Binance founder Changpeng Zhao agrees to step down, plead guilty
wsj.com
wsj.com
Govt collects a big crypto fine, fine makes the big losers in FTX whole, problem solved.
CZ should have just bought FTX and closed the deal and made people whole, woulda saved himself some drama.
most people criticize fines as a mere check for the offender belonging to some moneyed elite and nothing else.
fines are not replacement for civil law. if anyone think they were wronged, that's the only way. not a magically proactive government becoming their patents.
Otherwise somebody else will be left "holding the bag" eventually (and it will be a larger bag).
I might be old-fashioned but these fines and charges, to be clear, are for ACTUAL wrong-doing, you know, MONEY LAUNDERING. That's greedy-bad-guy stuff. It's not arbitrary or simply a matter of "avoiding drama".
Is this conjecture?
SBF was convicted ~2 weeks ago and a Section 35B (federal cooperation and substantial assistance) doesn't go through that quickly, unless SBF started cooperating against CZ before his conviction.
And it sure didn't seem like SBF was interested in cooperating in any way pre-conviction.
TL;DR: they might have assets but they were and are still "awful financially"
I actually can't believe he didn't get jail time given the severity of what was uncovered.
Could we make a connection about Binance, and now Kraken prosecution with what happened after 9/11 where US pressed countries such as Switzerland to remove bank secrets? [1]
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/24/swiss-claim-the-us-banking-c....
There's so many people who Trump and his various enterprises left stuck with sometimes very huge bills that it's a miracle he didn't get dinged years ago. And that is why Trump is being on the receiving end of the stick at the moment... he forgot one crucial point: never make too many enemies in life because eventually they will team up to get their revenge on you.
[1] https://eu.northjersey.com/story/news/columnists/mike-kelly/...
[2] https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2016/0...
In US, you can be rich and get away with a lot of crime and crookedness.
If Trump does go to prison, that will make quite the news.
Putin and Xinping will be laughing because they have such a strong hold on their countries, them going to jail is unthinkable.
That’s one way to look at it. Another way is to note that they’ve done a real good job of limiting their potential future options. They get to remain in power, or be exiled and live in hiding, or be dead? They’re unlikely to resign and get to live a quiet retirement, just as they’re unlikely to be jailed by their opponents?
Only at the “modelling a cow as a perfectly thermoconducting sphere” level of analysis.
Actual damages and preliminary injunctions to preserve a situation remediable by damages are about that, other parts of what happens in civil cases are often not. E.g., punitive damages are, as the name suggests, punitive, not compensatory.
- Punitive damages were awarded in only 5% of trials where the plaintiff won
- It was lower for tort cases (3%) and higher for contract cases (8%)
- It is lower in product liability and medical cases (1% each)
Those findings show that the punitive damages awarded are both relatively rare and modest. A "spherical cow model" based on compensatory damages is probably still a very good model.
[1] https://www.centerjd.org/content/fact-sheet-punitive-damages...
But he would do livestreams where he said anyone without insurance or that had insurance that wouldn’t cover it could DM him and he would take care of it for them. One of my online friends was able to get the medication this way.
https://web.archive.org/web/20170710014221/https://www.washi...
Think about this: I hijack an airplane full of people but all I do is get them to their destination faster. Everyone is better off (i.e., no material injury occurred) but I assume you'd still think I should be charged, no?
FWIW- Madoff used the same excuse that "nobody actually lost money." According to him, none of the principal was lost, it was just unrealized gains. Most people still think he should have been charged with fraud.
You can do a lot of illegal things and get away with it, but questioning the US government’s ability is just asking to be made an example of.
There are limited law enforcement resources and no doubt Silk Road would have gotten a bit longer reprieve, but once he poked the bear, you damn well know they said “I don’t care what it costs, I want this guy in prison for the rest of his life”.
I think that (sadly) the key distinction in the American justice system has to do with how easily it is to justify your prosecution to the public. If you're wildly popular, you're probably able to get away with quite a lot. If you're wildly unpopular, it's probably pretty easy to get a conviction on any number of things.
Justice, in its broadest sense, is the concept that individuals are to be treated in a manner that is equitable and fair. A society in which justice has been achieved would be one in which individuals receive what they "deserve"
So, what do they deserve? It's up to a panel of peers to determine. Peers, mind you, that are representative of the society you live in.
