These two graphs show the 30 day moving average as a percentage drop for Bitcoin and Ethereum (blue lines). For Bitcoin, the largest single 30 day drop in its history was just after the Facebook advertising ban. Ethereum only has one larger drop, in December 2019 and no larger drops prior to Jan 2018. I'm only showing downward movements to make the picture easier to see.
As those who've followed our court case up to now would know, we're claiming the bans on advertising and the associated false statements in which Facebook claimed that the entire industry was "frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices" led to the Crypto Winter.
The terms of the Facebook First Ad Ban Policy stated: “Ads must not promote financial products that are frequently associated with misleading or deceptive promotional practices, such as binary options, initial coin offerings, or cryptocurrency.”
These two graphs are the simplest ways I've found to put the drops following Jan 2018 into the context of the complete history of crypto currencies (as short as it is).
If you click on the graphs you'll be taken to Plotly where you can zoom in and mouse over the graph for more details. All my graphs are Vs Australian Dollars
These two graphs are my current favourite way to show that this event in Jan 2018 was something unusual in the history of crypto and show the close correlation in time with the actions by Facebook (and subsequently Google, Twitter and all the others).
One significant part of that research is the true scale of the drop in crypto in 2018. Wikipedia has a section about the 2018 crash, which completely fails to mention the Crypto Ad bans. Across the industry, people seemed to accept the bans as punishment for their own unspecified and vague crimes. It is as if an entire industry has a collective guilt.
For our increasingly important Crypto Advertising Ban class action case in Australia, we need to work on the damages part of our claim. Earlier this year, in response to a new provision in Australian law, it became possible for Andrew and I to run this case pretty much on our own. Andrew is doing all the significant legal work, and I'm backing him up with communications and, now, research with a bit of coding thrown in.
I'm learning to code. I should say I'm re-learning to code because the first time I learned to code was in 1981 when I saved up for and bought my first computer, the Sinclair ZX81. I coded up to around 1997 when I handed in my PhD thesis which involved a whole lot of C++, but since then I've done little more than a few Applescript macros.
Being able to do this kind of analysis in house, just as Andrew is doing all the legal work, not having to go to outside "experts" at this stage means we're still running the case within the amount we've self funded and the very modest sums we've raised from others. The costs of running the case, if we're successful are born by the class members: the less we spend, the more we pay out to the class members and the wider crypto industry in general.
Finally, as we've seen over the last few weeks, censorship is reaching fever pitch in the US. Big Tech is desperately trying to prevent Trump from winning. At its heart, our class action is about censorship. It has a commercial twist because the speech they censored was also the business idea that can one day sink Facebook, Google and the others: decentralised systems. But it is about censorship.
And right now the US government, for all the noise and bluster of anti-trust hearings, reports and subpoenas doesn't seem to have any clear idea on how to nail these obvious monopolies. We do. And we're doing the work.
I talk about this further in my most recent video:
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