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Proposed SEC order to freeze, repatriate Binance.US assets

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

#421

Post by stale2002 »

dublinben wrote: post #153
eru wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The financial transaction / storage side is relatively uninteresting to people because the existing financial system generally works really well for them in terms of risks, fees, uptime etc. In sane countries that is, yes. And that's where most of the global wealth is, too. However, there are places where you need to worry a lot more about the government arbitrarily seizing your funds, or the banks just 'misplacing…

As a compromise, let’s ban cryptocurrency exchanges in all “sane” jurisdictions, because the downsides outweighs the upsides. That seems to be where things are heading already. These companies will be free to operate everywhere else.

If crypto gets banned in free democracies it gets harder to use in other jurisdictions.

The fact that crypto can be used in the free world makes it valuable and useful for people in less free parts of the world.

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

#422

Post by siwatanejo »

ahtihn wrote: post #406
siwatanejo wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. S…

Why does everyone always compare BTC to USD when it comes to "holding". That's not the only alternative! You're not supposed to hold large amounts of USD over long time periods. It loses value by design . You're supposed to put excess money to more productive uses, e.g. invest it. No one ever suggests using some S&P500 ETF shares as money even though it also trends up vs the USD. Just like BTC it's also more volatile…

Except that BTC has outperformed S&P500 for years.

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

#423

Post by siwatanejo »

robryan wrote: post #397
siwatanejo wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. S…

With Bitcoin you have to think in terms of the exchange rate. To the extent that you can buy things in it most of that would be based off a dollar conversion. I doubt you can buy much denominated in Bitcoins at a stable price.

Give it time.

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

#424

Post by siwatanejo »

varjag wrote: post #391
siwatanejo wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. S…

No, you will perceive each and every other currency in the world fluctuating against BTC pretty much in sync. Which suggests it's the BTC volatility that is the invariant in the system.

Until it doesn't.

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

#425

Post by ryan_lane »

nroets wrote: post #324
ryan_lane wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax evasion is people stealing from you, just in an indirect way. Just because some people already steal from us doesn't mean it's OK for other (richer) people to steal even more from us. You may believe there's a better way for the government to tax us, but that's not how the system works currently. Crypto being used for tax evasion is a good reason for it to be regulated out of existence.

You can make the same argument that governments should ban physical cash.

Crypto scales a lot better than cash, and allows for considerably larger amounts of fraud, and not just locally, but also internationally.

I also think that businesses avoiding tax by not reporting cash are putting themselves into an unfair position against businesses that are legally operating, and I'd have a preference that businesses doing this should be shut down. If you're running a thin margin business and your competitor is able to price themselves better by committing tax fraud, then you need to also commit tax fraud to compete, and that's a race to the bottom that's not good for anyone.

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

#426

Post by ryan_lane »

nroets wrote: post #343
flangola7 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And many countries are moving in that direction, so what's your point?

For millennia governments survived with cash in circulation. Crypto is no real threat to their existence. Regulating it with a heavy hand will do more harm than good. Those innovators will just move offshore.

> Those innovators will just move offshore.

Yes, let them move offshore. Being able to more easily commit tax fraud and money laundering isn't the kind of innovation we need to keep.

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

#427

Post by troad »

matrix_overload wrote: post #239
silisili wrote: post #17

I'm pretty anti-crypto, but tested the water with Voyager USDC because of the absurd APY. Took my money and ran when Celsius hinted at having issues, luckily. Funnily enough there was some amount, less than a dollar IIRC, left in Voyager when they folded. I received an email telling me it was being taken over by...Binance. Never bothered to login and even check it. Guess it really is scams all the way down.

> but tested the water with Voyager USDC because of the absurd APY Why would you see it as an investment signal, rather than a massive red flag and an indication of a Ponzi scheme?

Yes, that struck me as strange too.

"I generally distrust door-to-door salesmen, but the Brooklyn Bridge deal was just too good to pass up!"

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

#428

Post by safety1st »

a2800276 wrote: post #418
safety1st wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's certainly more morally complex than just scamming somebody. Money is property. People generally agree that once you earn your money, it belongs to you. Is the government automatically entitled to part of it? The Boston Tea Party, the Women's Tax Resistance League, and Gandhi's Salt March are a few examples where people said no. Usually in this context the "evaders" will refer to it as tax resistance or tax prote…

> Is the government automatically entitled to part of it? The Boston Tea Party, the Women's Tax Resistance League, and Gandhi's Salt March are a few examples where people said no. Your argument doesn't make sense. The example you cite are examples of protest against unjust taxation not that "the government is not entitled" to any of my crypto. As you yourself elaborate in the following paragraphs. Are you seriously s…

I think it makes perfect sense in its immediate context, my parent asked a question about the morality of tax evasion, I gave some examples where there was wide consensus that people not paying their taxes was moral, but it still would have been referred to as evasion. Other people were bringing up examples of tradesmen and stuff, not just crypto. I will leave it to the federal government to render the final verdict on SBF but he ain't got shit on Gandhi, that's for sure.

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

#430

Post by charlieyu1 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #363
derefr wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam but where you actually own, and so can resell, your game licenses. And where other supply-side companies can take over providing the game-download-delivery logistics if the original company providing that service goes belly-up. Or: Pokemon, but you can trade the pokemon outside the game itself; and the game can prove that your competitive mon were authentically caught and raised, rather than hacked in, because…

Any way of making real money out of game mechanics (selling Pokémon, cashing out in-game currency) instantly turns your game into (a) gambling (assuming you have any kind of randomness at all, which virtually all games do), and (b) a Mecca for bots, scammers, gold farmers etc. Someone losing their account is no longer losing just some in-game items, they are losing real money, which gets the police involved real quic…

D2R trading is alive and well, the failure of D3 is more about it being a poor game, poor itemisation, every build was the same, nothing is worth farming except gold.
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