Proposed SEC order to freeze, repatriate Binance.US assets
kitco.com
kitco.com
(Submitted title was "SEC granted emergency restraining order to freeze, repatriate Binance.US assets")
Worse, the SEC has already found large transfers out of Binance into what seem to be Zhao's private accounts. That looks an awful lot like the FTX situation. Which is why this action was taken. That's what happened with just about every crypto exchange that went bust, all the way back to Mt. Gox. The insiders dipped into customer funds. The SEC is trying to stop the leak before the money disappears.
This is not a new crypto-related problem. Stockbrokers routinely go to jail for misuse of customer funds.
The SEC press release (https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-101) includes a section titled "UNREGISTERED OFFER AND SALE OF CRYPTO ASSETS".
The SEC also filed https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-102 against coinbase.
The coinbase one makes it much more clear that yes, in fact, just being a crypto exchange is the same as being an illegal unregistered securities exchange, and no, the SEC will not let you actually register as one (coinbase has tried).
> This is not a new crypto-related problem. Stockbrokers routinely go to jail for misuse of customer funds.
It being illegal to run ponzi schemes and sell unlicensed securities is not new, but it very much is a crypto problem. The fact that there are currently zero crypto exchanges that are licensed with the SEC, and the SEC's filing against coinbase, together make it clear that it is not legal to operate a crypto exchange in the US.
It is possible to legally operate a stock brokerage. It is not so for crypto. That's a notable difference.
[2] https://dfs.ny.gov/apps_and_licensing/banks_and_trusts/comme...
The case has not been dropped, and I think pretty clearly states the SEC's opinion, which is quite consistent with what I said above. It is not legal to run a crypto exchange in the US (under current security laws I should add).
Under the Howey test (a security is "a contract, transaction or scheme whereby a person invests his money in a common enterprise and is led to expect profits solely from the efforts of the promoter or a third party") this is pretty clearly an unregistered security IMO. Whereas e.g. using Gemini solely to exchange N USD for M BTC with the customer retaining ownership the whole time is probably not. So had the Winklevi stuck to being a traditional exchange, they could have avoided this specific issue.
Of course, the SEC seems to believe that many shitcoins are also securities ("Buy this token for a % share in our company! Totally not equity!" is... not a convincing argument). But that's not what the complaint you linked is actually about.
Yes. You put money with them, they invest it, you get some return, maybe. That's unquestionably a security.
Note that there's real staking, as with Etherium validators, where you lock up some Etherium in exchange for a cut of the gas fees. You're still exposed to Etherium going down, but the risk to the principal is low. Then there's fake staking, where you lend someone assets which they then control and invest. That's not "staking", it's an investment deal. A bad deal, because it has a capped upside and an unlimited downside. Someone else thinks that they can get a higher return than you can, but you take the risk if they fail. See Terra/Luna, BlockFi, etc.
Notably, Bitcoin is not a security. But every stablecoin, or any other more complex system that is in some way related to something that exists in the real world is.
So you could run a Bitcoin exchange, but if you add any of the new, complex stuff you will end up getting shut down by SEC.
What makes you say that?
Any crypto that imply some kind of stake or ownership of something that exists outside of that instrument are securities. This includes all stablecoins, all defi, and probably plenty of other things I don't even know about. But pure currencies that are backed by nothing other than scarcity and other people's expectation about their value are not securities. They are either commodities or currencies. Which of the two they are is still unclear and will probably have to be litigated at some point, as this distinction has other tax and regulatory significance, but neither option gets SEC on your ass the way unregistered securities does.
This is in fact an argument against the usefulness of crypto/blockchains in general -- unlike some proponents claim, you really can't actually use tradable crypto to do anything interesting, like name resolution or whatever, because if you can freely buy and sell the tokens, as soon as you can do anything more interesting with them they probably become securities.
Not to suggest that I'm speaking in favor of them, due to bad security properties, I wouldn't... and not to say that they don't run afoul of non-SEC rules... I'm just not aware of the rationale that they're securities.
While some people might take reassurance in a comment like this, regarding the SEC and it's duty to the public, it's hard to look at the mortgage meltdown of 2008 and conclude that banking & investment in this country, and its overseers including Congress, is anything but corrupt to the core, and they are only going after "big crypto" because they're not going to let a bunch of amateurs get in on the action.
I'm sorry, I'm not able to understand what you mean here? Not letting amateurs in on the action would be attacking small fish instead wouldn't it?
After a decade of use the tech hasn't found many real world uses beyond gambling, drugs, confidence schemes, money laundering, tax evasion, and other financial criminality. This is 100% the community's fault, as they're the ones burning a lot of real world capital to build this stuff but have very little real value to show for it at the end of the day. I believe in creative destruction, this is just destructive destruction of capital.
Meanwhile the rest of the world is rapidly catching up. I have no trouble sending fiat money where I need to at the click of a button, with fraud and clawback protections in place. No chance of accidentally losing my savings, etc.
I don't understand how intelligent people can continue to believe this stuff is the future of finance. All signs point to this being a big nothingburger, crypto utopianism works great in theory but not in practice. The sooner this dream dies the better.
I guess it's something something human nature. I guess it's why we can't have nice things as a species. sigh
Crypto currency would work terrific in a society with fixed rules, unchanging laws & regulations, and constant rule followers. In other words, this would be amazing in a society filled with robots. Humans are not that. Humans are error-prone, emotional, conscious, questioning, moral, and very special creatures.
No matter how strong your passwords are, how “offline” your crypto wallets be, or how hacker proof your crypto holdings are - this doesn’t matter! All someone has to do is break into your house, hold a gun to your head and say “transfer your entire bitcoin holdings right now or we kill you”. Just like that you lose your entire life savings with absolutely no recourse or chance to reverse anything. We are immediately faced with an undeniable human issue. A human is breaking the rules of society. A human is fraudulently taking something that is not theirs. A human is using the threat of physical violence in the real world. Not only is Crypto/blockchain technology not equipped to handle this situation, not being able to do anything about this situation is a fundamental feature of the ecosystem.
Yeah, in it's pure form (no interop with fiat) it's the financial equivalent of anarchy. Rules/laws are impossible to enforce, no police or justice system to stop bad actors. It's lawlessness. This is a feature, not a bug.
I’m sure when this use case fails there will be another new use case that can be used as the Single Thing that crypto was made and defined for, you always need to find more sources of Greater Fools..
Nah, they just pretend it didn't fail, and blatantly ignore reality.
It's actually fairly simple. They're financially invested, one of the strongest biases of all.
You're suggesting that most/all of these pro-crypto commenters have real skin in the game. If so, then there are a lot more people here than I guessed with with disappoint in their future.
This is a pretty intelligent crowd, so the blind spot surprises me. Such is human nature.
The only value crypto has to the vast majority of people is to exit back into fiat, and doing that is only profitable if the trade value is higher than when you bought in, and that requires new money keep entering the system to be on the other side of your exit trade.
Those who believe it can not work are most probably not invested. Those who believe it can work are most probably invested.
Lots of people believe the war on drugs is a stupid, counter-productive endeavour, and indeed empirically there's no evidence of its success. The value on crypto is absolutely in that it gives common people a means to "fight back" against the power of the state and it's never-ending quest to control their private lives.
Most "financial criminality" in practice works out to "anyone doing anything the US government disagrees with", and not everyone believes the US has the right to police how the rest of the world spends its money. Nobody sanctioned the US when it killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in Iraq; do you think that's a fair system?
Agree 100%. I must emphasize that the war on drugs is a political problem.
> The value on crypto is absolutely in that it gives common people a means to "fight back" against the power of the state and it's never-ending quest to control their private lives.
Cryptocurrency claims to offer a solution to political problems, but the political problems it creates are worse than the problems it claims to solve: Its very hard to conduct commerce when the value of your money fluctuates widely; and (for drugs) there's no regulations guaranteeing the quality of the product.
I voted to legalize pot 8 years ago, and now I can go to a store and I have plenty of safe products to choose from. I wish I could do the same for psychedelics; and I'm rather sure that the opiate epidemic would be easier to contain if recreational opiates were also guarantied quality.
Cryptocurrency (and drug markets hidden on Tor) aren't going to solve what really is a political problem.
The cost of that bit of freedom being that it funnels all of their meager savings to the top of the pyramid, making a few very wealthy people even more so.
- https://time.com/5486673/bitcoin-venezuela-authoritarian/
- https://coincodecap.com/danish-reporters-in-ukraine-buy-used...
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33644090
People from wealthy countries tend to reject the legitimacy of these uses because "my country is stable and could never have these problems", or "if buying food is illegal, you shouldn't buy food, you financial criminal", or "I have no trouble sending fiat money where I need to at the click of a button", but that doesn't mean everyone on the planet is in as fortunate a position as you. It's quite selfish to say a technology is useless unless it benefits you personally. I wish humanity as a species could rise above that level of selfishness. Crypto gets its value from being a system that continues working quietly and reliably in the background when other centralized systems falter or turn against their users. As long as it's still helping people, we should keep building it.
Becoming the next Greece cannot save you.
The Greek economy may be better than the Somalian economy, but that doesn't make it The Future of Finance.
What if it's hurting more people than it's helping? Just seems like a handwavy way to ignore the scams, fraud and collateral damage. We're talking billions.
If we want to spend capital to help people in other countries, there are better ways of doing so.
I do not believe for one second that the people from rich countries spending money in this space are doing it to help poor people in other countries. It's great spin though.
For bitcoin specifically, a notable crypto skeptic Igor Makarov determined[1]:
> illegal transactions, scams and gambling together make up less than 3% of volume
To me, 3% is an acceptable level. It's a lower percentage than the black market in many countries even.
