 and investors demanded the redemption of $7 billion in funds, Madoff couldn't come up with the money, so he had to show his cards in the end. Only then did Madoff confess to his son that he concocted a giant pyramid-laminated "Ponzi scheme" that defrauded more than 4,800 clients totaling more than 60 billion dollars. In the end, Madoff was imprisoned, and Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison for defrauding as much as 65 billion U.S. dollars.
Here we first introduce what is a Ponzi scheme:
Ponzi scheme is a name for investment fraud in the financial field, and it is the ancestor of pyramid scheme (Pyramid scheme). What are the characteristics of the so-called "Ponzi scheme"?
1. The anti-investment law of low risk and high return;
2. The characteristics of funds moving and making up for the demolition of the east wall and replenishment of the west wall;
Three, snowball-like pyramid features.
Interestingly, Bitcoin was born just one year after the financial crisis, and during its 12-year development, it has been considered a "Ponzi scheme" countless times by the world.
In "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Currency System", Satoshi Nakamoto described Bitcoin as follows: "An electronic payment system, he gives the principle of cryptography, rather than based on credit, so that any two parties who reach an agreement can directly conduct Payment without intermediary participation.” At that time, he may not have realized that he had opened a new era. And this era actually mirrors Madoff's hidden destiny.
Back in 1944, at the end of World War II, the United States relied on its superiority in the war to become the master of the world order. In terms of financial hegemony, it established the Bretton Woods system with 44 countries preparing to establish the United Nations. It established the US dollar in the post-war international Central to the monetary system.
The U.S. dollar became the "equivalent" of gold, and the United States assumed the obligation to exchange gold at $35 an ounce, and the U.S. dollar played the role of a world currency. However, with the rapid economic development and limited gold production, the gold reserves in the United States are insufficient to bring more currency increments to the modern financial system.
The peg between the U.S. dollar and gold finally ended in 1971, and international currencies changed from fixed exchange rates to floating exchange rates. Because the U.S. dollar broke away from the constraints of the gold standard, it began to print banknotes crazily, and the risks brought about by this also broke out in 2008. With the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in the United States as the fuse, the subprime mortgage crisis triggered a global financial tsunami, which also led to the collapse of Madoff's "Ponzi scheme" and the birth of Bitcoin.
Coming out of the financial crisis, from the minority to the public in the past twelve years, Bitcoin has been misunderstood, questioned, sought after, and shouted and killed. Finally, on the day of April 14, 2021, the coinbase Listed as a symbol, standing in front of the world with dignity.
Coinbase is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States. As one of the most popular consumer-oriented cryptocurrency platforms in the world, Coinbase has 35 million users and average daily transaction volume of more than $500 million on most days. According to an S-1 registration statement filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Coinbase’s net revenue in 2020 was $1.14 billion, up from $483 million the previous year.
There is no doubt that Bitcoin is becoming more accepted by mainstream companies, and the emergence of Coinbase as a public company not only provides some transparency to the more opaque corners of the market, but also represents a step in the path of cryptocurrency acceptance as a mainstream asset class. Milestone, this is a historic breakthrough moment for the cryptocurrency industry.
More importantly, the listing of Coinbase also proved that Bitcoin is not a tool for money laundering by helping to alleviate the stigma against Bitcoin. Many people regard cryptocurrency as the domain of money laundering criminals and illegal transactions. People's mistrust of its underlying technology and structures.
The gray line of the grass snake, the veins are thousands of miles away.
The day Coinbase went public, Bernard Madoff died.
Although since the birth of Bitcoin, various projects with obvious characteristics of "Ponzi schemes" such as tokenplus have appeared in the encrypted world, and the future of the encrypted world once seemed to be shaky. will stop.
The alternation of the old and the new world is exactly April 14, 2021.
The future has already arrived.
