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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Whatever your opinion of crypto (disclaimer: I think it solves no problem and probably never will) you cannot deny that the FTX collapse has done massive damage to the integrity of the ecosystem. It is so large it may well take years to recover. What's interesting is that trust and confidence here is just as important as it is for TradFi. Regulation is not just important. It is required.

SBF & his polycule cohorts are probably going to spend decades in prison.

What astounds me is the lack of oversight from investors (regulation can be slow to catch up). The company literally has no CFO [1] and its books are prepared by a Metaverse accounting firm [2]. While I have sympathy for the customers who will bear huge losses from this. I have absolutely none fodr the investors.

[1]: https://www.ledgerinsights.com/ftx-warning-signs-no-cfo/

[2]: https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/11/11/meet-the-metave...

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international remunerations and payment censorship avoidance in tyrannical regimes are two obvious and virtually unarguable problems a genuine cryptocurrency solves

This falls under the banner of "breaking the law", which is the only use case people foresaw in the last decade.

Now you might consider that ethical (eg in totalitarian regimes). I make no judgement about that. But the fact remains the use case is avoiding the law and that has negative implications too (eg ransomware, funding various illegal activities).

international remunerations does not fall under 'breaking the law'

and there are plenty of failings of the security of various centralized information storage and processing systems as we have seen; they can become vulnerable to attacks by bad actors. some of those bad actors are trying to target specific people to harass, stalk, or otherwise harm them. you're not going to convince me that blanket surveillance of all financial activity is remotely optimal from a safety standpoint. and we have obvious human rights questions about mandated surveillance of financial activity. so, no, just because someone is in government does not mean i trust them not to abuse the immense power they've legislated for themselves. i can be doing absolutely nothing illegal and argue for the legitimacy of taxation and AML controls while still holding the above views about human rights, and for good reason.

https://wise.com

For legal money transfers you'll have a hard time beating that. For illegal ones you're, well, illegal.

how long does it take to make a transfer with wise? I couldn't find it

It depends; part of their appeal is they can get you significant savings by taking longer.

But that’s not because of transmission times (updating a database is faster than a blockchain), it’s because they get a better price for currency by batching you up with other people.

well, what's the minimum time for cross-country transfer, anyway, and what sorta fees does it correspond to, if you know?

Calculator on the front page should say. It depends on the currency pair, but sending from the US is usually as fast as any other ACH transfer, between instant and overnight for me.

oh, ok; most interesting. that means it's a solution then, well, aside from things like (a) privacy concerns and the associated (b) ability for them to arbitrarily censor, delay, hold etc transactions which we have certainly see e.g. paypal do.

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