So in a sense, public outcry and court of public opinion can sway personal opinions on what is just and fair and determine what people deserve. I find the entire system malleable and ripe for corruption.
"It's only when the tide goes out that you see who's swimming naked". The tide was going out even without CZ's actions. And FTX was swimming naked to the bone.
What is not the case is that it would have clearly gone one way or the other.
It was far cheaper for CZ to pay the $4.3B fine.
Sounds like kicking the can down the road to me. That won't end well.
SBF commits fraud and loses $8b, CZ pleads guilty and pays $4.3B fine and loses access to US market. I don't know why so many people think the crypto space is legit and this is just a temporary setback.
Pretty much every major marketing push and normalized on social media (Including NFTs and influencer Culture) ends up being a massive scam.
It worries me that no one sees the trend and holds social companies & people involved properly accountable for this form of crowdsourced theft.
It is also amazing to see that CZ managed to walk away free of any jail time, kept most of his assets gathered by his con job.
they are the exact targeted audience of CZ's business.
How did he con you?
Did someone force you to use Binance?
Do you have evidence that he conned someone?
This was ~2 months ago.
>Did someone force you to use Binance?
Do you understand what a con is? People are usually 'conned' because they are tricked into trusting someone that they shouldn't, when people are forced we typically refer to it as robbery or similar.
In case this is too hard for you to understand, try this - if I walk alone the street selling people paper with your name signed on it promising that such "magic sheet" is going to bring them unconditional happiness and I manage to sell millions of such sheets with a profit of billions, is that a con job?
This is exact what CZ did. He was/is/will always be remembered as a con man.
So yes there is a difference between gambling away deposits and allowing someone to use your service without taking their name and social security number and reporting it to government authorities
Here's a recent article
https://cryptoslate.com/reclusive-binance-co-founder-yi-he-s...
And all countries strong enough with their own fiat do care quite a lot to not having crypto in their country
One misstep and you wish you could be prosecuted in US instead.
I am on Google Fiber though, so I probably use 8.8.8.8 without explicitly meaning to. Perhaps this is a problem shared by both Cloudflare and Google's DNS proxies?
For Windows users, YogaDNS is a great little app for managing DNS configuration. Can set up DNS rules depending on domain name etc.
I actually use PiHole and added Local DNS entries for the archive.* domains in my PiHole config to fix the issue across my local network.
51.38.69.52 archive.is archive.today
41.77.143.21 archive.ph archive.li archive.vn archive.fo archive.md
And if all else fails, install Tor and access their site at archiveiya74codqgiixo33q62qlrqtkgmcitqx5u2oeqnmn5bpcbiyd.onion
Settings | Privacy & Security | DNS over HTTPS | Increased Protection | Choose Provider | NextDNS
One trick that might help: I have found if I use a bookmarked page from archive.is, I can get to that. From there I can put in the original URL in the "Saved from" bar, and hit "Search", then I can usually get to an archive of the article.
Not a hater, just processing the dichotomy of his genius image with his ingeniously ungenius self-immolation.
Lesson: Looking like you make lots of money makes you look very smart.
He's essentially getting off with a slap on the wrist, 50m is nothing given his wealth. The fines against the company are also a pittance compared to Binance's annual revenue.
The moral for white collar criminals is: if you get caught, just cooperate and pay up, and live up crime another day. The cost of the fines is trivial.
He'll step down from Binance and live the rest of his life with billions. Sounds like a good deal :)
Pretty much like you cannot eat your favorite food anymore and have to settle with "the next best" (philanthropy, maybe?)
Living at the top, to having no freedom must be very, very hard to stomach. I would take the deal too if I was CZ.
Giving up some "power-grab addiction" for 100% freedom (and being a billionaire still), seems very good for him.
Binance did a lot of fraud and money laundering. Clawbacks are coming. There will be no fortune when the legal system is done with him.
People will ask questions like "How do you pay for your groceries?" and "Where did you find the money to buy a $37M penthouse?" and your paper trail needs to convince people the answer isn't "With the billions of dollars I embezzled."
Many of them end with "Consultant", "Collector", or "Trader".
If you can't answer those questions -- questions the tax man at least will expect you to answer, and probably other people as well -- you might as well say "I found money in the street."
Every few years there will be some story about a cartel banker getting busted and one of the things which will usually stand out is that they had a bunch of people working for them, and found some legitimate businesses which had large enough volume to hide millions of dollars in criminal activity. Setting that kind of thing up isn’t usually a one man operation.
