301–310 of 332 posts
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what if the terrorists broke up 1mil into 1000 $1000-transfers?
I'm curious in money laundering laws have ever been noticeably successful in stopping terrorism?
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He said some non-capitalist societies , not all non-capitalist societies that have ever existed .
Which makes it a moot point. The common thread across capitalist, socialist, monarchist, whatever-ist societies with suffering is that humans are involved. Neither capitalism nor socialism is inherently bad; some humans are, especially in aggregate, hence we always need ways to enforce order. The fatal flaw to any utopian society is that the more it depends on trust, the more some people will abuse it and coordinate…
All I'm saying is we can do much better than this.
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I'm very cynical about cryptocurrency but that's a stretch. Criminals did that damage to companies and infrastructure, and they would do it without cryptocurrency if it was worth it. I guess dollars sell drugs to kids too and fuel murder for hire.
Anyone who doesn’t think cryptocurrency has facilitated monetizing cyberattacks needs to wake up. You can be pro-crypto and still acknowledge that the rise of ransomware has hone hand in hand with the ability to monetize it at dramatically lowered risk. This, in turn, broadened to scope of companies that were interesting to attack.
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> In the past few weeks crypto has shut down energy infrastructure, meat processing, and a major ferry service. You're conflating cryptocurrency with ransomware attacks.
I think it's reasonable to link the two, but not conflate them. Crypto has certainly made ransomware a much more viable attack vector. A crypto address is easier to hide behind than a bank account number or mailing address or drop location.
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For me the ultimate problem with deflationary currencies is that you get rewarded for doing nothing . Every year as keys to wallets are irreversibly lost, or the value of the real economy grows relative to the supply of BTC, your Bitcoin gets more and more valuable. Many Bitcoin hodlers actually have an expectation of becoming extremely wealthy, despite having done nothing for society, because they've been swept up i…
You get rewarded for your risk, its not nothing, its second key building block for a financial system. Those that have time, trade risk for money, those that have money trade money for reduced risk over a period of time. If this wasnt the case, people couldn't retire safely, there would be no one to trade their money for lowered risk. What is interesting is that this setup has been exploiting youth for a long time. I…
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Cryptocurrencies have also been used as a way to escape hyperinflation and retain savings despite a coercive and highly restrictive government, eg Venezuela. When a system becomes corrupt and dysfunctional and normal transactions and savings become ineffective or illegal, cryptocurrencies have proven themselves as a viable means of escape. The value of that is hard to understate. I agree that a lot of other applicati…
Any sources on how many Venezuelans actually moved their money into crypto?
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The government controls the traditional US Dollars remittance systems. They can force absurdly bad exchange rates. Crypto shines where the government is messing with banking and currencies.
That's nice, but you appear to be bringing up theoretical conditions as a counter to actual observed behaviour. Crypto might well potentially shine under such circumstances, or under your view of what such circumstances might be, but the truth on the ground is apparently different.
NFTs are dumb however some of the NFT markets have one cool thing that I hope sticks around: the artist gets a cut of all future sales. If you sell your NFT art for $10 and then someone resells it for $1M, you will get some percentage of the $1M. We've all heard the stories of "collector buys 10 Jackson Pollock's for $10 in the 70s, sells the collection for $100M today". Wouldn't it be nice if the artist could benefi…
I'm a bit torn about this. For example it is generally believed that say SONY should not get a cut if I resell a CD I've bought. Why should this be different for paintings?
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Imho it stems from a lack of understanding and faith in the financial services industry, probably exacerbated by the financial crisis. A large % of people now believe that the finance industry only exists to work against them and make an elite minority rich. There's a strong sense of "Fuck You, I Got Mine" from the last generation, so the current generation is saying "Fine, I'm going to invent my own system... with B…
"I will never own a home" is not the only reason. The whole financial system is "fuck you this and fuck you that, incl. when you least expect and depend the most, and we won't tell you why". Yesterday here were news about PayPal terminating an account without explanation again (by the way, even when they don't ban you, their verification and customer services are a disaster anyway). This bullshit has to stop. Every p…
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The most useful aspects of the financial industry are the most heavily regulated... by government. Banks have rules on what they can use the money in your savings account for. They have government backed insurance. Regular stocks are also heavily regulated. Financial reporting requirements, disclosures, auditing, etc. Why does all this regulation exist? Because people we getting screwed over, and it was bad enough th…
> Why does all this regulation exist? Because people we getting screwed over, and it was bad enough the government had to step in. I think the analogy still holds here. Medicine is highly regulated because people sometimes die as a result of medical intervention, and as a result of that regulation (hopefully, but debatably) less people die, but that doesn't prove that medicine is designed to kill people.
I really don't think so.
Let me tell you a little story.
Banks have offered checking accounts (now usually via debit cards) for a long time. Everyone understood how they worked, and if you wrote a check, it would be refused payment if you didn't have enough money in your account. This is the classic bounced check, and the merchant would be angry with you.
Fast forward to the 2000's. Banks changed the rules, and now (unless you explicitly disallow it) if your check was going to bounce, they will instead charge you an overdraft fee. Even if your account was in the negative by one cent.
All in the name of profit, because the fee would be like $35. And of course, this hit the poorest people the most. And let's not talk about check cashing services, which really screw over the people.
Now if banks stopped there, that would be one thing.
However, one of the "innovations" that Wells Fargo came up with (it was innovated for the profit margin, for a little while) was to re-order transactions any way they saw fit.
Suppose you have $5 in your checking account. This morning, you deposit $50, and in the afternoon, you withdraw $30, secure in the knowledge that you have $55 in your account. Seems safe, right? You're doing the right thing, and playing by the rules, you'll still have $25 left. You are still out and about, so later, you take out another $5 for a meal. No problem, you still have $20 left.
But Wells Fargo changed the rules. They decided that all the transactions coming in on the same day could be ordered (serialized in database terminology) in whatever order they decided. So they would process the $10 withdrawal first, charge you a $35 overdraft fee, and then apply the deposit, leaving you at -$10. Then, when you take out another $5, this is allowed, but because you're already negative, they charge you another overdraft fee, so now you're sitting at -$50.
That is innovation in the modern age of the financial industry.