Consider Negotiating with Infringers
thelegalartist.com
thelegalartist.com
> One of the Patrician’s greatest contributions to the reliable operation of Ankh-Morpork had been, very early in his administration, the legalizing of the ancient Guild of Thieves. Crime was always with us, he reasoned, and therefore, if you were going to have crime, at least it should be organized crime.
> And so the Guild had been encouraged to come out of the shadows and build a big Guildhouse, take their place at civic banquets, and set up their training college with day-release courses and City and Guilds certificates and everything. In exchange for the winding down of the Watch, they agreed, while trying to keep their faces straight, to keep crime levels to a level to be determined annually. That way, everyone could plan ahead, said Lord Vetinari, and part of the uncertainty had been removed from the chaos that is life.
> And then, a little while later, the Patrician summoned the leading thieves again and said, oh, by the way, there was something else. What was it, now? Oh, yes... I know who you are, he said. I know where you live. I know what kind of horse you ride. I know where your wife has her hair done. I know where your lovely children, how old are they now, my, doesn’t time fly, I know where they play. So you won’t forget about what we agreed, will you?
-- Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
Soon the deal will be complete. Starting next year there will be an acceptable level of securities fraud and pump-and-dumps in the US, with the SEC looking the other way while crypto banksters and their political allies con the public.
1. You can think of Greyscale as an arbitrageur between on-chain Chainlink and trust shares, where they'll be trying to purchase Chainlink at times when the difference between on-chain Chainlink and trust Chainlink is maximized.
2. You could also think of Greyscale as being able to print "shares". They can't print shares for free (i.e. they are legally obligated to purchase on-chain Chainlink) but they control the supply part of the supply:demand ratio. They can simply purchase on-chain Chainlink when the supply:demand ratio for trust Chainlink is higher than on-chain Chainlink, which takes money from trust Chainlink investors by diluting their shares. In theory the market will trend toward rational (i.e. eventually on-chain and trust Chainlink will trend toward a value that is equal, adjusted for the value of legal integration) but until that happens Greyscale is positioned as the only player that can take advantage of that temporary irrationality.
Cryptocurrency has always been an application of caveat emptor where the caveats can be hidden in the code or the economics, or both, but with the integration into the legal system, it's now possible for cryptocurrencies with solid code and economics to scam the public with legal caveats.
The average person was always at a disadvantage with cryptocurrencies, but I fear with the addition of legal respectability, even someone like myself who can read the code and has a solid understanding of economics can no longer be sure of my crypto investments.
I'm finding lately that options trading has the same high variance (high upside potential is why I wanted into crypto investing), without a lot of the parts I don't like. Particularly, I'm doing it with my Roth IRA money so even taxes are easy.
[1] These numbers have almost certainly changed since I did this analysis--I know HNers like to correct people, but consider that before you correct me here.
In other words, a EULA?
Sure, I get paid in all kinds of tokens, and it's nice to see some coins rise after I get paid, which makes freelancer work feel a tiiiiiny bit more like being and employee with stock.
But it's just a job like any other. I write articles, I write code, I talk with clients, investors, users... And at the end of the day I get paid.
This is the very definition of a security in US law. These tokens are unregulated penny stocks. (Of course you and your employers may be in another country and this doesn’t apply.)
It certainly doesn’t seem like a big crime. And maybe your employers are the good guys. But everyone knows there are also tons of bad actors in crypto who sell junk tokens to retail investors who lose their savings.
This happens all over the world: millions of Nigerians have invested in crypto, but it’s almost exclusively into tokens created by local influencers that end up being worthless in a few years. That’s the overwhelming global reality of crypto, not the stories of noble dissidents receiving Bitcoin.
NFTs, meme coins, etc.
I don't understand most of that.
I keep to my niche, build with stuff I think is interesting, and keep away from most of it.
I used to work for financial traders, and while I was there I'd justify it to myself in the usual terms: the traditional commodities markets increase liquidity and keep prices low for people doing actually socially valuable things, like growing wheat or turning it into food.
But honestly, even then that could have been accomplished with 1/10th of the effort and smarts that was put into trading, and it was mostly driven by greedy people and/or fools, so when I got out of that industry I was glad to be shut of it. Crypto strikes me as yet worse, in that there's no underlying value, just a circus of greed.
At least it keeps the clowns occupied.
Proof of work for stored data sounds like a reasonable use case for me.
Assume USD is somehow attached to food, shelter, and other necessities (for the record, I agree that it is, but only indirectly). Those necessities are the things we need, but we don't need money to create them. We just need energy and physical resources (which, technically, also just require energy). All money is an accounting system built on top of the physical processes that we use to grow, gather, hunt, cultivate, shape, and build matter.
