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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

#161

Post by heMan09 »

rudderz wrote: post #137
kelnos wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whatever your stance on cryptocurrencies are, what is of little dispute is the business opportunities they have created. Binance and Coinbase are large, successful companies. Poloniex was sold for ~400M. I find this argument a little weird, because I think we can all agree that bubbles and fad tech isn't really great for society as a whole. If you believe cryptocurrencies aren't a fad and actually provide useful be…

Take crypto out of the equation, what are the implications of the fed issuing a programmable currency? Many financial services would become obsolete. What do I need a stock broker for? What do I need a bank for? You have Wall St and other sophisticated investors profiteering and competing against the general public, devaluing our purchasing power, making leveraged trades because they know the public will hold the bag…

Humanity already solved this problem: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax

Most white collar crime is obvious and where the bodies are buried is largely known.

There’s simply no political will to do anything about it.

Crypto becoming mainstream isn’t going to change indifferent minds.

Physical reality is a thing. Burying our heads in ephemeral concepts is distraction, not change.

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

#162

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

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

#163

Post by RealityVoid »

coolspot wrote: post #134
christiansakai wrote: post #99

Tangentially related. Cryptocurrency is just a side effect of blockchain. Once blockchain technology matures and if one day we see blockchain to store files and blockchain to run cloud services, then will the US government censor it as well? If they will, how? It is practically impossible. You can upload anything there, including child porn, instructions on making bombs, videos that contain brainwashing propaganda fo…

When they realize, they will kill on/off-ramps into cash and make any transactions not legal. The software itself they can treat is as malware - blackhole IPs and shutdown any hosts involved.

The value of crypto would decrease but never be completely gone. A whole pandora's box was opened and they can't put the genie back in the bottle no matter how hard they try.

If they were to kill the offramps, the ecosystem would move on websites on Tor or I2P that would work P2P, they can use high privacy coins such as Monero or zcash. Or people will trade it in person using escrow systems. It's not like the first BTC trasactions had the privilege of nice exchanges. The possibilities are there. Just the incentives are not yet present.

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

#164

Post by samvher »

rawtxapp wrote: post #73
puranjay wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DeFi has a legitimate use case and NFTs have an astonishing number of use cases. Smart Contracts are an incredible, incredible innovation. We are at the tip of the iceberg and nothing has been more disappointing than seeing the traditional tech world's dismissal of crypto as "get rich schemes". The tech world is surprisingly as complacent now as the legacy dinosaurs it first helped destroy in the 1990s and 2000s.

I think it's somewhat similar to innovator's dilemma, a lot of current tech leaders were once the underdog and now are at the top, so they end up becoming complacent and non-innovators or slow innovators like the companies they replaced. An example of really cool smart contract usage is borrowing against your crypto, for example, this person/group was able to borrow roughly 340M$ [1], the best part, they didn't even…

To be honest this trend of borrowing against your crypto is specifically something that makes me very suspicious about the current state of the cryptocurrency world. If crypto crashes 30-50% again all these loans for which collateral is going to be sold would crash the whole market (or am I missing something?). Also it seems way too popular to borrow against crypto and then use that money to invest in crypto as well, creating significant leverage in the market, worsening the problem I mentioned before and inflating the price of crypto compared to its “true” value.

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

#165

Post by gpapilion »

goonogle wrote: post #2

I really want someone to ask Janet "do you have plans to ban Cash transactions because they are used for illicit activity?" I would guess USD inflation is far worse than expected and they know Bitcoin's initial intended purpose (as an alternative to government money) has come to fruit. It just sounds better to use the illicit boogy man.

To flip this a bit, how much of bitcoin usage is non-speculative, and for legal purposes?

I actually think the speculative issue is a bigger concern for the fed, then the legality. It's an commodity w/ very little utility, but a high degree of poorly regulated investing. In addition its used to funnel payments for illegal activity.

