Two weeks ago I moved into the area where I recently bought a small amount of land to clean up and build an off-grid homestead on. It’s a very rural area, and I’m feeling very at peace with the lack of noise, the low population density, and the abundance of nature. It’s everything I had been working towards for the past couple of years.
But there are trade offs. I get no cell phone service where I live. And I’m currently deciding whether to get the shitty local satellite internet or hold out for Starlink. There are pros and cons to both, but I’ll probably hold out for Starlink. It seems that it is starting to roll out in my area.
All this is to say that I can easily go days without checking news. And even then, I can just check quickly enough to get a rough overview of things happening in the world as I’m in town running errands. Since that’s a 30 minute drive each way, I try to keep those drives to a minimum.
As a result of all of this, I’m getting crypto news MUCH slower than it is actually happening right now.
I expected this. With an anticipated lack of speed with which to respond to changes in the crypto industry (read: The US government’s continued attacks on financial autonomy), I had moved 100% of all of my crypto assets into bitcoin, and then into cold storage. Time to hodl until I have the tech resources to actually do stuff and things.
I don’t like to keep anything on exchanges, because we all know how risky that is. But that seemed especially important right now. And it turns out it was a smart move. So far this year the two main exchanges that I have used have become inaccessible as an on-ramp or off-ramp for fiat.
Bittrex was a bummer when they closed in the US, then filed for bankruptcy, because that was the simplest way for me to purchase HIVE with USD, especially in small quantities at a time.
Because the HIVE community has such great tools at their disposal as Tribaldex and Hive Engine, I chalked up Bittrex closing as a minor inconvenience. There were still exchanges that I could purchase crypto on and trade for HIVE. Binance.us was my go-to exchange for most of my non-HIVE crypto shenanigans.
I knew they were next on the SEC’s chopping block. Them or Coinbase. So, I wasn’t surprised when I was able to quickly check my email this morning and find an email from yesterday from Binance.us stating their intent to become a crypto-only exchange. Apparently this is due to payment partners feeling pressure, and not wanting to work with the exchange. And apparently all funds are “safu”.
Apparently.
We won’t know until we know, it seems.
But nothing I’ve said here is news, or valuable analysis to this community, which is savvier than most. So I want to sign off with questions for folks in the US who believe in crypto’s multiple use cases beyond price speculation, and for folks who believe in the long term value of the HIVE platform in particular.
Which US available exchanges are looking the most resilient for the remainder of the year? How have your own acquisition, trading, and holding plans changed this year? What would you be doing differently if your reaction speed was reduced to a week or slower?
Thanks for reading. And forgive any slow replies to comments.