Uh, isn't it also illegal to buy unlicensed securities? Couldn't the SEC also prosecute individuals who bought into obvious scams as unaccredited investors? IANAL, but securities fraud is securities fraud. Why even take the risk? Why, especially now, announce to the world that you're taking the risk like in the article?
Bankers Ditch Fat Salaries to Chase Digital Currency Riches
81–90 of 150 posts
Re: Bankers Ditch Fat Salaries to Chase Digital Currency Riches
#82Investing in crypto is like a gambling addiction. I know some people who were paper millionaires based on their BTC during the days before Mt Gox collapse. They lost their entire savings once Mt Gox collapsed, since then they have spent years working hard to recover their savings and now they are investing all of it in ICOs. This won't end well. Seems to me like the story is repeating. On a side note, the brigading/s…
>the brigading/shilling here on HN is becoming quite annoying Can you point to a single post where the top, say, 5 comments aren't completely negative toward crypto as a whole? They typically mention gambling, fraud, ponzi schemes and (like yours) Mt Gox, in a rant that isn't specifically tied to the post at hand. Look at the top comments on this article: >Investing in crypto is like a gambling addiction >cryptocurre…
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Re: Bankers Ditch Fat Salaries to Chase Digital Currency Riches
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How it'll do any of that and why it's a good thing, that's left as an exercise to the reader. I'll give an additional hint to reader: who benefits from encryption that even law enforcement cannot break? Who benefits from TOR?
> who benefits from encryption that even law enforcement cannot break? People who live in countries with regressive regimes where law enforcement can be legitimately dangerous?
It's true that bitcoin might be useful in very unstable countries (venezuela comes to mind) when you can't really trust fiat and getting access to dollars or other foreign currencies is trickier.
It's still only really useful for relatively rich people who want to get money out or in, I doubt the average Venezuelian bothers with Bitcoin. And Bitcoin requires a widely available "free" internet connection to work correctly which would be trivial for an authoritarian government to disrupt. Turkey doesn't hesitate to block Wikipedia and Twitter, I doubt they'd have any problem blocking the bitcoin exchanges and the bitcoin peer-to-peer protocol if they felt the need to do it. Sure you can work around this and smuggle the blockchain somehow, but it becomes a lot less practical, especially if want something that you can easily spend for your day-to-day purchases like food and toilet paper.
I know there's a lot of defiance towards our governments all around the world and there are some good reasons for that. However I feel like we're having the bad engineer reflex, trying to find a technical solution to a societal issue and we might end up making things worse. I want to be able to trust the government that I democratically elect and I want this government to be able to gather taxes and even control the currency to some extent.
Instead Bitcoin will make it trivial to evade taxes, smuggle money overseas and makes bribery easier than ever. You can't seize it, you can't freeze it, you can launder it super easily etc...
At least when people open an illegal account in some tax haven it leaves some paper trail, there are intermediaries in the loop, you take some risks, you have to figure out a way to smuggle the money over there while keeping the books clean. With Bitcoin you click on "generate a new receiving address" and you're done. If the point is to make governments less corrupt and more accountable I don't see how that'll work. You can't have the Panama Papers or the Swiss Leaks if there's no paper to begin with.
The fact that it wastes an ungodly amount of energy to secure its ledger is just the icing on the crap cake as far as I'm concerned. And it's not even super successful because as far as I understand the majority of the hash power is currently in mainland China, so if the Chinese government wanted to take over they'd just send a dozen of military types in each datacenter and that'd be the end of it. Then you make a few double-spend attacks to make people lose all trust in the coin, the value collapses, nobody mines it anymore, game over, thanks for playing.
Re: Bankers Ditch Fat Salaries to Chase Digital Currency Riches
#84Who are these people spending real money in all these ICOs? Is this all just money made from bitcoin speculation being thrown around? Or is this real people spending real cash money?
And more importantly, how do I create an ICO and get these people to buy into it?
