Mark Cuban loses $870K in hot wallet hack

I remember (but very poorly, as this was over a quarter century ago and wasn't that important to me) back when there was a TV show (I remember this being in Japan, but that is quite likely my brain filling in gaps) where they locked someone in a room and they had to figure out how to live off of only things they could purchase off the Internet. Of course, this was extremely difficult, as most of the things you could order online were "some relatively niche gadgets". It was big news when you could order pizza off a website, but that was only in the United States and probably only in some places... I can't remember what he did to get calories but I remember it being interesting and I think it involved a website he found that sold cosmetics? It could very well be I am mixing this story up with something else :(. But like, it isn't as if the Internet was somehow universally useful from the very beginning... 1999 changed a lot, very quickly, but the Internet was already something even normal people could access for a number of years before then.

Right, because there is not any need for the other countries for that technology.

Does that mean stablecoins should be discontinued because it's not mass adopted at all? even if it's useful for a minority? I disagree

That’s his point.

I'd probably hold it as is. I wouldn't ever consider converting some of my hard-earned cash into bitcoin or physical gold, but for a no-cost investment I'll take the diversification.

Most of the people holding gold in a serious sense never actually see or touch it. They delegate that to trusted entities who can provide all the physical security and auditing that an average person can't. I feel like there's a parallel with the blockchain, in the sense that actual bitcoin is "heavy" to move but you can to a lot of IOU deals on the fringe of it.

It’s doable, e.g. you could take the names of twelve months in two languages; maybe even backwards and interspersed.

Still, the challenge is to live with that long term.

E.g. to not write it down. Or to write it down in a sufficiently cryptic way. But not too cryptic because you still need to remember it. Also you shouldn’t reuse this system. And every now and then you should check that it continues to work as you expect. And…

Or put everything on paper in a safe. Maybe self-sovereign transportable wealth is not for you.

And I prefer vi, or now vim tiny.

> Customers don't because the IRS is ridiculous, presumably on purpose.

I have mixed feelings about the IRS too but people need to remember they are chartered to enforce the law as it is defined. The SEC and IRS has interpreted (IMO correctly) that according to current law and regulations crypto transactions are a taxable event as you describe. What you're not understanding is that many people actually appreciate this handling of crypto because of the benefit under current capital gains regulations (long-term capital gains). Another fundamental conflict in what crypto is and isn't, what the crypto community wants it to be, etc.

It's yet another one of those "crypto people don't understand the world as it is". They are trying to bend the world to them and not the other way around. It's not working and it never will. You're never going to have what is essentially product market fit if you live in an alternate universe like the crypto community.

> So it makes sense to exempt transactions below some threshold. But for this they apparently don't. Which is hard to explain outside of malice.

Contrary to popular belief in the crypto community there isn't some cabal scheming to "keep crypto down" or any such nonsense as we can see now by the traditional investment community trying to offer bitcoin ETFs, etc. It's an asset and even though the cryto community falls back to "it's about the tech", "save the world", etc in a bear market we all know they're actually all about gambling in fiat. Wait for a bull market for "have fun staying poor" and endless posts about the value in fiat to come back in full force. If anything it's just another thing to provide tax revenue to the US Treasury. They don't care what you're trading as long as you follow the tax code.

With the scheme you have described there are obvious avoision loopholes, such as people avoiding taxable events altogether by just executing all of their trades in amounts under the threshold. Then what do you do, come up with some complicated scheme to define it under total transaction amount in a year for a given entity? This will then be abused because there are all kinds of things you can do to game that. If such a legal framework were implemented I guarantee the next product from exchanges would be schemes to avoid taxation to automatically execute trades to fit your loophole.

The other issue is knock-on effects - this regulation would have to apply evenly across other asset classes as any language to specifically exempt crypto would also be nebulous and very gameable. Why should crypto have a fundamental tax advantage over other asset classes? The tax code is already a byzantine mess and this would only add to that.

> And then people say "well nobody wants to use it."

It's clear people don't want to use it, they want to gamble. There are and have been "pro-crypto" politicians but the number of voters who support this are the tiny handful of crypto zealots that don't remotely move the needle in an election. Crypto doesn't get votes because the vast majority of people see it for what it is - a toy to gamble with and once again the actual adoption numbers, demand, etc reflects that.

Yes, and he was in custody at the time ... where he spent half of his adult life.

I'm sure there are other types of scams too right?

I see this as a great opportunity to learn the next few lessons of traditional Finance system that lead to them not being finite and only driven by market forces.

Crypto really feels like a speed run of human monetary history.

None of that is a given with central custodians, which very often already have to comply with regulations concerning money laundering, embargo enforcement etc.

> (instead of the awful SWIFT)

SWIFT is a real-time messaging network.

International transactions being slow has almost nothing to do with legacy technologies – it's partially outdated processes (batch processing facilitates netting, and netting preserves liquidity!), but overwhelmingly that we (or at least the regulators making the rules) want them to be slow enough to be able to intervene in case of financial crimes.

I’ve transferred a few million dollars with CurrencyFair by now, the transfer across continents has always been less than 24hrs, the notification from my bank arriving before the emitter tells me it’s sent; only 4$ per transaction (so 0.003%) and the rate always within 0.5% of the stock exchange (less than the 2-3% it costs with Bitcoins).

Therefore the point of faster settlement and less burocracy doesn’t stand unless you are selling weapons, which proves that Bitcoin is only useful for criminal schemes.

How is a crypto custodian immune to court orders, corrupt or otherwise?

> my phrases on paper and USB locked in safes separated by 2000 miles

That's nice (unless you lose access to both or make some other operational mistake), but literally the opposite of central crypto custody, which is what this thread is about.