You can pretty trivially check Binance's declared funds here: https://www.binance.com/en/proof-of-reserves
By my calculations they have >$6 billion in excess of customer deposits. Since he owns Binance, he principally owns those profits.
https://qz.com/binance-proof-of-reserves-solvency-1849884404
Do not forget. Binance operates in a space full of scammers and fraudsters. They've already admitted to money laundering at scale. After that, the question isn't whether they are dishonest. The question is how dishonest they are. The history of other crypto exchanges suggests that the appropriate prior we should start with should be heavily waited towards Ponzi scheme.
'We are operating as a fking unlicensed securities exchange in the USA bro.'
https://www.businessinsider.com/sec-complaint-against-binanc...
Some Middle Eastern countries have extradition treaties with the US, but, more relevantly, a number of countries have legal extradition processes not dependent on treaties, including the UAE, the country where he lives.
They're also further inviting every country they've ever had a customer in to levy huge fines against Binance.
The US has recently (gradually over the past 20 years or so) started to really weaponize access to dollar-denominated accounts, essentially conscripting all the banks that want to do business with American banks into service of American foreign policy goals. This started in the aftermath of September 11th, for terrorism, then spread with the Magnitsky act of 2012 to include international corruption, and has slowly spread to more and more areas. So far the US has been somewhat judicious about using the tool- they seem to be aware that if they use it too often people will eventually just build ways around it- but it is a pretty big threat to wield against a company that absolutely needs to do business with somebody's banks.
However when you're talking about billions, it's difficult to keep them in anything but US treasuries.
all usd swift wires get routed through 2 of the major banks - think it was JP Morgan Chase & Wells Fargo. this allows them to check all of these transfers for aml/cft and other sanctions blacklists.
heard this from a guy who works closely with Tether so i'm sure he'd know well
He lives in Dubai, within one of the US's closest allies in the region. I'd be worried.
Dubai has a lot to lose by damaging its reputation as a safe haven for wealthy exiles. My 2c.
They have even more to lose by creating an image of criminal safe-haven.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-10/uae-ramps...
If you were him, why would you lose ~20% of your customers when you could just pay a fine and keep going? Sure he steps down, but he still owns the company.
https://www.fidelity.com/learning-center/trading-investing/b...
The name implies they are stable, what more could anyone want?
SEC investigations address both aspects, when it gets past investigation to litigation, they do civil litigation themselves and refer to DOJ for potential criminal prosecution.
Let's hope it dies sooner than later.
It's the perfect finetuned and still optimized PoS system.
Lol. Tether imploding anyone?
What, is the giant ticking timebomb of the USDT money printer not likely to 'negatively affect the industry'?
That matters because cryptocurrencies don’t help at all with the inflation consumers are seeing, while adding more personal risk and an exchange rate to arbitrage.
In this case, prices went all over the place during the pandemic and the question is how they recover – companies are a lot quicker to raise prices than lower them and if you look at the business press there were a lot of record profits reported - the most since the 1950s when American companies were reaping the profits of uninterrupted production capacity selling to post-WWII Europe:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-08-25/us-corpor...
The St. Louis Fed estimated 60% of the inflation in 2021 was profit-taking:
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/19/1177180972/economists-are-rec...
The story in Europe is similar with roughly half:
https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/06/26/europes-inf...
How would a crypto "help" with inflation? In the same way the Dollar "helps" with the inflation of the Euro?
Cryptos don't add to personal risk, people do that. If you think cryptos are making an impact, you should understand that the entire crypto economy is a rounding error in inflationary impact.
Looking forward to reading the Plea Agreement.
Basically: buy cheap BTCs, print shitload of tethers, sell BTCs for real USD to the tune of tens of billions and now store these real USD in short term US treasuries (they don't own chinese treasuries anymore) bringing in 5% and more.
They're claiming they now have excess money (!) to back their tether due to the fact that they collect 5% or more of interest on the short-term treasuries they have.
Put it this way: even if they printed $40bn out of their arses out of $80bn of tether, the $40bn of actual USD they'd have would still net them $2bn a year in interest. That'd still be a big hole but...
What if they printed "only" 10 bn out of thin air out of 80 bn: they'd have near 70 bn bringing in 3.5 bn yearly at the moment.
