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Proposed SEC order to freeze, repatriate Binance.US assets

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371–380 of 598 posts

Re: Proposed SEC order to freeze, repatriate Binance.US assets

#371
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crypto's fate is bound be like those alternative Reddits and Twitters. What kind of users an alternative Reddit attracts? 1. People who don't like Reddit because of privacy concerns or other ideological reasons. 2. People who are banned by Reddit. It turns out group 2 is much larger than group 1 and the community rots. Now what kind of people who cryptos (a.k.a. alternative money) attract? 1. People who don't like ba…

Crypto has a viable micropayments for content story, see e.g. https://stacker.news . An upvote costs a minimum of 1 Satoshi (currently about 0.025¢)

Micropayments have been around since the 90’s, and never taken off. At any rate, a centralised version would likely be cheaper, more efficient, easier to use, with more functionality and better customer service.

Re: Proposed SEC order to freeze, repatriate Binance.US assets

#372
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The banking industry makes 25 times more profit than all other industries around the world combined. It has no competition and abuses this fact. Isn't it interesting how little awareness this issue has?

[Citation Needed] Banking and financial services is about 1/4 of world GDP and insurance is about 1/12th of world GDP. Anything making 25x "than all other industries around the world combined" would be ~96% of the economy.

Yes, GP might have misremembered 25%. To be clear: that is still way too high in my view. (That credit cards in less regulated economies like the US charge more than 2% is obscene.) However, the badly needed disruption will come (hopefully) from good old (centralised) FinTech (such as Wise), not from the crypto bros.

Re: Proposed SEC order to freeze, repatriate Binance.US assets

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do I get some Bitcoin? There are bitcoin-only exchanges, e.g. Bitaroo. There are also P2P exchanges that don't hold user's funds, like LN2bot (this one is very handy because it supports Lightning, so fees are ridiculously low, and trades very fast for not being a SPOT exchange). > I can't afford to mine it anymore. Right, it's a professional industry now; hobbyists can still do it, but at a loss. > What if I wa…

> not being affected by QE in the medium-long term (e.g. put your savings in it and forget about for 4 years[2] Sure, why care about the possibility that cashing out early might mean you lose half your money? Trust instead in the long long long history of BTC as a stable currency.

> Trust instead in the long long long history of BTC as a stable currency.

You perceive it as unstable because you're using USD as a unit-of-account. As a thought exercise, if you were using BTC as the unit of account, what you would perceive unstable is the US dollar. And what you would see is that the USD value would be trending down against BTC, especially if you choose a time-frame equal or higher than 4 years.

So yeah mate, nothing to see here, keep holding your cash.

Re: Proposed SEC order to freeze, repatriate Binance.US assets

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do I get some Bitcoin? There are bitcoin-only exchanges, e.g. Bitaroo. There are also P2P exchanges that don't hold user's funds, like LN2bot (this one is very handy because it supports Lightning, so fees are ridiculously low, and trades very fast for not being a SPOT exchange). > I can't afford to mine it anymore. Right, it's a professional industry now; hobbyists can still do it, but at a loss. > What if I wa…

> There are also P2P exchanges that don't hold user's funds, like LN2bot. The only search result in Google for '"Ln2bot" crypto exchange' is this article.

Yeah sorry, typo there. @bibabaloo FTFY

Re: Proposed SEC order to freeze, repatriate Binance.US assets

#375
post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Crypto is also used to evade taxes. You know what, this narrative is funny, because 99.999% of the time in which "crypto" is used to evade taxes, it's the kind of taxes that would need to be paid because of capital gains on the crypto assets because their value increased. But most of the time, they are unrealized gains, which means that tax evasion didn't actually happen. But anyway, let's now think of the cases wh…

I've never owned any crypto. I'm changing my tax residence for legitimate reasons. (Hardest thing I've done in my life!) But I suppose some crypto owners are changing their tax residence without declaring their crypto i.e. no deemed disposal and exit tax.

The big problem comes when they want to use their crypto horde to buy real world stuff.

Want to buy a house? Now you need to convert your crypto into fiat and a deed transfer. People will start asking where your funds are coming from. This is where you tend to get caught.

Re: Proposed SEC order to freeze, repatriate Binance.US assets

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is it https://lnp2pbot.com/

Ah. That's helpful. It's peer to peer, but not trustless. There's a moment in the transaction at which one party can default. So they need a reputation and dispute resolution system.[1] You'd think there would be trustless decentralized exchanges by now. Ones have been proposed.[2] Some even exist. It's possible to have a truly trustless exchange where orders are smart contracts on a blockchain, transactions are atom…

There’s a neat paper showing that you can have trustless decentralised exchanges only for on-chain assets, ie exchanging one crypto for another. Real world assets (including fiat) cannot be securely bought on blockchains.

Irrationality, Extortion, or Trusted Third-parties: Why it is Impossible to Buy and Sell Physical Goods Securely on the Blockchain

https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.09857

Re: Proposed SEC order to freeze, repatriate Binance.US assets

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most customers weren't willing to enter their CC information online in the late 90s and early 00s. It took horny trailblazers to get us to where we are today, to the overall benefit of e-commerce. Comparatively, putting CC info in to Coinbase and putting an address to withdraw the crypto in is far safer than what horny people did back then.

Real quick, how do I challenge a transaction I made with Bitcoin?

You can't, but the model is different.

If Bitcoin transactions involved giving your private key to every entity you wanted to transact with (like how credit card numbers work), then this would be a problem.

Re: Proposed SEC order to freeze, repatriate Binance.US assets

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Problem is that the person who sells the option to you literally cannot guarantee that they can pay you because there is an infinite downside to them.

A "person" can't sell a naked option, this can only be done by bigger companies with a margin account, and will be margin-called when the price approaches the strike price. The point is, should call options used for hedging regulated as insurance?

Margin accounts aren't that exclusive. I opened a margin account just because but I've never dipped into it. It's just a tool and if you know how to use it, good for you.

Re: Proposed SEC order to freeze, repatriate Binance.US assets

#379
post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real quick, how do I challenge a transaction I made with Bitcoin?

On the one hand, in general with raw bitcoin, you can't. On the other hand, you can only lose the bitcoins you actually have. With a credit card you can go into debt.

That seems worse unless your big problem is not being able to exercise discipline (in which case a debit card would also meet your needs).

Re: Proposed SEC order to freeze, repatriate Binance.US assets

#380
post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it? It sounds like they have a credit card with fraud protection and they already understand how it works, and don't want to have to fiddle with some newfangled financial product that doesn't offer those protections and seems vaguely shady, to me.

Many states in the US have legalised buying and selling of marijuana. Many payment processors don't want to touch this, on neither the buying nor selling side. You might declare marijuana vaguely shady, but as far as I can tell, it's a legitimate product that consenting adults might want to trade in.

How many people do you see choosing to use Bitcoin rather than cash at marijuana dispensaries? I'm puzzled at how this is a rebuttal of "people don't want to use Bitcoin unless they absolutely need to" argument. If the issue is that taking credit cards is inconvenient for the seller, I don't think buyers generally see that as their problem so long as someone else is willing to accept them.
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