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SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world

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Re: SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world

#121

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Counterview: those who made gobs of money who transpose that outcome to "gosh, crypto must be great and I don't know why everyone is bashing it so much". Lots of older generations felt that way about housing price increases as well -- are they right too?

They're right in that, seeing how it turned out, everyone who could have bought a house really should have bought a house. The thing about bitcoin is that EVERYONE could have bought in, either with cash or through mining. You didn't need to save a large deposit or get approved for a loan. It was an opportunity that was right there for everyone.

I regret not investing more or mining. I can only imagine how those who missed the boat completely feel.

Re: SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world

#122

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This is a typical sort of projection I see from crypto-owners. They can't seem to contemplate the fact that there are people that think crypto is a bad idea _regardless_ of how much profit they might or might not have made by buying or selling at various points in history.

Nor that cryptocurrency doesn't create value out of nowhere -- for every person who "built generational wealth" (gag) by speculating on cryptocurrency, there's probably quite a few people who lost money. It's a zero-sum system.

Re: SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

everyone goes through a disillusionment phase with crypto from my perspective, there is simply a lack of coverage of things that function without incident, which are very numerous and solve frictions for a lot of people, whether you’re in the market for that or not like construction sites that showed “how many days since an incident”, because people only heard about the incidents

Where are these mystical things that function because of crypto that wouldn't function with regular money, and which also are not fraud?

> function because of crypto that wouldn't function with regular money, and which also are not fraud?

More things then just fraud are illegal.

Re: SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember fondly participating in the hype around crypto in 2017 and going in on btc/eth and also building a mining rig etc. The discourse on HN back then is quite different from today. These days we've seen scam after scam, fraud after fraud, failure after failure. From a technology perspective it's neat, but the kinds of individuals it tends to attract make it seemingly not actually all that useful in wider societ…

Wait till you read about the characters, early failures, and ultimate "success" of the central banking "too big to fail" ponzi scheme. My favorite character is Jonh Law: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Law_(economist)

Great point- these are reasons why we have the regulation we have today in our current banking system, and why any financial system that doesn't have any ability to be regulated (i.e. crypto) is massively problematic and ends up with 99% of people being fleeced out of their assets (as we've seen in the crypto space).

Re: SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world

#125

The quality of discourse at this stage of the thread (2 hours, 20 comments) is incredibly disappointing. Hn usually has high quality discussions. What is it about crypto that causes us to lose our minds?

Cryptocoins are far from the only topic that get people to be very insistent about clearly bad takes.

Re: SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world

#126
post #89

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I take issue with something about crypto "causes us to lose our minds?". Couple points: 1. At this stage of the game, there is not a lot new under the sun to discuss that is likely to alter people's opinions. I would say that I did think there were some good comments in some of the other posts about what constitutes a security by the legal definition, and helped me understand better the specific points of the SEC's a…

All I know is I gambled away more BTC than Elon Musk is worth in today's dollars, so there is that. Instead of being a trillionaire I am broke because of gambling.

It's a fallacy. The predisposition to gambling that led you to speculate in the first place in Bitcoin also caused you to lose the asset. You should consider these traits as a pair, and recognize that everyone has similar pairs of traits. I did not gamble and never had much Bitcoin to lose in the first place. Those opposite pairs of traits led to similar results. What would be rare and truly remarkable is to have precisely the right traits to the situation, at all the right times.

Re: SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world

#127

The quality of discourse at this stage of the thread (2 hours, 20 comments) is incredibly disappointing. Hn usually has high quality discussions. What is it about crypto that causes us to lose our minds?

I think you can largely find your answer here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31356857

tl;dr: frustration towards people in the cryptocurrency scene, feeling they've gained wealth through luck rather than skill or hard work. Also a disdain for how some cryptocurrencies are overzealously promoted.

It was the top comment of a 640 comments thread, so it presumably had a lot of up votes and is representative of how HN feels about cryptocurrency.

Unfortunately, the low quality discussion on crypto related threads dates back a long time and some of us just got tired of always correcting the same misinformation and low effort criticism.

Re: SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world

#128

The quality of discourse at this stage of the thread (2 hours, 20 comments) is incredibly disappointing. Hn usually has high quality discussions. What is it about crypto that causes us to lose our minds?

> What is it about crypto that causes us to lose our minds?

There may simply not be that much that is novel to be said about this. The SEC's complaint was discussed at length yesterday. This order is a prophylactic procedure tied to the complaint. It seems even the best of us fill vacuums with tribal genuflection.

Re: SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The govern can simply turn off your money for any reason. This obviously happens so often /s

Happened in the 90s where I live. Hyperinflation set in and government just froze everybody's accounts in a desperate attempt to stop it. It's 2023 and people are still afraid it might happen again, especially with a literal communist in power. Cryptocurrency is absolutely valuable as a defense against government idiocy. That fact cannot be denied.

And an easy way to lose everything because you sent tokens to the wrong address, forgot your passphrase, lost your hardware ledger, fell prey to some scam or another, house burned down, etc.

Re: SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world

#130

The quality of discourse at this stage of the thread (2 hours, 20 comments) is incredibly disappointing. Hn usually has high quality discussions. What is it about crypto that causes us to lose our minds?

I think you can largely find your answer here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31356857 tl;dr: frustration towards people in the cryptocurrency scene, feeling they've gained wealth through luck rather than skill or hard work. Also a disdain for how some cryptocurrencies are overzealously promoted. It was the top comment of a 640 comments thread, so it presumably had a lot of up votes and is representative of how…

Thanks for pointing that out. Clearly, the only people who hold anti-crypto views are just jealous and spiteful people. There totally doesn't exist any group of people who are just sick and tired of people propping up an almost totally useless technology as the savior of all financial, political, and social woes. /s

Please, point out one single application of blockchain that is useful and more efficient, beneficially transparent, and faster than a different implementation that doesn't utilize blockchain. Being somebody who is a big fan of blockchain yourself, surely this should be a very straightforward thing to point out.

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