The reasons people contribute to crypto projects are as diverse as the reasons people contribute to open source in general. Some people want to get rich overnight, others contribute as part of their day job so they can go home at 5pm, and others are genuinely altruistic, though you may not believe it. It's reductive to paint everyone with the same broad brush.
[1]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3942181
> To me, 3% is an acceptable level. It's a lower percentage than the black market in many countries even.
Yeah, but that's because the vast majority of volume comes from speculation and wash trading lmao.
What do you think the ratio of speculation and illegal activity to legitimate use cases is? I'd be willing to be it's greater than 10:1, maybe even 100:1
What level of speculation would you say is high enough to justify throwing away the remaining productive uses of an asset class?
---
In 2019, forex volume was $6.6T per day[1], or $1716T per year. In 2019, global GDP was $87.3T[2]. That's less than 5% economically meaningful activity.
[1]: https://www.financemagnates.com/institutional-forex/executio...
[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/268750/global-gross-dome...
Speculation (short selling etc) is a necessary part of a healthy financial system. Wash trades on the other hand are simply market manipulation.
GDP / production is what it's all about. The dollar is powerful in part because of US GDP. The financial sector exists to help put capital to work and extract more P (and to do so more efficiently). The financial sector cannot exist on it's own without meaningful production of value underneath it.
The crypto exchanges are different from forex in that forex facilitates people from other countries doing business with each other helping convert the value of one country's productive output into the value of the other countries productive output. Exchange rates rise and fall relative to GDP from the two countries.
I don't think comparing crypto exchange trading to forex makes sense, as that the crypto currencies don't have a meaningful connection to any nations GDP.
I think the point I'm trying to address here is that there is no P with cryptocurrencies. So the "crypto financial sector" seems more about price manipulation and gambling than it is helping facilitate trade between two economies.
If you don't: why is it productive when I buy a car using dollars, but not productive when I buy a car using bitcoin?
If you do: why must a currency's worth be tied to one particular country's GDP? Why can't it instead be tied to the global production of everyone on earth, in any country, who has chosen to use that currency? I think it's actually a sign of strength when someone goes out of their way to adopt a global non-politcal currency, instead of succumbing to inertia and using the currency that was foisted on them by the geographical circumstances of their birth.
>Starting from 2015, 75% of the real bitcoin volume has been linked to exchanges or exchange-like entities such as on-line wallets, OTC desks, and large institutional traders.
Because there is certainly plenty of speculation outside of those entities.
And for the traditional financial system, when you said "see below", are you referring to the ratio of forex volume to global GDP? Because those metrics are terrible proxies for "global financial activity" or "speculation"
I would recommend doing some reading on what GDP is, and how it's calculated. It's not the same thing as the total volume of transactions, or even in the same ballpark. The United States alone had more than $128T in just non-cash payments in 2021 (https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fr-payments-st...)
You should also understand that all forex activity is not speculation. I would think that global trade would fall under the bucket of "economically meaningful activity", no?
Sure. And there's plenty of non-speculative activity outside of those entities as well. The paper explicitly looks at on-chain activity only.
> Because those metrics are terrible proxies for "global financial activity" or "speculation"
Maybe so. I put forward my sources, but there could be a better way of calculating it. My broader point was that speculation is the majority of activity, and I doubt that's any different whether you're talking about fiat, gold, oil, crypto, or any other widely used asset/asset class.
If you had to calculate that same statistic, what methodology would you use?
> You should also understand that all forex activity is not speculation. I would think that global trade would fall under the bucket of "economically meaningful activity", no?
In one sense it is meaningful, in another sense it's just a middleman market maker taking their cut, due to the inefficiency of humans having multiple currencies. Either way I don't see how the meaningfulness of trade changes once you introduce crypto.
Say I'm subscribed to a Australian musician's patreon. I send her USD, then a middleman sells that USD and gives her AUD. I also support a French musician. I send him BTC. He (or a middleman) sells that BTC for EUR. How can you say either of those situations is more or less economically meaningful?
You claimed that 75% of bitcoin volume was speculation. There is nothing in the paper to support this claim. I'm not arguing that there is 0 non-speculative activity, I'm saying that it is significantly less than 25%, and you're making up bogus statistics that aren't supported by your sources in the way that you say they are.
> Say I'm subscribed to a Australian musician's patreon. I send her USD, then a middleman sells that USD and gives her AUD. I also support a French musician. I send him BTC. He (or a middleman) sells that BTC for EUR. How can you say either of those situations is more or less economically meaningful?
Yes, these are both economically meaningful. This type of transaction is much more common in the fiat world than it is in the crypto world (where speculation and wash trading drive the majority of transactions).
Currency speculators make up a tiny portion of the real-world economy, while they make up the vast majority of the crypto economy.
The paper literally says, "75% of the real bitcoin volume has been linked to exchanges or exchange-like entities"
You may think the source isn't perfect, but at least I'm bringing some objective data to the conversation. If you disagree, please show me some data of your own instead of just repeating your preconceived bias (which I'm aware of already)
I repeat: If you had to calculate that same statistic, what methodology would you use?
> This type of transaction is much more common in the fiat world than it is in the crypto world
Source?
> where speculation and wash trading drive the majority of transactions
Source?
> Currency speculators make up a tiny portion of the real-world economy
Source?
> while they make up the vast majority of the crypto economy.
Source?
Those were some mighty bold claims.
Which is an entirely different metric than the % of bitcoin volume that's speculation. If I link a paper that says "1% of squirrels are albino", and I claim that it says that 1% of bitcoin trading is speculative, then I'm not "bringing objective data to the conversation"... I'm just lying
My original comment was
What do you think the ratio of speculation and illegal activity to legitimate use cases is? I'd be willing to be it's greater than 10:1, maybe even 100:1
You responded by lying and trying to shut down any actual data-driven discussion
> You don't have to bet, the data is in the paper I linked. 75% of bitcoin volume is speculation.
And then you have the audacity to ask for a source on the claim that "currency speculators make up a tiny portion of the real-world economy"? How many people do you know who are participants in the real world economy (should be literally everyone you've ever met), and how many of them are FX speculators?
Now compare that to crypto, where the entire marketing apparatus is built not upon its current value proposition but instead the idea that value will go up.
Why would I spend my time digging up data to quantify things are incredibly obvious from observation, when you're willing to lie and make up facts to support your narrative?
Of course not. If you disagree, at least try to present a coherent argument instead of just talking about squirrels. What entities do you think are missing from the list: exchanges or exchange-like entities such as on-line wallets, OTC desks, and large institutional traders
That might be overcounting even, since online wallets have nothing to do with speculation. So I'll correct myself: speculation is at most 75%, definitely a bit less.
> trying to shut down any actual data-driven discussion
I responded with exactly the data you asked for, just read it again :) If you need me to do the math for you:
75% speculation (at most) + 3% crime = 78%. 100% - 78% = 22%. 0.78:0.22 = 3.55:1 (at most)
> And then you have the audacity to ask for a source
Yes I do, since all data presented so far disagrees with your unsourced (though very strongly held) opinion.
Here's one example of how reality may be counterintuitive: High-frequency traders can make thousands of trades per second. How many people do you know who receive thousands of paychecks per second? From that alone it's plausible, obvious even, that forex speculation volume is substantially higher.
What's obvious to you isn't obvious to everyone else. That's why, in order to build a larger society, we need to set aside our biases and look at objective data in order to make informed decisions.
> Now compare that to crypto, where the entire marketing apparatus is built not upon its current value proposition but instead the idea that value will go up.
That doesn't sound too different from all modern investing. The stock market is also fueled by the illusion of the possibility infinite exponential growth. Bogleheads don't care about index funds' current value proposition. The grocery store won't accept your VTSAX as payment for a gallon of milk. You're just hoping that later you can sell your VTSAX to a greater fool.
Maybe the problem is you take everything the "marketing apparatus" says at face value? If one day you saw a TV advert for a pill that didn't work, would you also decide the entire medical industry is a scam?
> Why would I spend my time digging up data to quantify things are incredibly obvious from observation
Reality can be counterintuitive. It was once incredibly obvious that the earth was the center of the universe. Why should I spend my time digging up data when it's incredibly obvious from observation that the sun revolves around the earth?
HN is a place to engage with our curiosity, rise above anecdata, get out of our limited personal bubbles, and maybe even learn a thing or two along the way! Your immediate personal experience is not the objective reality for everyone on the planet. If you're just here to think with your emotions, ignore data, and rant about how much you hate change, you might feel more at home on Facebook or Twitter.
> when you're willing to lie and make up facts to support your narrative?
Source?
If you don't even understand that speculation can (and does) occur outside of on-exchange transactions, then I don't think this conversation is worth continuing.
I now understand that you probably weren't lying, you were just clueless about what you were talking about and actually thought that exchange volume is the only place where speculation occurs lmao.
In case it still isn't clear to you: on-exchange activity != total speculative activity. It isn't an upper threshold on total speculative activity. It has no concrete relationship with total speculative activity. Both on-exchange and off-exchange transactions can be speculative, or non-speculative. The metric you provided is not "exactly the data I asked for", it's a complete non-sequitur that betrays your ignorance on the underlying topic.
> That doesn't sound too different from all modern investing.
This is a valid comparison, you're on the right track here! Crypto ownership is very similar to modern investing, in that it's a speculative asset class, and not primarily being used for its function as a currency.
1> Here's a paper that calculates the average lifespan of humans. The average lifespan is 75 years.
