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Jed McCaleb…and Bill Clinton?
By ProCoinNews•October 23, 2022 5:50 pm•3,566 views views• Comments
This post is for WILD SPECULATORS only!
I always get a kick when the Digital Asset Investor talks about wild speculation.
And it’s one thing when we’re speculating about price or lawsuits settling, but this speculation is going way deeper, and it comes to us from a reader.
This is a follow up to an article we posted recently about Jed McCaleb, Liberty Reserve and Costa Rica.
I’ll post the full article below in case you missed it.
But the essence of that article was Jed McCaleb (one of the original founders of Ripple) is a very perplexing individual.
Not much is known about his history, his family, his childhood.
He’s been involved with nearly everything big in Crypto: Mt. Gox, founding Ripple, founding Stellar, Liberty Reserve…ties to the Satoshi Four?…and on and on!
Oh, and not only does he have deep ties, but he always seems to skate and bail before bad stuff happens.
In other words, seems like he’s a “Made Man”.
Well, in response to that post we got a reply today via our Crpyto Tip Hotline with a very interesting theory…
WARNING: this is where the wild speculation comes in!
A man named Jonathan (last name withheld for privacy) sent us this message suggesting that he has been studying Jed McCaleb for a long time and trying to track down his roots, and he thinks the roots lead right to Bill Clinton!
Yes, you read that right.
Read his full theory here:
In case that’s hard to read, I’ll copy the text below:
I share your ideas from your recent article
“Liberty Reserve, Jed McCaleb, Japan and Costa Rica…
October 21, 2022 5:31 pm”
I do believe McCaleb is a “Made-Man”.
I have investigated this same subject and have determined that
Jed McCaleb is the illegitimate son of Bill Clinton.
Here’s why-
– No one knows who McCaleb’s parents are,
it is a closely guarded secret.
( Quote from harraiyatimes – )
” Ніѕ fаmіlу lаtеr rеlосаtеd tо Lіttlе Rосk,
(from Fayetteville) ѕtіll іn Аrkаnѕаѕ, whеrе hе ѕреnt mоѕt
оf hіѕ еаrlу lіfе. … Не hаѕ nоt dіѕсlоѕеd whо hіѕ раrеntѕ
аrе аnd аlѕо іf hе hаѕ аnу ѕіblіngѕ оr nоt.”
(my summation is that “his family” consisted of an unwed mother,
following Bill Clinton to Little Rock)
– McCaleb was born in 1975 in Fayetteville, Arkansas.
– After Bill Clinton graduated from Yale Law School in 1973, he
moved back to Arkansas with a job teaching law at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville
– Bill Clinton was married in Fayetteville on October 11, 1975,
his single status of opportunity and ready access to college women was from 1973 to 1975.
– I have studied countless photos of these two men carefully comparing their facial features- it’s a match.
I started this investigation because it struck me as very peculiar that a man so young with no parents could get banking privileges with J.P. Morgan and consistently skate from every legal disaster he’s been square in the middle of. That level of cover only comes from the highest of places.
Wow!
I told you it was wild.
But not too crazy when you really give it a fair shot.
First of all, let’s just compare pictures like Jonathan says he has done.
I started taking a look and I absolutely see the resemblance, how about you?
I mean, you account for some different genes with the mother and it’s not implausible at all!
I had a little fun and ran the photos through an online face comparison app, and the app said we had about a 33-37% match:
Interesting!
Is this why Jed burst onto the scene?
Did he have a secret hand guiding and funding him?
Did he have connections being made behind the scenes to make his paths straight?
I’m not even saying anything corrupt was going on, but we’ve all now lived through “10% for the Big Guy” so is this really all that implausible?
I think not.
Oh, and once you bring the Clintons into this, you’re only one degree of separation away from, you guessed it, Gary Gensler.
Anyone remember this?
SEC Chief Gary Gensler Was Hillary Clinton’s Campaign CFO During Russia-gate Payments…
UH OH!
A major story is breaking today that involves Securities and Exchange Commission head Gary Gensler.
In fact, just like all the good stories this one was hidden in plain sight but is now being uncovered and revisisted.
The revolving door of Wall Street / Government can lead to some lucrative opportunities if you’re in the club, but as we’re now learning it can also put you in some very compromising situations.
