SEC has not approved Bitcoin ETFs [fixed]
twitter.com
twitter.com
Edit: since the original tweet (https://twitter.com/SECGov/status/1744829327294837236) no longer exists, I've changed the URL to your link above.
If they have any reason to be concerned about the security of their account (and it looks like they should have at least from now on), they should arguably reconsider their choice of platform.
And if it's actually important, a third source from a trusted media outlet wouldn't hurt either.
> This account is verified because it is a government or multilateral organization account.
Along with a link to "Learn More"[0]
[0] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/profile-label...
"The grey checkmark indicates that an account represents a government/multilateral organization or a government/multilateral official. Eligibility criteria to receive a complimentary grey checkmark are listed below. Additional government and multilateral accounts can receive grey checkmarks through Verified Organizations.
Eligible government organizations at the national level may include: Main executive office accounts, agency accounts overseeing specific areas of policy, main embassy and consulate accounts, and parliamentary or equivalent institutional and committee accounts. Eligible government organizations at the state and local level include: Main executive office accounts and main agency accounts overseeing crisis response, public safety, law enforcement, and regulatory issues.
Eligible government individuals may include: Heads of state (presidents, monarchs and prime ministers), deputy heads of state (vice presidents, deputy prime ministers), national-level cabinet members or equivalent, the main official spokesperson for the executive branch or equivalent, and individual members of all chambers of the supranational or national congress, parliament, or equivalent.
Eligible multilateral organizations may include: the main headquarters-level, regional-level, and country-level institutional accounts. Eligible multilateral individuals include: The head and deputy-head or equivalent of the multilateral organization.
US only: Accounts of current US state governors and senior military leaders are also eligible.
Eligible accounts may apply here. (link)
Any government or multilateral accounts that do not qualify under our current grey checkmark criteria can see if they’re eligible under our Verified Organizations feature."
Lol, I can't believe this is really what they ended up with: multicolored stars to indicate different things? I thought it was a joke at first, but no, that's really how it works now. What a strange world...
What's the issue with it?
Whereas it used to be just. Blue check mark = this is probably the real person I think it is.
(But in this case it don’t matter anyway. They were hacked and even if we still had only blue check marks their account would have been hacked all the same.)
but really it'd be better if they didn't, since it opens them up to liability, "the website said this is a government account and they verified it, what do you mean someone was impersonating the SEC"
Old blue check = ~90% confidence that this is the person/org I think it is. Yes, mistakes happened, but by and large the verification added trust.
New blue check = This person was insecure enough to pay for a symbol. Most of them are frauds.
New grey/yellow/green/whatever check = I already forgot. Some are real, some are frauds, some are hacked, the whole system is untrustworthy.
Twitter paywalls 2FA to premium users, and even then it's SMS only
not a serious company, anyone who trusts a tweet for official information should think twice before trading on it
"We continue to be committed to keeping people safe and secure on Twitter, and a primary security tool we offer to keep your account secure is two-factor authentication (2FA). Instead of only entering a password to log in, 2FA requires you to also enter a code or use a security key. This additional step helps make sure that you, and only you, can access your account. To date, we have offered three methods of 2FA: text message, authentication app, and security key.
While historically a popular form of 2FA, unfortunately we have seen phone-number based 2FA be used - and abused - by bad actors. So starting today, we will no longer allow accounts to enroll in the text message/SMS method of 2FA unless they are Twitter Blue subscribers. The availability of text message 2FA for Twitter Blue may vary by country and carrier.
Non-Twitter Blue subscribers that are already enrolled will have 30 days to disable this method and enroll in another. After 20 March 2023, we will no longer permit non-Twitter Blue subscribers to use text messages as a 2FA method. At that time, accounts with text message 2FA still enabled will have it disabled. Disabling text message 2FA does not automatically disassociate your phone number from your Twitter account. If you would like to do so, instructions to update your account phone number are available on our Help Center.
We encourage non-Twitter Blue subscribers to consider using an authentication app or security key method instead. These methods require you to have physical possession of the authentication method and are a great way to ensure your account is secure."
(I don't have an account, cannot confirm current state of MFA auth story)
There was already some for radio/early news, but the landscape has changed so much, and it bothers me a ton that these platforms are being used.
What kind of legislation? There's a whole lot of existing law that applies in that domain (both statute and Constitutional case law), but if you think we need different laws, it probably helps to at least present the general shape of the law you want rather than just that it should in some way touch impact government using private platforms for announcements.
Whatever X is or becomes, as owned by private interests, is trusted with nothing more than scraping and rebroadcasting the original and authentic source.
A solution with less developer and user overhead ma ybe that government webs host a list of public keys by which any "gray or blue check mark" type of authenticatuon signal capability on any private service can be validated against, and the government can revoke keys at any time if for some reason there's a suspicion that a counterfeit message is being distributed via these private services. Maybe repurpose the creaky old atomic clock time sync radio signal that is deployed almost everywhere as a means to distribute a rotating secondary factor. just old PKI tactics proven to work for two plus decades.
