but instead of addressing the obvious fraud at hand, politicians aim to make crypto the "bad guy". You can't make this up
What are the Pandora Papers ?
"The Pandora Papers is a leak of almost 12 million documents that reveals hidden wealth, tax avoidance and, in some cases, money laundering by some of the world's rich and powerful.
More than 600 journalists in 117 countries have been trawling through the files from 14 sources for months, finding stories that are being published this week.
The data was obtained by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in Washington DC, which has been working with more than 140 media organisations on its biggest ever global investigation.
What has been uncovered?
The Pandora Papers leak includes 6.4 million documents, almost three million images, more than a million emails and almost half-a-million spreadsheets.
Stories revealed so far include:
the owners of more than 1,500 UK properties bought using offshore firms, including individuals accused of corruption
the Qatari ruling family who avoided £18.5m tax on a London super-mansion
Sir Philip and Lady Green went on a property spree after off-loading the BHS retail chain which went on to collapse
the prominent Tory donor who was involved in one of Europe's biggest corruption scandals
the King of Jordan's £70m spending spree on properties in the UK and US through secretly-owned companies
Azerbaijan's leading family's hidden involvement in property deals in the UK worth more than £400m
the Czech prime minister's failure to declare an offshore investment company used to purchase two French villas for £12m
how the family of Kenyan president Uhuru Kenyatta's secretly owned a network of offshore companies for decades
The files expose how some of the most powerful people in the world - including more than 330 politicians from 90 countries - use secret offshore companies to hide their wealth."
(Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-58780561)
"The leak shows that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, singer Shakira and many other familiar faces engaged in, at best, aggressive tax avoidance that was accomplished by hiding assets in extremely complex corporate legal entities. Though in some cases hidden funds seem linked to outright corruption, much of this activity is nominally legal – but the very existence of such structures almost guarantees they’re being used for deeply harmful ends well beyond dodging taxes.
For those in the crypto world, it is tempting to frame these revelations in terms of simple “whataboutism.” And hooboy, what about this: By one estimate, as much as $32 trillion in assets worldwide may be in offshore tax havens. That’s roughly 15 times the total value of all cryptocurrency in existence, and much of it amounts to theft by world leaders from their own citizens. The tax revenues missing thanks to those hidden funds mean immense amounts of missing public infrastructure and services worldwide, at the particular expense of the poorest and most vulnerable people.
There are many nuanced, detailed arguments for the inevitability of cryptocurrency and blockchain’s growth and adoption – advantages of efficiency, trust, privacy and autonomy that are already proving out at a global scale.
But interest in cryptocurrency is driven perhaps most of all by something more elemental and emotional, a deep intuition that has been rising around the world for decades: that the people in charge cannot, and should not, be trusted."
Hillary Clinton recently stated that: "What looks like a very interesting and somewhat exotic effort to literally mine new coins in order to trade with them has the potential for undermining currencies, for undermining the role of the dollar as the reserve currency, for destabilizing nations" and she is completely right, that is the idea of cryptocurrencies in the 21st century, to deconstruct a corrupt financial system and provide a more decentralized, better version of it.
Crypto is a way out, a way to take control of our finances on our way to decentralized financial system. The people who are supposed to lead us, realize the threat that crypto poses and that we, millions of adopters, have the potential to destabilize nations, central banks and traditional currencies. I think we are in for a hell of ride this decade, and we will hit a lot of resistance once governments start to regulate crypto, but I am surely excited to see where this development will lead us and that I jumped on the train.