ProCoinNews does not take a side in politics, other than we vote with our wallets and we vote for those people who are pro-crypto and pro-American innovation.
But we’re also not shy about reporting on a story when it touches politics because we have a mission here to report the truth wherever we find it.
And the truth has found Gary Gensler.
After leaving as Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, it appears Gensler found his way to a cozy position as CFO of the Hillary Clinton 2016 Campaign…and the money was flowing free and fast according to many reports.
There appears to be an all-out MSM blackout of this story by any media source even slightly left of John F. Kennedy, but it appears based on recent court filings by John Durham that not only is Hillary’s campaign accused of spying on both the Trump Campaign and the Trump Presidency (is that treason?) but also of creating and spreading the discredited Russia-gate story.
Take a look:
So according to the Durham probe, the Clinton campaign was not only behind the Steele Dossier and Alfa Bank hoax, but it SPIED on the Trump campaign AND White House.
Because many of the allegations made by Durham include the intentional payments of money to promulgate the Russia-gate hoax, and it appears to be inconceivable that those could not have flown through Gensler.
As I said above: UH-OH!
The story is breaking wide open today with The Gateway Pundit leading the charge in connecting the dots:
Gary Gensler, Biden’s Head of Securities and Exchange Commission, was running Hillary’s campaign finances in 2015-2016, when millions flew from her campaign to entities wt the sole purpose of making up a Russia collusion story that led to spying on candidate and President Trump pic.twitter.com/tpxUb1tqZs
Let’s go back in time to 2016 and this article from CNN praising Gensler’s abilities on the Hillary campaign:
Hillary Clinton’s campaign will add to its top ranks a man who’s known for being tough on Wall Street.
Gary Gensler, the former chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, will serve as the Clinton campaign’s chief financial officer, Bloomberg reported.
Gensler would bring a wealth of knowledge about the financial industry, as well as the federal agencies that regulate it, to the newly launched campaign.
He was chairman of the CFTC, the government agency that oversees the derivatives markets, from 2009 to 2014. He previously served in senior Treasury Department roles under President Bill Clinton, and prior to joining the Clinton administration worked at Goldman Sachs for almost 20 years.
Bart Chilton, a former CFTC commissioner who served alongside Gensler, told CNN that Gensler was an “effective leader” at the agency, adept at juggling the demands of working with lawmakers on Capitol Hill and regulating the financial sector.
“Secretary Clinton will be well served by his financial and strategic acumen,” Chilton said. “I know he’s deeply committed to the Secretary, and to her public policy agenda.”
It might seem surprising that Hillary Clinton picked a former Goldman Sachs guy to manage her campaign finances as CFO and advise her on economic policy, considering all the criticism she gets over her Wall Street ties. But Gary Gensler is no ordinary veteran of the “Government Sachs” cabal. By his own admission, Gensler underwent a major transformation from a Goldman Sachs executive and Rubinite (part of the group of loyalists around former Treasury Secretary and Goldman chief Robert Rubin who deregulated Wall Street in the 1990s) to a true believer in regulation following the 2008 financial crash. “All of us that were involved at the time, and certainly myself, should have done more to protect the American public through aggressive regulation,” he said shortly before he became chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the Obama administration, where he would earn praise from liberals for cracking down on derivatives trading.
Over tea at Hillary Clinton’s Washington home in late 2014, Elizabeth Warren warned her host that when it comes to Wall Street, what mattered most was the people Clinton surrounded herself with. Months later, as Clinton launched her presidential campaign, Gary Gensler, who had been a Goldman Sachs banker before he became a senior policy aide and Bob Rubin protégé during the deregulatory years of B
The deeper explanation is that Gensler is a financial-policy unicorn—a deregulator turned reformer. As head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Gensler became known as one of President Barack Obama’s toughest regulators, willing to buck his friends and former colleagues to tighten rules on the $400 trillion swaps market following the 2008 crisis. His name became an expletive to many on Wa
Even for a former regulator, it’s not the most glamorous role; every day, he’s given a big stack of checks to sign. He insisted on using strict accounting practices so that the campaign wouldn’t fall into debt by leaving costs off its balance sheet until bills are paid, as campaigns often do. He hopes to end the campaign in November with nothing left in the bank and no debt, either. Obama 2012 end
The Hillary campaign took over the DNC’s financials and then hid how the money was being spent by funneling it through its attorney Elias and Perkins Coie. Millions were passed onto its attorneys where they used this money for activities being investigated by the Durham investigation now. The Clinton campaign paid Perkins Coie $5.6 million in legal fees from June 2015 to December 2016, according to campaign finance records, and the DNC paid the firm $3.6 million.