But this approach is still open to exploiting human tendency to trust things that have been trustworthy for a long time, until they aren't. So I still think hosting official messaging feeds directly from a government run server, accessible by any barebones http client capable of displaying plain text with basic paragraph/item formatting at most, is the gold standard.
The current situation, where X or meta or google or even a mastodon instance is entrusted with the entire conduit from human input to broadcast output, is a terrible precedent to normalize.
For what it's worth though, I think the solution to that is people should have some real amount of education about the function and potential dangers of the internet before getting on it.
Twitter and Instagram could repost the government feeds.
https://www.sec.gov/about/sec-rss
So it looks like they're already doing exactly what you suggest: they post official announcements on their website which you can subscribe to using the standard way to do that (RSS), and they also rebroadcast on Twitter by linking back to the original source. What should they be doing differently? Periodically tweet reminders that you can subscribe directly to their RSS feeds? Stop posting to Twitter at all and leave only a message that you can find official news on their website?
(full opinion here): https://int.nyt.com/data/documenthelper/1365-trump-twitter-s...
which while resolved, really opens more questions than it solves (which is fine because legislating from the bench shouldn't be the norm...)
There need to be very clear laws about how social media and modern tech is used to present information. Hell for the first time the government should have the ability to directly release information and not be reliant on normal privately owned distribution, and that should be investigated as well.
This whole thing is a giant can of legal worms anyways, and it only gets worse because our legislative branch has decided to devolve into high school popularity contests and just let the judiciary sort it all out.
What laws? “There should be laws about X” is a bunch of words with no substance unless you can say what the laws should, at least in general terms, require and/or prohibit.
> Hell for the first time the government should have the ability to directly release information and not be reliant on normal privately owned distribution
The government is able to do so, and has done for... quite a long time, though until recently wide distribution was a problem. Now, you can get information directly from the websites of most government agencies.
They also release information via private conventional media (via several mechanisms) and social media (via government run accounts), but they aren't exclusively reliant on such media.
The big issue is you can't be banned from newspapers, radio, and news channels. And there was still some question about "can you just announce this on the news or is that going to be unfair to people who don't own TV's". You can absolutely be banned from twitter.
There's also the standard of keeping records. The government is supposed to have immaculate records of these sorts of things with a whole shitload of legal nonsense involved in it. Twitter has complied with this under recent presidents but it's a big question of "do they need to?" and "what happens if they don't?".
For starters it like violates the FOIA, which is a serious thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_gazette
going back even further in time you had the town crier:
1. The government owns it's own top level domain(s) to be a primary source
and
2. There is the general media who can turn that into stories, and use whatever private companies they need.
This delineates official statement from general news, which people will be slightly more skeptical of.
After reading said announcement on Twitter, the first thing I’d do (if I cared about it) would be to head on over to sec.gov or use a search engine to find the official SEC site, then from navigate to find the official announcement. Any reputable news source should include a link in their announcement to the official announcement to save you this verification step.
At some point there may be so much targeted disinformation/misinformation out there that we need legislation to help protect against it but I don’t think we’re there yet.
Something big can happen and only a very little information can reveal it to have happened. That is the power of speed of information and the scale.
That's just as possible with regular stocks, which Twitter's owner has (unrelatedly) demonstrated multiple times in the past with both Tesla and Twitter... or, a bit slower, in the early covid months.
Stock markets are insanely sensitive to "insider" information and breaking news in general, which is why the regulations around them are so strict.
There have been many flash crashes in traditional markets bigger than that, triggered by similarly stupid events.
more than that. all the alts went up too
A pump and dump would require the same entity to be doing the buying, pumping up, and then dumping the asset.
The SEC didn’t buy, nor did it sell, nor did it pump up the price (someone pretending to be the SEC pumped up the price).
Even assuming that the “largest pump and dump” claim is correct, at most, the SEC was used for that purpose and isn’t “responsible” for it.
Which may or may not be true, if they were using "password123" then sure that's negligent and they'd bear some of the responsibility, but it might not have been the SEC's fault at all.
It seems like SEC didn't even have some basic protections in place for their Twitter account, like having 2nd-factor enabled. That feels kind of negligent already, even if they had a very secure password.
How do we know it's not an inside job? Pretty tempting to pull a twitter account takeover and make potentially millions if you a lonely cog in the SEC wheel.
These guys hacked the SEC, made huge announcement tweet, and only got a 3% move from that. More over, they only had a 10 minute window to close whatever positions they had before BTC crashed through it's pre-hack price.
There is a fair chance that they actually lost money on this play, lol.
As you say though 10 mins is a small window, but they could have easily set a Conservative stop on doubling their money with only a 1% gain.
Certainly you will admit at some size, responsibility and level of funding the organization should take responsibility for protecting itself from hacks. If the Department of Defense got hacked and nuclear secrets were leaked, I certainly hope people would get fired rather than sympathized with.
The DOD doesn't use Twitter, a social media platform, as the mechanism for launching nukes... what are you talking about?
SEC twitter getting hacked is the last of scenarios I'd expect
Honestly I find it kind of suspicious but I could easily be missing something. I see multiple transactions spend more on fees than the amount exchanged in the transaction. A number of transactions looked enormous but turned out to be some form of washing. E.g address X sends $100MM worth of bitcoin to two addresses, with ~$1k going to address Y and the rest going right back to address X.
