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Comment by keiferski | Hacker News Reader

I’m no fan of Binance, but to label them as Bond villains while spending zero effort on trying to understand the ideology behind cryptocurrencies (at least, what was supposed to be the ideology) and why being a distributed business without a physical address is desirable from that point of view – and not just because they’re evil greedy people (of which Binance may still be) – makes this essay not very interesting. It would have been a much better piece had the author attempted to understand the decentralization ideology and then squared that with the apparently very real crimes so widespread in crypto.

Edit: found the essay that this link reminded me of: a comparison of Jason Bourne to James Bond, from a societal perspective. A good piece to read after this original link.

https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2015/09/20/bourne-aesthetic/

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You don't need to dig into the ideology of crypto to make the argument that Binance's business was essentially money laundering and sanctions avoidance. But if you do, you'll have no trouble finding people arguing that ducking state financial regulations is a huge and core utility of crypto (let sex workers get paid, buy drugs, etc). You can disagree with the regime, Patrick does and so do I, but it doesn't change the fact that the whole thing was just crime, crime everywhere.

Yes well that’s why I think it is a nuanced topic. Decentralization is appealing to a lot of people, including myself, but it also obviously has a ton of negative outcomes as well.

Acknowledging this and exploring the complexity is interesting; calling everyone evil Bond villains is childish and at the ethical level of a Marvel movie.

Proponents of decentralization should be heralding Binance's demise, as it represents the strongest force for centralization in the crypto world.

Also yeah OP is basically about CZ and Binance, not all crypto people everywhere.

I'm keen on decentralised cryptocurrencies, particularly ethereum, and I am fairly pleased about Binance's problems. What I'd like to see succeed is easy to use wallet apps running on an ethereum zk L2 with low transaction costs, social recovery, account abstraction, stable coins, and most transactions happening peer to peer on decentralised exchanges.

Centralised exchanges are not about cryptocurrency or decentralisation or democratising access, or innovating money to be programmable, they're just about finding yet another source of risk for people to play with in exactly the same ways we've been playing with risk in tradfi for millenia. Pretty boring.

Still, I assume that Binance's woes are at least partly because of an antipathy towards all forms of finance not controlled by the current system, and so the fact that they are taking down Binance probably doesn't augur well for the chances of my preferred outcome succeeding either.

Yeah I mean, I think I'm a little in the same boat as you. I think they're cool too. I do think there are uses (anti-spam, authentication of ownership/authenticity), though I think any use needs the transactions/sec number to go way up, but that seems doable.

I'm actually a little bitter that this stuff got rolled up with "real" money. It twisted the essence of distributed ledgers/contracts/computing and infested it with grifters. Like you, I worry that this entanglement will take down decentralization with it, though I hope it doesn't.

I think he called CZ an evil bond villain, not everyone.

The author, patio11, has been writing about crypto since at least 2018 and is thoroughly familiar with "the ideology behind cryptocurrencies".

https://www.kalzumeus.com/tweetstorms/1032033115408031744

We all understand it, we've read about it since 2012.

We just rightfully understand that at least the exchange level, it's not about that. It's about money laundering and making billions.

I agree that the author could’ve done more to make the case for the other side. Where I have some firsthand knowledge, I find eg his suggestion that Binance and FTX divided up markets based on US geopolitical affiliation implausible and unconvincing.

Nonetheless, it’s fair to wonder if crypto has meaningfully lived up to any of its promises and why it has been hard to point to examples of value creation in crypto in a way that would make sense to an average person

In most jurisdictions businesses must have a physical address, in fact it is a requirement to incorporate.

This is no government conspiracy against "my freedom", this is to offer a level of protection and allow service of legal documents.

Binance has always looked very shaddy and not to be touched with a bargepole.

Have you considered that the author did try to understand the underlying ideology? It seems pretty accurate to me.

Well, I can’t read his mind, but considering that he didn’t mention anything about it, I think we can assume that he hasn’t.

Even if he did, my criticism was about the essay, not the guy himself.

> He has long been adjacent to money and power, but craves more.

> They have no passport and fly no flags; these concepts are thoroughly beneath them.

Yeah, this is not an intellectually honest characterization of libertarian and anti-authoritarian ideology. I'd be very, very surprised if Patrick didn't actually understand that.

I am describing actual literal appears-in-the-movies James Bond villains with these sentences, not anyone you know or any real-world political ideology. The way you would know this is to have read the previous two sentences: "James Bond films have a certain formula to them. It is more interesting when seen from the perspective of the villain."

> “being a distributed business without a physical address is desirable from that point of view”

Everybody agrees that CZ owns a majority of Binance (around 70% I believe). How does that square with the idea that it’s a “distributed business”? Its ownership is more centralized than Meta’s.

There’s no legal system on this planet that recognizes the notion of a company that’s 70% owned by someone but doesn’t have a physical address. It’s just nonsense that was meant to keep regulators from catching up. But it’s over. The DOJ now has full oversight of Binance, CZ has pleaded guilty, and he may still end up doing jail time.

Geographical distribution and ownership distribution are not the same thing.

There’s no legal system on this planet that recognizes the notion of a company that’s 70% owned by someone but doesn’t have a physical address.

Yes, and so consider the possibility that some people see this as a problem to be solved and not an unchanging fact of reality.

Again, there is a huge rich new field of discussion about this stuff [1] and so I find the lack of curiosity by the author to be very uninteresting. You don’t have to agree with these ideas but to ignore them entirely is intellectually flawed, especially when it’s the supposed reason for these actions in the first place.

1. See the Network State stuff. https://www.youtube.com/live/x-GfuIFkB_Y?si=t1r96klba69rwTtx

So do those people want an individual to be able to incorporate, declare their corporation distributed and then not have to obey any country's laws?

Yes, and so consider the possibility that some people see this as a problem to be solved and not an unchanging fact of reality.

Sure but there are a significant number of people who feel the same way about government generally, or the ban on perpetual motion machines.

A corporation that's able to do business globally but is not domiciled anywhere is analogous to a person who can travel anywhere but doesn't have any citizenship or a passport.

The latter sounds obviously like a fantasy — it's simply not how any of this works. What makes anyone think the former is feasible?

The author is a pragmatist and simply thinks it ain’t gonna happen.

The bit about Jason Bourne and James Bond is quoted from https://www.metafilter.com/93504/You-carry-a-00-number-it-me..., and the rest of that exple.tive.org link is irrelevant other stuff (don't bother).

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