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Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance

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Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance

#341

I am so happy about this. I hope this is going to sour crypto for "investors". I use quotes, because they really are not -- investing should be reserved for fronting cash to create some value (like buying stock to infuse capital into a corporation). As it is all crypto trading is purely speculation. The world would be so much better if money tended to be exchanged in good faith, to improve something rather than just…

>investing should be reserved for fronting cash to create some value (like buying stock to infuse capital into a corporation). As it is all crypto trading is purely speculation.

Ok but let's be real- buying a stock is not really "creating value". The stock already exists. Company A has issued 100 shares. People are buying/selling it in the market.. no one is creating value there. Sure they may be arbitrarily driving the value up, but that's not creating real value.

If you want to argue that an IPO is "creating value" because people basically front the money to give capital.. ok fine. But let's not pretend you as a random person buying and selling google shares that already exist is creating value.

Also, I would say the people sitting here buying and selling stocks are most of the time 99% pure speculation. They have zero control over what actually happens in the company. Sure they can do "research" and guess what might happen.. but it's still nearly all gambling.

Investing is the horrible word for how nearly the entire financial system works. People have created gambling as a way of life, and convinced everyone else that they must gamble their money to make more. Which, surprise surprise, nearly always benefits the rich. Guaranteed pension/good social security? Nah, throw your money into our 401k so we can prop up the rest of the market arbitrarily and continue to drive up everything the rich own so they are richer! And you've all fallen for it.

Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance

#342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is, when does bitcoin actually crash? I agree it is a scam and should crash in a sane rational world. But I’ve heard these exact arguments like 5 years ago. It’s the scam that just keeps going! Eventually it has to end, right? What is the thing that makes it end? Or will it just fizzle out with no real implosion? Maybe after 10 years to most people it would be just a distant memory?

> What is the thing that makes it end? This is much easier to answer, at least in general, than many of the other "bubble" questions out there. The growth simply requires a larger and larger pool of new investors. It first started with tech enthusiasts who were really interested in the principles of cryptocurrency and people who also knew how they worked. The was a time when everyone in crypto had read the original B…

I’ve heard this exact argument 5 or 10 years ago. Yet here we are.

Like I said, I totally think cryptocoins are all scams. I’m just amazed that the bottom hasn’t fallen out yet.

Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance

#343

I am so happy about this. I hope this is going to sour crypto for "investors". I use quotes, because they really are not -- investing should be reserved for fronting cash to create some value (like buying stock to infuse capital into a corporation). As it is all crypto trading is purely speculation. The world would be so much better if money tended to be exchanged in good faith, to improve something rather than just…

>investing should be reserved for fronting cash to create some value (like buying stock to infuse capital into a corporation).

Low interest rates have killed this cause. If corporations can get cash from the banks at near zero rates, the only remaining use case for investments is heavy speculation. In a sense, the post-2008 monetary policy was about making things look good on paper, while hollowing out the economy with bullshit jobs, bullshit stocks and bullshit business models.

As bad as the spiraling inflation could be, I hope the shock coming from it will bring the economy back to the common sense.

Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance

#344
post #108

I recently watched some traditional cable and was shocked by the number of crypto ads bombarding viewers. I have to imagine that this market was goosed up by retail investors trading on coinbase and binance just as the e-betting market was. The only difference between crypto and e-betting is that everyone got to be a winner on the crypto markets for a while. As users lose out, and exchanges stop ad campaigns - how lo…

I recall walking through an airport this year and seeing Crypto ads everywhere. That was my shoeshine boy moment (1) (1) https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-spot-stock-market-bub...

I had a similar moment at the peak in 2017 when my non-financial friends asked me if I owned Bitcoin.

Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance

#346
post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To do what? (Other than enable financial engineering)

Why would programmable money be useful for anything beyond financial engineering. It’s literally engineering + finance. Why is financial engineering inherently universally without qualification bad? I have a mortgage, an index fund, and an ATM card. I :heart: financial engineering.

