Crypto cash markets are “beyond our expertise”, says CFTC Commissioner Stump | Hacker News Reader

Crypto cash markets are “beyond our expertise”, says CFTC Commissioner Stump

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29 pointscinquemb43 comments

Nobody outside this space knows what’s going on. Even a vast majority in it don’t know. It’s the most bananas thing I’ve ever seen. Probably in our lives. But it’s kinda expected, we just went through a situation worse than the worst thing that happened last century. Times, they are always a changing. I grew up to value a dollar. And I see people selling jpegs for more than an average person makes in a lifetime. I’ve seen thousands of assets manifest from the ether. I’ve seen billions of real honest to goodness dollars being tokenized and bounced through a dozen jurisdictions, and disappear into hundreds of thousands of places protected by naught but a very large integer. And We have barely scratched the surface.

It's insane how quickly things are moving now. The last year has felt like a decade. So many building blocks are in place now that I don't think we'll see another "crypto winter" quite like the last one.

It seems quite certain that we'll se a "crypto apocalypse" instead, given how many of those "building blocks" consist of outright fraud and market manipulation.

Do you have any examples of this besides Tether?

Not GP, but plenty of unmemorable (but for their quantity and nature) ICOs a few years ago, before the SEC decided to subject them to the Howey test and consequently regulate many of them (and probably deter many more from bothering to work out if they passed the test/risk it).

Wouldn't this lead to less "outright fraud and market manipulation" as those actors would have left "a few years ago"?

Also, how would those tokens even affect anything today? The argument was that there will be a "crypto apocalypse" because there is so much "outright fraud and market manipulation" today, not "a few years ago".

Seemingly no one can point to a top 100 cryptocurrency that actually shows "outright fraud and market manipulation" so the argument feels a bit out of place for HN that usually tends to be accurate and precise.

I'm aware of various rugpull scams with both fungible and non-fungible crypto assets. I as more asking for examples of major "cornerstones" of crypto that could have create big waves across the market if something happened to it. Tether is the only example I'm aware of in which there is a case to be made that the creators are not actually collateralizing USDT with actual USD(and so if there was a run on Tether for some reason it'd potentially have rippled effects elsewhere).

Oh I see, yes ok re-reading 'building blocks' you replied to and your 'besides Tether', fair enough. I don't know either.

I don't follow crypto a lot, but what would the other candidates even be - BTC (because it's like the USD of crypto), ETH (because of derived coins, and everything built on top of its contracts), and ...?

Nano/Raiblocks

Nano doesn't even show up in the top 100 list of cryptocurrencies, I don't think it can cause any sort of impact even if it disappeared overnight.

Remember that Bitcoin still has ~45% of market, Ethereum around 20%, and the rest of them share what's left over. For a "crypto apocalypse" to happen, something needs to happen with the majority of top 100 cryptocurrencies.

That's because the largest exchange for it in the world stole hundreds of million of dollars from people and the value of it totally collapsed.

Haven't heard about that. Yet, the entire market is moving upwards, doesn't that prove the opposite? That the market can afford loosing smaller coins without impacting the larger market?

When did this "steal" you mention happened anyway? Seems the price of nano been stable since this year, hovering around $4, unless you go all the way back to 2017.

It's not hard to find; check Wikipedia for the coin

How is that a fault of Nano/Raiblocks and not BitGrail itself?

Since you're too lazy to actually contribute to the discussion, here is the part (I think) you're talking about:

> On 9 February 2018, the Italian cryptocurrency exchange BitGrail announced its shutdown after being hacked.

Where is the reference pointing to that the they stole it? The exchange had poor security, which is what they got sued for.

The 2nd of January, the price of Nano was ~$33, by the 9th of February, the price had already dropped to ~$10. After that, the lowest price it went to was about ~$1.

The price of Nano started to increase again and is now ~$6.

I again fail to see how Nano is an example of being a "building block" (what is even built on Nano that is relatively popular?), how it is "outright fraud" or how this "collapse of Nano" (which again, seems to never have happened in the first place) caused a "crypto apocalypse".

https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/12/21/bitgrail-operato...

Why do you people keep arguing against yourself? That very article says:

> “It is not yet clear whether he participated actively in the theft or if he simply decided not to increase security measures after discovering it,” Ivano Gabrielli, director of the national centre for cyber crimes, said in Reuters' report.

How does that prove anything? What's happening with HN users making baseless accusations? What happened with providing hard evidence to what you're stating?

True, he probably didn't hack his own exchange.

https://medium.com/@bitgrailvictims/the-bitgrail-exchange-ru...

I've never heard of either of these and I'm not sure how they would qualify.

How so?

It's the nature of the internet as an environment, things iterate exponentially faster than in the real world.

There isn't that much honest to goodness dollars disappearing though. Mainly pumping with unbacked stablecoins to create an ever increasing price to attract real dollars so the small group of criminals (Tether and their buddies) and miners could cash out. Most normal people sucked in will never cash out any significant % of the paper millions.

As to NFTs. It's wild West with wash trading and artificial (as in created by hired workers) hype again going to woe suckers with real cash.