So there's nothing weird, to me, about money being built almost directly on top of energy usage. I think it makes sense.
Most money is built on top of gold or other precious-but-unnecessary materials, which I can't say seems more attached to real value than energy. But even if we assume 1 unit of money is 1 day's worth of food, who's to say that unit of food is actually a necessity for the holder? That food is a specialized form of energy; energy which has been used and which can't be unused. The food itself is an accounting of entropy. But it (mostly) can't be converted into shelter or other necessities, only traded or stored. So, again, I don't see "this money is an accounting of energy used" as outlandish, but reasonable.
Let me conclude, however, by roundly rebuking crypto grifters and the majority of the industry. They're generally not operating on the arguments I've made above anyway.
I grant that the rhetoric of Bitcoin is about energy usage, but it doesn't work that way in practice. The most obvious use is the rise of Ethereum and its shift to proof of stake rather than proof of work. But there's plenty of other evidence. David Rosenthal has some good evidence there, like:
https://blog.dshr.org/2024/10/it-was-ten-years-ago-today.htm...
https://blog.dshr.org/2024/05/sufficiently-decentralized.htm...
Money depends entirely on trust which is a form of belief. But it only matters because it accounts for energy. Because there is nothing to trust in if money can't be exchanged for energy. We trust that our paychecks will buy food because our society is usually fairly robust in that respect. We trust that the US government will go to war to prevent the USD from being deprecated, which lets us continue to use USD.
There's no trust that Bitcoin can always be exchanged for any arbitrary good or service - whereas USD can be turned into anything you want. Bitcoin will always account for some energy usage, but so will starting forest fires. The difference is that nobody is ever going to trade me anything of value for starting a forest fire. That's the trust element. But starting a forest fire leaves just as real an impact on the universe as mining crypto, as mining gold, as building bombs to threaten grifters with.
I get where you're trying to go, but I just don't think it makes sense. If you're serious in trying to find some sort of fundamental thing behind money, you might read Buchan's "Frozen Desire".
"There are people driving cars to commit crimes, like bank robbery!"
Oh no! Now all cars and their drivers are criminals, I suppose? Grandma driving to the grocery store surely is up to no good?
I think the claim being attempted is that crypto is mostly used for crime. Yet is that true? How many transactions happened yesterday? And how many were nefarious?
The biggest bucket is going to be purely financial trades. This is true whether you're trading wheat or copper or oil or whatever. Anybody who thinks they can make a dime but doesn't actually want any of the underlying is here.
Then of the rest, you split by social value. For the traditional markets, most of these trades will be socially positive. Wheat buyers and wheat sellers are mostly making things that people actually want and benefit from. Anything like that is in the "positive social value" bucket.
The third bucket is socially negative. In the traditional commodities, this includes the people who were trading nickel but just swapped in rocks, and other kinds of fraud. Or if you were a terrorist who was buying oil to dump it on the Great Barrier Reef, that'd be there too.
Most crypto trading is in the first bucket, because that's true of almost any financial market. People who need the underlying don't trade much compared with people who are seeking financial advantage. But of the rest, unlike traditional markets, most of the non-financial trades are socially negative. Cryptocurrencies main non-trading uses are things like ransomware, scams, pump-and-dumps, rug pulls, and money laundering, plus other efforts to evade the controls of the traditional financial system.
So the right societal question is: Ignoring the financial traders, what's the ratio between the socially positive and socially negative uses of the underlying?
If you look at my last two sentences, that is precisely what I said, so saying it's "not the right question", then asking the same question isn't very fair.
Your analogy, driving cars, certainly primes people in that direction, as the great bulk of current car trips aren't caused by traders looking to make a buck off the underlying motion of the people who actually need to get somewhere.
I think you're also grossly misunderstanding the most relevant claim, which is not that most crypto trades are directly criminal. I think most informed people agree that these days the bulk of them are speculative. (But speculators can speculate in anything, so crypto doesn't add anything to the world there.) The common claim is instead that the places where crypto has a direct advantage for actual use are mostly criminal.
And I think that's pretty obviously the case. When you compare the original Bitcoin paper with the current state of things like online bill pay, debit cards, Zelle, Square, Cash App, Venmo, M-Pesa, and the like, it's clear that Bitcoin has failed in it stated goals. It's just not very good at solving the problems normal people have transmitting money. Who needs to move money around but can't use any of the effective legit options? It's mostly criminals.
