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Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

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Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#161

Post by ls15 »

chalst wrote: post #69
jcbrand wrote: post #6

Similarly, most public blockchain-based financial products are a disaster for financial privacy; the exceptions are a handful of emerging privacy-focused blockchain finance alternatives, and these are a gift to money-launderers. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. The existing, centralized electronic payment systems are a disaster for financial privacy, and it'll only get worse with CBDCs. If you try to make so…

> Damned if you do and damned if you don't. Conventional banking combines a moderate level of privacy with effective measures against money laundering. Why shouldn't we ask that crypto be judged against this baseline?

> Conventional banking combines a moderate level of privacy

Rather fake than moderate, I would say.

https://moguldom.com/351338/fact-check-do-jp-morgan-chase-we...

As long as banks can just pretend to protect my privacy, while they sell my data, I feel more comfortable about the type of privacy that cryptos like monero provide.

> Why shouldn't we ask that crypto be judged against this baseline?

Why shouldn't we ask for a reasonable baseline that really protects people's privacy and not just some corporate version of "privacy™"?

> effective measures against money laundering

Just yesterday, Deutsche Bank's HQ was searched over possible money laundering.

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#162

Post by [deleted] »

jcbrand wrote: post #6

Similarly, most public blockchain-based financial products are a disaster for financial privacy; the exceptions are a handful of emerging privacy-focused blockchain finance alternatives, and these are a gift to money-launderers. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. The existing, centralized electronic payment systems are a disaster for financial privacy, and it'll only get worse with CBDCs. If you try to make so…

[deleted]

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#163

Post by martialg »

mfitzp wrote: post #155
martialg wrote: post #116

So - I love thoughtful criticism. My ego doesn’t, but I generally find it very valuable. This letter is honestly not thoughtful criticism. It reads like a group of academics and specialists annoyed they were too early to profit from a technology they spent a lot of time thinking about esoterically and avoids specificity in…well… any meaningful way. It also makes no effort to segment the space. If a critical letter cr…

> annoyed they were too early to profit "na na sore loser" is quite the angle for someone bemoaning a lack of "thoughtful criticism." Do try and grow up.

This is somewhat fair.

I guess my speculation stems from a lack of substance to poke holes in?

Even going line by line beginning with the first real paragraph we find they launch into a classic straw man of rejecting the "industry claims that crypto-assets an innovative technology that is unreservedly good". Nobody with a whiff of tech acumen in crypto thinks or says this. Additionally, anyone not thoroughly anarcho-Libertarian also gets the need for guardrails to squash scams.

A scattershot of the other tangible claims in the paper feel pretty similar.

"Append-only digital ledgers are not a new innovation. They have been known and used since 1980 for rather limited functions." "Blockchain technology cannot, and will not, have transaction reversal mechanisms because they are antithetical to its base design." "Financial technologies that serve the public must always have mechanisms for fraud mitigation and allow a human-in-the-loop to reverse transactions; blockchain permits neither." "Finally, blockchain technologies facilitate few, if any, real-economy uses." There's more, but I hope this provides some context to my initial post

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#164

Post by hesk »

tromp wrote: post #20

> Similarly, most public blockchain-based financial products are a disaster for financial privacy; the exceptions are a handful of emerging privacy-focused blockchain finance alternatives, and these are a gift to money-launderers. Is this arguing both for and against the need for financial privacy at the same time?

No, they are arguing against extreme positions.

With public ledgers like Bitcoin, everybody can reconstruct your financial history if they know your wallet address.

With privacy-focused blockchains, nobody can do that.

However, with a bank, your financial history is not publicly available but the bank still can perform checks to guard against money laundering.

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#165

Post by mrpf1ster »

I feel like half of HN has taken crazy pills with crypto.

Cryptocurrency has been a energy wasting, grift enabling nightmare. It will (and already has) go in the history books as an example of the biggest Ponzi scheme amplified in the social media era.

I can’t wait until the world moves on. Until then I hope you all enjoy expensive ape jpegs.

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#166

Post by mrpf1ster »

cdata wrote: post #160

Even if I didn't already have well-formed opinions on this topic, reading the comments here would be enough to convince me that "tech" does not speak with any sort of unified voice on this topic. I wonder if we will start identifying factions of tech by the political orientations expressed by the technology in question.

One of the (many) problems with cryptocurrency is that it’s holders are financially incentivized to generate hype and get people to buy in to it to drive the value of their coins up.

Thus I am extremely skeptical of people with pro-cryptocurrency views on this website.

If I had significant holdings in crypto, you can bet I would also be on hacker news trying to legitimize and defend anything to do with crypto to get people to buy in.

This is also amplified by the sunken cost fallacy, and not wanting to admit someone convinced you to spend thousands of dollars on fake coins and an ape jpeg for your twitter profile.