They don't give any of the interest back to USDT (tether) holders.
So if they printed "only" 10 bn out of their arses, in less than three years they'd have these 10 bn for real on interest alone.
It's still criminal (I guess) but it may not be "0% of tether are backed".
People have tried to run the maths on how much money entered the cryptocurrency world (with Coinbase giving a huge hint).
Centre (Circle+Coinbase) has really $24 bn backing their USDC coin (they publish the individual US short term treasuries bill number).
USDT (tether) is much older than USDC.
Did they cheat? Most certainly.
Did they "fake it 'till they made it", helped, by sheer luck, by interest rates going like crazy?
I think it's possible.
1. Make Tethers out of thin air and sell for BTC
2. BTC price goes up because crypto boom
3. Sell enough BTC for USD to back the fake Tethers you made up in step 1
4. Balance sheet now looks legit, and you even have BTC to spare to buy yachts for everyone.
Coinmarket cap shows the USDT market cap going up by about $2 billion during that weekend, but it's not clear if they were using this strategy. (which would have profited ~1-10% of that figure).
[1] or, depending on how much risk they wanted to take, traded them for USDC and DAI! Those were trading for as little as $0.90.
Why else would the US allow the largest counterfeit money printer to continue for long?
Incompetence.
Are you taking about tether or the fed?
Somehow I doubt that. That would mean someone invested this in a save and independent way with enough return to keep it inflation save and apparently has no other idea on how to invest that even more magical.
How is tether really pegged safely?
I'm not super savvy with money but why would anybody buy an ETF and pay their fees when the assets in the ETF don't grow or give dividends? How will they secure those assets? Cold wallet in a vault? What happens if they do their audit and the backing coins aren't there (stolen) or there's a hardware failure on the cold wallet?
The interesting ETF will be for Ethereum because a custodian can possibly stake it and earn yield. ETH can earn within the basic protocol.
Nothing you listed applies to bitcoin besides remote theft. The whole point of a blockchain is be fault tolerant in the face of those real failures. Remote theft occurs from a failure to secure your private keys. That’s human error and will be resolved in the same way as gold with… custodians aka a bank.
Also, securing physical assets is much easier than securing digital assets.
If you haven't written down your seed before generating your private key and also lost your private key, your money is lost. Thank you for this sacrifice for the common good, but you will want to educate yourself better next time.
https://www.businessinsider.com/jpmorgans-nickel-bags-turned...
For the everyday purchases, a Lightning wallet on a smartphone is enough.
Gold is hard to transport, easy to confiscate and hard to divide, thus difficult to use as a currency. None of those apply to Bitcoin. Well, unless someone is dumb enough to leave his money on an exchange.
https://decrypt.co/97795/blackrock-handle-circle-usdc-cash-r...
'BlackRock will become "a primary asset manager of USDC cash reserves"—the fiat currency backing the Circle-issued USDC stablecoin.'
It's the institutional version of their Vault feature: https://www.coinbase.com/vault
> 98% of digital currency is stored totally offline, in geographically distributed safe deposit boxes and physical vaults.
The ETF then takes out an insurance policy incase the custodian loses they BTC they hold on the ETF's behalf.
Now they do have to design redundancies for the keys. eg. they should not lose access to the assets because say they made it too safe and cant find the keys anymore :p
It's funny because it happened with Prime Trust a crypto custodian. But I'm sure a company like BlackRock can and will do better.
Coming to the security and safety part. In theory, BTC was made with a intension to be easily usable and accessible. Once you understand it, its pretty simple and straightforward (even easier than using a bank's service). No level of hardware wallet failure will compromise the funds because the funds are not in the wallet rather the record of the funds are in 100s of thousands of BTC nodes that is being run by miners and other enthusiasts. The real threat may be letting people that share OTPs to scammer handle their private key and seed phrase. Thats where custodians like coinbase comes in.
And to the point of how to make sure the fund held by ETF/Custodian is actually there or not, This can be easily verified. Tt is a public ledger and anyone with the public key can see how much funds are held in the wallet. This aspect of transparency is one of the key selling point of BTC.
I would recommend a short and interesting read - "Inventing Bitcoin".
This means rich late people will never migrate or buy BTC ETF ever.
It's like always buying at the increase
Late adopting rich people might still get into BTC ETF for its ability to maintain its value in the long term, as simple as that and doesn’t matter at what price they buy.