Do something like this guy: https://uetoken.com/
Raised something like $50k
Re: Bankers Ditch Fat Salaries to Chase Digital Currency Riches
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I know exactly about the pull you are describing. I also invested a small amount (around £1500). When I lost about 1/3 of my initial investment, I felt a really strong urge to deposit more cash and try some risky trade to make my losses back. I guess this is the feeling gamblers have. I managed to use my will power and cash out my remaining investment and just stay away from this as I understand now how it can become…
When did you invest, and why did you feel you needed to sell it off so fast? I bought some bitcoin when I thought it had reached the bottom at $800 a couple years ago, but I was wrong and it kept sliding all the way down to $250 a coin (and stayed that way for a year and a half, that was rough to see the price every day, I eventually stopped watching it for about six months), but I held on to it, and the current pric…
I invested when BTC was around 1100-1200, don't remember exactly. It then fell bellow 1000 to low 900s (quite quickly) and I panic sold. It was sometimes last year before it went to rise to almost 3000.
I guess I am not a type of person who can take the stress of investing in something so volatile. I am trying to live a fiscally responsible and frugal life and this was probably the riskiest investment I have ever made.
I only invested a small amount. I could have easily lost all of it and it would make almost no difference to me. But I'm trying to save money to buy a property now so I will stay away from any kind of investments until I buy a house/apartment.
Re: Bankers Ditch Fat Salaries to Chase Digital Currency Riches
#86Uh, isn't it also illegal to buy unlicensed securities? Couldn't the SEC also prosecute individuals who bought into obvious scams as unaccredited investors? IANAL, but securities fraud is securities fraud. Why even take the risk? Why, especially now, announce to the world that you're taking the risk like in the article?
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Don't take investment advice from my Internet comments.
> isn't it also illegal to buy unlicensed securities
There are "safe harbors" like Regulation D [1]. This is how private companies issue securities. There are still rules about to whom you can sell your securities and the minimum information you have to make available to them. Needless to say, I have not seen an ICO promoter make use of these safe harbours.
Re: Bankers Ditch Fat Salaries to Chase Digital Currency Riches
#87I remember the .com-bubble; it kind of made sense that companies like Amazon were very valuable as they had the promise to transform whole industries. But this one; it is just stupid. Massive amounts of electricity and hardware wasted to keep a distributed ledger safe; an army of computer nerds facilitating fraud, narcotics sale and money laundry; and finally the bankers sensing bucks to be made on a large number of…
"It's not about the money, it's about the game." -- Gordon Gekko
Re: Bankers Ditch Fat Salaries to Chase Digital Currency Riches
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> who benefits from encryption that even law enforcement cannot break? People who live in countries with regressive regimes where law enforcement can be legitimately dangerous?
It's true that bitcoin might be useful in very unstable countries (venezuela comes to mind) when you can't really trust fiat and getting access to dollars or other foreign currencies is trickier. It's still only really useful for relatively rich people who want to get money out or in, I doubt the average Venezuelian bothers with Bitcoin. And Bitcoin requires a widely available "free" internet connection to work corre…
> However I feel like we're having the bad engineer reflex, trying to find a technical solution to a societal issue and we might end up making things worse.
Same is said for encryption.
My perspective is that tools empowering individuals is the solution to societal problems. Cryptography does that, whether applied to communication or applied to value transfer.
Re: Bankers Ditch Fat Salaries to Chase Digital Currency Riches
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Blockchain technology carries with it the possibility to change how we think about and use money. That's the type of fluff I keep hearing coming from the bitcoin enthusiasts but I have yet to read a compelling argument about what it'll enable and how exactly. "Bitcoin will kill the banks", "bitcoin will prevent the evil government from stealing your money", "bitcoin will cure cancer and polio". How it'll do any of t…
The internet native versions of previous offline technologies have a long history of revolutionising their respective industries. MP3, video codecs all internet/computer native versions of things that already existed offline but which have swallowed entire markets. I wouldn't bet against cryptocurrencies doing the same thing, that's not to say I know how they're going to do it.
The added value of having access to these things online seems obvious though. It just took a while until the infrastructure was here to allow it (good luck streaming 4k video in 1995). Bitcoin is mostly here already, it sorta works. And then what? Besides speculation, illegal activities or simple curiosity, why would I bother? What's the blockchain's Youtube, what's the killer app? What will it let me do that I can't do today with my Visa card, except lose all of my money if I mess up?
Re: Bankers Ditch Fat Salaries to Chase Digital Currency Riches
#90So cryptocurrency is the new Gold Rush. As the story goes, the only people who reliably made money during the original gold rush was the people who sold the spades. What are the "spades" here?
Nobody mentioned them yet, so I'll add the exchanges to the hardware manufacturers.