What’s the point? Why not just send $1k to address Y.
I originally started looking around to get a sense for how much bitcoin is being transacted relative to the block reward. As the halvings continue I can’t imagine how miners can profit without exorbitant transaction fees. Many of the transaction fees in the block I looked at were comparable to wire transfer fees.
Why would anybody want to use bitcoin outside of speculation after nearly all 21mm bitcoin are mined? Why would anybody want to continue mining as well?
You then end up with UTXOs that are each made up of a different amount of BTC and you keep grouping them in transactions and sending the leftovers back to yourself.
Bitcoin uses a UTXO model, a recipient address is specified for the remaining funds that are not intended to be spent. Similar to how you pay for a $20 item with a $50 note, you (recipient) receive $30 in change.
User
My friend says Bitcoin has 7 letters, how should I respond to them?
ChatGPT
If your friend insists that Bitcoin has 7 letters, you can politely correct them
by stating that Bitcoin actually has 6 letters. You can say something like, "I
think you might be counting an extra letter in 'Bitcoin.' It has six letters,
not seven." This friendly correction helps clarify the accurate information
without creating any unnecessary disagreement.
To fix your example, it’d be more like paying for a $20 item with $100MM worth of $50 notes, and receiving $100MM-20 in change.
It also allows for easier parallel processing because you can check many UTXO's in parallel without having some shared state they interacted with.
Only a few chains use this system - Bitcoin, Litecoin, Cardano, Fuel, maybe some others. Almost everything else uses an account based model, where everyone has an account balance, like how you'd imagine a blockchain whould work.
To your last question, bitcoin is just digital gold. Unlike ethereum which is inflationary.
Current gold reserves by country: United States: 8,133 tons Germany: 3,359 tons Italy: 2,452 tons France: 2,436 tons Russia: 2,299 tons China: 1,948 tons Switzerland: 1,040 tons Japan: 846 tons India: 754 tons Netherlands: 612 tons
Around 30% of known gold in the earths crust is accounted for. Nations included in the "BRICS Meme" have been purchasing large amount of gold and would like to see us return to a gold standard for monetary and policy reasons.
Bitcoin is based on the UTXO model, and requires the full amount of an input to be sent. For example, I might need to transact 20 bitcoin even if I only need to pay 1 bitcoin, with 19 bitcoin being transacted to a "change" address.
More by googling Bitcoin change addresses: e.g., https://support.blockchain.com/hc/en-us/articles/44170823927...
What you are likely looking at is not fraudulent and is a characteristic of bitcoin's UTXO design in almost every transaction that doesn't deplete a wallet. If it didn't send the remaining BTC to itself, it would be the "mining fee". So you see these transactions where you see the remaining change is sent back to the same wallet.
The speculation component of these new asset types has has created a high fee environment where instead of paying for bitcoin moving around, ownership of secondary assets encoded as data are being transferred.
There is currently a big controversy where one tribe says that these transactions are spam and should be banned via opt in from miners.
With that being said I’m still confused about how blockchain.com is representing this data. Consider block 825075 on the bitcoin blockchain.
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/blocks/btc/825075?page=1...
Not all of the transactions in this block show with multiple outputs where one output is the originating address. In fact if you sort by value ascending you’ll be able to see multiple transactions from the same address to the same address amount to $.13 with fees $2.86 transaction ids 78b1741ee0946380d9ee31d51d160a637394b24b5cfdc2871861d8e1db484d2f and 201a94087323d152911575ea029df9d1a0d46626a1b18211727be913d747e72f and so on.
Now, contrast those transactions with transaction f395de972c4ba3fea85a2c1621bfe9fa238950f6a2eb3d3b4932f7f620f63ce2
Why do they display differently on blockchain.com?
The 3rd transaction you included is an ordinary bitcoin transaction that sends value.
But to your larger, exaggerated ("everyone"), question: It'll make it easier to include bitcoin as a part of larger trades when it can be bought and sold and used as collateral like a regular stock. It'll be another tool used by professional traders. I don't think it'll be a world-changing event, and like you said, it's probably not going to increase aggregate demand as trading desks will shift out of complicated ownership structures to use the ETF instead.
It's possible to do it now, but not easy.
There is a friction that would undoubtedly be solved by bitcoin ETFs. There's hundred of millions of causal investors who prefer to simply treat btc as any other stock and don't want to bother with actual ownership of the asset in any form and don't want to have to deal with anything different from normal stocks. And lowering friction increases usage.
And it hardly matters that wrapping it in an ETF makes it potentially really weird (like how GLD and other gold ETFs are only barely nominally like holding gold, and VIX ETFs often hold cash-settled futures based on the value of a formula that is based on another formula that takes in various parameters of the prices and durations of options which themselves are priced based on the price movements of various equity securities and .........). The depths of weirdness have already been pretty well-explored by existing weird ETFs. A bitcoin ETF wouldn't even be particularly notable levels of weird, imo.