2> That's because the vast majority of humans eat junk food lmao. What do you think the lifespan of a human is? I'd be willing to be it's less than 10 years, maybe even 100 years
1> You don't have to bet, the data is in the paper. 75 years.
2> The paper only looks at the Americas, Eurasia, Africa, and mainland Australia. It doesn't even look at Tasmania. You're making up bogus statistics that aren't supported by your sources in the way that you say they are.
1> Maybe so. I put forward my sources, but there could be a better way of calculating it. If you had to calculate that same statistic, what methodology would you use?
2> One time I saw someone die from a heart attack when they were 45 years old, and 45 is way less than 75. Why would I spend my time digging up data to quantify things are incredibly obvious from observation, when you're willing to lie and make up facts to support your narrative?
1> Your personal observations are not universal objective reality. That's why data is important when running a society at scale. Why exactly do you believe the inclusion of data from Tasmania would significantly change the results? Do you have any sources for your wild claims?
2> I'm sorry, I was under the impression that you at least had a basic understanding of geography. If you don't even understand that humans live in Tasmania, then I don't think this conversation is worth continuing. When talking about the lifespan of humans on earth, the lifespan of humans in most countries on earth is a complete non-sequitur.
Anyway, if you don't understand why data is important when discussing policy, there's not much to be gained here. I hope you find truth if you're looking for it, and peace otherwise. Cheers.
What you're describing is a scenario where you take a sample, and use its measure of central distribution to make inferences about SAME METRIC in the population. This is perfectly valid!
But the obvious flaw with your argument isn't "this paper says that 75% of X volume is speculation, but it's excluding some data", it's that the paper presents literally no claims or evidence about the % of volume that is speculation lmao.
You have been conflating 2 entirely unrelated metrics this whole time. I said this before, but I guess it needs repeating: the % of volume that happens on-exchange is not a proxy for the % of volume that is speculation. These are completely different things!
If you want an accurate analogy, this would be like if you said "this paper shows that the average human lifespan is 4 years", but what the paper actually said was that the Olympics are held every 4 years. It's a completely unrelated data point, irrelevant to the topic at hand, and you'd have to either be ignorant or intentionally deceitful to pretend that they are the same thing.
Just bush league stuff... and as I said earlier, if you can't grasp this concept then I don't know what you're doing on a crypto thread.
I actually do think that you have serious underlying confusion about the nature of what speculation even is, because you keep pretending like it's something which can be objectively measured by using on-chain data. Data is obviously a useful tool when it's available, but making up bullshit statistics to support your argument is malignant.
Agreed, repeated media narratives lead to bias (myself included) which stands in the way of reasoned argument. Data is good.
> illegal transactions, scams and gambling together make up less than 3% of volume
I've read that over 70% of trade on the unregulated exchanges are wash trades / fake volume. [1] Huge huge red flag to me, may not be technically illegal, but evidence like this runs counter to the "helping the poor and unbanked" narrative. Market manipulation usually hurts more people than it helps.
> It's reductive to paint everyone with the same broad brush.
Fair enough.
I still say there's a lot of smoke here, and a few clear major wildfires.
Today's takeaway for me is that there are a lot more of people here that are heavily invested in crypto space than I guessed. People with money invested that need to see the space succeed. Makes it hard if not impossible to have a reasoned discussion here. It's probably fruitless to continue to talk about crypto here.
[1] https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/wash-trading-centralised-cryp...
People want the USD. I'd argue that crypto is mainly a dollar/fiat scam, as getting their hands on fiat seems to be the point of it. "I'll trade you magic beans for those USD" isn't about the beans, its about the USD.
People are free to trade BTC on the blockchain no matter what the US government says. It's anonymously cashing out to dollars that seems to be their main goal, and the source of all the ecosystem's trouble and reputation problems.
It seem clear to me that almost all of the utility in the crypto space revolves around fraud and criminal behavior. There is little intrinsic "value" in a crypto token, it seems to be nothing more than an unit of account for a large extra-governmental online casino. It empowers and amplifies criminals who do more collective damage than the few "unbanked" that are helped.
And so my argument is that because of the above, crypto is not The Future of Finance by a long shot. And my original point was that there are a surprising number of people here that still believe it is in spite of the evidence.
You are along the right path. Now take it one step further - what if "fraud and criminal behavior" is against despotic regimes like Taliban or Putin or dictators around the world? See my examples here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095
The use case was found over a decade ago: "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System"[0]. I don't know why HN commenters seem to think we are supposed to come up with other use cases.
Contrast with say Hashcash where anybody can make more for a fixed amount of computation, so there would be little point in speculating on Hashcash tokens.
One also has to wonder how much Bitcoin's asymptotically limited supply directly caused the blooming of thousands of shitcoins [0] to satisfy the demand for monetary units. If newcomers could have just straightforwardly minted their own like Hashcash, would there have been as much of an incentive to go create competing currencies?
(I'm not some Hashcash maximalist or something. It's just an example of a system with a different paradigm of monetary creation, regardless of its other flaws)
[0] (not that Bitcoin itself isn't a shitcoin, being non-fungible and all)
(2) Just this May the USA decided to add 1.5 trillions of inflation on top of the already high levels of inflation people are already experiencing. And I can guarantee that they will do this again and again, in good years and in bad years, both democrats and republicans equally (look at the record, not what they say).
(3) Bitcoin was explicitly created for these reasons, and it has _way_ over succeeded in its goal _financially_.
(4) The other complaints you have are the fault of the government, they have purposely let the space become lawless in the hope that it would diminish the space, or that it would die by itself, but the problem with this is (1), (2) and (3)
(2) not sure what you mean by 1.5 trillions of inflation, but your point seems to be that inflation is bad. I disagree. High inflation is for sure bad, but zero inflation is also bad. Capital needs to be put to work, inflation forces people with capital to use it (productively) or lose it.
(3) I don't agree that bitcoin has "way over succeeded", seems like an opinion and not a fact.
(4) It's not the fault of the US Government that Bitcoin is lawless. It was designed that way from the get go. The government can't stop people from sending and receiving bitcoin on the blockchain.
Why would anyone want to trade their ideologically pure bitcoin for those filthy fiat dollars they've been so desperate to escape from? Bitcoin maximalists say it's all about the bitcoin, but at the end of the day they want a pathway into the USD system.
I don't see any real arguments here on how this is the future of finance.
SVB execs knew the risks of having too many long term low interest securities. The Fed repeatedly warned SVB about it's problems. SVB ignored internal recommendations until it was too late.
If this was a systemic "fiat dollar" problem then many more banks would be failing.
Cryptocoin enthusiasts seem to look at all that, look at how it all isn't perfect, see how that imperfection allowed a big bad event (2008) to happen, and completely throw the baby out with the bathwater. They ignore how the imperfections in the system were intentional, based on misguided and purposefully inaccurate economic theory, that was broadly popular and pushed by the broad political system because of that popularity (literally democracy), and that it can be fixed.
Instead, they want to replace it with a supposedly deflationary system (because gold bugs are still apparently taken seriously in their philosophies), where there is no such thing as property RIGHTS, because you only "have" what you physically control. This is considered a desirable property in fact. Then, this system is also DESIGNED, intentionally so, to profit a select few who already had significant resources. The system, by design, accrues more benefits to those who already have power or resources.
Then they try to tell you that this system somehow benefits you, the normal person.
It's insanity.
mismanaged companies that make the headlines coexist with organizations that function well and make zero headlines "even" in the crypto space. the quotes because it shouldn't be surprising but its odd that this persistently low signal level of discourse is what's prevalent on this otherwise analytical community.
My experience is that all of the really intelligent people interested in crypto did leave after the ~2012 wave of excitement. At that time when you saw people give talks on crypto they were almost entirely technical with very little focus (or interest) on becoming rich. That was when the people involved tended to be technical idealists. I didn't buy that crypto was the future then, but I wanted to be wrong.
Fast forward to ~2017 during the next crypto boom and the conversation was around the non-technical people at technical companies getting excited. People did believe crypto was going to become the currency of the world, so there was still some idealism, but it was mainly about getting in to get rich. By this wave a good chunk of the idealists I knew were entirely disillusioned.
Then the 3rd wave which just happened to correlated with a massive injection of money in the market by the Fed. At this point it was just literally get-rich-quick dreamers with more dollars in their hands than sense. Nobody I know who has gotten in during this period even has a coherent vision of what the future looks like, they just have too much money and think crypto is the way to get insanely rich one day. It's also when people completely unrelated to tech started getting involves. People who don't even know how to use a wallet, and rely 100% on 3rd parties to manage all of it.
People are holding on to crypto for the same silly reasons that coworkers of mine keep all their vested stock in companies that have dropped 50%+ in value over the last year. It's because they earnest believe that the era of low interest, free money is the norm. They believe this current macro is just a blip, and if they just hodl a bit longer it everything will go back to "normal".
I think part of that appearance is the rest of us have just kinda moved on from commenting on this space. We've been saying "this crap is dumb" for ten years, it's getting old at this point. Let the true believers play around in their litter box; I got other stuff to do :)
I think you're overestimating average intelligence, and/or how well intelligence translates to common sense. Some of the craziest people I've ever met were absolutely brilliant. Still crazy.
Try explaining to someone why they are wrong about voting for <idiot you voted against> and the reason becomes obvious.
Just like if you have a small vendor that takes cash only, they are probably tax avoiding. Buying drugs? Heck, even legal drugs for some states require cash.