We now know the money that Hillary’s team paid entities to link Trump to Russia.
This all happened while Marc Elias was general counsel and Gary Gensler was CFO of the Hillary campaign. What are the odds these two individuals knew everything that was going on?
And now if you missed it and would like to dive really deep, let’s talk Jed McCaleb, Liberty Reserve, Open Coin, Costa Rica, Japan, and so much more:
Liberty Reserve, Jed McCaleb, Japan and Costa Rica…
Buckle up friends, we’re going on a deep dive today…
A few days ago, we brought you a story on the “Satoshi Four”…at least that’s what I’m calling them, and I think we may have coined that term here at ProCoinNews.
Well, it comes from the recent revelation that despite leading the public to believe NO ONE in the U.S. Government knows who Satoshi is, that’s actually not true.
Not true at all, it turns out.
In fact, it turns out very early on the Feds went to interview Satoshi and they learned it was a group of four individuals.
Here’s one more fun video before we move on and really go deep.
Here is former SEC Chair Jay Clayton being asked if he knows who Satoshi is.
Joe Lubin’s elbow thinks this guy is nervous and has a really bad “tell”…
Watch here:
Now that we’ve seen that video… check out Jay Clayton’s response to the “do you know who Satoshi is?” Nervous much? pic.twitter.com/Fp4xGH7iwo
— wEeZiE {X}💭GaryGenslerResign (@NerdNationUnbox) July 12, 2022
I’m no body language expert, but I’m pretty sure that’s one of the biggest lies I’ve ever seen.
Jay, don’t ever try to make a career in playing poker, you wouldn’t fare well.
So let’s recap quickly on what we’ve learned so far:
First, the Government has known from VERY early on who/what Satoshi is.
Second, they’ve been lying through their teeth claiming they didn’t know.
Third, most likely all big business, big banking and big investment houses know as well, because there’s no way someone like Michael Saylor is betting his entire company on Bitcoin if he doesn’t know who the Founder is, if the Founder might come back, if the Founder might be a foreign country, etc. They know. They all know. And they’ve been lying to you.
That knowledge led to a great graphic The Working Money Channel posted recently:
That graphic suggests that Three of the Four members of “Satoshi” are most likely Jed McCaleb, David Schwartz, Arthur Britto and one more person.
We go into much more detail on that in this article:
Now I want to talk Jed McCaleb, Costa Rica, Japan, Mt.Gox, Liberty Reserve, and how all of this may be connected.
The man who seems to be at the middle of just about all of this is Jed McCaleb.
Jed has been a notorious figure in the XRP Community for several years due to his “Tacostand Wallet” where he has been systematically selling the billions of XRP he received when he left the company.
Many argue this has suppressed XRP’s price for years.
Others say it’s had no impact.
To me, the story here is much deeper.
Whether Jed’s sales of XRP have hurt the XRP price is far less interesting and far less important than these questions:
Why does Jed seem to be involved in just about everything in crypto dating back to the near beginning?
Why does Jed always seem to exit right before things crash?
Even after the crash, why does Jed never face any legal liability or legal restrictions of any kind?
For example, there is no dispute that Jed was one of the founding partners of Ripple Labs and there is also no dispute that Jed has been selling his XRP for years, both before and during the SEC lawsuit.
So why does the SEC sue Ripple Labs and Chris Larsen and Brad Garlinghouse but NOT Jed McCaleb?
Certainly, he’s well know. He’s an undisputed co-founder of Ripple Labs (Garlinghouse is not). He’s continued to sell millions if not billions of XRP during the lawsuit — which the SEC claims is an unregistered security. Garlinghouse, to the best of my knowledge, has not.
So why sue Garlinghouse and not McCaleb?
That’s the first of many questions that just don’t seem to make sense.
Unless, Jed is a “made man”.