It's all sad. No one is in for the tech as the tech has already proven itself to be useless, inefficient and dirty. It's just not very interesting either. It's rejected by about anyone competent in either tech or finance. It's just the number going up making them reconsider or more often just keep their mouth shout as there isn't much to win going against cult like crypto evangelists.

The whole thing has just one use case: going around financial regulations. That's it. For everything else centralized ledger would be much more efficient, faster, user friendly and better in all other aspects. It would also be a subject to regulations though and that's one thing the space can't afford to have.

Amazingly though one thing the regulators acted against is much better idea of a stablecoin backed by a big player. It wouldn't be deflationary by design. It would be fast and cheap to use. It wouldn't have a group of criminals printing billions of tokens and giving them to sister corporations, the headquarters would be under US jurisdiction and users would actually benefit from real competition to dinosaur banks and credit card companies. Needles to say there wouldn't be dirty mining either. This time though the regulators acted in advance issuing stern warnings and causing many members to drop out. Let's have million dollar links to jpegs in a database maintained by dirty energy in a dirty jurisdiction pumped up by dirty individuals instead.

> The whole thing has just one use case: going around financial regulations.

I don't see this as a bad thing on its own. I want to be able to earn with my money the same kind of ways that banks earn with my money. The reason I can't is because I'm not an "accredited investor". DeFi has a perfectly valid use-case and it's not just to get around those regulations.

So you want to do something regulations currently prevent you from doing. Doesn't that prove my point?

If you want to earn money the same way a bank does just buy stake in a bank. You don't want to do the business yourself as that means huge burden of complying with regulations unless it's crypto which goes around that.

My point was that it's beyond simply skirting regulations, as if that is merely the goal unto itself. Something being a regulation doesn't mean it's well conceived or even ethical, and they're frequently abused by incumbents in various industries to prevent disruption and protect their golden goose.

"Buying stake in a bank" does not necessarily translate to sharing in the profits a bank is already making from holding my money with them.

> we just went through a situation worse than the worst thing that happened last century

ummm, no, not even close

We know exchanges can currently operate as insolvent fractional reserves, with no oversight to prevent trading against their own customers or using customer deposits to orchestrate coordinated "arbitrage" events across other exchanges.

We know tether has provided billions in loans to FTX and Cumberland [1] to continue the market manipulation that Bitfinex operators Phil Potter and Giancarlo Devasini publicly bragged about. [2]

We know newly printed USDT is used to manipulate BTC markets, with a full academic report published from market data.[3]

We know tether has been insolvent and continues to refuse an audit.[4] [5]

We know FTX and Alameda Research were among the top donors to the Biden campaign. [6]

[1] https://protos.com/tether-minted-usdt-stablecoin-crypto-two-...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Tether/comments/7swyfb/a_collection...

[3] https://www.cftc.gov/PressRoom/PressReleases/8450-21

[4] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jofi.12903

[5] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-my...

[6] https://www.opensecrets.org/2020-presidential-race/joe-biden...

a quick search on tiktok for NFT wash trading will show you influencers teaching kids how to create the illusion of value by selling to yourself.

The reason you see NFTs "sold" for 200 ETH but there’s never any real commissions for art is because that would mean actually moving capital to spend on other people…

YCombinator was also among the top donors of the Biden campaign. Uh oh! This means something, right?

The quote in the article says "... historically been beyond our expertise."

Yes, this is a good point. The title is a lie, I've flagged it for this purpose. "Historically been beyond our expertise" is not "is beyond our expertise".

The article itself has the title of "is beyond our expertise", flagging for this is a bit too much?

That's why the article itself deserves flagging here on hacker news, the article's title itself is a lie

Oh, I see! How do we flag articles on HN?

It also doesn't specify crypto (just 'cash markets' - which was new to me, apparently means spots) so combined with 'historically' I'm not even sure she doesn't simply mean 'futures are our expertise', crypto or not?

I don't know if it's beyond anybody's expertise, but I think one of the greatest mysteries in economics is how Tether is able to hold a 1-to-1 peg to the US dollar, considering it's not redeemable for dollars (according to Tether's own terms and conditions). Apparently people just buy Tethers for 1 dollar a piece and expect that the peg will hold. And surprisingly it does.

It’s probably one of the most irresponsible things humans have came up with. Let’s hope nobody gets hurt in the aftermath.

It's very nice that you can concluded this without blinking. Meanwhile there are people that died in concentration camps, vaporized in atomic blasts or got burned for being a witch.

While right here we have some people potentially loosing some disposable income while others get rich.

We skipped AGI and invented a paperclip maximizer directly instead.

How many are spending their rent money or food money on this? Probably not that many. I really won't be too sad of idiots lifesavings or pensions. They want to gamble, let them gamble. It is not that different from stock market currently...

~4% of "the great resignation" this year attribute leaving their jobs(and the workforce, or seeking another job) to crypto, and proportionally more among the lowest income.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing either IMO. These people generally don't get any other breaks in life.

Do you mean they resigned because they made bank off of crypto?

"resigned" is not the term people in this echelon use. Literally just leaving their job for another one, but now they have some breathing room.

"Historically"

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