I'm also still highly amused at just how inappropriate blockchain techs are for crime. It is literally recorded basically forever.
an oft said criticism that ignores a lot.....
standards within the crypto ecosystem follow a proposal and ratification process that takes years, this is a highly active area and highly collaborative
there are people that have the exact same information as you that said "I'll contribute" instead of "I'll find reasons to reinforce my disdain"
those standards get ratified and the crypto ecosystem begins catering to additional industries and additional people
this chronology is very easy to follow
Because maybe when you see crypto, you see scams (SBF, Terra, etc). When we see crypto, we see legit decentralized asset like Bitcoin or massively successful open source project like Ethereum.
> After a decade of use the tech hasn't found many real world uses
Or maybe, there are legit uses but you are ignorant because of your bubble? I compiled some examples here long time back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095 (and this has only grown since)
> money laundering, tax evasion, and other financial criminality
That just depends on your pov ("freedom fighter vs terrorist"). If someone is trying to protect their wealth from Venezuela, Putin, Taliban or other despotic regimes, that is still "money laundering" in those regimes' eyes. See my examples above.
> I have no trouble sending fiat money where I need to at the click of a button
My colleague begs to disagree. He can send fiat USD to his native country but official exchange rate is suppressed and he loses a lot of value through fiat channels.
> I don't understand how intelligent people can continue to believe this stuff is the future of finance.
I don't think this will supplant finance as much as augment it. Also, maybe you haven't yet had real conversations with intelligent people who believe in crypto?
> it's something something human nature
Yup. Wanting to escape oppressive regimes with your wealth. Or freedom to protest your government's tyranny (imagine the uproar if Trump had frozen assets of all the BLM protestors in the summer of 2020. Now see what happened when Canadian goverment froze the assets of truckers).
If you really want to try, go read all they have to say. There's no shortage of that here.
If your goal is to convince them that they are "wrong", you simply can't.
Sorry I just had to. I think crypto as an investable asset class is finished. SEC is sending a very clear signal here. It’s entirely the community’s fault for failing to properly manage this space. They actually earned public’s trust (sometime during the pandemic). And then they threw it all away for a few bucks.
there are so many really cool sites from the past that i cant recall what they were but i recall the experience, like that one with the gallaxy cluster of all music genres and how each were related, and each node played an sample for that genre...
/one handed popsicle typing
Or: Pokemon, but you can trade the pokemon outside the game itself; and the game can prove that your competitive mon were authentically caught and raised, rather than hacked in, because it records all the actions you took to train it.
Most obviously: in any MMO with an in-game currency you can and are encouraged to buy with real-world money (e.g. EVE Online), just tokenize the darn thing, so that people playing can easily cash back out of the game when they don't feel like playing any more.
These become loot boxes / gambling as well.
Where’s the need for crypto in this business model?
> Pokemon, but you can trade the pokemon outside the game itself; and the game can prove that your competitive mon were authentically caught and raised,
So… cheating protection? Every notable multiplayer game in the world already does hat.
> so that people playing can easily cash back out of the game
Sounds a lot like a cinema where you can resell your ticket after the show is over – why would any content creator do that?
> Where’s the need for crypto in this business model?
Crypto advocates misinterpret this as a technological failing or gap. It's actually an issue that could be solved purely in existing technology, but no one wants to because lock-in is desirable to everyone but the consumer. The market will never decide on its own to offer this solution.
This is usually the problem with any crypto idea. They fail to distinguish between people problems and technology problems. Ticketmaster ain’t charging hidden bullshit fees because their database somehow forces them to.
This is already possible and always has been. The reason steam and the game studios haven’t implemented it is because it wasn’t in their interest to do so, not because they didn’t have the technology to.
They've been winding it back best they can ever since because having a tradable USD proxy (keys) led to money laundering and under-age gambling websites where people used "keys" as a proxy for dollars so eventually they had to make the keys non-tradable.
The cat was out the bag and too late to make the skins themselves non-tradable, but it's worth noting that other companies haven't tended to follow suit in having their skins fully marketplace enabled.
There just isn't the incentive for one, why would a company want people to be able to resell skins when they can just sell a fresh new copy at full price.
The point of putting a blockchain in the middle is that the immutability of the smart contract underlying the tokenized asset guarantees that you still own the thing even if the person who sold it to you disagrees, and the person running the show backs them up†. Which is not true in the by-fiat system.
To put that in terms of non-digital assets: a country that issues a fiat currency, can declare at any point that some asset token they've issued is "no longer legal tender." Canada did it with pennies a while back. But they can't declare by fiat that a commodity has no value. Commodity values can be manipulated (see: oil prices), but they can't simply "make it go away" by withdrawing their backing from it. A commodity has inherent value, whether or not it's backed.
(How would that work, in this case? You'd need 1. IP ownership [or at least sub-licensable use] rights sold to a legal trust, 2. where that legal trust's beneficiary is a DAO; 3. where that DAO declares in its immutable articles of incorporation that non-fungible tokens issued by smart contract X represent transferrable sub-licenses of its acquired IP license; and where 4. smart contract X is immutable.)
If you've got all four of those properties satisfied, then what you've created is less like a fiat currency, and more like a commodity. The IP owner cannot revoke selling a sub-licenseable IP license to the DAO, any more than you can revoke selling your house to someone. The DAO has no path to change the rule by which it allocates IP rights through the token. And the token itself can't be tampered with to change who owns it. The only place you could affect this system would be at the level of getting the government that issued the original IP license, to declare it void. (But why would they do that? The US government didn't do it for Tolkien's dumb sale of sub-licenseable IP-rights to LOTR in the 1970s, and that was pretty much the case where you'd expect big-Hollywood lobbying to win out over the public good.)
---
† Yes, technically, you can also create this guarantee just using the regular legal system, without involving blockchains — you'd issue individual IP licensing "deed" contracts to each primary-market buyer, such that they can prove they own the rights; and players could then resell these "deeds" to each-other with a notarized and registered document of sale, similar to land title transfer, so that you can prove that a given "deed" is legitimately acquired rather than stolen or forged. But that's extremely impractical — the costs of the overhead of the transfer process far outweigh the costs of the goods being transferred! In this sense, a blockchain is just a way to make this process scale for lower-value items, by making the whole "notarized transfer-of-sale ledger" into just some (digitally-signed) bits, such that people can transfer each-other IP rights — and other low-value "deedable" things — from an app on their phone, at the cost of maybe a dollar for "notarization and registration" by the chain's validators.
Diablo 3 actually did this exact thing at launch with the real money auction house. Shockingly, they didn't need crypto to do so! But it also didn't make them too many friends, and they had to pull it down a year or two later.
Nintendo at no point WANTS their players to be able to use their pokemon in something that you didn't have to buy from Nintendo. This isn't complicated to understand.
There is no desire from IP holders, from investors, from developers, from anyone involved, to allow you to export your Keanu Reeves skin from Fortnite into whatever else. Why do that when they can just make you buy it again? Why would anyone forgo that literal free money when the vast majority of video game players seem perfectly willing to spend 10s of real dollars on a simple, half assed texture made by an intern in a few days. It's been a literal gold mine.
What I'm saying is that what you experienced is not a technology problem, and nothing about cryptocurrency inherently fixes that problem. I could absolutely create a cryptocurrency that puts you through mountains of bullshit and bureaucracy anytime you want to make an account or wallet.
But most HNers here are not begging for donations, or suffering from starvation or are currently at war (Ukraine) or not experiencing hyperinflation (Argentina) and are not the ones who experienced their bank accounts getting locked after protesting against their government (Canada).
But never-mind. But a clear pattern I’ve seen on HN is that they only care as long as it directly affects them. (For example, look at the herd reaction about the Bob Lee situation in San Francisco [1])
Since they are not experiencing all of the above and are comfortably sitting in their chairs browsing on this site on their computers, why would they care about crypto use-cases since it doesn’t affect their luxuries, yet?
No it isn't as it is true on this site and the truth hurts and bleeds your eyes doesn't it? Obviously people like you can't stand it due to your highly emotional reaction.
> You only care about crypto because you invested in it.
Please.
Speculating on a stablecoin which the Stellar and Moneygram use case is for sending stable currencies for worldwide payments cheaply and instantly is hardly useful as an 'investment'.
> Please tell me how much volunteer work you have put in for food relief or refugee causes then tell me how much money you have put into crypto and then let's see if you can claim the moral high ground.
I can tell that people like you complaining have about it here isn't a solution to helping the refugees such as the ones in Ukraine for example or any of the help they need or anything close to a solution, whilst others are providing a solution today. [0]
So this is indeed a great crypto use case that you yourself realise that it works.
[0] https://thefintechtimes.com/stellar-aid-assist-creates-new-r...
What is “well” here?
Using Wise or similar almost always ends up cheaper and faster when you factor in the need to go to/from fiat, and the chances that you’ll fat-finger the transfer and lose your money, get difficult questions from your bank, or that Wise will collapse with your balance are much reduced as compared to using crypto for this.
If you’re trying to evade capital controls, however immoral you may consider them, well that’s something different.
You think all those people paid under the table is "legal"?
Unfortunately it hasn't been a priority for the community and the focus has always been on getting rich, instead of working for infrastructure and adoption.
Even Bitcoin itself made this choice.
But I would also want to see derivatives die. Like what it even mean to "invest" in QQQ or VIX? This is just gambling (unless you have market inside knowledge).
Regardless, I'm inclined to agree the main point is probably gambling and insider trading.
But today we are the point where we’re trading each others insurances betting on whether they will be triggered or not. That is bonkers.
Should you call that insurance as well?
The point is, should call options used for hedging regulated as insurance?
Anyway your argument to regulate hedge trading as insurance is lacking.
Who is “we” ? You don’t have to trade anything you don’t want to.
> That is bonkers.
Why?
My gut instinct is to agree. I also feel the same about the fossil fuel industry for the most part.