Has Jed been on the inside track since the very beginning?
We know David Schwartz is ex-CIA (which means CIA), so what is McCaleb? Is he connected?
Here’s another question: XLM is mostly a clone of XRP with a few minor changes. Why is Ripple Labs sued and not McCaleb’s current company, Stellar Labs? Why wouldn’t both be sued? Is it because that would be a little TOO close to comfort for McCaleb?
We’re just asking questions here and we’re only just scratching the surface.
Let’s keep going…
Now let’s talk Mt.Gox.
Jed founded Mt.Gox which we all know had one of the most infamous hacks (allegedly) in all of Bitcoin, almost leading to the end of the blockchain.
Once again, Jed was right at the heart of the story, but escapes unscathed.
That he sold out in 2011 to Mark “MagicalTux” Karpeles, a French programmer living in Japan. Mr. Karpeles rewrote the entire code, so Mr. McCaleb’s fingerprints, literally and figuratively, were nowhere near the scene. Mr. McCaleb even told ArsTechnica.com that he himself had lost $50,000 in a Mt. Gox account when it tanked.
Even if the extent of Mr. McCaleb’s involvement in the Mt. Gox collapse is never completely known, its immolation hangs over him like a toxic cloud. According to a leaked 2014-2017 Mt. Gox business plan, “MtGox (Japan) has two principles [sic]: Tibanne, owned by Mark Karpeles (88 percent) and Jed McCaleb; the initial founder and creator of the MtGox exchange platform (12 percent).” The bankruptcy proceeding commenced in Japan listed Mr. McCaleb as one of two owners of Mt. Gox. And just last week, Charlie Shrem, the Bitcoiner who is headed to prison and is very close to Mr. McCaleb and Mr. Karpeles and has done business with them, shared his suspicion that the Mt. Gox money actually disappeared much earlier than had been revealed: “I think he lost those coins early on. Like many years ago in the first hack.” That would put the time of the hack much closer to Mr. McCaleb’s daily involvement. Mr. Shrem told the Observer that this “first hack” occurred after Mr. McCaleb had fully transferred control over to Mr. Karpeles. “Jed was still helping out when he could, like we all did, but Mark had completely controlled Mt. Gox at this point.”
Even Ripple Labs was excoriated on its own message boards for its association with Mr. McCaleb. One poster claimed that he knew for a fact that Mr. McCaleb maintained close ties to Mr. Karpeles after the sale, giving him his personal bank account information so Mt. Gox customers could deposit money through Mr. McCaleb. A reliable source could not confirm the details of the arrangement between the two Mt. Gox owners, but said it was “definitely Jed’s style to keep things loose and informal, such as trusting Mark with his personal bank account—and his administrator password, which then got hacked.”
The two indeed appeared to be very close and Jed’s sale and departure seem incredibly timed:
Check out this infamous exchange between Hayden and David Schwartz where Hayden points out what we have been saying: isn’t it quite odd who McCaleb always continues to walk away completely unscatched?
Strange how Jed was able to walk away completely unscathed despite being the U.S. bank account for Mt Gox in 2011.🤨
Now let’s back up a little farther in time to before Mt.Gox.
The farther back in time we go, the farther we get to the source? To the truth? To the origin of all of this?
Let’s go back in time to something called LibertyReserve.
Ever heard of it?
Most people haven’t, but this is where the puzzle pieces will start to connect and your mind may start to get blown a bit.
Please keep your seatbelts fastened and your tray tables in the upright position…
According to Wikipedia, Liberty Reserve was a very early digital currency service and was based in (you guessed it) Costa Rica:
Liberty Reserve was a Costa Rica-based centralized digital currency service that billed itself as the “oldest, safest and most popular payment processor, serving millions all around a world”.[1] The site had over one million users when it was shut down by the United States government. Prosecutors argued that due to lax security, alleged criminal activity largely went undetected, which ultimately led to them seizing the service.[2]
Also from Wikipedia:
Costa Rica you say?
Very early digital currency service you say?
But what’s that have to do with Mt.Gox?
The two were closely commingled.
From DarkNetDiaries a wild story is told of what was going on behind the scenes:
KIM: In January of 2011 there was two exploits related to Mt. Gox integration of Liberty Reserve withdrawals.
