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

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241–250 of 294 posts

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

#241
post #237
post #5

Once again the use-case for crypto turns out to be... large scale criminality and fraud. Shocker.

Yeah, back in my day when we used cash, it was never used by criminals ;) As I get older I want the anonymity or immediacy without a paper trail for normal day-to-day small transactions. For big transactions maybe not. Also, just try and walk in nowadays to a car dealership and hand over $35k in cash for a car. See what happens.

$35k cash makes the dealership to file a currency transaction report with FinCen. For that matter, any entry/exit of untraceable monetary instruments(cash, money orders) > $10k is filed as a CTR. This is not a big issue; people get panicked, then structure their transactions(multiple cash transactions each $10k in total over time), thereby leading to a SAR(suspicious activity report).

Mandatory reporters(banks, dealerships, remitters, etc) are obligated to file these reports. These can be used under Beria’s law ‘show me the man and I’ll show you the crime’.

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

#242

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?

> Hn usually has high quality discussions. Lmao keep deluding yourself. What the hell did y’all put in this kool aid.

flavoraid

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

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I understood the technology after reading the Bitcoin paper, but later realized that there's a lot more to it. See the ZeroCash/Zexe papers, ZK rollups, optimistic rollups, BFT literature like HotStuff, or scaling research like Block-STM. Some HNers just aren't that interested in the use cases, which is fine. But others tend to critique decades-old technology, and don't seem interested in learning about mod…

Yea, I'm not sure what proportion of the negative camp is negative because of issues in early iterations like power consumption used by bitcoin which is solved with newer tech and what proportion is negative due to the use cases themselves. I do think that a lot of the tech itself is pretty elegant but I'm less certain on whether it's the right solution. I also think the fact that many in the pro camp have investment…

You hope for regulation, but so far regulation protected the capital from responsibility.

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

#244
post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, back in my day when we used cash, it was never used by criminals ;) As I get older I want the anonymity or immediacy without a paper trail for normal day-to-day small transactions. For big transactions maybe not. Also, just try and walk in nowadays to a car dealership and hand over $35k in cash for a car. See what happens.

$35k cash makes the dealership to file a currency transaction report with FinCen. For that matter, any entry/exit of untraceable monetary instruments(cash, money orders) > $10k is filed as a CTR. This is not a big issue; people get panicked, then structure their transactions(multiple cash transactions each $10k in total over time), thereby leading to a SAR(suspicious activity report). Mandatory reporters(banks, deale…

I have some inheritance cash that I received when my grandma died.

Right now, it is soaking up some nice 4.9% apy, but eventually I'd like to buy a car (waiting for the prices to crash a bit more). It is what she would have wanted (she bought me my first car).

I can't wait to walk into a dealership, with cash, and find out what sort of criminal I am.

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

#245
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto is also good as a form of market speculation and to make gaming GPUs too expensive for gamers. Don’t sell it short!

Crypto is no longer mined on gpus. The gpu apocalypse is over.

Technically, ETH is no longer mined on GPUs. Bitcoin stopped being mined on GPUs a decade ago. There are still plenty of other cryptos that are mined on GPUs, but their market share is tiny.

The interesting thing is that ETH switching to PoS, completely decimated the GPU mining market. This had the side effect of lowering cryptos power usage significantly and also countering all of the anti-ESG arguments against ETH.

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

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto is no longer mined on gpus. The gpu apocalypse is over.

Just in time for AI to slurp up all supply?

Different class of compute. GPUs for mining didn't need to be the latest/greatest or a ton of RAM.

AI needs the fastest/bestest/mostest.

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

#247
post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

crypto makes things much easier to track

Not all crypto is created equal. Monero is pretty much the state of the art for private electronic money.

And the market cap for monero is tiny compared with the ones that are easy to track. Which implies that the nefarious actors are smaller than portrayed in the news.

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

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BTC has been around since 2008. Today in 2023 BTC is like $27k. Does the longevity, ubiquity, price and liquidity of BTC fit the pattern of a useless get rich quick scheme? Has any such scheme existed this long, despite so much scrutiny and hostility, based on hype and confidence alone? If no useless speculation scheme has ever thrived as long and as much as BTC, and it keeps on going, at what point do you have to as…

> BTC has been around since 2008. Today in 2023 BTC is like $27k. Does the longevity, ubiquity, price and liquidity of BTC fit the pattern of a useless get rich quick scheme? Has any such scheme existed this long, despite so much scrutiny and hostility, based on hype and confidence alone? Yes, Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme famously ran for decades, with everyone invested calling doubters idiots and pessimists. Until i…

This is a common straw man argument.

Madoff was a single individual controlling the narrative.

Bitcoin has no central actor.

The same problem existed with FTX/SBF. But when they went down, it wasn't like Bitcoin died with them.

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

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, and cryptography was made for pedophiles and terrorists. Am I right?

This Motte & Bailey argument using cryptocurrency and cryptography is so old, so stale, and it was never very convincing to start with. A whole field of mathematics doesn't compare to digital pet rocks.

Your argument about Madoff is old and stale and definitely not convincing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36227328

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

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the misunderstanding: I used "laundering" to describe a method of obscuring a trail of exchanges, not a crime. I can exchange gold, or textiles or something, and not expect surveillance of those transactions. I do live in a country that requires some reporting of those for tax purposes, but not tracking of the assets the way crypto does. The moment I pick up a monetized piece of paper that the government printe…

You clearly did mean crime: >Where are these mystical things that function because of crypto that wouldn't function with regular money, and which also are not fraud?

I was asking for examples of applications that are enabled by crypto in the first message that you quote.

Next message someone listed features, not example applications. I had two responses: that's not an application, and in addition I somewhat sloppily said that even that feature (privacy) does not exist (because it's just laundering which is defeatable).

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