So, just the fact that it makes it really easy is typically a big boon to people getting exposure to whatever financial force the ETF holds.
$BITO and $BITI
It gives credibility to the thing that explicitly does not want credibility. Or at least didn’t. Maybe it does now. I don’t know.
- The ones who don't believe it, and sell off their inflated coins after the price jumps
- The ones who do believe it, and are the rubes the first group is counting on
But approval is an opportunity to create hype and buzz around cryptocurrency.
They are terrible assets with severe discount/premium swings reaching the high 40%s [0]. The ratio's only tightening now that a potential arbitrage opportunity is on the table.
[0] https://ycharts.com/companies/GBTC/discount_or_premium_to_na...
Tracking for actual BTC futures ETF's is quite good. Arbitrary example: https://ycharts.com/companies/BITO/discount_or_premium_to_na...
GBTC has diverged so far because it doesn't have a public creation/redemption mechanism. Matt Levine briefly touched on this recently: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-01-04/put-th...
The issue isn't just additional volatility and tracking error, but the fact that the con tango creates a "roll yield" which affects the long-term returns of the strategy. To keep constant maturity exposure, the futures ETF has to constantly "roll" its positions into further dated contracts. In particular because the market tends to be in contango it means further dated futures tend to be higher priced than near dated futures. So usually the futures ETFs in their daily rebalancing are selling cheap near dated contracts for more expensive longer dated contracts. Hence the roll yield tends to be negative. Then add all the transaction costs from daily rebalancing. It should be clear why the futures strategy has inferior returns to simply holding spot.
Spot Bitcoin ETFs truly are a game changer compared to futures ETFSs.
and anyone could get an annuity
and anyone can buy spot gold
and yet
Now they have to worry about whether Elon is in the mood to give your account proper security or if your password hash leaked "by accident" by a "junior dev." Or just the everyday incompetence of all personality-cult organizations. Elon went from being sued by the SEC to hosting its humiliation.
Elon is chuckling it up right now. The problem with personality-led companies is that if you get on the bad side of that personality, then anything goes.
Bureaucracies get a bad rap, but the idea that everyone needs to follow the same process for every case is pretty novel in human history.
It seems so likely that it should probably be assumed that this is the case imo.
Made the account easier to be hacked? Yes, probably. That would be my assumption. Changed password, changed MFA, changed owner e-mail, etc. They no longer have a real support team, but I'm sure the support mechanisms are still all in place.
How the FED, SEC, and any government office thought having a faceplant or twit account was good idea is beyond me...
Of course, those who throw themselves gushingly at every corporate slime to crawl out from under a rock will have a hard time understanding this opinion. That is also part of the problem...
Instead of a Twitter account that could be hacked, why not let the SEC post to a feed hosted by themselves that Twitter can poll against and post to Twitter for them? Then you get the benefits of centralization for dissemination of information but decentralization for security? Then these important accounts can invest as much as they want in their own security?
It seems like the only benefit that Twitter actually gives vs the SEC just posting on their site is that centralization.
I get your point that it may not rebound quite as much because the hack itself lowers the odds of approval, but imagine the optics of Gary Gensler saying “it's not true that we denied the ETFs” -- bitcoin boosters would read that as a signal that it will be approved.
You must have some of the steeliest nerves and self control the world has ever seen.
At what point does a 46.19 MILLION per cent gain become insufficient?
$1,111 of Bitcoin in 2010, would net you $1M today in Bitcoin SV alone, even if you gave away your Bitcoin, Bitcoin Gold, and Bitcoin Cash.
Many hold ethereum and bitcoin because of the utility. It's a permissionless and portable store of value that you can 100% be in control of and not have to worry about your account being locked, funds being frozen, asset seizure, operational hours, etc.
The SEC doesn't need brand promotion, nor to be caught up in nastiness like pervades X/Twitter. The SEC already has the authority, they do their job with it, and presumably they value respectability.
Earlier Web showed us how to do this right, before commercial entities steered the influx of the newbie masses back towards being captive to proprietary walled gardens.
Stop choosing proprietary walled gardens to endorse with the government seal of approval.
Put press releases on your .gov open-systems Web site. Optionally do supplementary alerts with an open-systems email announcements list and/or Atom feed. Let journalists, citizens, and lawmakers take it from there.
That said, now that the Fediverse exists, ideally all of those government agencies would self-host their accounts, either individually or via a server for many different agencies of the same government. It makes sense for the SEC to be @sec@sec.gov or @sec@usa.gov rather than example.com/SECGov . (Which, of course, does not prevent them from having security issues.)
Companies have cited that their Twitter account is an official source of company comms and that gives the SEC a reason to have an account and access that information as part of enforcing securities laws.
You're describing some of the behaviors that occur on those platforms, not their purpose. Governments have accounts on those platforms because it makes communicating with their constituents easier, because that's where the people are. It would be grossly irresponsible in this day and age for a government not to have any social media presence at all.
Like a Nostr account?
