I wished to see some analysis by smart people on HN if this is a lawful request, can they do it and what are the local/global consequences. So far not that much discourse in that regard.
SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world
201–210 of 294 posts
Re: SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world
#202Earlier 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…
I don't know what "discourse" you are talking about. I've been reading about crypto on hacker news before bitcoin hit one dollar. Other than r/buttcoin and yahoo groups, this site has been one of the most anti crypto places you can visit, to the point of being an absolute embarrassment. It has been a lesson to me about humans and intelligence since that time. Still love the place though, but I learned never to let co…
I distinctly remember the opposite to be the case -- that there was a positive eariy adopter hype cycle on this site for crypto in the early years.
I went back a decade and randomly clicked on a discussion and found most of the comments constructive and matter of fact. Perhaps I got lucky, but it lines up with my memory of the period.
Re: SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world
#203I'm perplexed that BTC's price dropped 5% yesterday and bounced right back today. How does the market not care that the biggest exchanges keep collapsing?
Bounce back is actually logical conclusion. If withdrawing BTC is faster it makes sense to buy it with dollars(in SEC's reach) and then moving them elsewhere and taking the money.
Re: SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world
#204what if shutting down all the exchanges is the thing that causes people to start using bitcoin directly as a currency?
Is Bitcoin worth anything if you can’t convert it into fiat currency & vice versa?
Re: SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world
#205I'm perplexed that BTC's price dropped 5% yesterday and bounced right back today. How does the market not care that the biggest exchanges keep collapsing?
I think it's sort of priced in already. I expect certain cryptos will outlive even the biggest exchanges. That statement has been repeatedly over the last 12 years anyway.
Re: SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world
#206Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a great many people who chose to see crypto as an existential threat to the earth because proof of work requires energy and energy is derived from fossil fuels and therefore any expansion of its use exacerbates climate change. Proponents of crypto are frequently corralled into a “climate change denier” corner by this faction. The other large contingent, myself included, sees the never ending scams, shady de…
> There are a great many people who chose to see crypto as an existential threat to the earth because proof of work requires energy and energy is derived from fossil fuels and therefore any expansion of its use exacerbates climate change. (...) Don't miss: and energy costs grow much faster than linear with that expansion, and the incentives are all wrong - with traditional financial systems, energy expenditure is was…
You can't waste energy. It can't be destroyed!
Re: SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world
#207The 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 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…
Exactly my way of thinking. I do appreciate cryptocurrency innovations, but so many scams and frauds made it unappealing. I ignore almost everything related to crypto now. I think the breaking point for me was Ledger leak.
Re: SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There are a great many people who chose to see crypto as an existential threat to the earth because proof of work requires energy and energy is derived from fossil fuels and therefore any expansion of its use exacerbates climate change. (...) Don't miss: and energy costs grow much faster than linear with that expansion, and the incentives are all wrong - with traditional financial systems, energy expenditure is was…
You can't waste energy. It can't be destroyed!
Of course you can. Waste != destroy.
The First Law tells you can't create or destroy energy, but you can transform it. The Second Law tells you that this transformation always reduces the amount of useful work you can extract from it. This is how energy is "used up" - it's transformed from a high-grade form (e.g. electricity) to a lower-grade form (e.g. waste heat). Per the Second Law, you can't then go back the opposite direction.
(For a hands-on example, compare the utility of an egg vs. that of a smashed egg, and the amount of effort required to convert one into the other.)
So no, Proof of Work isn't destroying energy, but it's wasting it. It's literally the whole point: you're meant to burn high-grade energy down to waste heat in order to prove you can afford it - there is math to show that trying to make it not wasteful (by e.g. doing some useful math like protein folding, instead of brute-forcing a random hash) creates incentives that defeat the whole system that PoW is supposed to establish.
Re: SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world
#209The 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?
The problem IMHO is that it is so well-known that HN hates crypto that anyone who wants to voice a reasonable opinion is likely to avoid doing so in order to not get piled on with downvotes, hatred, etc. - At least for me that's it, it would be stressful to deal with that so I go elsewhere to discuss the technology. And this is probably precisely how an echo chamber can be created even without recommendation algorith…
This is really the only way that a discussion can become "settled": one group is driven from the field. Otherwise it's just endless trench warfare of rehashing talking points.
Especially as none of this is new. It's been obvious since the mtgox collapse, nearly a decade ago, that offshore unregulated "institutions" run by small teams of opportunists were going to be extremely risky places to put your money. It's been obvious for a long time that selling tokens to people with the expectation of profit later that could only materialize from selling to others (no fundamentals) was fraudulent, which the SEC is gradually catching up on enforcing.
The remaining questions are political, and as such unresolveable. Delusional people who thing the US dollar has been on the verge of collapse since 1932 vs people stuck in actual collapsed currencies who want access to pseudodollar banking. Europeans annoyingly pointing out that regular bank transfers can be free and quick vs Americans insisting this is impossible.
Re: SEC asks for emergency order to freeze Binance US assets anywhere in the world
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Using cryptographic signatures and distributed systems theory to authenticate asset transfers is against natural law. It's in Leviticus.
Pardon my ignorance, but what do you mean by "it's in Leviticus"?
Leviticus is a part of the Bible/Torah. It's just a joke obviously, implying that crypto technology is simply against both nature and the writings of thousands years old religious texts.