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Bitconnect founder indicted in global $2.4B cryptocurrency scheme

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Re: Bitconnect founder indicted in global $2.4B cryptocurrency scheme

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that folks who claimed their bank accounts were frozen because they were “donors to the convoy” never actually verified that that actually happened [1]. At the same time the government, the RCMP, and the banks have come out and said “that didn’t happen” [2]. Last, the government ceded its emergency powers after about a week total, despite claims on HN and various thinkpieces that they would be extended in perpet…

The reason they didn't extend them was that they didn't want to go through the senate vote, and also because of the extreme controversy it caused. Trudeau had said earlier he wanted to extend them past the 30 days. So it's weird to say that the controversy and reactions were baseless because their intended goal was achieved. And that was to make Trudeau's decision as politically costly and controversial as possible.…

I never said they were baseless, I said folks claimed this would never end and it did, rather promptly.

> Trudeau had said earlier he wanted to extend them past the 30 days.

Can you provide a source because I can’t find anything backing this claim.

Re: Bitconnect founder indicted in global $2.4B cryptocurrency scheme

#312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the property of a government. And please show me where rights are granted to governments and by who and for what basic purpose. And it's not always about govs. You may be imprisoned. but dont imprison others with your assumptions

You are part of a system not the property of it. I'm totally lost on what you are trying to imply with "And please show me where rights are granted to governments and by who and for what basic purpose." You are fully aware that there are countries. You should know how they work, you should know what models of representation exists and which forms of gov you are in. Give yourself the illusion that you are independent…

Just answer the question. If you can't then perhaps you should admit you're arguing about your ideas rather than specific facts. Nuances actually matter here. You said a government has a right to reduce my freedom to participate in a certain system. I'm asking you to cite it so we can speak about something real instead of following a path that leads very clearly to imprisonment of those with whom the buck actually stops (the citizens).

Re: Bitconnect founder indicted in global $2.4B cryptocurrency scheme

#313
post #309

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of course it uses language. it's called a protocol for a reason. god this debate is tiresome.

Whatever. Good luck convincing anyone that a financial transaction is speech.

I don't need to, mr. creates-strawmen-to-try-to-avoid-the-real-discussion. Many people already hold the view that certain financial activities reduce to the freedom to speak or pursue happiness. It didn't come from me. Good luck convincing anyone that you've ever experienced real threats to your human rights.

Re: Bitconnect founder indicted in global $2.4B cryptocurrency scheme

#314

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A friend asked me to watch that video back when it came out, but I couldn't get past all the technical inaccuracies about Bitcoin and Ethereum in the first half hour or so. Most of those links are about artwork NFTs, not Bitcoin or Ethereum. There are a lot of cryptocurrencies that are scams, and there are a lot of NFT projects that are scams. I've heard respectable arguments that Bitcoin and Ethereum are not actuall…

And just what specifically were those "technical inaccuracies" that were so intolerable to you that you couldn't stomach watching the whole thing? You should thank your friend for trying to deprogram you from the cult you've fallen for, and go back and watch the entire video. Because he makes excellent and "technically accurate" points about the cult-like behavior of that community, which explains why you're so quick…

None of that speaks to Bitcoin or Ethereum being scams.

You've posted a wall of text about how they enable scams and how the community is riddled with fraud and pyramid schemes. Guess what, I agree with you.

You accuse me of ignoring the cult-like behavior of the crypto community, when I am more familiar with it than anyone. But the behavior of a community has nothing to do with whether a network communications protocol is a scam.

You accuse me of "ignoring warning signs and dismissing criticism" when I am intimately familiar with the warning signs that many cryptos besides Bitcoin and Ethereum have, and I welcome criticism as long as it's not based on a foundation of misunderstandings of the technical workings of the protocol.

You accuse me of having a difficult time perceiving the pervasive fraud that's so stunningly obvious to everyone else. I am acutely aware of the pervasive fraud, but fraud being pervasive doesn't mean that the Bitcoin or Ethereum protocols themselves are frauds.

You know what else is riddled with fraud? The internet, the telephone, and originally the telegraph (leading to a whole new class of crimes called wire fraud).

But to pick at just one of the technical inaccuracies:

>Ethereum is ultimately a central platform, and the fact that a few dozen people need to sign off on every major change before it can be implemented is largely meaningless and symbolic, with the validation network ultimately sitting somewhere between consortium and cartel.

Ethereum has roughly 2,000 nodes, the operator of each of which must approve a change and manually upgrade, otherwise they continue to participate in the unchanged version of the network. In practice, this means that every customer-facing exchange, custodial wallet, and service provider needs to "sign off" on a change in order for the fork to be legitimized.