That works well until sec.gov/x gets hacked.
https://www.sec.gov/news/pressreleases
https://www.sec.gov/about/sec-rss
It looks like their tweets just link to their press releases on their website, though they're in random order for me and I can't see whether they have any replies or whatever, so I could be missing something.
https://nitter.net/SECGov/status/1714020932509982771
...until the SEC's account gets hacked?
SEC's twitter isn't SEC. What they mean is this: https://www.sec.gov/news/pressreleases and even that should be verified across multiple outlets if you want to be sure.
So whoever is using the account is committing fraud
This seems less about crypto - after all, crypto will crypto - and more about "why the heck did the SEC normalise Twitter as a communications outlet!?".
Today the SEC grants approval for #Bitcoin ETFs for listing on all registered national securities exchanges.
The approved Bitcoin ETFs will be subject to ongoing surveillance and compliance measures to ensure continued investor protection.
On the other hand, it is the SEC ....
In the past few years we've seen ample evidence that crypto is largely a complete scam, and likewise strong evidence that none of crypto's hoped for value will come to fruition (we didn't see it useful for fighting inflation, it's not being used to avoid sanctions, it certainly isn't being used as a currency, etc).
The fact that crypto still has any market value, and that companies like coinbase not only exist but have had a stellar year defies the imagination.
I get a few years back when there was still a lot of speculation/optimism, but clearly today everyone see that it is just a con. Today even my most cynical view of markets seems naive.
There is no evidence to support your “complete scam” claim.
Most of the ecosystem is scammy garbage, but I think there's still going to be enough demand for sound money that a currency that can't be artificially manipulated by a central bank will do well, relative to currencies that can.
Perhaps I'll be wrong, but that's why I'm not heavily leveraged and I hedge my bets.
I don't think the entire ecosystem is garbage. I do think there are a few useful ideas other than bitcoin. But I can easily support the assertion that more than 99% of the "crypto" things that exist are worthless and/or outright scams.
I'm surprised that the SEC wasn't using 2FA.
Feels like something Elon would orchestrate for the purposes of trolling the SEC.
Gensler freaked out and said it was compromised
if you’ve ever worked in government this would be your first assumption
An upvote to you sir, for being right.
It achieves some sort of purity of concept. Plenty of people _gamble_ on the stock market but there has always been some sort of link to reality. With crypto, you can cut that tether and really treat it like gambling, rigged odds and all.
I'll go with completely agreeing with this statement, the way it's written. Let's be honest...There's nothing semantically or generally wrong with it to argue against.
As far as the "gambling" part... My objection would be that speculative vehicles aren't really on the "stock market" as much as they are the "derivatives market", if anything. Problem here is that the derivatives are, by definition, tied to the value of something else that could be called an investment. I'm not opposed to people trading. I made my money with market making algorithms and will make more as people keep trading. I'm just saying that classifying it as an "investment" poses quite a few issues for the SEC in terms of regulating it. Introducing it into an ETF that does nothing but hold crypto will be viewed by the public (that doesn't understand what crypto is) into presenting it as an investment. There are issues with that.
To Downvoters:
The Twitter / X account of the SEC was compromised: [0]
> The @SECGov twitter account was compromised, and an unauthorized tweet was posted. The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products.
You all got manipulated very easily.
[0] https://twitter.com/GaryGensler/status/1744833049064288387
Same reason gold ETFs are big -- people want exposure to the price of gold, but managing physical gold requires effort that many are not willing to put forth.
On a systemic side, ETFs have a number of advantages; notably a credit market (share borrow, etc.) which can lead to effective shorting of the price of the underlying, something that is difficult to pull off without getting suckered in by the next FTX. Plus inclusion in other ETFs, inclusion in various retirement schemes, and generally the wide availability of liquidity in equity markets.
1. Low fees. I think five of the ETF filers even have 0% fees for first 6-12 months. Compare this to Coinbase, where the fees will seem astronomical in comparison (maybe this drives Coinbase fees down.)
2. There is a non-zero number of people in the family office investing world that don't want to deal with learning new tech and just want to call up their stock person on the phone to buy them something.
Manifold markets still giving 90% odds.
https://manifold.markets/123Newsletter/will-a-spot-btc-etf-b...
this would be a good short but no liquidity
Can I go make an ETF for magic the gathering cards? How about restaurant reservations or taylor swift tickets?
Historically the SEC has refused these grants for Bitcoin ETFs on the basis that the underlying asset does not have well-established spot markets and credit mechanisms. See for example [1].
Greyscale finally sued the SEC for applying arbitrary and capricious standards, and prevailed in federal court. But even so the SEC has not approved spot bitcoin ETFs (that is, ETFs that "physically" hold Bitcoin) but had only given guidance for cash-settled Bitcoin tracking ETFs. That makes this announcement a very unexpected surprise.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/rules/other/2018/34-83723.pdf
EDIT: And it does in fact appear that this is too good to be true. Looks like there was a brief spike up to $48k from the $46k baseline so somebody made out nicely on this little scam. Also goes to evidence that Bitcoin markets might be a bit too sensitive to manipulation to be suitable for inclusion in an ETF.
