I'm glad a big government supporter such as SBF is out of crypto leadership. Crypto is an anarchist experiment and it should remain that way
Cryptocurrencies were prophesized to get rid of banks. Instead exchanges reinvented banks with all the drawbacks and none of the benefits.
Cryptocurrencies were supposed to be in wide circulation just like USD, eliminating the need for fiat on/off ramps. Instead we got these centralized corporations and endless KYC/AML surveillance with none of the regulation and government backing.
Real cryptocurrency is what you have in your wallet. How many of us hold our own coins? Pretty much everyone keeps "their" coins at the exchange...
If these stats are correct we closer to 15%. Which is a lot. I would have expected 0.1%.
That was never going to happen, too much institutional money and index funds have been super focused on trading rather than the tech, and their are ETFs that have paper BTC that can move the price at will, just as much as if a whale decides to do so--it wouldn't even take MicroStrategy's stash, it could just be Laszlo wanting to get some stuff out of cold storage and clear a couple days because the tx fee is low.
Also most of those HFT bots need to have liquidity on hand so this is part of the system, what is noteable is how little it takes to move the market these days: less than a 500 coin sell off on an exchange like Bitfinex gave us >$1000 swings. Which if you trade is what you want as volatility is where the money is made.
MTGOX taught us very early to never trust exchanges and this was after the capital controls in Cypus that made us all on edge at the time, and yet it took multiple GOXXINGS to learn (the last one still hasn't been resolved and the Japanese govt has been dragging it's feet for nearly a decade now). People who buy and keep them on exchanges are going to have to learn why self-ownership is a critical part of this ecosystem.
People may have lost untold millions/billions having sloppy OPSEC when handling BTC, but so did Turing [0] and he did it for the same reasons we have just so it's clear and goes to show how it's not a fringe idea to have self-sovereignty over one's finances, especially in uncertain times like war (and in his case peace time as they castrated for being gay despite his efforts in breaking the U-boat cryptography) and I doubt you will question his genius in cryptography and just think of him as a crypto bro: proving it's just as common for a super genius as it is from the layman to get it wrong.
We just need to make it better, and in that regard I think we have com efar but it's still too difficult and a trusted 3rd party is required: Dorsey is working on something along those lines.
This is why we have always encouraged doing small sums until you can replicate the process and then transfer the whole amount with several contingencies in place should anything happen. It's not easy or perfect, but neither is physics and we can still have re-usable first stage rockets when it was thought to be impossible.
0: https://www.iflscience.com/alan-turing-buried-his-life-savin...
The speculative frenzy with FedCoins like BTC and ETH will obviously fall to baseline, but the true use case for cryptocurrency still exists.
Using the most successful fiat currency the world has ever known as a goal seems a bit lofty. In your view, how much time should it have taken to surpass the dollar?
It is not democratic as in "you have a vote to force others to comply to the majority", but more a democratic in "you can try to convince enough people that the major chain becomes how you like it, while the others run a minority fork".
People think "where the money goes, is where the miners go", but the blocksize wars showed that "where the users go, is where the miners go". Miners themselves don't decide on bitcoin rules, users do.
So I personally think that bitcoin is not necessarily democratic, but still highly people/community vs money driven.
That's not democratic at all!
is less terrifying to you?
It's basically trying to claim some good, without having to quantify or justify that in any way.
The US dollar is ultimately controlled by democratic institutions even if you don't count individuals using it as having any control. Therefore it is democratized money by the same vague handwaving.
FWIW, that is also true for fiat. You can become an economist, or a journalist, or a politician, or a pundit, and try to convince your country to do economics differently. It's a tall order, but it's been known to succeed. If this seems harder than the equivalent for blockchains, it's only because cryptocurrencies have much fewer users, so your voice seems more powerful.
Even if UN would finally vote to deem the invasion illegal (note: it apparently is not by the democratic votes of the UN), it probably wouldn't be stopped either.
I think comparing real world war scenarios with how consensus is found in decentralized open source protocols is a bit intellectually dishonest
Significantly less, as the central bank is usually at least accountable to the democratically elected government of the country.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/business/binance-hack.htm...
[2] https://decrypt.co/100530/binance-ceo-says-exchange-never-so...
What exactly makes it remain that way?
I don't say this as a cheap "gotcha": what's the governance structure that makes it an anarchist experiment, specifically, and not just a free-for-all?
And, like every anarchist experiment before it, it failed. It continues to draw in new suckers every day, and that is a problem for society.
It doesn't matter if you didn't cause the problem. Because you live in that society, you still have to pay the cost to fix it or continue to take the losses from the problem existing.
It's the same with slavery, not educating blacks, and then not employing blacks in America. I had nothing to do with it. My family had nothing to do with it. But because I live in America, I have to either pay the cost to fix the problem or pay the ongoing cost of crime that the problem produces. Taking on the cost of problems others created is the cost of living in society, just as benefiting from the value that others create is the benefit of living in society.