I am curious which one of those two death wishes would lead to more negative economic impact in the short term.
Based on my ignorant googling of relative values, I think erasing the fossil fuel industry would be much less devastating to investors in general, correct?
I do think that for both industries a multi-decade phase out would give people plenty of time to change their investment portfolios. This would do less economic damage in the short term. That’s a good thing.
In the case of fossil fuels, we still need to go all-in on alternatives for two functions: air travel and sea travel. We can do that in the time scale of 2 to 3 decades imho.
But look up synthetic derivatives as part of the global economy. It is crazy. Such a huge piece of the economy. So crazy that it makes me have crazy thoughts like maybe let it be, with a Tobin tax of sorts assigned to novel anti-poverty solution attempts.
However, no new wells sounds like a great lever to pull.
Forget CO2 for a moment, just the economic flourishi of all those very smart people released from oil exploration duties would be very interesting.
Yes, fossil fuels created the amazing world that we live in, but they are obsolete on this planet. We have alternatives now.
When I look at what oil companies have engineered, I am truly in awe. Sub-sea well heads are nuts! Rigs are gonzo engineering / operations in the coolest ways! Those people should be working on asteroid mining, or civilization scale geothermal, or 2-story-house-sized PV panel laying robots roaming the deserts. They could pull it off, and it is already 2023 ffs.
There are many arguments that index investing is the best long-term strategy. Is NASDAQ the issue?
I would argue index investing is far less gambling than stock picking because you're betting on the overall direction of a market segment, in this case tech, as opposed to a specific tech stock. Stock investing, in aggregate, can be viewed as a positive-sum game - the value of your holdings tends to appreciate through the contributions of non-investor participants (company customers buying products -> increase in intrinsic value of the company).
VIX on the other hand is a very exotic product, and it's not an investment - it's a hedge, if you can call it that. VIX is a mean-reverting index that spikes up when volatility goes up and drops back down over time, the notional value of which is based on the premium of calls and puts on the S&P 500 over the coming 30 days. It's the derivative of a derivative - a 2nd derivative, if you will. Note that, importantly, you cannot buy a "VIX," there's no such thing. You can buy cash-settled VIX futures where people speculate on the index value on a certain date, and you can buy cash-settled European-style calls or puts (i.e. they cannot be exercised except at expiration, vs American options which can be exercised any time on or before expiration). You can also buy ETFs like VXX and UVXY that use futures and cash positions to attempt to track the index.
QQQ and VIX are very different things.
[edit] When I say VIX futures aren't an investment, check this out lol. Set the graph in [1] to Max duration. Since 2018 it's lost 96.5% of its value. Heck it's lost just shy of 50% of its value since January 1st. They just continuously reverse-split so the numbers aren't silly.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/VXX?p=VXX&.tsrc=fin-srch
What kind of users an alternative Reddit attracts?
1. People who don't like Reddit because of privacy concerns or other ideological reasons.
2. People who are banned by Reddit.
It turns out group 2 is much larger than group 1 and the community rots.
Now what kind of people who cryptos (a.k.a. alternative money) attract?
1. People who don't like banks or the government's monetary policy, and ideologically believe they have to own their own wallets.
2. People who literally cannot safely use normal money, from non-conventional porn artists to scammers and drug dealers.
It turns out group 2 is bigger than group 1 and you know the rest of story.
Crypto is people who see the tax that credit card networks are on all transactions, but their problem with it isn't that it's wealth redistribution from those with bad credit to those with good credit, but rather that they aren't the ones collecting the tax.
I guess my definition of tyranny is different...
Crypto is also used to evade taxes. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it's not as bad as dealing drugs or scamming people.
You know what, this narrative is funny, because 99.999% of the time in which "crypto" is used to evade taxes, it's the kind of taxes that would need to be paid because of capital gains on the crypto assets because their value increased. But most of the time, they are unrealized gains, which means that tax evasion didn't actually happen. But anyway, let's now think of the cases where the person sold the crypto back to fiat: how easy is to evade taxes at that moment? Not very, because most exchanges report trades to authorities.
And anyway, the fact that their crypto balance increased is due ultimately to politicians doing QE! So they tax us in a hidden-way via money-printing, and after the scarce assets increase in value because of this, they want to tax us again.
But I suppose some crypto owners are changing their tax residence without declaring their crypto i.e. no deemed disposal and exit tax.
Want to buy a house? Now you need to convert your crypto into fiat and a deed transfer. People will start asking where your funds are coming from. This is where you tend to get caught.
This is a weird statement.
If it's a cash offer, it's a seller's job to determine if you have the money, not if you paid taxes on it.
If it's a mortgage down payment, then the bank is more interested in if your assets are going to disappear (e.g. are they actually a loan from a third party?). I've never had a mortgage bank inquire about my tax situation.
If you're talking about IRS audits... then yes, they might be curious how you purchased a giant asset without any declared income. But that's similar to any unreported income situation.
>This is a weird statement.
Not in the UK. Here there's a legal obligation on the conveyancing practitioner - which you have to use - to confirm the source of funds for the purchase. They "will ask questions about your salary, request bank statements and ask you to give details of any family inheritances"[1].
[1] https://www.bannerjones.co.uk/your-property/services/buying/...
Or has it always been a thing?
Yes, but your bank and the bank of the seller both have strict KYC/AML rules to respect. And the seller probably doesn't want to accept a pile of bills that requires laundering.
Honestly, to op's point, the IRS audit would be the likeliest to nail you, post-purchase.
"Person without demonstrated income suddenly buys expensive asset" is hard to hide and a huge, trackable signal.
Governments can get most of their revenue with little economic distortion by taxing stuff where evasion is much harder: Fuel taxes and property taxes.
You may believe there's a better way for the government to tax us, but that's not how the system works currently.
Crypto being used for tax evasion is a good reason for it to be regulated out of existence.
Regulating it with a heavy hand will do more harm than good. Those innovators will just move offshore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_money
But a system that takes the concept of ledgers, and makes it tied to pseudonymous addresses instead of persons, is distributed across the world, resilient to tampering, and which gives its users control over their money, and which has been in use for 15 years is
1. “Not innovative”, and
2. That in the span of 30,000 years that 15 years is enough time to really tell if this is something that will survive or if it’s just a dumb idea that will die out.
I think that Bitcoin is a wonderful system, and I think that more people should take time to study Bitcoin in detail. Do not let the crypto bros and the people that only care about measuring Bitcoin in dollars distract you from the real point of Bitcoin.
Well, it is innovative, in the same sense a jet engine is. What you don't do with jet engines is using them to keep static structures in the air indefinitely. You use steel beams or concrete for that.
Crypto tech as cash alternative is pretty much jet engine as a steel tower alternative.
I don't personally own any beer hats. But I see how they are useful at a baseball game for example.
Thanks for reminding me that beer hats exist. Now, if only I can find a store that sells beerhats for BTC :thinking_face:
Yes, let them move offshore. Being able to more easily commit tax fraud and money laundering isn't the kind of innovation we need to keep.
I also think that businesses avoiding tax by not reporting cash are putting themselves into an unfair position against businesses that are legally operating, and I'd have a preference that businesses doing this should be shut down. If you're running a thin margin business and your competitor is able to price themselves better by committing tax fraud, then you need to also commit tax fraud to compete, and that's a race to the bottom that's not good for anyone.
You can also compare apples and oranges, but the comparison might not be useful.
If you are Donald Trump or Nancy Pelosi, other rules apply to you, because they are the ones who write the rules or lobby for them.
Usually in this context the "evaders" will refer to it as tax resistance or tax protest. It is a form of civil disobedience. The government being disobeyed, of course, is unlikely to see it that way, and in a modern context, would call it evasion. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_resistance
The Indian example is especially poignant because refusing to pay salt taxes was one of their key strategies for achieving independence from the British, and they managed to do it without firing a shot. So yeah I'd say refusing to pay the salt tax was a big win morally and probably saved a lot of lives.
What the best examples typically have in common is that the government in question didn't possess the consent of the governed. In the case of the British WTRL the refrain was "No vote, no tax." If the government won't let women vote then what right does it have to tax them? Women weren't able to indicate consent (or lack thereof) via the political process, and they were ultimately successful in their argument that this taxation without representation was unjust. Incidentally this line of thinking was expanded upon decades later across the pond in the US, which ultimately decided via the 26th amendment that it was immoral to draft men into the army when they were still too young to vote, and lowered the voting age to 18.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_historical_acts_of_tax... for hundreds of examples you might or might not agree with ...!
Your argument doesn't make sense. The example you cite are examples of protest against unjust taxation not that "the government is not entitled" to any of my crypto. As you yourself elaborate in the following paragraphs. Are you seriously suggesting parallels between the crypto bros and Gandhi in that they are both participating in civil disobedience? Oh. Please.
And SBF is just a modern day MLK because both are referred to by TLAs!
This doesn't seem to want crypto or finance exchanges. Thistle people just want the benefits of the government without paying for it.
That's just fraud.
I never met his dealer, but I'm sure the dealer saw the decay and did nothing.
Dealers have no morals. Even the law that bartenders aren't allowed to serve drunk people is an absolute farce. Walk into any bar in this country and you'll find drunk people being served alcohol.
Maybe there is more to it than whether something is legal or illegal.
Regular tax paying people who want to alter their mind; ok.
But also customers who break the law in order to pay for drugs.
And when and where is it okay to deal? Personally I would not want drug addicts frequenting any place where I am trying to live.
Then what about the product they sell: supplied by violent cartels? No thanks.
Designer drugs laced with who knows what manufactured in an overseas lab? Again no.
