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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

#421

Post by conanbatt »

kelnos wrote: post #109
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…

> 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…

Since when does the head of the fed need to crackdown on bubbles?

BTC is over 10 years now, and the most powerful monetary authority in the world is now afraid of it. How is this slipping by people's minds?

The btc maniacs are winning.

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

#422

Post by conanbatt »

knorker wrote: post #207
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…

Beany babies spawned a lot of successful business, but you absolutely cannot from derive that they were fit for purpose, or in any way useful. You're cargo culting. They're still a solution in search of a problem, backed by tech people who think they understand what they are trying to replace. Once you understand the fence you can tear it down, but cryptonerds really really don't understand law (they think smart cont…

12 year old beanie babies with one of the most accessible financial assets in the world with returns of over 60.000x

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

#423

Post by XorNot »

devmunchies wrote: post #305
maest wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would a government with a sovereign currency ever have to borrow any sort of money? They can issue as much of their own currency as they want.

that's the point. if money is backed by something with a max-supply (like gold or some cryptocurrency) or if there were a law limiting the max money supply then eventually they will have exhausted their reserves if they aren't careful, and will need to borrow. The american dollar is not backed by anything but the "full faith and credit of the american govt" Even cryptocurrency projects like Brave browser's BAT has a…

So here's the thing...there was a long period of time where empires were on the gold standard. Spain during the early American colonial period was one such empire.

Spain did really well out of it's brutality in the New World - plundering the Inca and Aztec empires yielded a wealth of gold, and the big find in the salvage industry today is still "spanish gold" because just so much of it sank to the bottom of the ocean.

But now a question: did the Spanish economy boom from this influx of gold they had (through a substantial expenditure of resources), suddenly acquired?

The answer is: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_Spain#Gold...) No.

Spain actually experienced massive inflation and then an economic crisis as the government suddenly found itself, bizarrely, bankrupt. Gold wasn't worth remotely what it was before, because gold is not actual productivity - the conquest of the new world was a conquest of gold, at the cost of real resources - food, men, timber, arms etc. But it didn't yield anything that was actually worth trading for other then just more gold. So prices skyrocketed, and suddenly the Spanish empire was raising taxes - despite in theory having "made money" because it couldn't afford to pay for its own upkeep.

What does this have to do with the concept of loans? Quite a lot. Because the exact same factors would apply to a government with a wealth of productivity which was forced to seek loans from a market: demand for currency drives the value of currency up, but the same thing happens - farmers, workers, everyone else winds up poorer because the value of their labor is being reduced relative to the value of currency. So currency holders get richer, but everyone else with bills and day to day living expenses are getting poorer.

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

#424

Post by XorNot »

intotheabyss wrote: post #400
XorNot wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You keep saying "asset" as though this means anything. Say my asset is a bulldozer. How is an automated ethereum contract going to lend it out and ensure its return in good working order, or pursue damages if it is not? Say my asset is actually just a lump sum of regular US dollars, which I would very much desire to be returned to me as US dollars plus interest so I can my US taxes with them at a later date. How is a…

The asset won't be the bulldozer, but ownership of the bulldozer. How did the natives of the Yap islands know who owned which Rai stones? Through social contracts. The same would be the case for bulldozer ownerships on Ethereum. It's just a way for you to prove to other humans (or programs) that you own the bulldozer. If you sell the bulldozer in real life, then presumably the buyer would want the ownership. The diff…

Except you keep talking about automation of assets but you haven't answered the question: how does the delivery, and return of the bulldozer work?

How does the delivery and return of my USD work?

At every junction the answer is "well you trust another party and..." - so why is ethereum needed in the process at all? All of this is just companies providing an API for a service (which generally they don't, now, because it's complicated to orchestrate such a thing).

Ethereum is not contributing anything useful here, because everything important is "trust this person" - at which point I'm really just "hiring a lawyer".

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

#426

Post by beambot »

viraptor wrote: post #368
beambot wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Censorship-free distributed storage (using Ethereum & Filecoin)

I wouldn't rely on that one. As cool as Filecoin is, LE can query who has a given file and chase them and their ISP until they no longer advertise that file. Without secrecy you can't have a censorship-free solution.

The Ethereum smart contract can advertise the file in perpetuity by being memorialized on the blockchain in an irrevocable way

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

#427

Post by samvher »

rawtxapp wrote: post #187
samvher wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

These are all over-collaterized, so you're usually borrowing up to 30% of your collaterals value, it's nowhere near the 2-20x leverage that you might get in traditional markets or leverage based exchanges. I think it makes a lot of sense in the current bull market, it probably makes less sense in a bear market unless you're borrowing only up to like 5-10% of your collateral to actually spend on something you need.

The numbers I’ve seen range more from 40-60% (haven’t gotten involved with this though so not sure how accurate these are). That would cause lots of issues on a 40% pullback.

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

#428

Post by TearsInTheRain »

xvilka wrote: post #378
wayoutthere wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the fed did a cryptocurrency, it would be backed by the full might of the US Government — and all the things that the government can do if it decides to print more money. This also includes military and police powers. Which brings me to the other point: currencies are governed at both ends; at issuance and at use. If you use a crypto that’s not approved, the government can simply arrest you for using one of its co…

US is not the only country in the world. There are many countries whose currency and government are much weaker to fight such an adoption.

Exactly. I think all of the people that say "Crypto doesnt solve any problems" just live in countries with strong institutions which dont have the problems crypto solves. Even in those places though crypto is useful as a hedge against institutional failure.

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

#429

Post by defterGoose »

cblconfederate wrote: post #346
scandox wrote: post #202

To me it's always seemed like money grows from the barrel of a gun. Detaching money from military power sounds wonderful but it makes no sense to me. It seems to defy the very basis of what money is. Tokens handed out by warlords. Only stretched out over such a long time that it isn't obvious any more. Obviously I am neither an economist nor a political theorist.

It's true but , bitcoin is a weapon, like the dollar is. Because BTC can't be physically destroyed, nukes become useless if the purpose is to destroy an economy / state. Raising an army with bitcoin is also impossible , because it s international and inherently impossible to inflate. In fact any state that wants to wage war in a crypto world is essentially fighting mathematics. It is also inevitable, as any country t…

While it would be nearly impossible to destroy all the servers maintaining the blockchain, it makes me wonder about the possibility of a sophisticated virus erasing it by means of an update cycle.

Seems like some good fodder for a Mr. Robot-esque show or novel.

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

#430

Post by Daishiman »

leppr wrote: post #404
Daishiman wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Decentralized networks have the potential to resolve many of the issues we techies love to complain about. I continue to hear this yet I never get a _single_ convincing example from DeFi advocates.

Community-governed vs. advertiser-dictated networks. Free markets. It's a wide topic, I'm surprised you can't find a single usecase you would use or think makes sense. If it can help you imagine some, take the decentralized primitives: a money/value transfer network, a reputation network, a content delivery network. Starting from those, many currently gimped online services could be replicated in a way that incentivi…

The statement that P2P networks are superior to centrally managed ones stands far from reality. There is a certain class of problems where this is true. But like in most computer science problems, distributed systems have a ton of flaws and inneficiencies.

Moreover, trust isn't something mediated by computers. Trust is a question of human societies. Algorithmic trust is not arbiter of trust any more than the thousands of electronic trust schemes, which get gamed at some point or another and where human intervention is necessary for course correction given a measure of authority.

Computer systems aren't outside of human law or common principles of human trust or institutions. BTC and all those other networks are just as if not more vulnerable to being gamed as any other system.

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