JACK: Liberty Reserve was a company Mt. Gox used to transfer money from one person to another. It was a service tied to their back end which allowed money to be moved around but Jed made some mistakes when adding the service to his site.
KIM: A user would just be able to inject XML to override parameters in the API request sent to Liberty Reserve to get more money than they actually withdrew from Mt. Gox.
JACK: So hackers were withdrawing more than they should be allowed to withdraw by exploiting this poorly implemented code. But that wasn’t the only issue Jed had with Liberty Reserve. Users type in how much money they want to withdraw, but…
KIM: The code forgot to check for negative inputs.
JACK: This had screwy results, allowing users to withdraw money they didn’t have. Jed found these bugs and fixed them but it wasn’t until he had already lost $50,000. Around that time, Jed McCaleb and Mark Karpelès started talking. Jed was realizing the site required more time than he could put into it. Then Mark showed an interest in taking over Mt. Gox from Jed. Mark was a web programmer from France but had recently moved to Tokyo, Japan where Mt. Gox was located.
KIM: Jed basically almost gave it away to Mark Karpelès in that very favorable price and sold it for almost no upfront money and just getting a cut of the revenue for the next six months, I think.
JACK: But just before the transfer of ownership to Mark, something terrible happened to Mt. Gox. Someone had broken into the Mt. Gox servers and stole the hot wallet file. The hot wallet is a Bitcoin wallet Mt. Gox used to conduct daily operational trades. This differs from a cold wallet, which was not stored on the Mt. Gox servers but in another location in a much safer place. The thief took the hot wallet and then transferred all the Bitcoins that were in it to their own wallet.
KIM: That was about 80,000 Bitcoins that disappeared and are actually still sitting untouched on the blockchain to this day. It’s quite possible they’ve been [00:10:00] accidentally destroyed or something. Since these 80,000 Bitcoins have been stolen there was of course, at this point, already a shortage. Mt. Gox was technically already insolvent as soon as Mark Karpelès took it over. I don’t think Mt. Gox was ever, in fact, solvent for a single moment for as long as it existed under Mark Karpelès.
So Jed is in Costa Rica, doesn’t appear to ever be in Japan, and suddenly he’s integrating this service called Liberty Reserve into Mt.Gox, which apparently has very serious exploits in the code and leads to all sorts of problems.
Jed then “unloads” Mt.Gox on Karpeles for next to nothing and sails off into the sunset unscathed, only to later launch Ripple Labs and then Stellar Labs.
From ComputerWorld, here is more on Liberty Reserve:
Liberty Reserve, incorporated in Costa Rica in 2006, worked by charging a small fee to help users send and receive payments anywhere in the world. Transfers were made through its own virtual currency, which could be converted into real dollars using pre-approved exchangers.
The online payment processor, however, did not verify the accounts of its users, requiring only a valid email address, along with a name and birthdate, which Liberty Reserve did not verify. This allegedly helped turn the online service into a hub for illegal transactions relating to credit card theft, investment fraud and computer hacking, among others.
LibertyReserve.com went offline, and the currency exchange’s founder Arthur Budovsky has been arrested.
Did you catch that last line?