>The movement of Ethereum from proof of work to proof of stake has been vapourware

Ethereum's beacon chain proof of stake network has been running since November 2020 and has received its first hard fork upgrade, Altair. Currently, there is a public merge testnet named Kiln, the second testnet rehearsing the "merge" event where Proof Of Stake replaces Proof Of Work as the Ethereum execution chain's consensus model. The code is there, the network is there, and it's all running publicly. You can download the client software today from the public github repo and run it to join the network and help rehearse the merge, in a way that is very close to the final specifications. That's the opposite of vaporware.

> in no small part because the validators simply choose not to.

Moving consensus models is done by hard fork, it has absolutely nothing to do with "validators choosing not to." Think of it like the Ethereum development team, with the explicit permission of the exchanges and service providers, changing the direction of a firehose to point at the PoS validators instead of the PoW validators. The PoW validators can't grab on to the stream of water and wrestle the hose away, their income stream just vanishes.

Those are 2-3 examples of technical inaccuracies. More technical inaccuracies in that video surround the characteristics, economics, minimums, and protocol liveness guarantees for Proof Of Stake, the nature and maturity of protocol scaling, the nature of bounded historical data size, and the nature of network congestion (it does not in any circumstances lead to forks, that's complete bunk).

If I chose to indulge your shotgun approach, we'd both be here all day and I don't really want that. This comment is already getting long and took a lot of effort for me to write up. Most of your copypasta can be summed up as problems with the community, not problems with the network protocols themselves.

I'm not here to try to convince you to like cryptocurrency, you're free to hold whatever opinion about it you want. It just really annoys me when people spread misinformation about how the protocols are constructed, and try to characterize them as scams when they are nothing more than distributed database software.

Re: Bitconnect founder indicted in global $2.4B cryptocurrency scheme

#315
post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever. Good luck convincing anyone that a financial transaction is speech.

I don't need to, mr. creates-strawmen-to-try-to-avoid-the-real-discussion. Many people already hold the view that certain financial activities reduce to the freedom to speak or pursue happiness. It didn't come from me. Good luck convincing anyone that you've ever experienced real threats to your human rights.

Of course it didn't come from you. It came from the bitcoin ideologues. You simply repeat what they say like a parrot.

Re: Bitconnect founder indicted in global $2.4B cryptocurrency scheme

#316
post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't need to, mr. creates-strawmen-to-try-to-avoid-the-real-discussion. Many people already hold the view that certain financial activities reduce to the freedom to speak or pursue happiness. It didn't come from me. Good luck convincing anyone that you've ever experienced real threats to your human rights.

Of course it didn't come from you. It came from the bitcoin ideologues. You simply repeat what they say like a parrot.

No post body was provided.

Re: Bitconnect founder indicted in global $2.4B cryptocurrency scheme

#319
post #108

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This is just plainly not the definition of a ponzi scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme

That’s just semantics at this point. I would encourage you to address the statement being made and ignore the technical definition of the phrase. To restate without the offending phrase: [T]he idea that the promotion of crypto thus far has existed to allow early adopters to cash out at the apparent expense of later adopters, while bringing essentially no other utility to any of its backers or the public at large, is…

I wasn't trying to debate the merits of crypto. I'm pointing out that the parent has a clear misunderstanding of what a ponzi scheme is. The semantics is the whole point. He's using the word incorrectly.

By your definition, every successful stock on the planet is a ponzi scheme

Re: Bitconnect founder indicted in global $2.4B cryptocurrency scheme

#320
post #156

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> “Civil forfeiture” does not and has never meant “fiat forfeiture.” If the government tells you to forfeit your assets (justly or unjustly!), you can be certain that they will not be amused or deterred by attempts to hide those assets via cryptocurrency. If they don't know it exists, they can't take it. Just like I can cross the border with a hundred thousand in crypto in a wallet. And even if they find the hardware…

Just like I can cross the border with a hundred thousand in crypto in a wallet. No, you can't. You can cross the border with the private key for a wallet containing the addresses of a hundred thousand units of crypto, but the crypto isn't in your wallet (either kind), it's in the blockchain ledger of whatever cryptocurrency you're using. And this is an important distinction from money, because the money is actually i…

Interesting. Just for fun, thinking through this more I could just give someone my private key instead of transferring funds on the blockchain. Then the transaction does not require the internet, only the verification of funds in the wallet (which could be elided if the participants so chose).
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