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#167

Post by photochemsyn »

walnutclosefarm wrote: post #63
jcbrand wrote: post #6

Similarly, most public blockchain-based financial products are a disaster for financial privacy; the exceptions are a handful of emerging privacy-focused blockchain finance alternatives, and these are a gift to money-launderers. Damned if you do and damned if you don't. The existing, centralized electronic payment systems are a disaster for financial privacy, and it'll only get worse with CBDCs. If you try to make so…

> Lastly, we reserve the right to manipulate the money supply. You may dislike the way central banks control and manipulate the money supply, but the reality is that an unmanaged currency is generally a disaster for everyone. To fulfill its role as a stable store of value, a currency has to be managed. The notion that an inherently deflationary unit of accounting (such as Bitcoin), or a completely unmanaged one, or o…

I recall looking into plans from the 1970s to peg all central bank currencies into a 'basket of currencies' to avoid things like currency collapse. It would require international goodwill and cooperation, and would eliminate a lot of currency speculation games, so it was kiboshed. Basically it was a mechanism to eliminate volatility and to stabilize the global monetary system. Maybe someone else knows more about it.

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#168

Post by cdata »

mrpf1ster wrote: post #166
cdata wrote: post #160

Even if I didn't already have well-formed opinions on this topic, reading the comments here would be enough to convince me that "tech" does not speak with any sort of unified voice on this topic. I wonder if we will start identifying factions of tech by the political orientations expressed by the technology in question.

One of the (many) problems with cryptocurrency is that it’s holders are financially incentivized to generate hype and get people to buy in to it to drive the value of their coins up. Thus I am extremely skeptical of people with pro-cryptocurrency views on this website. If I had significant holdings in crypto, you can bet I would also be on hacker news trying to legitimize and defend anything to do with crypto to get…

I consider myself a centrist in this debate. I don't think "crypto" technology is one giant scam (though there is a lot of scamming taking place), and I don't think it has delivered on most of its promises either (I suspect this will change in time).

In your comment I read rhetoric that attempts to de-legitimize the other side by questioning if they are even authentic members of your community. Your comment is not "wrong" but it paints with a very broad brush (something I see a lot of crypto fans doing all the time). It certainly places you in one of two sincere-but-polarized political groups.

I wish more people would foster nuanced attitudes about topics such as this. It makes for more interesting discussion.

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#169

Post by smoovb »

Financial technologies that serve the public must always have mechanisms for fraud mitigation and allow a human-in-the-loop to reverse transactions; blockchain permits neither.

Human-in-the-loop is costly. Twitter, Youtube and card payments can't manage fraud mitigation well with all-kinds-of-humans-in-the-loop. Can't hurt to give the blockchain folk some space and time to innovate on cheaper, irreversible transactions.

Re: Tech experts urge Washington to resist crypto industry’s influence

#170

Post by ryan_lane »

martialg wrote: post #116

So - I love thoughtful criticism. My ego doesn’t, but I generally find it very valuable. This letter is honestly not thoughtful criticism. It reads like a group of academics and specialists annoyed they were too early to profit from a technology they spent a lot of time thinking about esoterically and avoids specificity in…well… any meaningful way. It also makes no effort to segment the space. If a critical letter cr…

> If a critical letter created by supposedly credible experts in a field can’t spare a paragraph to delineate between DeFi, NFTs, L1’s, smart contracts, stablecoins, and whatever else is bothering them then I think it’s fair to assume they don’t know the difference.

DeFi is a scam to let crypto gamblers avoid taxes on their gains by taking profits as a "loan". The space is filled with unrealistic interest rates, and in general is a scam. See stablegains as a good example of this fraud.

NFTs are essentially a way to do money laundering with "art". The market, as a whole, is predatory, and is dominated by artwork stolen from legitimate artists who didn't mint the NFTs. It's mostly already collapsed, and essentially no one is making money on secondary sales. The space is filled with wash trading, often by the trading platforms or their employees directly.

I don't see what L1s have to do with the conversation. No matter the layer, the same criticisms apply, because ultimately, they roll back to the L1.

Smart contracts don't actually fulfill their basic premise. They don't replace normal legal contracts, and they can't stay in sync with real world assets. Nearly every day one of these contracts is owned and everyone loses their money. They're also incredibly inefficient and expensive.

Stablecoins have proven to need very strict regulation, and in reality a bank charter should be required to run one. Tether alone shows that they're a very serious problem, though the recent issues with Terra/Luna also show their general problem.

The entire stack, from top to bottom, is built on unfulfilled promises, and their very existence introduces new, horrible problems for us to deal with. For example, ransomware is simply not possible at its current scale without cryptocurrency.

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