BTC is made 1 per 10 minute.
BTC is not gold
But gold or any other precious metals for that matter still has a flaw of having unlimited supply. Yes the supply is limited on earth but we are only couple of decades far from mining asteroids like 16 Psyche.
Flood the market with gold, it will drastically lose its value and this will indeed help its consumption like manufacturing of electronics etc but gold as an asset would be pointless.
This cannot happen in BTC, which is programmed to have finite supply.
Its domination will just change / already has.
I bought weed with BTC for years, I never cared how much it's worth I just used the current dominator value for 10g weed.
Not sure what advantage fungible should be? Even bills are fungible.
And there is no reason to assume BTC is less prone to inflation. BTC right now is not even stable enough to be deflationary or inflationary.
They poured scorn then, but I'm up to my eyeballs in bagpipes now
It's odd how clear the picture is but how many people have been fooled by fakes. What other industry is 99% scams and only 1% legitimate?
Why would anyone bother with Bitcoin?
If you want to avoid financial regulations in transmitting value across borders or purchase black market goods and services, you're going to be caught since all/most Bitcoin is KYCd and impossible to keep private, unlike Monero.
If you want to avoid transaction fees, you're SOL since it's at $10 right now versus $0.06 for Monero.
If you want a store of value, it's poor because it's volatile, not backed, and theft is not reversible, unlike virtually any other regulated security.
If you want to make legal purchases with it, any transaction costs $10 and can take hours or days, and is not reversible if you are defrauded, unlike USD.
Bitcoin has no value proposition beyond being a speculative asset and a Ponzi scheme for early buyers.
- Unlike Bitcoin, Monero's monetary issuance is not auditable, which could prove a major problem in case of an attack, potentially leading to inflation.
- Monero faces blockchain bloat issues due to its ring signatures. It cannot scale gracefully.
- Privacy and transaction cost concerns with Bitcoin have largely been addressed by Lightning and potentially other upcoming layer 2 solutions. A lot of work is being done here. If you are technologically inclined, you can also participate: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/20...
- KYC happens on exchanges. Buy your BTC on decentralized platforms like Bisq or RoboSats and be done with KYC.
- A private-only ledger can pose challenges when transaction notarization is necessary. Bitcoin lets you choose between a private L2 transaction or a public blockchain transaction.
That said, I love Monero and am glad it exists.
Yes, it still has some rough edges but it's now mostly usable. https://medium.com/coinmonks/lightning-network-2018-to-2023-...
Besides, about 80% of transactions within exchanges are actually off-chain, so this is nothing new.
But the whole thing is a distraction anyway. The majority of transactions happening off-chain means that Bitcoin is an utter failure at everything it ever set out to accomplish.
I'm not sure you've used Bisq or RoboSats if you think they're good replacements for exchanges. Barely anyone is online at a given time.
The press has tricked you into believing every coin aside from a few popular ones are scams. Dig deeper.
If I dig deeper, and determine that <some shit coin> is a scam, well, I am just looking at the wrong one.
If I dig deeper, and decide that it's not, and then get burned later, I should have done more due diligence.
'Digging deeper' in a minefield is, generally speaking, not great advice.
If you believe everything is a 'shitcoin' and you want to hold them forever then on your death bed you can look at the value and determine if it really was a shitcoin or if the media made me think everything was a shitcoin.
[1] And 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, ...
I'd be very happy if Monero somehow turned into the stable coin of crypto. It could just hover around $150-$200 forever.
Also, except maybe for purely digital there will be "on-off ramps" anyway, except it will be for real goods instead of fiat currency. The government can ban you from paying the gardener or buying milk with XMR.
Bitcoin and Monero have always been able to send transactions instantly and for Bitcoin, essentially free for over a decade with zero down time. That beats the pants off Visa and MasterCard.
Why use an inflationary currency that costs 2% to spend and takes 30+ days to settle?
“FTX and Binance are not examples of true crypto!”
“Soviet Union and Venezuela are not examples of true communism!”
you don't have be a believer in either to understand that objectively
True crypto does exist.
Bitcoin is true crypto.
When I mine Bitcoin, and I use that Bitcoin to buy something from someone else, that is true crypto.
When I sell something for Bitcoin, that is true crypto.
When I exchange fiat for Bitcoin at a centralized exchange, and I successfully withdraw it to a self-custody wallet. That is acceptably close to true crypto.