I don’t understand how you came to that conclusion. $2k is a relatively small fluctuation. Do you think other securities wouldn’t be subject to the same fluctuations given positive news? If not, there shouldn’t be laws against it like there are now
I generally don't agree with this guidance as it is not universally applied to ETFs that the SEC has allowed historically, but it does buttress their case to a degree.
EDIT: bad math; closer to 4% price move -- although the rebound from the spike might break the threshold, current SEC rules use a trailing price band so wouldn't trigger here.
"Oh glorious SEC, once thou bestowest thine blessing, Crypto shall rise a thousandfold! Glory to Bitcoin!"
Given that the original Whitepaper is titled: "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" and a news article describing the 2009 bank bailout is literally baked into the very first block people celebrating slow morphing of Bitcoin into a traditional finance product is at least a little bit funny. Instead of a hedge crypto is now just effectively a correlate of the financial markets.
The ability to easily reduce crypto to some hot take and equivalence is why otherwise quite smart people keep missing the space for the last decade.
Suggesting either could happen would get someone laughed out a room really not too long ago.
If you were around for $3k btc, those intervening years saw:
* first national current adoption (ES)
* futures contracts from CME
* institutional trading volumes CEXs and DeFi
* first rounds of crypto being able to pull FAANG-types for jobs
* countries approving it for contracts (Argentina)
* looks like an imminent ETF
* funding UKR war efforts faster than US govt could manage - $50m overnight iirc
* arms deals via aforementioned funding
A lot has happened! Bodes well
How? Serious question. What would it enable that hasn't already been possible for many years now?
"Currently, Fidelity Crypto does not support borrowing against assets, leverage, or margin trading. You can only transfer, and use collected and settled available cash, as well as processed EFT deposits, to trade within your Fidelity Crypto account"
https://www.reddit.com/r/FidelityCrypto/comments/17lr3ro/com...
BlackRock said its Bitcoin ETF would be backed by actual Bitcoins in custody at Coinbase (a HN unicorn btw).
Just because you do not derive utility from something does not mean it a waste and should be banned.
I'm not sure which of the many consensus protocols you may have in mind, but proof of stake is the most popular alternative.
A 51% attack for PoW requires that someone can afford to power 51% of the network. That's expensive. Once the attack is detected, the community can fork away from the moment of the attack.
A 51% attack for PoS requires that someone owns 51% of the tokens. At that point, the attack costs nothing. If the attack is detected and the community forks, the attacker still has enough tokens to attack again on the new network - at no cost.
All of this stuff is brand new. Saying that any of it is "proven" is pretty bold.
And replacing unstable fiat money with even less stable, totally speculatory crypto like Bitcoin? Seems like it's better just to buy some USD and stash it somewhere. Hell, even buying and reselling Steam keys is probably less volatile.
On the other hand, without the PoW mechanism of Bitcoin, it's impossible to have the properties that bitcoin has - global decentralised money and payment network. If you believe otherwise, make one! Very quickly no one will be willing to pay for Bitcoin, and all those "wasted electricity" will suddenly become available again.
To be clear, I'm not saying either of these is "correct". My entire point here is that everyone talking about "waste" is just imposing their own private value system on everyone else and I've yet to see a single person apply some kind of consistent standard for what should and shouldn't be banned
The difference is that, for videogames or mining physical rocks, the power use is an undesired side effect, so the incentive is to minimize it, while for POW cryptocurrencies, the power use is an essential component of the mechanism they use to prevent double spending, and the incentive is to use as much as possible.
POW could be replaced by the more efficient POS, but network effects make that highly unlikely without government intervention.
The fake news problem has gotten so bad on twitter. total shitshow. sub 30k soon on delay, imho
Glad to see that it's been watered down to "just as bad as" arguments.
Having the freedom to truly own your own money and investments is valuable in and of itself, no matter how much crypto "devolves" towards traditional finance in other regards.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/22/world/americas/canada-pro...
The other, not so much.
Plenty of downsides to crypto no doubt, but I'm not sure "personal responsibility" is one of them.
Among the innumerable problems with cryptocurrency, this is not one of them.
Protesting ought to be something you can do in any Western democracy without fear of losing access to your accounts.
Did you mean intellectual property? You draw Mickey a year ago and a FBI helicopter would soon be overhead to kill your dog and take any cash they find in your wallet.
They call it civil disobedience. People seem to forget part of civil disobedience is going to jail and paying a fine. That’s always been the deal.
If it was entirely painless, it would have a lot less effect I think.
That's not even vaguely what happened here and it's well beyond arguing in bad faith to attempt to trivialize it to such.
The goal of freezing the accounts was to make the truckers unable to buy food or pay rent to force a near immediate end. If the civil disobedience starts being evictions and starving protests are going to become a thing of the past.
Not that I am a crypto supporter, but the current western based financial system hegemony is good until you are have wrong name, religion, country... etc.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-08-16/british-m...
Magical Amulets?
Fake your own death, move into a submarine?
Even if crypto becomes 100% ubiquitous, the end game isn't "now the government can't control finance" the end game is "now the government will find a new way to control the new finance". Eventually, the government will intervene because people will be begging them to, because they don't actually want to live in a world where theft and fraud are irreversible and their entire financial life is tied to a set of cryptographic keys that they barely understand.