It may not have jumped out at you, but read this next quote from the Liberty Reserve Wikipedia and see if you notice anything “strange”:
From 2002 to 2006, United States businessmen Arthur Budovsky and Vladimir Kats ran a digital currency exchange service known as Gold Age.[4] In July 2006, the duo were indicted[by whom?] on charges of operating an illegal financial business, a felony. They were sentenced to five years in prison in 2007, but the sentence was reduced to five years of probation.[4] Budovsky fled the country, settling in Costa Rica.[7] He subsequently became a naturalized citizen of Costa Rica when he married a Costa Rican woman in 2010, and renounced his American citizenship in 2012.[8][9]
Liberty Reserve was incorporated by Budovsky in Costa Rica in 2006.[2] A 2007 interview with Joul Lee, the company’s marketing manager, claimed it was founded as “a private currency exchange system for import/export businesses” and opened to the public in 2007.[5]
Criminal investigation and charges
Costa Rican authorities became aware of Liberty Reserve in 2009 and informed the business it needed a license to operate as a money transmitting business.[6] In 2011, Liberty Reserve was denied a business license in Costa Rica, according to state prosecutor José Pablo González, due to lack of transparency about how the business was funded. The business formally disbanded at that time, but company founder Arthur Budovsky continued to operate the business by funneling it through five other Costa Rican businesses, according to authorities.[1] A criminal investigation was launched March 7, 2011 following “suspicious” bank activity.[6] Later in 2011, the United States authorities asked Costa Rica to begin investigating Budovsky’s business dealings.[4] According to Bernardita Marín, associate director of the Costa Rican Drug Institute, Costa Rica seized funds from Liberty Reserve on three occasions from 2011 to 2013.[6]
In 2011, Liberty Reserve was linked to (unrelated) attempts to sell thousands of stolen Australian bank account numbers and British bank cards.[10][11] In 2012, a group of hackers attempted to blackmail anti-virus software company Symantec into transferring $50,000 into a Liberty Reserve account.[12]
2013 seizure
Domain name seizure notice, citing 18 U.S.C. § 982(a)(1)
After a multi-year investigation by officials in 17 countries, a sealed indictment was issued by the U.S. government in May 2013.[3] U.S. prosecutors filed a case against Liberty Reserve, alleging it had handled $6 billion of criminal proceeds.[3] Arthur Budovsky was arrested by Spanish police at Madrid’s Barajas International Airport as he attempted to return to Costa Rica where he had citizenship.[13][14] Budovsky and a second man were ordered jailed by Spanish authorities pending an extradition hearing.[14] Earlier three homes and the five apparent shell businesses owned by Budovsky were raided.[15] Four others, including Kats, were arrested across three countries: Costa Rica, Spain, and the United States. Two others are at large in Costa Rica.[3]
The Liberty Reserve website was taken offline on May 24 and replaced with a notice saying the domain had been “seized by the United States Global Illicit Financial Team.”[1][16] In Costa Rica, a court order was issued to seize the “financial products and services” of Budovsky, Maxim Chukharev, and the six apparent shell companies.[6] More than a million dollars of luxury automobiles alone were seized.[6]
I bolded some of the names to help you out.
Could just be ENTIRELY a coincidence, but I do believe this gives us an “Arthur B” (no relation to Arthur Britto, I’m sure) and then we have reference to a “second man” who is never named (is that the Fourth Member of Satoshi, or perhaps McCaleb skating again?) and then we have Vladamir Kats and Joul Lee.
Kats….why does that sound so familiar? Where have I heard that before?
Oh right…David Schwartz’ Twitter handle is @joelkatz, do I have that correct?
I’m sure the fact you have one guy named Joul (Joel?) and one guy named Kats (Katz?) both at Liberty Reserve is ENTIRELY a coincidence. But it sure is an interesting one!
Forbes has a much better explanation…according to Forbes, the @joelkatz moniker did not come from Liberty Reserve at all (of course not) it came from the Ren & Stimpy Show cartoon:
Along the way, Schwartz developed an online persona, JoelKatz (the name was inspired by Stimpson J. Cat from The Ren & Stimpy Show), to pseudonymously publish his philosophical meanderings. His widely read JoelKatz blog is subtitled “Democracy is vulnerable to a 51% attack,” an allusion to the tipping point at which one party could gain majority control of a cryptocurrency, no longer making it decentralized. @JoelKatz, his Twitter handle, has more than 100,000 followers.
See, I told you it had nothing to do with Liberty Reserve!
So there you have it folks.
It sure does seem like we have the same players all circling around this story for a long time, doesn’t it?
Aren’t you dying to know who the 4th Member was?
And wouldn’t you love to see a picture of Arthur Britto?
We’re not nearly smart enough here at ProCoinNews to figure out how all of this fits together, we just report on some things that seem a bit odd to us.
But that’s just our opinion, we’d love to hear what you think!
Drop a comment below…
Much ado about nothing?
Random coincidences with little connection, or something much larger at play here?
We do know a few things are not in dispute to the best of our knowledge:
Jed has never faced any serious prosecution for any venture.
Jed has not been sued by the SEC.
Jed has been allowed to sell his XRP (a very dangerous “unregistered security” according to the SEC) with no restriction all while during a pending lawsuit.
The U.S. Government DID allegedly know who the Satoshi Four were, despite leading us to believe they just couldn’t figure it out.
