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CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

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Re: CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

#51

Post by john_moscow »

captn3m0 wrote: post #30
liquidise wrote: post #4

> U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and other officials have warned about the use of cryptocurrencies for illicit transactions. Wait until you hear about cash. More seriously (and hopefully less reductionist) i feel nations who embrace cryptocurrencies early will see mixed results as the landscape matures. I am more confident that nations which turn their back on it, or shut it out completely, will see a loss of o…

You can't transfer a billion dollars worth of cash by sending an email with your private key.

If you have a billion dollars to hold, you don't want the volatility that could turn it into a hundred million, or ten billion in a few weeks, just because.

Also, holding a billion dollars in a form protected by a single private key is effectively putting a billion-dollar bounty on your own head.

Re: CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

#52

Post by tonfa »

retrac wrote: post #49
maerF0x0 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wait until you hear about cash. anecdote time: I once travelled to Vietnam for a vacation, people in vietnam prefer $100 bills because they're easier to use for hiding wealth, transporting cross border, and other slightly less than legal reasons. Additionally it's the preferred currency of criminals in the country too (so I heard). They will even pay higher exchange rates for ones in better condition or with more a…

In Canada, organized crime holds on to the $1000 notes. They're the largest value banknote commonly used in the West in the last few decades. They were last issued in 1992 and then officially withdrawn in 2000 for concerns over moneylaundering. They're not legal tender anymore, but can be exchanged at the bank. There's about $1 billion in circulation, and that will likely remain true for a long time yet. They move in…

CHF still has 1k banknote (and with negative interest rates this with a safe might be a better option than a bank account).

Re: CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

#53

Post by gruez »

system16 wrote: post #42

Is the timing of this statement a coincidence, or is it possibly a jab to take the wind out of the sails of another top exchange set to go public in two days?

Judging by the market's non-reaction to this, I'm going with the latter.

Re: CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

#54

Post by drummer »

This is exactly why i love projects like MobileCoin and its integration in Signal. We are going to desperately need anonymous, secure and privacy focused payments very very soon. Signal needs to open up payments worldwide as soon as possible. The last problem to fix is making it all decentralized.

Re: CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

#55

Post by mrtksn »

liquidise wrote: post #4

> U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and other officials have warned about the use of cryptocurrencies for illicit transactions. Wait until you hear about cash. More seriously (and hopefully less reductionist) i feel nations who embrace cryptocurrencies early will see mixed results as the landscape matures. I am more confident that nations which turn their back on it, or shut it out completely, will see a loss of o…

The cash argument is not a good take at all. When you travel with large amounts of cash people ask questions, you are obligated to declare it when crossing borders if it’s over certain amount(over 0,25BTC as USD will make you fill out declarations and it may be confiscated until you can prove that it is legitimately yours) depositing it to your bank account rings all kind of bells, the banks can refuse to work with you and can trigger law enforcement interest.

We can be cynical about it but actually number of banks paid fines in the billions of dollars and they take it seriously now. Some hard hit banks like BNP that got fined for $9B would even refuse to work with cash intensive businesses.

The criminals need to go through trouble of creating shell companies to launder or transfer money, cash is no good anymore.

Re: CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

#56

Post by gruez »

winslett wrote: post #46

Instead of killing it by banning it, I suspect they could kill it by buying it. If the Fed wanted to "invest" in Bitcoin, it would kill it by soaking up liquidity and creating a liquidity-squeeze. Because the amount in circulation is fixed, it wouldn't have to buy all of the Bitcoin -- just enough to kill any utility. This is a downside of an asset with a fixed quantity. Once the community discovered the liquidity-sq…

Can you elaborate on why a "liquidity-squeeze" is bad for bitcoin? It's subdivisible to 8 decimal places, so it's not like reducing the supply would make it harder to transact or anything.

Re: CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

#57

Post by vmception »

PaywallBuster wrote: post #47
vmception wrote: post #40

Capture US regulatory agencies while you can. This has already had varying levels of success with the Chief Legal Officer of Coinbase being the acting chair of the OCC and telling banks it was okay to custody crypto and settle transactions on cryptocurrency networks instead of just SWIFT, ACH, FedWire There are some at the SEC, and the new SEC chair was pro-crypto when he was previously the chair of CFTC Cabinet leve…

Crypto exchange owner was 2nd biggest donor to Biden campaign https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/02/sam-bankman-fried-bi...

Great, yeah a lot of crypto builders thrive in power vacuums. So the Trump administration was convenient for the 2017 bubble, as a debilitated SEC was necessary for the token launches that made issuers millions (and billions). And a paralyzed Congress was necessary to get non-establishment people confirmed who will last many administrations. All of that lost its utility by 2020 as the outcomes were mostly solidified and favorable.

I would say it is slightly more than moderately successful.

The SEC still hasn't approved a digital commodity trust yet ("bitcoin ETF") but enough wealthy people are involved now that have created surrogates that it isn't as important.

Maybe some college kid in the late 2020s will make some Netflix conspiracy documentary about the "revolving door in crypto", I would call that success.

Re: CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

#58

Post by lambda_obrien »

winslett wrote: post #46

Instead of killing it by banning it, I suspect they could kill it by buying it. If the Fed wanted to "invest" in Bitcoin, it would kill it by soaking up liquidity and creating a liquidity-squeeze. Because the amount in circulation is fixed, it wouldn't have to buy all of the Bitcoin -- just enough to kill any utility. This is a downside of an asset with a fixed quantity. Once the community discovered the liquidity-sq…

The USG could kill it by using a 51 percent attack; the NSA must have rows upon rows of servers that could be repurposed for a week or two to destroy the market. Split the blockchain every couple of hours into several different versions, eventually there would be little chance to reconcile things.

Re: CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

#59

Post by NaturalPhallacy »

kec wrote: post #44
tinus_hn wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can’t reliably restrict what you can’t see

At some point you need to convert your crypto gains back to fiat to actually use it, especially in the hypothetical case where crypto trade is banned locally. The IRS/FBI/etc are not going to arbitrarily constrain themselves when trying to go after folks who do this.

>At some point you need to convert your crypto gains back to fiat to actually use it

Except you don't. It's a currency. Just because it's hot right now and people are treating it like an investment doesn't change the fact that it's a currency itself. You don't need to convert it to anything. It was literally built to be a currency free from bank/government control. That was the whole point.

The sole criterion for the viability of a currency is acceptance in trade. It doesn't require government, bank, or sign off by any authority. If people accept it in trade, it's a currency and it's viable. Just because other, older fiats are more mainstream currently doesn't change that fact one iota.

Re: CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

#60

Post by Y_Y »

winslett wrote: post #46

Instead of killing it by banning it, I suspect they could kill it by buying it. If the Fed wanted to "invest" in Bitcoin, it would kill it by soaking up liquidity and creating a liquidity-squeeze. Because the amount in circulation is fixed, it wouldn't have to buy all of the Bitcoin -- just enough to kill any utility. This is a downside of an asset with a fixed quantity. Once the community discovered the liquidity-sq…

But won't you also increase the mining activity if the price shoots up? I'd like to hear more detail on this "liquidity-squeeze" plan.
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