601–610 of 659 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the TV show "Sherlock," the titular main character's self-deprecating videos for the "Everyone" collective (spoof on Anonymous) are a sort of ritual sacrifice as a medium of payment.
I think you're meaning to reference "Elementary," the other show about Sherlock Holmes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What future does an asset have if people don't actually buy stuff with it? Does gold have a future? Nobody buys anything with gold. Also, the Bitcoin blocks are full. Somebody is using it for something.
Why is everybody all suddenly so excited about gold? Maybe btc is modestly better gold. So? Who tells typical people to invest in gold other than foxnews and infowars? I own precisely zero dollars worth of gold. Why should I buy btc? Transactions are not always buying goods. If I transfer 1btc to somebody and then send me $10,000 there will be a transaction. But btc was not used as a currency to purchase a good here.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gold has value because it's shiny, doesn't oxidize, is malleable enough to easily form conspicuous jewelry, is much rarer than base mining elements, and is not cheap to extract. The not oxidizing and rarity are key. E.g. platinum is also not cheap. Aluminium is close but it's orders of magnitude more common, and still oxidizes a little.
Value as a currency.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Gold is a greater-fool asset, just like Bitcoin. We buy it hoping a greater fool will pay us more for it later. Most of the value is what we ascribe to it. Close on 80% is used in jewelry. It doesn't actually make you money, there's no universal law that makes it more valuable over time. It's just stuff we like, same as art or classic cars or Bitcoin. We've just liked it for longer than those things, so we trust it m…
> We buy it hoping a greater fool will pay us more for it later. Well not exactly, the largest consumer of gold are Indians and they buy gold jewellery to show affluence. Most of the jewellery is passed down generations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course with enough effort and investment you can probably stop many things, the point is whether the increasing marginal costs of enforcement are worth it to the government and society. By that same argument, the US could round up every illegal immigrant and deport them, or every casual drug user and lock them up for life. We don't do that because it'd be ruinously expensive (not to mention immoral) and transform…
> the point is whether the increasing marginal costs of enforcement are worth it to the government and society The same applies to cash. Investigating them is expensive. We don't bust the kid who fails to report the proceeds from their lemonade stand because (a) it's too small and (b) it's too mean. > privacy coins + tumblers + crypto + VPNs + TOR will make it very hard for a government to punish motivated individual…
Yes, but again, costs matter (this time on the other side). Money laundering with physical cash is expensive, risky, and time consuming.
You need to first get a bunch of physical cash, which itself raises suspicion and is easily tracked. Then you need to find someone in the physical world that you trust to help launder for you.
If you reduce the cost of 'money laundering' by 2-3 orders of magnitude, it indirectly raises the cost of enforcement significantly, because then the government will have to sort out all the 'harmless' infringement from the serious crimes that it cares about today.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While there's no doubt they are used for money laundering, they also serve an essential privacy purpose. Imagine if every vendor you made a purchase from with your credit card also received a copy of your entire transaction history with that card. The mafia run business, the fetish porn shop, the megacorp, the government agency. While it wouldn't be that easy to connect a wallets previous transactions to the real wor…
It's not that tumblers are just "used for" money laundering, it's that they are money laundering, definitionally. All the terrible privacy implications of using Bitcoin that you've described are true. The conclusion "so therefore it's okay if I launder money" does not follow. You could instead not use Bitcoin.
If by 'money laundering' you simply mean transacting in a way that is mostly anonymous, you can do this today just be using cash, finding someone else with cash, mixing your bills together, and none of that is either wrong or illegal.
If by money laundering you mean committing a criminal act and then hiding its financial traces, then that is only one possible use of tumblers, but there are other legitimate uses.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you've been kicking yourself about not getting into Bitcoin early - you have a new opportunity with Lightning now. Why not just delete the rest of your post and just leave this? This once sentence is what really drives all of the rest of your breathless hype. Naked greed. It's the only thing the entire crypto "space" has. Lightning network is pure vaporware. It was "coming any day now" when Mt Gox collapsed. It'…
You'll be happy to hear then that a lot of progress has been made on Lightning since MtGox imploded I probably should have linked to these from my original comment - rather than removing anything Specifically with lnd the lightning daemon[0], BOLT's (the equivalent of Bitcoin BIP's) 1 through to 11 have been implemented in the core daemon[1] There is also the Neutrino light client[2] (screenshot [3]) Far from being v…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not that tumblers are just "used for" money laundering, it's that they are money laundering, definitionally. All the terrible privacy implications of using Bitcoin that you've described are true. The conclusion "so therefore it's okay if I launder money" does not follow. You could instead not use Bitcoin.
You're taking the different definitions of money laundering and switching between them as it suits you. If by 'money laundering' you simply mean transacting in a way that is mostly anonymous, you can do this today just be using cash, finding someone else with cash, mixing your bills together, and none of that is either wrong or illegal. If by money laundering you mean committing a criminal act and then hiding its fin…
It's sufficiently anonymous for most people to just spend the cash they have. You didn't get the cash from D. B. Cooper, right? So nobody's watching the serial numbers. You just spend it.
It's only Bitcoin where that isn't an option.
Edit to be clearer about what my point is: cash has a moderate amount of anonymity, with practical limits. If those practical limits are a problem for you, you probably are covering up a crime. Bitcoin, however, has no level of anonymity between "everyone can see everything you spent" and "covering up a crime".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your sentiment and your plan do not align. Ethereum is so far head and shoulders above other cryptos in the "coolness" factor that it's unreal. Do you realize how many popular tokens are ERC20 tokens?
Yes, that's why I bought it! But it's still proof-of-work-based. The future is proof-of-state. I know folks are trying to retro PoS into Ethereum, but I'll believe it when I see it. Many others are already there. I'd say: Bitcoin is first gen, Ethereum is second gen, and there are a variety of third-gen coins with good UX and proof-of-stake already on the market. I expect one (and probably only one) of these latter t…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wow. The short-sightedness in this comment is astounding. Check out on some of those "advantages" that trusting those thirdparties can mean for you: https://www.google.fi/search?q=paypal+destroyed+my+business&... https://www.google.fi/search?q=amazon+destroyed+my+business&...
Yeah, sure, what's your point? I worry about getting screwed over by any of a dozen vendors, including but not limited to our payment processor. I also worry about getting scammed, about losing all our money due to a bug, about costly human errors, and about getting priced out of the market by competitors who take shortcuts I'm not willing to. On balance, we feel that the benefits of sitting behind a payment processo…