Major corporations and investment firms are buying Bitcoin either because they know who Satoshi is or in the face of massive risk.
To quote a prominent YouTuber…do we file all of this in the Red File?
We report, you decide.
BONUS!
Before we wrap this up, I just came across an incredible piece from 2018 that ties together many of the same strings we just talked about above.
Credit to SmartOptions for this write up, again from back in 2018.
As we sit here now 4 years later, some of this looks downright prophetic.
Please enjoy this wild read, from our friends over at SmartOptions:
The Ripple Mafia story comes to life:
Ladies & Gentlemen,
One of our partners just submitted a wonderful elaborated piece about RIPPLE. We won’t leave many words about it. Just make sure to grab your favored beverage, sit down, and let this piece of extensive research sink in. Please enjoy the write-up “The Ripple Mafia” As well look at the EXPLOSION of volume for XRP on BITMEX!
Or how about that? Cypherpunks have been calling for decentralized and anonymous financial transactions since 1993.
And finally… David Chaum wrote a paper on anonymous electronic money all the way back in 1982.
So when it comes to the world of cryptocurrencies, there’s a lot going on in the background that most of us are unaware of. Many conversations are had and decisions made behind the curtain by influential individuals and organizations long before the general public is aware.
And among all this commotion, one crypto company stands out – Ripple. It is a skillful player in the world of politics, having established strong widespread relationships with the most powerful decision-makers and thought-leaders. This is surely to be a key pillar of Ripple’s success.
Oh, and what if I told you that Ripple was older than Bitcoin?
Ripple Mafia: The Company
Logo of RIPPLE
Today, we’ll talk about some interesting connections between Ripple and numerous influential individuals, including Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and Peter Thiel, and powerful organizations, including IMF, Google, and the US Federal Reserve.
Ripple’s primary vision is to enable the world to move money as fast as information.
With over 300 employees and with offices in the USA, UK, Australia, Singapore, India, Luxembourg, Japan, and Dubai, Ripple provides services to over 100 corporate clients. Their products – xCurrent, xVia, xRapid – are gaining traction and are being incorporated by huge names like Temenos.
Even more… Chris Larsen, the Executive Chairman of Ripple, believes that XRP could even help preventthe next financial crisis by releasing the tied-up capital.
OpenCoin Logo
Ripple Mafia – But how did everything begin?
Ryan Fugger started developing Ripple in 2004. In 2012, it was turned into OpenCoin Inc. by Jed McCaleb, Arthur Britto, David Schwartz, and Chris Larsen. A year later, the company was backed bysome of the best-known venture funds in Silicon Valley. They include Google Ventures, Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, and Andreessen Horowitz, the company that sold Skype to Microsoft for a whopping $8.5 billion.
The PayPal Mafia
Speaking of Peter Thiel, let’s talk about the Paypal Mafia. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Steve Chen, Reid Hoffman, and Russel Simmons all worked together at PayPal. They later sold it to eBay for $1.5 billion to split the cash and create multiple billion-dollar companies of their own. The list is long and includes names like SpaceX, Tesla, Youtube, Yelp, and Linkedin. Well done, guys!
We are seeing a similar pattern in the world of crypto with the creation of Stellar and Tron.
Jed McCaleb, the founder of OpenCoin, Mt. Gox, and eDonkey, left Ripple to set up Stellar which is currently sitting at $5 billion market cap. Later in 2016, Justin Sun left Ripple to create Tron, currently evaluated at more than $1.5 billion. Who will be the next Elon Musk and what will be the next Youtube? That we don’t know. What we know pretty well, though, is that Ripple Mafia is building something huge. You’ll see why in a moment.
ChrisSusanKenSperlingDavidBarack Obama, Bill Clinton
Ripple’s Top Management & Third-Party Relationships
Let’s start by taking a look at some of their current directors and their relationships with big organizations.
Chris Larsen is the Executive Chairman, one of the co-founders of OpenCoin with an extensive fintech background. Being a member of the Fintech High Level Advisory Group at IMF and HSBC’s Technology Advisory Board, he is making sure that Ripple’s interests are taken into consideration by the global governing organizations.