I'd wager that group 3 is much larger than groups 1 and 2.
(Yes, I'm considering VCs to be part of group 3.)
Banking and financial services is about 1/4 of world GDP and insurance is about 1/12th of world GDP. Anything making 25x "than all other industries around the world combined" would be ~96% of the economy.
Competition happens inside an industry. And there is fierce competition between banks, much more so than in many other modern industries (e.g. there is much more competition than in tech).
And that's why Apple is worth 6x more than JP Morgan Chase?
What is the return on profits in the banking industry compared to tech, oil, etc.?
What are you even trying to say?
Was it by being trustworthy, or just their scams not yet being publicized?
There are bitcoin-only exchanges, e.g. Bitaroo. There are also P2P exchanges that don't hold user's funds, like LN2bot (this one is very handy because it supports Lightning, so fees are ridiculously low, and trades very fast for not being a SPOT exchange).
> I can't afford to mine it anymore.
Right, it's a professional industry now; hobbyists can still do it, but at a loss.
> What if I want to buy some more? Or sell some of what I have?
See the aforementioned exchanges above, in my first answer.
> What can I spend Bitcoin on?
Anything, really. For example you can buy flights & book hotels with travala.com. Or buy things in Amazon with a discount thanks to purse.io .
> What does Bitcoin solve for me?
Not being affected by events like SVB closures (or worse: smaller banks that may not be bailed out[1]); not being affected by QE in the medium-long term (e.g. put your savings in it and forget about for 4 years[2]).
[1] If you don't believe it, watch this: https://twitter.com/Stromens/status/1664977520750370816
[2] Try to find 2 points in the historic data of a BTCUSD chart, which differ by 4 years, the oldest point is never higher value than the newest point.
And Bitcoin absolutely tanked with rising interest rates, just like the equity markets. Can't say it's not responding to QE.
Did you miss the part where I recommended an exchange that doesn't hold user's funds?
> And Bitcoin absolutely tanked with rising interest rates, just like the equity markets.
Right, and where's the value of it 4 years after each value-tank event?
I tried to bring my bitcoin to the grocery store to buy some brownie mix and cheese slices but they wouldn't take any coins from my Trezor.
The only search result in Google for '"Ln2bot" crypto exchange' is this article.
It's peer to peer, but not trustless. There's a moment in the transaction at which one party can default. So they need a reputation and dispute resolution system.[1]
You'd think there would be trustless decentralized exchanges by now. Ones have been proposed.[2] Some even exist. It's possible to have a truly trustless exchange where orders are smart contracts on a blockchain, transactions are atomic swaps, and at no moment does a third party have custody of anything. This is called an "on-chain order book". It's rarely seen, because it's slow, lacks liquidity providers, and is subject to front-running. Also, nobody makes a billion dollars running one. Most so-called "decentralized exchanges" turn out not to be totally trustless inside.
[1] https://lnp2pbot.com/learn/common-problems-and-solutions.htm...
[2] https://www.smartcontractresearch.org/t/research-summary-tex...
This concept applies to custody, not to fiat-to-crypto exchanges. Because a fiat-to-crypto exchange is an on/off ramp into/outside crypto. And as fiat cannot be held in a trustless way, the most "trustless" way to make a swap without the exchange holding the fiat amount is by using an escrow system. If the escrow system can only be moved to party A or party B during a trade-dispute, then it's the most trustless thing you can get, my friend.
PS: Your 2nd link seems to suggest that you're saying "DEXes are better than p2p exchanges!", well, DEXes don't have fiat-to-crypto pairs, only crypto-to-crypto. Nice try.
Irrationality, Extortion, or Trusted Third-parties: Why it is Impossible to Buy and Sell Physical Goods Securely on the Blockchain
Sure, why care about the possibility that cashing out early might mean you lose half your money? Trust instead in the long long long history of BTC as a stable currency.
You perceive it as unstable because you're using USD as a unit-of-account. As a thought exercise, if you were using BTC as the unit of account, what you would perceive unstable is the US dollar. And what you would see is that the USD value would be trending down against BTC, especially if you choose a time-frame equal or higher than 4 years.
So yeah mate, nothing to see here, keep holding your cash.
No one ever suggests using some S&P500 ETF shares as money even though it also trends up vs the USD. Just like BTC it's also more volatile than money. Unlike BTC it represents something real though.
The point is that USD isn't for holding. It's for spending. BTC is more like a stock or asset than money. Money isn't supposed to be volatile and it's not supposed to appreciate in value.
And if I choose a time frame of, say, 25 months or 19 months instead of 4 years, my savings lost more than half their purchasing power, which is far worse than anything QE has done to cash over equivalent time frames (ironically over a timescale which has been exceptionally bad for cash and exceptionally favourable to a notional "safe asset" alternative)
No, you would literally have to negotiate prices every single day. The vast majority of currencies have less volatility than Bitcoin. People don't think the dollar is unstable in the euro area.
Like you would do with gold.
FINES BY SEC: Merrill Lynch – $100 million Fine in 2002, Goldman Sachs- $550 million 2010, Eli Lilly & Co. – $1.42 billion 2009, UBS AG – $1.5 billion in 2012, Abbott Laboratories – $1.6 billion in 2012, Siemens $1.9 billion in 2008, HSBC Holdings – $1.9 billion in 2003, Pfizer – $2.3 billion in 2009, Bank of America – $3.6 billion in 2009, JP Morgan Chase – $13 billion in 2013
Did the SEC send a clear message? Are these company's dead? lol.. Are the industries they are in dead?
It's like saying tulips outperformed every other assets for a few years in the 1600s.
What risk do you think the market has been handsomely compensating Bitcoin investors for over the last year?
Genuine question, I don't know the answer, but if the market were pricing in the risk of Bitcoin suddenly going to zero through regulatory action, it might make sense that the price goes up a lot as old investors compensate new investors to exit while the music slows.
I feel like people smarter about finance than me who were paying close attention to Bitcoin might gather clues about this hypothesis from watching the order book consistently, so yeah, genuinely asking.
I cannot make any sense of this.
Bitcoin also loves this. Lots of people will use the coming fall to make money shorting this. Then eventually as BTC stabilises they will make money going long as well.
In short a lot of BTC doomers will celebrate, and BTC mooners will celebrate as well. Except for different reasons.
Makes no sense at all to me.
How much of crypto is collectively going through FTX, Binance, and Coinbase? If they are really shut down, especially in a way where it's clear their business model will not be tolerated in the USA (so no one will take their place), how much will that pull down on the whole ecosystem?
However, because it is so poorly designed, almost nobody does that, and instead store their crypto in exchanges. Which have all the downsides of banks (they can hold your money hostage) but none of the upsides (security and regulation).
* Early adopters disproportionately end up in control of majority of coins (currently 0.03% of wallets own 59% of all bitcoins)
* Proof-of-work is wasteful
* Chain is very inefficient
* Loss of coins with loss of wallet means, for one, that inheriting the coins is not possible unless special precautions are taken which undo a lot of the security
* Other libertarian nonsense that shows very naive understanding of economics that I can't think of at the moment
You could argue about people losing their private keys being deflationary, but that's still different from blockchains like Ethereum whose currency is literally burned in small amounts during block creations (and therefore has the chance to be truly deflationary at times).
Aside from that your other points are valid.
Indeed. Bitcoin is the only cryptocurrency that the powers have deemed a commodity. The rest are securities.
Now let's talk use cases.
Funnily enough there was some amount, less than a dollar IIRC, left in Voyager when they folded. I received an email telling me it was being taken over by...Binance. Never bothered to login and even check it.
Guess it really is scams all the way down.
In March they asked us to sign up with Binance who would take over the accounts.
In April they said the Binance thing was off.
Since April, they just keep sending chapter 11 restructuring projections.
I imagine the folks who had money in Voyager when it melted down felt pretty scammed.
And now for folks in Binance...
Except you aren't really. You will always be beholden to one entity or another, in bitcoin the 51% who need to clear your transactions. You just decide to not trust in the current financial apparatus and instead bet on the new.
the entire concept of money is a social construct. It's a culture wide bluff that we all agree to never call. "self-sovereignty" is antithetical to the idea of money.
Specialized ASIC were developed after crypto became popular.
Sure there is. The capped supply is intended to cause deflation and enrich early adopters if/when Bitcoin goes mainstream. To argue otherwise is to claim that the author of the whitepaper was ignorant of how a currency with limited supply would behave. And if that's true, it's more damning of Bitcoin than the "get rich quick" stuff.
At the end of the day, you need to keep your keys on an a dedicated air-gapped system where you have epoxied the USB ports and have ideally written the OS and all of the firmware (and the compiler) yourself. But then what's the point of a supposed currency of the future that is barely usable without paranoid security measures?
(These are the hard truths they won't tell you in the super bowl commercials)
so eschewing exchanges, you conduct all your commercial transactions directly in crypto straight from your crypto wallets? it's cool you can avoid all fiat like that, but doesn't it limit your purchasing options? Or have I missed another one of the points of crypto?
I use an exchange occasionally, but I don't keep money parked there long-term like a bank. Deposit fiat, trade for crypto, withdraw crypto. I'm never exposed for more than an hour.
Which isn’t to say the existing financial system works well for everybody all the time, but in practice crypto just isn’t showing real benefits to offset its many downsides.
It does not appear to be justified to make claims about what's true of "the majority of sex workers online". This is not an area where reliable numbers exist.
Many payment processors do restrict the business they want to deal with beyond what the letter of the law requires. (And that is their prerogative as a private business!)
> How is refusing to serve legal sex workers different?
