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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

#491
post #313

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3) Lose all your money - deserved for being this stupid. The only reason someone sends you money back after you irreversible send money to them is if they are even more stupid than you.

That's what I don't understand. How could you possibly exchange crypto for fiat in a completely safe/foolproof way? The person gives you fiat, you can say no. You send the person crypto first, they say no. Because it's not physical, there's no way to wrestle it from the person or whatever...

Escrow. First BTC I bought, circa 2013, I met with a guy and gave him physical money. He then released the escrow.

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

#492

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Yeah literally that has been my argument too. And I'm invested in this... because number go up. Ok, so govs ban exchanges and you have your stuff in cold storage. You have to buy/sell p2p? Are people gonna do that just to have this magical deflationary currency? Possibly... but idk.

Ever wondered why so many crypto projects come from China and Russia and former Soviet states? Because people who live there know what oppressive governments can do and how unreliable fiat is. I don't think people in the developed world understand it because they haven't really faced oppressive governments.

In US, BTC had a use such as on Silkroad for drugs and other stuff; in China, at least from what I understand, it has a use of transferring assets out of the country.

If you talk about China specifically, the average people wouldn't consider governments 'oppressive', the approval rate for government is actually quite high.

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

#493
post #410

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This happens every time I ask for use cases in these threads. It is always something just over the horizon. The early internet immediately allowed people to do cool stuff that was explainable if someone had a moderately open mind. If wasn’t vaporware.

Buying drugs sex and hitmen online wasn't cool enough for you? You sound like a dork

We've banned this account for repeatedly posting unsubstantive comments. Not what this site is for.

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

#494
post #423

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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…

yes, just because a nation is on a gold standard doesn't mean they can't have devaluation of currency, like when spain dumped a bunch of gold into the market from south america. Cryptocurrency wouldn't have this problem, since it has a hardcoded limit, unlike gold or USD.

A government which has to "seek loans" for crypto by definition must be trading in something which is not crypto internally. Because a government can't directly trade it's own citizens productivity (hence taxes), and can't mint new crypto to repay such loans in response to productivity.

So in such a scenario there are only two options: increase taxes on citizens for crypto they hold (while in the meantime being unable to pay for services upkeep - and thus probably inventing a form of fiat anyway to stay afloat), or devalue it's own currency to pay escalating loan rates to crypto holders to buy more crypto for those transactions in which people will not accept fiat.

Of course since taxes can only meaningfully be levied in the crypto-world on income, since you can control businesses to some extent but not holdings, the effect is the same: the compensation for your labor goes down, or you're fired (because the value of your output has gone down faster then wages), or most likely, you are inefficiently taxed at a much higher rate then is necessary to ensure the government is never stuck with the risk of a crypto shortfall which would suddenly put their ability to supply payment for services into almost immediate default.

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

#495
post #444

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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…

>What do I need a stock broker for? You still have that stuff with crypto, just crypto exchanges not stock exchanges. >What do I need a bank for? Banks do two main things - taking savings and lend that out as mortgages. Crypto has been no good at part two. Basically most financial services would still exist if in modified form.

P2P loans already exist and are only becoming more competitive as the market grows. This (Bitcoin) will cause a complete disruption of the financial system given enough time.

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

#496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what I don't understand. How could you possibly exchange crypto for fiat in a completely safe/foolproof way? The person gives you fiat, you can say no. You send the person crypto first, they say no. Because it's not physical, there's no way to wrestle it from the person or whatever...

Escrow. First BTC I bought, circa 2013, I met with a guy and gave him physical money. He then released the escrow.

But how do you confirm that you are in ownership of the only private key? Since transactions take too long you can't just send it.

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

#497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Escrow. First BTC I bought, circa 2013, I met with a guy and gave him physical money. He then released the escrow.

But how do you confirm that you are in ownership of the only private key? Since transactions take too long you can't just send it.

He doesn't give you the private key, they usually are held by the exchange, local bitcoins, par example.

You could do an escrow system where you send the btc to a wallet that you need 2 of 3 private keys in order to move the funds. You, the seller, and and escrow arbiter. The seller moved the funds to the wallet, you give him the money and then with his key and your key you move it to your wallet.

In case of conflict, the arbiter can step in and decide.

I am sure with eth you can do even _more_ clever things. Whomever says you can't do trustless transactions just shows lack of imagination.

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

#498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how do you confirm that you are in ownership of the only private key? Since transactions take too long you can't just send it.

He doesn't give you the private key, they usually are held by the exchange, local bitcoins, par example. You could do an escrow system where you send the btc to a wallet that you need 2 of 3 private keys in order to move the funds. You, the seller, and and escrow arbiter. The seller moved the funds to the wallet, you give him the money and then with his key and your key you move it to your wallet. In case of conflict…

Yeah but don't you need always need a centralized arbiter to guarantee the exchange? Not verifying the transaction, which of course is done decentralized.

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

#499

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I'll give you an example. The most "mainstream" revolutionary idea in crypto right now is automated market makers (AMMs) like Uniswap. These essentially allow anyone to create a "pool" to trade between two assets and earn fees from it. You can tokenize any asset, pair it with a liquid token (such as ETH or USDT) and offer it to anyone to trade while you earn fees. Or you can join an existing, popular pool (such as be…

Yeah but what would the decentralized exchange be used for, other than other crypto? A bank can legally process a person who fails to come through on a loan. They can physically take stuff. A decentralized crypto network can't do anything to anybody. It can just take the marginal collateral and then the rest swallow the losses... I feel like defi crypto types discount the power of the physical world.

You can tokenize anything in concept- right now it's just crypto + small number of stocks. It's slowly building out a distributed version of Wall Street. That is the value-add, and it doesn't need to do anything more than that for it to be revolutionary.

Loans in defi are over-collateralized right now meaning there's very little risk for the lenders. This will likely change as distributed identity/credit scores are implemented.

A couple examples of what's to come: https://cointelegraph.com/news/defi-s-critical-missing-piece... https://medium.com/minaprotocol/snark-powered-defi-teller-bu...

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

#500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't give you the private key, they usually are held by the exchange, local bitcoins, par example. You could do an escrow system where you send the btc to a wallet that you need 2 of 3 private keys in order to move the funds. You, the seller, and and escrow arbiter. The seller moved the funds to the wallet, you give him the money and then with his key and your key you move it to your wallet. In case of conflict…

Yeah but don't you need always need a centralized arbiter to guarantee the exchange? Not verifying the transaction, which of course is done decentralized.

You would need an arbiter, or some system to do the arbitrage, for sure, but it need not be a _centralized_ arbiter. If you kick the can down the road and enough across sufficiently many actors you could get a fair, or, well, at least, predictable, system.

Some sort of voting/staking consensus system might work quite well for this.

Might not sound like a lot, but, IMO, it is.

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