It's not enough to look at whether the day-to-day work "feels like a normal job", or "looks like a normal job" from the outside. You can have a highly respectable job while interacting with people who all look like stereotypical movie mobsters (e.g. prison social worker). You can also sit in a respectable office all day wearing a nice suit while committing genocide.
-- Shards of Honor by Lois McMaster Bujold
I need your book recommendations, or reading list :)
My main caution is that I wouldn't start with Pratchett's earliest works--there are already bunch of suggested reading-order guides out there. I spent a decade thinking Pratchett was overrated because I started with the wrong book. (IIRC The Colour of Magic seemed just too much of a parade of absurd situations for their own sake.) I like the City Watch books (starting in Guards! Guards!) and Small Gods is a decent stand-alone.
For Bujold, the Vorkosigan series is the flagship, where I'd put the Curse of Chalion (fantasy) as a second.
I mean... whether it's true or not, it sure _looks true from the outside_.
What it looks like from the outside has little bearing on the underlying reality, but it's extremely relevant to questions like "will I be viewed with suspicion for having worked with this" or "is my company likely to end up subject to restrictive regulation".
Assuming (I genuinely do not know) that the crypto industry has got legitimate uses which are not dwarfed by illegitimate ones, it has got a _massive_ image problem - because "everyone knows" it's for crime.
I mean, in US urban areas back in its heyday, everyone knew who the mafia were. But that didn't prevent them from doing their mafia thing.
What he's doing there is turning the thieves into the watch - they have a permitted level of theft they can do, normal people can buy "guild passes" which immunizine themselves from even that level of theft, and the Thieves' Guild comes down exceptionally hard on unlicensed thieves.
And the Patrician is unmarried.
They're quite fun to read as Pratchett has a good handle on the "balance of power" negotiations that the Patrician engages in; he plays various power groups off against each other in such a way that he is always the second worst problem to deal with, and taking him out would make it worse.
Part of this rests on the ancient Guild of Assassins, which requires a certain amount of style and also has a very very dim view on anyone threatening their monopoly on killing-for-profit. Their price for going after Vetinari is high enough to discourage most bidders, and Vetinari is a skilled (mostly non-practicing) alumnus that can largely protect himself from them.
______
> “I see you're very comfortable here,” said Vimes weakly.
> “Never build a dungeon you wouldn't be happy to spend the night in yourself,” said the Patrician, laying out the food on the cloth. “The world would be a happier place if more people remembered that.”
> “We all thought you had built secret tunnels and suchlike,” said Vimes.
> “Can't imagine why,” said the Patrician. “One would have to keep on running. So inefficient. Whereas here I am at the hub of things. I hope you understand that, Vimes. Never trust any ruler who puts his faith in tunnels and bunkers and escape routes. The chances are that his heart isn't in the job.”
[...]
> "You see,” he said, “it’s always the case, is it not, that should a city be overtaken by violent civil unrest the current ruler is thrown into the dungeons? To a certain type of mind that is so much more satisfying than mere execution."
> “Well, okay, but I don’t see—” Vimes began.
> “And you look at this door and what you see is a really strong cell door, yes?”
> “Of course. You’ve only got to look at the bolts and—”
> “You know, I’m really rather pleased,” said Lord Vetinari quietly.
> Vimes stared at the door until his eyebrows ached. And then, just as random patterns in cloud suddenly, without changing in any way, become a horse’s head or a sailing ship, he saw what he’d been looking at all along. A sense of terrifying admiration overcame him.
> He wondered what it was like in the Patrician’s mind. All cold and shiny, he thought, all blued steel and icicles and little wheels clicking along like a huge clock. The kind of mind that would carefully consider its own downfall and turn it to advantage. It was a perfectly normal dungeon door, but it all depended on your sense of perspective.
> In this dungeon the Patrician could hold off the world. All that was on the outside was the lock. All the bolts and bars were on the inside.
-- Guards! Guards!
Sega’s choice to treat their fanwork seriously and make them second-party developers rather than shutting them down was not only an immeasurably good thing for both the project and its fans, but a measurably, handsomely profitable move for Sega.
The number of ports of Doom that were made by fans and only licensed after the work was done so it could be sold is surprisingly high. Randy Linden on the SNES is an interesting story (and the very chip he used was also a similar story at its inception).
I disagree with this. Everyone knows they didn't make it - they know it belongs to someone. They just don't want to give anyone else anything for using it, so they hope either it happens to have been released to public use or the creator can't be bothered to chase it up.
This works, sort of kind of, for mid-level creatives who aren't struggling to make rent (and thus need the money) and aren't huge (so don't need the exposure).