The time to regulate crypto and cut our future losses was yesterday.
The Internet's still around, buddy.
The "crime" the problem produces allow a lot of white men to put their kids through college, fooling themselves into thinking they are stopping "bad guys".
If you dont keep them busy, they would create far more crime than you think black folk do. They might even start storming the White House.
Calling cryptocurrencies "anarchist" is walking on the corpse of actual anarchists and taking a big, steaming shit on them. Anarcho-capitalists have nothing to do with anarchy and are just kids whose bedtime reading was, regrettably, Ayn Rand.
Anarchists simply want every single thing to be voted on by the people, whether through referendum or randomly picked representatives. Anarchists agree that there should be governing bodies (merely that they shouldn't be the ones we have right now, and that they should be more representative and prevent the formation of a political class) and that authority should also be granted by these governing bodies _and_ revokable by the same. Hence, there is nothing an anarchist loves more than voting. It does not prevent living in groups, just that there are no leaders in that group.
By saying it is defined as an absence of government and authority, you're either thinking of ancaps (which are a bad right wing joke made up of said Ayn Rand readers), or dogshit propaganda fed to you. Read a bit.
Reading a bit:
1 a : absence of government
2 a : absence or denial of any authority or established order
Merriam Webster
Redefining anarchy to mean democratic government is a new one.
A supporter or another crook LARPing as pro-regulation because it makes some people ignore red-flags?
Constantly braying about the "the law" is part of the the main act of the highest profile scammer claiming to have created Bitcoin.
Fact is that saying a lot of vague "pro regulation" things doesn't likely subject you to any additional regulatory scrutiny, it's a free move even when you are waste deep in the cookie jar. But some people are going to notice it and consider it evidence that you're all above board.
Whom are you alluding to?
In the latest season we find Wright trying to steal literally billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin while constantly yelling that everyone who doesn't support him is a criminal. If he weren't financially ruining people with vexatious litigation it would all be pretty funny.
In the process, huge fortunes were created and libertarians were empowered(but not enough to be the main political power). Congrats to them but there's nothing anarchist left in crypto, they even end up consolidated and centralised. No interesting business models or financing came out of it except for ransomware.
The silver linings might be that the crypto regulations can be made with the current technology and globalisation in mind, hopefully.
The Fed sure isn't without its issues, but it was created to solve the exact problems that we're now seeing proliferate via the crypto space.
The FED was created in 1913 for a very specific reason - to counter the Panic of 1907 by creating a banker of last resort.
It did nothing to curb the banker speculation that led to the panic of 1907
Witness LTCM, Web bubble, Subprime crisis, all fueled by banks willing to lend and overextend themselves beyond margin. The 1913 ACT did not change that one bit except make the speculators never "lose"
The FED did nothing to resolve speculation, if anything, bubbles are worse and now they are worldwide thanks to them and their low rates.
This was addressed under Glass Steagall by creating the FDIC and ushering in the fractional banking system, which kept commercial and investment banking separate and imposing liquidity requirements and a review system on banks. This legislation was later repealed during the Clinton administration and was largely seen as one of the key mistakes that led to the 2008 crisis.
That doesn't mean that the Fed is failure now and should be completely done away with. The runs we're seeing on crypto exchanges are very similar to what the Fed was created to avoid.
Repealed by congress which was controlled by GOP at that time.
You understand that BTC, ETH, and every derivative non-privacy-coin is exactly what the regulators have been salivating for, right? Why regulate a non-repudiable chain-of-custody that mathematically proves your serfs'/slaves' assets that you can seize at will?
> libertarians were empowered(but not enough to be the main political power).
You should re-examine the GOP, particularly the tickets on today's ballots. This ain't your grandfather's GOP.
Well, actually it’s always the peoples behavior that is regulated. Obviously no one can stop you mixing chemicals in private but they can totally tell you what you can and can’t do in public with it. The same thing goes for crypto, you can calculate block hash all you want but they can intervene if you engage in a business deal with someone else.
Oh and regulation doesn’t mean ban, necessarily. It means rules on how you deal with it so that the risk of unwanted consequences is reduced. You can expect to have rules on how you keep the money if you run a stablecoin for example.
Many parts of the world e.g. Australia are heavily regulated in the financial sector and will not be looking to water them down just because its 'crypto'.
I think the whole endeavor may end up strengthening the traditional economy - crypto space repeating centuries of fraud in a decade is effectively a booster shot - suddenly it's obvious why all those laws ended up in the books in the first place.
> and libertarians were empowered(but not enough to be the main political power)
In a sense, they've discovered a novel way of attempting to gain power - I don't think many people expected someone could wish a parallel economy into being and leverage that to for political gain.
Anarchism should be about dismantling hierarchies. Crypto has further entrenched owners against the rest.