Joe Knows
Joe Kennedy, father of JFK and RFK, was one of the very few millionaires who survived the Stock Market Crash of 1929 unscathed. Joe credited his good fortune to hearing a shoeshine boy giving stock tips. “If a 12 year old kid thinks he understands the market, it has gone crazy. It’s time for me to get out.”
The gas station / mini-mart that I drive past every day recently expanded its offerings to include “Super Hot Fried Chicken Available 24 Hours” (Just the thing for drunks when the bars closed and the Taco Bell drive-thru is under construction), “Live Bait” (There’s no fishing hole within miles. It will be dead bait by the time you get there), and “Bitcoin Sold Here”. As Joe Kennedy would say, “If hungry drunks and foolish fishermen think they understand cryptocurrency, it’s time for me to get out.”
What would Joe say if he heard that North Korean hackers stole more than $6 billion in crypto (appropriately enough this weekend on Halloween)? The theft took all of 20 minutes before the victim, Binance, froze $3 billion of the theft. The remaining $3 billion is adrift in cyberspace and unrecoverable. The benefit of cryptocurrency is that it is non-traceable. Why take the time and effort to keep the FBI and the IRS from your ill-gotten gains with holding companies in the Cayman Islands when you can go to the gas station mini-mart and buy non-traceable Bitcoin?
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Surely, the Feds are aware of this and will regulate crypto. One would think that allowing $3 billion to go into Kim Jong Un’s pocket is a bad idea. He can build a few more nuclear-armed missiles with that money.
Or maybe not. Trump, Inc. made $1.7 billion last year from its crypto investments. Donnie pooh-poohed the Great Crypto Hack of 2026 with “We are looking into that.” Sure you are, Donnie.
How big is Big Crypto? Within a half hour of the hack, Binance reserved $6.34 billion to cover the stolen crypto. Would even the biggest banks in the world be able to find $6 billion in 30 minutes? That’s kind of fishy.
Joe Kennedy would advise us to get out of crypto. It’s a bubble about to burst as soon as Donnie is out of office.
By Ed Dufton