As far as I can tell, in the US discrimination is forbidden against certain protected groups / along certain protected differences only. But you are free to discriminate on all other grounds. Eg a restaurant can legally discriminate against people who don't wear a tie.
The UK rules are similar, see eg https://www.gov.uk/discrimination-your-rights
In the British rules, sexual orientation is explicitly mentioned, but your trade ain't. So as far as I can tell, it's illegal in the UK to discriminate against gays but legal to discriminate against sex workers.
(However, a government might come after you, if you do something they don't like, even if it's perfectly legal. Eg the government could just 'randomly' decide to audit your taxes all the time, or 'randomly' apply other regulations and rules more strictly.)
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group for a list of the protected groups in the US. Wikipedia lists sexual orientation, but not vocation.
I think the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Iran since the Islamic Revolution etc went for a less legalistic and more moralistic approach.
(Of course, you should still evaluate these policies on their own merit, instead of tarring them guilty by association. To give a counter-example: Nazi Germany was one of the first places to put anti-animal cruelty laws on the books and officials were very concerned about the dangers of smoking. Two stances that are widely popular today, and rightly so.)
(And if the general public doesn't care, why should laws in a democratic country care?)
You might declare marijuana vaguely shady, but as far as I can tell, it's a legitimate product that consenting adults might want to trade in.
Yes, if you buy in person, then cash works. I was more thinking of buying online. And also where a marijuana business would keep their money.
(For the latter, bitcoin isn't very useful, because suppliers won't accept it. But neither is the legacy banking system always willing to serve businesses in weird niches.)
This goes beyond the question of legal risks and statutory limits, CC’s are debt which means someones money isn’t tied up during a dispute.
On the other hand, you can only lose the bitcoins you actually have.
With a credit card you can go into debt.
If Bitcoin transactions involved giving your private key to every entity you wanted to transact with (like how credit card numbers work), then this would be a problem.
You can also choose not to trust any 3rd party. If I'm buying an on-chain digital item, I probably don't need to support disputes, but if I'm buying something off-chain and don't trust the merchant, I might want that protection.
Free speech, no matter how disgusting, is constitutional in the US. This is a legal use case of crypto.
Another is micropayments for content or for upvotes with Lightning Network, for example https://stacker.news
Actually, even in the US communication providers are required to stop people sending certain images to each other.
These people also need to pay their bills and not have their money stolen or otherwise disappear in the “fraud all the way down” world of crypto. Cash solves most of these problems, as well as basic intermediate layers like LLCs.
In an industry where getting fucked by payment processors regularly is part of the business, I think there is obvious appeal to pseudonymous transactions for both buyer and seller. Again, off-ramps are far better in 2023. I can deposit crypto and get cash in my bank account in a working day or two.
This is a common problem in these discussions. The HN crowd tends to have better access to payment infrastructure and reliable income from their industry. Not everyone has those benefits and many people are punished by our existing system for doing completely legal work that some see as immoral.
It’s the people saying “Sex workers should just use crypto, it will solve all their problems!” who are lacking empathy, and not the people listing very plausible reasons why “Magic solution X” doesn’t make any problems go away.
Modern internet finance on hacker news. I pulled a muscle cringing.
In sane countries that is, yes. And that's where most of the global wealth is, too.
However, there are places where you need to worry a lot more about the government arbitrarily seizing your funds, or the banks just 'misplacing' them.
(I specifically write 'arbitrarily' above, because sane countries also typically want a cut of your income and/or wealth, but they write laws and regulations _beforehand_ that you can read to figure out how much you'll owe in taxes. Of course, some people also use crypto and other tricks to avoid paying taxes.)
These companies will be free to operate everywhere else.
I'm not really in favour of bans here, because just as no one forces you to enter a casino, no one forces you to trade on a cryptocurrency exchange (or hold any cryptocurrencies at all). Matt Levine's Money Stuff reported a lot on people losing money in crypto over the last two years, and was always amazed that the media couldn't really find those sob stories where orphans and widows lost their life savings. It was always some guys who admitted that they gambled and lost.
However, if eg American elected officials, or their appointed proxies at the SEC, want to ban certain things, who am I to judge?
Here in Singapore the authorities are a lot more crypto friendly, which works for me.
(I don't hold any cryptocurrencies. My investments are all in the most boring index fund available.
My position on weird financial assets is the same as for drugs: I don't think cryptocurrencies are a good investment for most people (on the grounds of insufficient diversification, if nothing else), but I don't see any reason to ban consenting adults from them. By default, let people make their own choices.)
We have casinos here. Our government is an interesting mix between laissez-faire and paternalistic with a strong Puritan streak. (I don't think it's actually of Puritan origin, but a parallel evolution from Chinese culture? Would be interesting to look into the origins.)
The result is that foreigners can enter the casinos willy-nilly, and lose all their money as they please. But as a local you have to pay an entry levy of 150 Singapore dollars, just to remove any illusion that you might be come out ahead when you visit.
You can also tell that government that they should ban you from entry completely (if you know you have a gambling problem). Curiously enough, your relatively can also do that for (or rather, to) you.
See https://www.mha.gov.sg/docs/default-source/media-room-doc/an... for sources.
The fact that crypto can be used in the free world makes it valuable and useful for people in less free parts of the world.
In the same class of assets as beanie babies and tulips, perhaps
Similarly whatever you do or showcase or discuss, "Oh that is not REAL Crypto. Our Crypto is different!"
It's a massive whack a mole. Meanwhile there are what, ten thousand plus different tokens tracked on coin market cap?
Edit : 25k, apparently lol. It's been a few days since I last checked :-)
Why would you see it as an investment signal, rather than a massive red flag and an indication of a Ponzi scheme?
"I generally distrust door-to-door salesmen, but the Brooklyn Bridge deal was just too good to pass up!"
Doesn't keeping coin in an exchange (as opposed to in a wallet, locally) sort of violate the ideology of crypto? Wasn't this shit invented to circumvent the banks?
I don't get it, using something meant to circumvent the banks, just to invest it in a less regulated form of a bank
Isn't to say I have a problem with crypto, but the one camp of people who shill these exchanges and the other that is saying crypto = exchanges = ponzi scheme are both wrong
Without access to 'real' money, the get rich quick crowd (and probably a lot of the scam crowd, and probably a lot of the dark market crowd) move on. With them gone... there's probably not very much left of a cryptocurrency user base.
Wrt to the get rich quick crowd, things were fine before they showed up. They should go somewhere
I think if you remove the latter there won't be many people left playing with cryptocurrency. Which would be fine from my perspective (a lot fewer people being ripped off in what appears to basically be a huge unregulated casino). And it sounds like from yours too.
Essentially, the thesis was that a decentralized protocol can never evolve and adapt as quickly as a centralized platform, because the protocol has to reach consensus with all stakeholders before it can change. This leaves a gap between user expectations and the protocol's capabilities, which platforms are happy to fill. They extend the protocol with bespoke and proprietary features, these features draw users, and users come to depend on these extensions. Thus, lock in.
You can see this with email and Gmail, with the web and Facebook et al. NFTs had OpenSea, and crypto in general has the exchanges. You can't separate crypto from the exchanges because the existence of crypto necessarily implies exchanges.
Seems to me like building a centralized system on top of a decentralized one, similar to my earlier example of building a bank on top of something designed to circumvent the bank
General rule seems to be greed v laziness -> centralization
In a world where people were using nothing but some sort of a peer-to-peer currency this system would be unbelievably amazing. The reason exchanges exist is because fiat currencies still exist, and so there's a lot of demand for exchanging between peer-to-peer currencies and fiat currencies.
Exchanges are what make crpyto usable, to the extent it is.
> Doesn’t keeping coin in an exchange (as opposed to in a wallet, locally) sort of violate the ideology of crypto?
Maybe, so what? “Exchanges as a venue for, um, exchange” and “keeping coin in an exchange” aren’t the same thing (except to the extent that exchanges make it difficult to move coin off the exchange, which AFAIK usually isn’t an issue for crypto so much as it is sometimes is for fiat.)
> Wasn’t this shit invented to circumvent the banks?
That’s been part of the marketing, sure, and not just banks but the financial services industry more generally. But, as it turns out, you need a lot of those services for anything money-like to be usable, especially when its not the primary currency of the economy you are trying to operate in. A lot of the marketing of cryptocurrency is…not particularly realistic. (Of course, a lot of it is done by the people running the crypto-community versions of financial services, so…)
Its a bit confusing because the submitted order is a proposal of how a order could be given by a judge, but is still full of important blank information like the name of the judge, the date, etc.
"Later on Tuesday, a filing from the United States District Court for the District Of Columbia showed that the court had agreed to grant the SEC’s demands."
Its a proposed order.
for those who dont want to click through, its full of stuff like this:
"IT IS HEREBY ORDERED, ADJUDGED, AND DECREED that the Defendants show cause, if any, before the Honorable __________ of this Court, at __ o’clock _.m., on the __ day of ____, 2023, in Courtroom _____, United States Courthouse"
In the article the words "a filing" link to attachment 1 to docket entry 4, titled "Text of Proposed Order"
Further the docket indicates that sometime today (Wednesday) the court scheduled a hearing on the 13th to consider this motion (docket entry 4).
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/67474542/securities-and...
As tedunangst says below, this is common and doesn't mean the judge agreed with you.
It just makes it procedurally easy for the judge to agree with you. The judge might not sign it at all. Might edit it and then sign it. Might write their own version that says something else. Etc.
I only checked that the title matched the contents of the article, not that the article was correctly researched.
Without that onerous administrative tax-compliance requirement, I'd have made many purchases with bitcoin.