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

#166

Post by arcticbull »

xxxxxxx12 wrote: post #114
devmunchies wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked the take from the Mayor of Miami (from a podcast about cryptocurrency): "they [governments] will have to borrow money like everybody else borrows money, they can't just print their own money. They have to borrow money at an interest rate. And if governments don't behave fiscally then they are going to have to borrow at worse and worse rates. They can't just invent their own interest rates and currency, which…

There is a (seemingly growing) number of people that openly say that the budget doesn't matter. You just print and spend. Fortunately this incentivizes finding ways to circumvent that regime and point out how absurd it is.

It's only wrong if it doesn't work -- but it does. Economists aren't 100% sure why, but it does.

The fact is while the debt has exploded, the total cost to service that debt has collapsed. The US is now paying less interest on its sovereign debt than before the COVID stimuli. Explain to me how it's stupid not to take advantage of this?

The reality is when you take on debt, the only thing that matters is what you choose to do with it. If you use it to generate economic activity - and hence revenue - that's a good investment. If you don't, that's a bad investment.

Now, you can "circumvent" this by investing your money like you're supposed to in literally anything.

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

#167

Post by CharlesW »

puranjay wrote: post #132
justapassenger wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DeFi main value proposition isn’t tech (that’s cool) but avoiding regulations. Blockchain has lots of potentially interesting use cases like NFT, but crypto currency is still not one of them. And by not cracking down on scams in cryptocurrency will only make any future adoption harder.

DeFi's main value proposition is the automation of money. NFTs main value proposition is fractional ownership and assertion of ownership rights in a transparent manner. Imagine owning 1% of a Drake song - and getting paid 1% of the royalties every time it plays on Spotify. Or creating a yield earning strategy that automatically moves money around based on fixed paramters without ever interacting with a banker or fund…

> DeFi's main value proposition is the automation of money.

That's a potential value proposition of any currency which can be manipulated digitally. Whether it's distributed or not is an implementation detail.

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

#168

Post by yunesj »

AlexandrB wrote: post #130
yunesj wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The small value cryptocurrencies provide over other digital transaction methods I’m not aware of any other digital transaction methods that can send un-printable money besides cryptos. I think devaluing currency to inflate stocks and fund wars is harmful, and cryptos are a valuable solution. Although, I think there’s better than PoW.

These are political problems. If you think that an additional form of currency will solve them, I have a bridge to sell you. Even if you convince the US government to switch to BTC (this is probably a harder political project than defunding the defence department), I'm sure they'll think of something if they need to fund a war or two. BTC would be a mere speed bump.

Yes, the US can still raise funds other ways. It would still be preferable if they were more transparent about it.

> Even if you convince the US government to switch to BTC

There's no need for that. It would be enough for some people to switch to BTC. I.e., not store their money or denominate their salaries in USD.

As things stand, most wealthy people already store their money in things other than USD that are somewhat less easy to manipulate, like stocks and commodities. It would be nice if this strategy were more accessible to people worldwide.

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

#169

Post by atat7024 »

AlexandrB wrote: post #117
noxer wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are stable coins backed by crypto.

What does that mean? How does "crypto" guarantee that someone has the reserves necessary to back the stable coin in circulation? Whenever cryptocurrency interacts with the "real" world, you're trusting someone to verify that the real world state corresponds to the state recorded in the blockchain. I have yet to see a satisfactory solution for this. You're also trusting someone to verify that all this software is free…

Liquidity, in a word.

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

#170

Post by yunesj »

arcticbull wrote: post #158
yunesj wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The small value cryptocurrencies provide over other digital transaction methods I’m not aware of any other digital transaction methods that can send un-printable money besides cryptos. I think devaluing currency to inflate stocks and fund wars is harmful, and cryptos are a valuable solution. Although, I think there’s better than PoW.

> I’m not aware of any other digital transaction methods that can send un-printable money besides cryptos. That's because it's not a useful feature heh. Money is meant to be a medium of exchange and temporary store of value. To the extent it holds its value for the duration of your ownership of it, it's met its goal.

Sure, it's a fair argument that gold + paypal may be superior to bitcoin.
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