You're trying to push a technological solution to authoritarianism, and it's not going to work for the masses. Canada doesn't need crypto, Canada needs voters to hold the government accountable for its abuses.
I say this as someone who got his first 0.05 btc for signing up for a newsletter in 2009 or 2010.
This event is no different.
It’s sad that blockchain went the way it did, because it’s probably a great technology when you don’t expect it to revolutionize the entire internet.
It really isn't. There's nothing legal it can do that something else can't do better. It's not even that good at the illegal stuff.
Eh, Treasuries should probably be traded on a blockchain. Cryptocurrency is nonsense. But the tech has legs. It just needs to, ironically, clear its way of the crypto/web3 crowd first.
A blockchain without the economic carrot-stick power to protect its own integrity and internal rules, power that comes from aligning the behavior of otherwise unrelated and even mutually antagonistic custodial participants by incentivizing their common interest in getting rich (or at least not losing their existing wealth), is no more than a database with superfluous "decentralization theater" yak shaving bolted on.
If defecting from the game doesn't cost you a meaningful penalty (and such cost is defined by a fixed unit of measure, in order to distinguish in-game gains from losses) then you are not compelled to follow its rules except by your own conscience. This would be noble, but it would not be a blockchain.
seems like it would work...
Bitcoin ATMs are an interesting example because they involve at least one trusted third party - the Bitcoin ATM operator.
This is one significant advantage of Bitcoin, that it works for the unbanked.
One thing I definitely didn’t need any more of back then was glamorized systems of financial predation and exploitation targeting me because of it. There’s no version of the world where the cryptocurrency ecosystem as it actually is, rather than how it is idealized to be, would have made my plight better had it existed at the time.
In any case, it still seems like a non-sequitur.
I’m just laughing at the premise that the many, many, many billion dollar investments and valuations of cryptocurrency firms, and the unending deluge of fraud and scams they reliably leave in their wake is meaningfully offset by the total amount of money transacted in the niche of homeless friends who need fast cash from their wealthy friend who is half way around the world outside of normal business hours. I mean, if that’s the case, then it would really behoove Western Union and MoneyGram to keep a few locations open on the weekend.
I don't know; who does? I said it was bad at all the things.
It's a back door attempt to fundamentally rewire how value is routed through society, and in the abstract this _might_ be a good thing (perhaps too generous with that 'might') in practice it cannot possibly happen due to physical constraints on consensus formation at the global, realtime scale that it would have to happen. As a result shortcuts are taken (or appear organically, i.e. exchages) in the form of centralized nodes of consensus settlement (what the promoters like to call Layer 2, sharding, or similar), and it's the people controlling these centralized nodes who end up becoming the new kings of this "revolutionized" system, the trust-me-bro's of trustlessness. I've met some of them, and they are not people who I would ever want to have anyone I care about to be under the thumb of.
That's fundamentally a bad thing. I want my social contracts enforced socially. The rot is at the heart.
* were not for HN's character limit my username would have started with the word 'block'
Web 3.0 as Tim Berners-Lee envisions it might have some legs, but web3 was a always an empty marketing vessel.
It secondarily has connotations of decentralization with stuff like Mastodon, but relatively few people care about that stuff.
Hence i associate web3 with the grift, and blockchain with the technology. Probably gp does the same.
1. German Weimar Republic (Germany) - The German Mark, introduced in 1924 after World War I, was originally intended to replace the hyperinflated German Papiermark. However, the Great Depression and military reparations led to massive deficit spending, resulting in hyperinflation starting around 1921. By 1923, one US dollar equaled approximately 4.2 trillion Reichsmarks.
2. French Revolutionary Franc (France) - After the French Revolution in the late 18th century, France's new revolutionary government issued the assignats, which were paper money used as part of a monetary reform program. Initially, these notes held value due to their being backed by goods such as grain; however, excessive printing eventually led to severe hyperinflation between 1796 and 1797, where prices rose exponentially.
3. Hungarian Pengő (Hungary) - Introduced in 1946, the Hungarian pengő suffered from rampant inflation due to economic mismanagement and Marshall Plan aid exchange rates. Between 1945 and 1946, the exchange rate for one US dollar was set at HUF 52, but due to various factors, including nationalization, hyperinflation reached an estimated 44 quadrillions to the US dollar by 1946.
4. Zimbabwean Dollar (Zimbabwe) - Succeeding the British colonial Rhodesian dollar, Zimbabwe adopted its own fiat currency, the Zimbabwean dollar, upon independence in 1980. Hyperinflation began in the mid-1970s, and by November 2004, it had become virtually worthless, forcing the country to abandon it.
5. Mexican Peso (Mexico) - Following the Mexican-American war, Mexico faced significant debt. To finance the national debt, a silver peso coin was minted. Despite its initial value, hyperinflation struck, and by the late 19th century, the Mexican peso became almost worthless. Numerous attempts at currency stabilization failed until the introduction of the "El Banco" gold standard in 1914.
It rather seems like the opposite; an altruistic gift to humanity. An anonymous programmer produced a decentralized currency that solved the double spend problem and didn't even sell his coins.