Same goes for Monero.
consumers choosing mismanaged companies are consumer discernment problems that have nothing to do with the sector they're involved in. specifically with crypto, centralized exchanges and brokerage experiences are not necessary parts of the crypto ecosystem and exist in parallel to other ways of getting fiat in and out of crypto, and other ways of getting exposure to the crypto ecosystem. many proponents of the crypto asset ecosystem have always sounded the alarm on those kinds of companies and actively track how much crypto is held by the companies or in self custody.
analogies compare dissimilar things with common attributes, what is the common attribute between observers of these two concepts?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism_in_20_years
So for a while there was an actual date attached to the constitutional goal.
I believe the deadline was quietly buried by his stagnation-oriented successors, but I’m not sure.
The Bolsheviks were a minority, but controlled key elements of the army. After months of civil unrest and violence, they staged an armed coup.
Others would like to buy it via retirement plans and having an ETF makes this doable.
Those that want to hold BTC incase the US dollar collapses will hodl their own BTC.
Those that want to hold BTC incase it really appreciates will hold it via an ETF in a tax advantaged account so they don't have to pay taxes on their gains, depending on the account type.
Also, CZ (pleads guilty to money laundering charges): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38366729
Many financial institutions do not care about decentralization, but they do care about investing in an asset where they do not have to worry about managing the asset (in that regard, similar to REITs). Having the asset insured against various types of malfeasance is also a requirement for investments by many institutional funds.
But now the speculators have taken over, and all that really matters is what BTC is worth in dollars.
Commodities are similar. People might invest in pork bellies even if they don't personally eat bacon.
Never should have been that cheap to begin with, really.
Binance is very different. While it hasn't complied with various securities laws, it's never lied to customers and has kept customers' assets safe. They've also done steps to build confidence and be transparent like verifying proof of reserves:
https://www.binance.com/en/proof-of-reserves
While this report isn't perfect, it does show that wallets they control have as much in assets as they're supposed to, so we know they're not doing what FTX did.
May the entire of crypto be brought down with it.
Crypto has brought good in underdeveloped countries like Venezuela and Argentina. Venezuelans use USDT to purchase real, physical goods. Sometimes groceries.
But besides all that, I think it's criminal to leave people in underdeveloped countries at the whims of unaccountable central-bank-style institutions like USDT. What will proponents of this crap say if/when USDT collapses? "They knew the risks"? Is the "crypto community" going to bail out people who invested their life savings in this garbage[2]?
[1] https://www.chainalysis.com/blog/latin-america-cryptocurrenc...
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/AxieInfinity/comments/10ovcoo/lost_...
Seems to me like Binance and crypto is the winner here.
Pretty hard to get rid of decentralized systems.
Crypto being ‘decentralised’ is a well known myth.
> If AWS were shut down, the chain would continue as usual.
Continue laundering money for foreign state actors and narcotics businesses, sounds about right as this is is what crypto is good for.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-nj/pr/united-states-seized-and-...
It's already impossible for crypto to become part of the current financial system so the only way to stop this scourge is to make crypto illegal starting with the exchanges down to the blockchains.
Blockchains have absolutely no use case at all.
That should be much better.
It's not productive to spread falsehoods about how blockchains are hosted.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/3-cloud-providers-accounting-...
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/10/12/morgan-stanley-...
Furthermore, the cointelegraph article misquotes a Messari report as if it's discussing the current state of Ethereum as having central points of failure, when it's really discussing a hypothetical upgrade to Ethereum that was never considered nor built.
Finally, node percentages don't actually matter in terms of chain uptime. What really matters are staking validator percentages, since they are what determine chain building and finality.
This doesn't change the fact that centralisation is still a massive problem with Ethereum and it is still a big enough problem that everyone knows that the crypto infra of choice is to coalesce on AWS.
Infura deploys Ethereum nodes solely on AWS further centralising Ethereum on there thanks to a Consensys and AWS partnership.
The entire opposite of decentralisation in crypto.
But sure, in a sector where most of the biggest names are fraudsters, some people still manage to be adherents.
Also, every month or so an article pops up here where either some business is rekt because their payment processor’s automated process kicked them off, or someone’s bank account got closed in a similar way screwing them.
Yet the only way to self custody electronic money and transact without intermediaries is somehow ‘pointless and idiotic’.