> Why is financial engineering inherently universally without qualification bad?

Yeah because it takes up engineering time and produces no tangible good but to widen inequality.

Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance

#347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As usual crypto in practice is the opposite of decentralized because people. Will. Not. Run. Their. Servers. "My theory would be perfect if only I could convince humans to stop acting like humans," is the original sin of bad economics. I would submit that it is approximately impossible to have a cryptocurrency that is simultaneously popularly successful, and has even a significant minority of its users owning their…

Is that a failure of implementation though? I ask because you also said "impossible". Computers themselves were impossibly unfriendly for so long. What if someone created a UX friendly cryptocurrency. Like any computer, deep down it could be insanely complex, but is it a requirement that the UX reflect that complexity?

that is kind of what the exchanges do.

The thing is user friendly UX usually creates user friendliness by removing the user's ability to control the product. For example, macOS vs BSD. The GUI makes it much more user friendly, but at the cost of limiting the user a bit more. Then again, perhaps there are exceptions.

Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance

#348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Long term I'm bearish because it's a deflationary asset. Deflationary value stores have a tendency to cause all sorts of social ills by encouraging hoarding. There's a reasonable line of thought that observes that it's no coincidence that the end of the age of European colonialism coincided with the demise of the gold standard. More concretely: if crypto is deflationary, then its value works similarly to how an Amway…

In my opinion mixing the functions of medium of exchange and store of value has caused untold amounts of needless suffering. You see 2% inflation is the middle ground. Rich people may want to save and increase their wealth but my mom just wants a job to pay rent and buy groceries, she has no grand ambitions to become super wealthy. When you mix the two functions into cash, one of the two is going to dominate the econ…

Maybe the issue is just that we no longer have a store of wealth that isn't tied to a speculative asset? Fiat currency is a fantastic currency - even terrorists who hate America use dollars. But it's a terrible store of wealth because it loses at least 2% of its value by intention (this fluctuates - just going off the stated Federal Reserve targets).

I think this is where things like houses becoming collateralized assets start coming into the picture. You can buy stocks or index funds, but those can lose value and they're definitely not guaranteed to increase in value. Houses are a pretty "hard" asset in physical reality and with inflation basically they go up in value while also providing utility. And to buy a house you need fiat currency so they're somewhat liquid in that sense. So what do you do? Buy gold? Maybe. Bitcoin is another option similar in some ways to gold (in function at least). Other cryptocurrencies are assets in my view more similar to a stock with products or platforms behind them. I'm just not sure what to do. If you make cash inflation neutral or deflationary that sounds ideal, but how do you do that? And would people be likely to take risk in such an environment? Do we need to? Is it bad that we are encouraging the use of fiat currency by threatening to devalue it over time? I'm not sure.

Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance

#349
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "My [product] would be perfect if only I could convince humans to stop acting like humans," is the original sin of bad [technologists] fixed that

There was recently an article posted to HN [0] about a startup founder doing this very thing, blaming his customers for behaving like humans. >I was fighting human nature and losing. >Everyone swears they will eat right and exercise, but most don’t. Everyone agrees they need to spend less to be financially secure later, but most won’t. Our users were telling us they would use ContractBeast to achieve those long-term…

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Re: Temporary pause of Bitcoin withdrawals on Binance

#350
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What queue? Is there a queue in the bitcoin network? Yes, that's what the mempool is. >I thought it was a question of paying a high enough transaction fee and you would get your transaction done faster / within 10 minutes. that's broadly true, but if transaction volume spikes then your initial fee estimate might be too low. there are ways around this (RBF, CPFP), but it's unknown whether their wallet software handl…

How would this be an excuse for Binance to block outgoing transactions? Unless somehow all of Binance's bitcoin was stuck in the mempool ...

It wouldn't need to be all their bitcoin, just their hot-wallets. Moving bitcoin out of cold wallets should generally be a slow process.
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