Sure would be nice to have fewer scammers, and we should try. I, too, detest many of the actors in the space, the whole number-go-up get-rich-quick culture, and much more.
But it’s a sideshow. The reality is I’m not giving up digital assets I completely control (preferably private ones) any more than I’m giving up strong encryption, e2e encrypted comms, or the right to run whatever software I like on my computers. I’m not the only one.
It’s really irrelevant if you or anyone else considers it irredeemable. What does that even mean? There’s not even a single coherent “it” to be irredeemable.
Perhaps a greater percentage of the people, projects, and attention are part of the “parasite” as you put it, but that was my point: while it is bad, and something we should work to minimise, it’s may be a price we have to pay for something that at its core is very important.
I do think that creating a censorship resistant place for data is more important than preventing people from being scammed, but when I think about what ought to go there, I come up with nothing so status-quo-preserving as abstractions that ensure the continuity of asset ownership. It's like you hate banks so much that you went and built one just to show-em.
I mean, on a long enough time scale, they won't :) Same with USD, other currencies, or any given stock or bond. There are no guarantees. That applies doubly to crypto assets.
Why would this change my assertions?
In any case there are a myriad socio-political views and values represented in blockchain/“crypto” projects. It’s not all hypercapitalist libertarians…
I open a wallet app and the paypal app, copy the deposit address from paypal to the clipboard, paste into the wallet, type the amount, hit send. 5 seconds later paypal receives it. With one button I swap any portion of it to USD on the paypal app. I do this in large enough amounts so the crypto TX fees are insignificant to get into paypal, and the conversion fees are also small.
Any extra fees are more than covered by the long term appreciation of the Bitcoin, which will obviously continue as governments worldwide are drunk of their own power to print.
for them its just crypto -> USD which is very fast. for me, in the US as a US citizen, that is 2 minutes up to $25,000. from a personal crypto wallet, to the exchange, to my bank or brokerage account. beyond $25,000 it is 15 minutes to 2 hours via domestic wire transfer.
so one likely unreported aspect of crypto is that it likely has reduced international wire transfers, and cross border transfers that are prone to error and erroneous reviews and holdups
for about a decade now I have paid people in other countries in crypto. and been paid in crypto from some revenue sources. and we both liquidated as domestic transfers in our local countries. specifically because we didn't want to bother with international bank issues and time delays.
even hedge fund and private equity fund administrators that are more competitive allow in-kind investment of new limited partners in crypto, for many years now
the other thing thats important to understand is that there is a growing group that doesn't want "money they can spend" because they are liquid. they can buy goods, services, invest, day trade, passive income all in crypto within the crypto ecosystem. and for other things they can get the cash when they need it, or simply use a debit card that is custodying their crypto and representing it as the local fiat currency
but truthfully, going from USD -> crypto is fast too. if you're a US citizen you just need to use wire transfers to the exchange. SEPA region can also do same day settlement.
your user story and assumptions are really antiquated and don't represent what's been happening for at least 10 years now. if it doesn't apply to you then thats fine and move on
but I sincerely doubt the average western crypto hater has ever had to deal with western union or some remittance company taking 30%+ in fees.
What’s the crypto solution that beats that?
The idea that there would be anything but a massive acceleration of crime and fraud as a result of the digitization of actual money is actually hilarious.
It’s a fact that North Korea relies on hacking it for funding critical imports at this point…
The real question is who and how this massive financialization and tokenization exercise will benefit, because it’s increasingly clear that the old guard has designs on how to control it pretty effectively and it’s not actually as free or anonymous as many people think. Some exceptions apply.
Did you know that China curtails more hydropower (200+ TWh/yr [1]) than the global electricity consumption of Bitcoin, than entire "mid-size countries"? China literally spills water through the dams without powering the turbines, because they have a hydropower surplus that they can't redistribute through their national grid. When you start learning things like that, you realize Bitcoin's electricity consumption is, fortunately, still a drop in the bucket compared to the immense waste from, well, everything else humans do on the planet.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13640...
A fact? What are the #s that they are bringing in from hacking, versus the $4.8 billion/year they bring in from exports to China/Africa?
Bitcoin == Web5
gensler freaked out and said it was compromised
Let's assume it was the SEC's fault, either by accident or otherwise, could they be charged with market manipulation? Which agency would have authority to investigate? Quite a few people were tricked into buying right before the price dropped like a rock. Shorters have made a killing.
check out recent decisions to see if anything could apply here
nothing happens to the agency itself, theyre immune
I'm sure your performative nocoinering will feel really good in a year when you're wrong yet again.
@EricBalchunas "On TV right on talking about this.. and yes, I think someone prepped a planned tweet and put wrong date, bc the tweet would have made PERFECT sense tomorrow at this time. The language sounds legit SEC-ish IMO vs a crypto knucklehead pulling a prank but I guess we'll see.."
https://twitter.com/EricBalchunas/status/1744835562643595652
yup
https://twitter.com/EricBalchunas/status/1744841094997680477
why would the SEC 'like' random accounts? hacked