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Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

coindesk.com

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Re: Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

#251

Post by steveBK123 »

lazzlazzlazz wrote: post #249
steveBK123 wrote: post #183

What is the point of having a zillion magic internet moneys if you can't get yourself off the financial grid and living in a non-extradition country? Cmon. What a bunch of jokers. I think it's a hugely bearish case for crypto that none of the crypto guys have been able to use it to avoid authorities for more than a few weeks/months. That's literally one of its alleged use cases. "The government can't control it". SBF…

Terra was centralized garbage from the beginning. Serious players in the crypto industry did not take it seriously.

Right. No one. It didn’t help bring about the demise of one of the biggest US crypto exchanges?

Re: Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

#252

Post by steveBK123 »

tobyjsullivan wrote: post #237
rippercushions wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Satoshi's coins have sat untouched since pretty much the beginning, so no, they certainly have not been able to make any use of them.

And their identity and whereabouts remains concealed - which I believe is the more relevant factor here.

Being able to remain anonymous and concealed as long as you don’t touch your magic internet money is.. not a great ad for the magic or the money.

Re: Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

#253

Post by steveBK123 »

scotty79 wrote: post #248
kibwen wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well the government still, so far, cannot make it so that there's more than 21 million Bitcoins. Of course it can. The only thing capping the supply of bitcoin is a variable in a C++ source file. The only thing preventing a modified version of that variable from being deployed as the dominant protocol on the network is countervailing hashrate. The government knows exactly where all the major bitcoin mines are, both…

It's not about what government can do because it can literally do everything. If we are talking about USA it can literally end the world. What's important is what the government can do cheaply, kinda quietly and without stepping on toes of the rich people. And in that book bitcoin is fairly safe so far.

It’s really not that safe. All US needs to do is tighten the screws a bit more on US crypto exchanges (hint: like they did today).

BTC isn’t useful for someone residing in US if you can’t get your dollars into or out of it. Centralized exchanges have been the main means of that.

They could make it progressively more costly & difficult to do so or shut it down entirely.

Remember predictions markets were dubiously illegal right up until they got shutdown.

Average Joe consumer and businesses aren’t going to go to the hassle of wallet setup to trade BTC for goods & services, so again it leaves speculation and exiting to USD as the main things to do with a BTC holding.

Re: Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

#254

Post by steveBK123 »

yucky wrote: post #244
tobyjsullivan wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

*Satoshi Nakamoto enters the chat*

Satoshi Nakamoto = NSA, so the point remains. That being said, Monero still remains untraceable.

NSA inventing crypto honestly seems like one of the less implausible conspiracies. I mean they basically compromised Tor already.

They have a vested interest in tracking decentralized communications and assets.

The pseudonymous nature coupled with its public ledger actually make it great for an NSA type entity to track fund movement by people who think they are operating in the darkness.

Re: Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

#255

Post by throwawaylinux »

yucky wrote: post #247
throwawaylinux wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way the government could restrain themselves from spending that money if they had it so it can't be the NSA.

The US Government prints money whenever it feels like it despite being $30 Trillion in debt, it's the only entity in the world that could manage to not spend it.

No that's not right. It's not that all the countless departments and agencies can go to the federal reserve or congress whenever they need more money and it will write them a check. I mean in aggregate that's vaguely how it goes, but there is never enough money to spend at any given time. If there was a gigantic cache of money, they would be unable to help themselves. Why do you think the CIA sells drugs and weapons?

It's not a couple of greedy dudes at the top running everything and telling everybody to waste money. It's systemic from top to bottom.

Re: Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

#256

Post by x-complexity »

EGreg wrote: post #240
kinghajj wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hashrate doesn't matter if nodes don't accept their blocks. So while you're right that a powerful government could severely strike Bitcoin by taking down miners, they can't force the community to accept invalid blocks, no matter how much hash power they could amass.

Well what they can do is make longer chains and double-spend a lot, undermining trust in the Bitcoin network and making BTC plummet in value. The mining rewards would then not be enough to mine it.

> Well what they can do is make longer chains and double-spend a lot, undermining trust in the Bitcoin network and making BTC plummet in value. The mining rewards would then not be enough to mine it.

The economic costs of performing such an attack is extremely expensive: It's why despite the "Oh, they can just double-spend & make it go to 0" rhetoric, this attack is too costly to launch against BTC - The amount of hashpower needed to create long chains of *valid* blocks would require deep investments into ASICs, on the order of billions of dollars.

https://www.crypto51.app/coins/BTC.html

Re: Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

#257

Post by MountainHoliday »

ezekiel68 wrote: post #128

What is this world coming to when Crypto renegades can no longer flee to Montenegro using falsified documents? This must somehow be seen as yet another nail in the coffin of Big centralized fiat currency. /s

Crypto people are anti fiat. That's bitcoiners. Crypto people believe every VC should have their own private money

Re: Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

#259

Post by kijin »

noloblo wrote: post #151
kijin wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He probably believed he could have his cake and eat it too. Turns out he's not as clever as he thought. Now the only thing he has some amount of control over is which jurisdiction he will be handed over to.

which jurisdictions can he handed over to?

Any jurisdiction that has filed charges against him and has an extradition agreement with Montenegro. His country of citizenship probably has priority, though.

If he doesn't want to be extradited, he can delay the process for quite a while like Julian Assange did.

Re: Do Kwon arrested in Montenegro: Interior Minister

#260

Post by kijin »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #140
kijin wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The South Korean justice system is notoriously lenient on white-collar crime, and it's exceedingly rare even for violent criminals to be murdered in a Korean prison. The popular perception is that you can spend a couple of years in prison and enjoy your ill-gotten gains for the rest of your life with no further repercussions, provided you've hidden your money well enough. Guess what, the whole point of crypto is that…

> The U.S. wanted to put him away for life, but the Korean courts would not deport him. Wouldn't the right word here be "extradite", or was he a US citizen?

Yep, that should have been "extradite", not "deport".
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