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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

"vaguely sketchy"

What does that mean?

That doesn't sound like a positive thing.

I think it means seibelj works for Circle and is shilling their stablecoin. The irony is that the entirety of "crypto" outside of the people doing the academic work for it is not just vaguely sketchy, but extremely sketchy.

Well, don't know for these stablecoins but to me the "normal crypto" meaning bitcoin is very easy to understand and use. It is like commodity nowadays - it is up to the user whether to use it for scetchy things or for normal things.

ROTFLMAO

Are you serious? You need to establish presence at an exchange meaning you need to scan and send your ID to a company which more likely than not -- does QuadrigaCX ring a bell -- is run by scammers. Then you need to buy bitcoin and store it somewhere... and then send it to someone. The sending costs an unknown amount, takes an unknwon amount of time, the receiver gets something but none of you can predict how much that is actually worth by the time they receive it. If they want to do something with it they need to go through the exchange rigmarole. And you call this very easy to use.

Bitcoin was, is always will be nothing more than a novel scam. It's not a Ponzi... it's a novel form of scam. https://prestonbyrne.com/2017/12/08/bitcoin_ponzi/

For people who know what they are doing, Bitcoin provides a new way to move money across borders. Almost always, the fees will be lower than they would with any other money transfer service. Most money transfer services will also have KYC policies which closely mirror what is required at crypto exchanges.

You only need to hold Bitcoin for ~1 hour total in the entire process. You can avoid making international wires by using domestic payment systems on each end of the transaction. If you do some research, you may be able to move money across borders and actually make a small profit of 3-4%, depending on the sending / receiving currency.

All said and done, Bitcoin allows people to have much greater control of their money. It is very useful for moving money between countries without subjecting yourself to the wait times and high fees associated with cross-border transactions.

>The sending costs an unknown amount, takes an unknwon amount of time,

This is a downright lie.

>the receiver gets something but none of you can predict how much that is actually worth by the time they receive it

This is just misleading, the recipient gains control of the transmitted bitcoin almost instantly. Confirmation delays are known.

I do not lie.

> The sending costs an unknown amount

Here's you can see historic daily average Bitcoin transaction fees both in dollars per transaction and in satoshis per byte https://bitcoinfees.info/

> takes an unknwon amount of time

Here's the average time for one confirmation: https://coincentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Screensho... here

> This is just misleading,

But it's not, there's a time delay between when you initiate exchanging your real money to scam money and the receiver finishes the exchange back and during that time bitcoin can move in any direction.

Fees are always knowable, the real average confirmation time for transactions with appropriate fees is fixed at 10 minutes.

>But it's not, there's a time delay between when you initiate exchanging your real money to scam money and the receiver finishes the exchange back and during that time bitcoin can move in any direction

Well yes, but this is known beforehand. There are many mechanisms you could use to hedge your risk here.

> There are many mechanisms you could use to hedge your risk here.

Do you even hear yourself? We started from very easy to use and now we are at hedging strategies...

I don’t think I’ve ever said it was very easy. I don’t really have all that many good things to say about cryptocurrencies.

I was merely objecting to your false claims. Bitcoin & co. have enough problems as is, there’s no need to invent imaginary ones.

Apparently, there originally was something like 60 cents backing each $1 of tether. Then bitifinex needed the money to cover its legitimate business, so they swapped the tether dollars with an equal amount of dollars in a frozen bank account. And the account was frozen because the _bank_ it was deposited in has had all its accounts frozen by numerous investigating governments. After the swap, Bitfinix then had to be loaned $900 million to back tether, with shares in its business as collateral.

Sketchy is a generous characterization of tether. Tether is fraudulent.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-26/things...

Let's not mention that the same two people signed the loan documentation on both sides of the transaction. Funny for all the denials that Tether and Bitfinex have any relationship.

There are theories that USDT is not actually (fully) backed by dollars, and instead just minted to push BTC value up.

https://www.tetherreport.com/

> it means they are less likely to have their funds blacklisted

Why would being "sketchy" do that?

Being sketchy means Tether are less likely to do that (blacklist) despite claiming they do. So some people are attracted to that type of organization…so they won’t get their coins blacklisted for whatever reason.

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