> Users can trade the tokens anonymously 24 hours a day, seven days a week, from anywhere, unhindered by capital controls, “know your client” rules imposed on broker-dealers, and other frictions of the traditional financial system.
These are certainly new innovations and features, be they good or bad.
> These are certainly new innovations and features, be they good or bad.
That's saying a car with its seat belts removed has an "innovative new feature." The usual word for that situation is "regression."
The usual phrase for your argument is "false analogy."
I quoted the full sentence, but I was mainly referring to:
>> unhindered by capital controls, “know your client” rules imposed on broker-dealers, and other frictions of the traditional financial system
While you can always find some little exceptions, most financial regulation has actually has good reason to exist and solves actual problems (though maybe not your problems, as in burglary laws do not solve burglars' problems). It's not much of a "feature" to do away with them, since then you just invite the re-emergence of problems that have already been solved or mitigated.
No seatbelts means it's easier to get out of the vehicle (if you planned to or not). Some seatbelts are uncomfortable. Seatbelts add to the materials and assembly cost of the vehicle, and add weight to the vehicle which increases fuel usage and wear on the tires and suspension and road. Maybe they wrinkle your clothes? Installing retrofit seatbelts on a vehicle without them can be difficult and the result may be really uncomfortable. Very ocassionally, it might be preferable to be flung from a vehicle rather than retained in a vehicle during a colission, although that would have to be a pretty specific set of circumstances, because being flung from a vehicle results in a lot of undesirable injury.
Not having seatbelts has minor benefits. All of them are outweighed by the benefits of seatbelts in my opinion (and I think there's broad consensus) but claiming there's no benefit to not having them or that there's no cost to having them is silly.
Where does all this HN hostility come from, I thought this crypto stuff would mesh so well with the Silicon Valley mindset. Trading should be instant, totally free, in any increment you choose, across borders! That’s the kind of mentality we apply to so much else in tech right? Is this really a bunch of hackers defending oppressive government regulations written by lobbyists for oligopolies?
Since when does Silicon Valley defend the old ways?
"dubloons"? Stock prices used to be in binary fractions. Barely over 20 years ago.
Obviously moving to decimals is going backwards, how many people program with BCD these days?
Might have something to do with the Spanish dollar being called "Real de a ocho" or "pieces of eight".
Also, I think it was silver based, not gold. Doesn't "silver dollar" in old books ring a bell?
I'm guessing you got your information from here:
https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/why-nyse-switch-fra...
It's poorly written and misleading, if not technically false.
"even before the decimal conversion, some ECNs permitted their customers to enter orders in penny and subpenny increments or their equivalents (e.g., in increments as small as 1/256 of a dollar)"
...from https://www.sec.gov/rules/concept/34-44568.htm
It appears that 8ths were the official minimum until mid 1997, which must be why I don't remember smaller fractions being very common. I feel like maybe it was mostly penny stocks that traded in smaller fractions?
The following mentions stocks trading in 32nds:
Crypto has become monstrous, filled up with fake stable coins and most of them ( i think) consider it a pyramid scheme currently, nothing more.
Move fast and break things is a slogan for your own company for growth. Not when you are playing with other people's money.
Crypto is filled up with pump and dump schemes. Not much of the original intentions remained by now.
For much or most of the world, that isn't true.
Even In the USA or EU, a significant proportion of people do not have access to something like buying some Apple stock legitimately. Just think of all the people who use those extortionate "cash apps" and payday loan services. Why not just use a bank? The same reason they're not going to be buying Apple stock the proper way.
Most obviously, perhaps no bank account, or no ID. They may not have legal status in the country they live in. They may owe child support. Or tens of thousands of unpaid fines for criminal convictions. Or they have a garnishment against them. Or banks simply won't open an account for them because of bad credit. So on and so on, reasons legitimate, and not, for not engaging with the formal financial system.
This adds up to something like 5 - 20% of Americans depending how you set your threshold. To those people, both cryptocurrencies and possibly-scam crypto-investments are attractive because they offer something otherwise not available.
In context, they also mention traditional markets being closed at certain days and times. This is also friction, but negative.
So yes, I understand where you're coming from, but my libertarian instincts to reflexively think of KYC/AML as excessive and annoying regulation and untrammeled exchange as a good thing, turn out on closer examination to be simply wrong.
And I'm not sure that it's all that effective, especially after seeing HSBC launder money for cartels and get away with it [2]. Oh and none of these regulations obviously stopped 2008 or any of the previous crises.
To me a lot of these regulations seem like the TSA security theatre, seems useful, but at this point, pretty outdated and inefficient.
1: https://www.cpomagazine.com/cyber-security/global-cost-of-fi...
2: https://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2013/investing-n...
The question of whether it's worth it is a real one, and more honestly answered (whether positive or negative) if we admit these substantial costs.
I am not sure if the burden is worth it, when living in the right country makes cashing out without KYC kinda easy?
Sure no way to pull out millions, but I would argue most bad actors are rather on a 10k level.
People argue that voter ID is an unreasonable burden on vulnerable populations. If that's the case then how is it a reasonable burden for interacting with the financial system?
If cryptocurrency does anything useful at all it will be to make privacy invasions like that sufficiently toothless that the case can be made to eliminate them in the ordinary financial system as well. Arguably it already has and all that's left is to eliminate the pointless KYC requirements.
It astounds me how even principled civil libertarians wholesale accept an Orwellian level of surveillance on anything related to money. The Founding Fathers would have all revolted at anything even resembling modern KYC/AML law.
You might try reading the Federalist Papers before making claims about the founding fathers. Again, it is not surveillance by government anyhow.