Given the state of crypto adoption now, I can’t imagine a non-dystopian future a century from now where what we now call crypto or digital assets haven’t become a very boring and non-remarkable part of the civilizational fabric.
I can imagine dystopian futures where that’s the case though. One would be where the infrastructure we use to run crypto on (the internet, telecommunications) doesn’t exist. Another is where all the regulatory environments for digital assets that currently exist (UK, EU, Canada, etc) have been totally rolled back, and self-custody has been made a criminal offense. Probably some type of society straight out of hunger games.
but keep commenting the same dialogue prompt the salt is pretty entertaining
Don't know if this is because it's mainstreamed in a way that makes it less "hacker"-appealing (quotes intentional), the HN community has changed, or because crypto went full crypto-bro so hard.
May be some combination.
Especially for funding the North Korean regime.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-18/how-north-korea-makes...
Great job.
This is very much a positive use case if you value individual freedom. Remember that any wall and border has 2 sides.
I can only name 1 person who is in this position you describe yet they are not fleeing Russia any time soon.
So according to your logic the North Korean hackers who borrowed $2BN in crypto are not criminals in North Korea's eyes despite the US government calling them criminals?
You might want to come with real world examples with a larger impact instead of tiny selective scenarios where almost nobody other than that 1 person would get themselves into.
Firearms and cryptography are two additional examples of things that provide a lot of utility to their users, both innocent and criminal.
This isn't a positive use case. It is a negative one.
So unless you are a criminal or you're sending ransomware to Joan from Nebraska for 0.5 BTC...
Nope.
Bitcoin and others can be officially settled in minutes to hours
https://wise.com/help/articles/2977951/why-is-my-transfer-ta...
But it might not be as pro-crypto as crypto-boosters think. Crypto was supposed to replace orgs like Visa. Now Visa is co-opting crypto.
It turns out that these entities are only getting into crypto for hiking up fees and centralisation, defeating the point of crypto in the first place.
Projects such as UPI in India doesn't use Visa or Mastercard and is rolling out worldwide, the exact solution crypto was supposed to solve, yet 15 years later no progress whatsoever has been made on the crypto front.
So crypto proponents have just been screeching for nothing but price speculation which isn't a use case at all.
>>Name one thing good about crypto
names it
“Welllll that doesn’t count.”
I have used Bitcoin to donate money to organizations the state would prefer me not to, such as Ukrainian defense, or Wikileaks (famously blockaded by banks without/before criminal charges).
There are lots of truly amazing cross-border use cases; permissionless internet money has huge utility.
NFTs allow fans to financially support visual artists via collectibles (potentially with resale value) in exchange for donations. (I say donations because buying an NFT does not purchase the art the NFT represents.)
Usually when I offer these use cases, people move the goalposts, saying how these things are somehow already possible (they aren’t, at least in the same way, or same speed, or same cost, or same level of privacy-preservation).
It’s nice to be able to transact without identity attached to every transaction.
So?
You can do all of this without crypto, there is nothing new or novel that crypto has done here.
> There are lots of truly amazing cross-border use cases; permissionless internet money has huge utility.
Same again, and in fact we have PayPal, Xoom, Wise, etc.,
Instead, you are asking normal people to rely on crypto exchanges to convert their crypto into fiat (with extra costly fees) through a complicated process in order to receive money.
This is neither innovative or novel, it just adds more needless complexity and is a regression from what already exists in the current financial system.
> NFTs allow fans to financially support visual artists via collectibles (potentially with resale value) in exchange for donations. (I say donations because buying an NFT does not purchase the art the NFT represents.)
This highly wash traded 'market' is down big, so by using NFTs you're not really supporting artists at all, you are driving down the 'value' of the collectible down to 0.
> Usually when I offer these use cases, people move the goalposts, saying how these things are somehow already possible (they aren’t, at least in the same way, or same speed, or same cost, or same level of privacy-preservation).
The reason why we have the current system is to reduce the amount of bad actors trying to defraud people, crypto just blows this right open to create a wild west of fraud.
How would the privacy preservation work with businesses, It wouldn't as no business would want to touch crypto and it is not worth the accounting hell for them.
> It’s nice to be able to transact without identity attached to every transaction.
This is called cash.
this will probably wind up like Arthur Hayes, where its just probation
This has nothing to do with crypto. What forces him to comply with supposedly US dictatorship? Apparently this was a move against Iran and maybe Russia.