Susan Athey, a senior economic consultant to Microsoft and Ripples’ board member, is another key player. She is responsible for the partnership between Ripple and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. This partnership aims at ‘banking the unbanked in developing countries, where nearly 2 billion people neither have a bank account nor use any financial services.
Ken Kurson is a person who is closely related to the Trump family. He served as the executive vice president of Jamestown Associates, which runs controversial pro-Republican advertising campaigns in the US, including, of course, for Donald Trump. He almost joined the 45th President’s administration but was halted by sexual harassment allegations. In spite of that, he still has close ties to the Trump family and Ripple Mafia.
Gene Sperling was the chief economic advisor to Hillary Clinton during her 2016 presidential campaign and served as the National Economic Council Director and National Economic Advisor under Presidents Clinton and Obama.
David Schwartz, Ripple’s lead developer, used to be on the board before he gave his spot to Ken Kurson. David has worked for CNN and NSA on multiple occasions.
These are just some of Ripple’s directors and their cozy relationships with the rich and powerful of our world. If you look closer, even more, fascinating details come to light.
Ripple Mafia The Bilderberg Group
Ripple & The Bilderberg Group: The Connection
What is the connection between Ripple and the Bilderberg Group? After all, it’s a forum (established in 1954) for immensely influential individuals and organizations to engage, interact, and share ideas.
Peter Thiel, one of the early Ripple investors, and his colleagues are present at almost every Bilderberg Group meeting.
Bill Clinton is another member of the group who was also the keynote speaker at this year’s Ripple Swell.
Ben Bernanke, the former Federal Reserve chairman who also regularly participates in those meetingswas the keynote speaker at Swell in 2017.
Interests of numerous businesses, organizations, and pressure groups are represented in those gatherings. Nonetheless, it seems clear that Ripple’s agenda is being successfully pushed forward.
CME-Group-Logo
The CME & Digital Currency Group: The Surprising Ties
Who else might be connected to Ripple? Well, a better question would be ‘Who is not connected to Ripple?’
The famous CME Group that offers crypto futures is an investor in Ripple and has one of its executives, Miguel Vias, in Ripple’s top management. Leo Melamed, CME Group’s Charmain, once said ‘We’ll tame Bitcoin’. Quite an ambition.
Another investor in Ripple is Digital Currency Group. The group has a stake in Coinbase and many other crypto-related services.
Speaking of Coinbase, let’s take a look at Ripple’s partnership with the Viamericas Corporation. Its co-founder and CEO, Paul Dwyer is a board chairman of the Money Services Business Association (MSBA). The MSBA works directly with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
If SEC declares that XRP is a security, then it will be taxed for capital gains every time it is bought and sold. Such an outcome would diminish XRP’s value proposition.
If SEC states that XRP is not security many doors will open and one of them will lead to a listing on Coinbase.Furthermore, Ripple, together with a group of companies, has formed the Securing America’s Internet of Value Coalition. This organization employed the services of the Klein/Johnson Group, a bipartisan lobbying firm, to raise issues with the SEC and other government agencies involved in the regulation of cryptocurrencies.
Ripple Mafia and its influential leaders know really well how to protect their interests and they are actively doing it.
The Ripple Mafia Members
Overall, Ripple has partnered with more than 100 banks and financial service providers around the world. These names include but are not limited to American Express, MoneyGram, Standard Chartered, UniCredit, BBVA, Santander, and Credit Agricole.
The expansion continues. Later this year, Ripple is opening an office in Dubai and partnering with three banks in Saudi Arabia, two in Kuwait, and one in Bahrain.
Latin America’s largest banks will soon use Ripple to process payments.
One of the biggest banks in Asia, SBI, is a long-term partner of and investor in Ripple with a presence on the board of directors.
The integration of Ripple with Temenos, a B2B finance software solution, was another step forward, as it allowed Ripple to gain access to over 500 million consumers and 3,000 financial institutions in more than 150 countries.
To wrap it all up, those whom we see as visionaries understand well that it’s the business component of their vision that drives adoption. For better or worse, groundbreaking technology goes nowhere without commerce. It was true for the printing press, so is it for cryptocurrencies. And at the core of building a strong commercial base is building strong business relationships. This is something that Ripple Mafia truly excels at.
‘The man who controls the British money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply’
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October 23, 2022 5:50 pm
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