The reason why currency has relative strength or weakness comes from the idea of a "national balance sheet": if your nation's assets exceed its liabilities, your local currency is gaining buying power, because it can take on additional debt from other countries and therefore, when we measure it in terms of "how much a unit of currency can purchase", we are getting them at a relative discount. You don't necessarily want the currency to be strong if your economy is based on exporting, but as a net importer, the US has assumed the role of strength for some time, and a large part of its system is to "export the dollar" as the international settlement currency.
So, with the pandemic, we got a round of fiscal stimulus, inflating the currency. Not necessarily insurmountable by itself. But then Russia invaded Ukraine and the US decided to punish the action with sanctions. That prevents Russia from doing some business, but it also has a blowback to it: if the usage of USD is becoming more restricted, it becomes less appealing as a settlement currency. Many smaller countries have peeled away to alternatives, with a handful even opting to hold BTC. Therefore, dollar strength is under serious threat now. The recent bank implosions have added to that uncertainty: there is a real question, often discussed in the crypto space now, of whether USD is going to survive intact.
Under Gary Gensler's administration, the MO of the SEC has been to swing around a billy club and drum up a bunch of charges against exchanges. The charges aren't very sound in nature: they don't adhere to a consistent framework, and don't suggest cooperation with exchanges like Coinbase that have taken pains to ask for regulatory clarity.
The rationale for why that's happening now is obvious: if the overriding concern is protecting the dollar, the SEC has to burn any possible lifeboats to maintain control of its own currency.
But...if you're doing that, that's the "then they fight you" part of the story. There are several countries where an informal crypto sector has taken hold to handle payments and remittance precisely because it bypasses financial controls. In many cases, people will still prefer settlement in USD, but they can hold a stablecoin if needed.
There is a fate in which USD pulls through without falling into an inflationary spiral, but it requires the economy to do extremely well(with a mix of labor mobilization and technological improvements) so that the balance sheet is fixed and faith is restored. The market reaction in this case suggests that people don't think the US is in control of its money, and they expect the action to be toothless - and they have a point, since if an exchange goes down, they can continue holding in self-custody and wait for the market to provide alternatives.
2) Crypto cannot be killed due to its decentralized nature and every attempt makes it more clear how anti-fragile it is. You cut off one head in the US, two more will spring up in other countries.
The US is not (anymore?) the center of the world attention. In a way, it's just that more countries "open their eyes" on the impact the US has on many countries. For instance, the US is an "ally" of France, but does a lot of damage to the French economy, on purpose.
Please provide examples for more self-directed research?
So basically the SEC failed to protect people from that ponzi scammer boy SBF was, but they're going after the like of Binance and Coinbase, who, so far, never stole a cent from anyone?
In the SBF case by the time anyone realizes what was happening the money was "gone."
Trying to reply why it will be that easy in this case perhaps. N.B. they were just granted an order; they need now to enforce it. That's a different "craziness."
In America you are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Therefore, under our legal system, Binance.US is presumed to not have stolen anyone's money until the SEC passes the burden of proving guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
These aren’t criminal charges. The standard is preponderance of evidence.
It is interesting however, the SEC purportedly has tons of evidence of wrongdoing at these exchanges but completely missed FTX which was a massive fraud. Color me skeptical, it's almost like they are saving face for missing FTX. FTX was even regulated to some extent -- I remember you were able to buy tokenized versions of US stocks on there.
"...is there a Snopes fact checked source?..."
I'm honestly finding it more and more difficult to believe there are actual biological people who think and talk this way...
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/07/business/binance-cash-ban...
The SEC has turned around 3 months after these banks collapsed and launched significant legal action against Binance and Coinbase, which says that what they found was serious enough to move really quickly against these guys. No idea what they found, but I have feeling we're all gonna be reading about it pretty soon.
The SEC is sending a message that the days of crypto exchanges being largely unregulated are over, and they're probably doing that because of how badly they screwed up with FTX, not in spite of it.
And Binance appears to be on the hook for various forms of fraud.
Maybe they did never steal a cent from anyone, but there are more crimes than theft on the books.
FTX was headquartered in the Bahamas for a reason. The SEC doesn't have jurisdiction over the Bahamas. It also takes time to build a case, which is difficult when FTX exploded and then collapsed so quickly.
Binance.US and Coinbase both operate in the US, under the SEC's jurisdiction.
Just because to the best of our knowledge, Binance is fully solvent and can make all US depositors whole, doesn't mean that they won't declare bankruptcy imminently. That's a condition that could change at any time, as has been well demonstrated.
I have a feeling Binance would also look a lot more like a ponzi scheme under subpoena with their asset values gone to zero, no?
There are dozens of crypto exchanges, and most of the major ones have not become insolvent. FTX and MtGox are the only major ones to become insolvent and lose user funds. The top ones like Kraken and Coinbase and Binance have been operating without issue for many years.
Agreed. SEC should have given enough time to these two so that they could fleece people of their money, then declare themselves bankrupt and then have law enforcement go to other countries and have the culprits extradicted back. Finally have everyone shouting "SEC colluded with these culprits".
I don't understand this rush to stop this from happening.
But this is HN and the people here are smart but lack the intellectual courage and honesty to challenge their beliefs, so they'll believe in things like "SEC trying to save the common investor" despite obvious examples like 2008, FTX, etc.
They apply the same reasoning to war for example, they'll never talk about how comparable the US aggression on Iraq is to the Russian aggression on Ukraine, and will call you a Russian sympathiser if you point this out.
This is expected and completely natural, humans will always find reasons why their actions are good and general just ways to explain their behavior, I think there are experiments that even show it on the biological level when they cut off the right from the left hemisphere.
The SEC's attack on Binance and CB has been part of a multi year attack on cryptocurrencies, everyone here will criticize crypto really hard but never the fact the fed printed huge amounts of USD, causing inflation not only for US citizens but for every country that relies on the US for food and other imports (that are done in USD, so for example country X's reserve in USD is worth less now, and US exporters raise their prices, etc.)
The people here will go to extreme lengths of mental gymnastics to say that the inflation wasn't caused at all by money printing but by covid disrupting the supply chain and by the Russian war.
Yes, scammy cryptocurrencies being called on their bullshit is a positive for the world.
Not saying one is more illegal/legal than the other, but they certainly acted differently.
Not saying that it couldn't be, but the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist.
Binance acts like this because complying with US law is ridiculously expensive. Binance cares most about serving the remaining 95% of humanity that does not live in the US. Maybe seven years or so ago they really started shifting things around so their US services are expendable, and could be jettisoned at any moment if US regulators start biting.
Both are entirely reasonable strategies, and it's why I, as a US citizen, moved everything I had in Binanace away 7 or so years ago, and only ever do anything custodial with Coinbase. Back in the before times, I had accounts across multiple global exchanges so I could run arbitrage bots etc, but now it's basically Coinbase or nothing when it comes to custodial exchanges.
That totally explains why they put so much effort into catering for US whales.
It doesn't look like anyone is going to outright lose assets - but perhaps not the able to withdraw for some period of time?
Withdraw to cold storage, dump everything except bitcoin, and of course, do your own research.
“Tortilla! Not your keys, not your coin! Eat your vegetables.”
If you really don't want to self-custody, probably the next safest option is to skip all the new crypto companies and instead use one of the traditional finance companies that's starting to branch into crypto (like Fidelity)
You either need to be day trading off the wild fluctuations in different coins prices, which requires working through an exchange, or you need to be "investing" in various scams and hoping to get your money back out before the rugpull.
[1] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/litigation/committees/wom...
https://www.federalreserve.gov/central-bank-digital-currency...
Another case of Alstom or even BlackBerry..
If you can't exchange it, payments that don't use fiat might be developed - good, imo.
Why do you think this makes it a net good?
Unironically, crypto fixes this, by allowing for self-custody and trustless exchange using verifiable programs (like Uniswap).
Assuming coinbase gets taken down too, do Americans have any options left to convert their crypto to fiat? Or do they need to perform offshore transactions?
https://cointelegraph.com/news/sec-coinbase-binance-lawsuits...
Just convert whatever you want to Bitcoin and Ethereum first in a decentralized exchange like any AMM, and then sell the Bitcoin or Ethereum on a fiat route. Assuming you even want fiat, but when you do you can.
Now everybody can safely swap and transfer coins on whatever dex. If they want to cash out, swap again for usdt, then go to usdt official exchange and get your $.
Also from TuongVy Le(@TuongvyLe12), former Chief Counsel at SEC:
"Let’s be clear: the @SECGov complaint doesn’t mention this, but there is currently NO way for a platform like @coinbase to register as a securities exchange, broker, or clearing agent. That’s why they’ve been begging @SECGov for YEARS to give them a path to compliance.
Instead of working constructively with U.S. market participants to come up with a working model, and knowing that Congress is actively considering legislation to do the same, SEC sues. No allegations of fraud, just accusing @coinbase of failing to do the impossible."
This is probably due to dedollarization and abject terror within the americans who don't know of a pre-1956 world order
This is a political stunt. Nothing more. Some helpful context:
https://twitter.com/superanonymousk/status/16666372273239982...
Gensler is a man who's overtures to work for Binance were spurned. He came into power at the SEC, and then he went after them, literally since the day he entered office. They were originally going to drop this case right when FTX blew up, but they knew how bad the optics of that would be, so they waited. This isn't someone impartial, looking out for investors. This is someone spiteful, looking out for himself.
If he wanted to protect people, he'd have done this when the market was hot. That's when investors need protection. That's when a good regulator acts - when a market is overexcited and people are being exploited. Who, exactly, is being protected now? From what?
How would you know? How would we know without actually auditing their books?