171–180 of 557 posts
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"What I think is important about the Coinbase business model is that we have set up our business such that there's not a conflict." We have illegal weapons but what is special with us, we won't use them. So it's not illegal.
No, because they also argue the weapons are not illegal. Your analogy implies they said "yes they are securities", and they definitely didn't do that.
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In bitcoin software contributors can propose changes to the protocol and software, but they have no absolute power since they can just be rejected by the miners, who are not paid directly from bitcoin raising in price, but from fees from the operation of the network itself. So there is no organization or entity promising returns for owning bitcoin. In Ethereum, a centralized group of people put together a public sale…
"In Ethereum, a centralized group of people put together a public sale of the token, promising great returns in exchange due to their visionary ideas. This is all perfectly fine, except they didn't register their sale as a security" If I write a book with visionary ideas that promises to change your life (great returns) and continue to work on revisions as I come up with new ideas - should I register it as a security…
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I think he did explain it: Most coins have a centralized development team who are focused on increasing the coin's value. It's a classic investment no different than a startup.
Bitcoin has a centralized development team who is focused on increasing the coin's value. By writing more efficient clients, coordinating soft forks, and curating standards, the Bitcoin Core dev team is directly supporting the asset. So why did the SEC declare it not to be a security? We could speculate as much as we want, but at the end of the day these are the hard-hitting questions that the SEC has been avoiding,…
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It's not about what's wrong, it's about the selection bias of what's included in such an article. You can write a technically "factually correct" article by only including statements that heavily favor one side of the argument, which is what's done here. Also, "facts" in topics that touch politics and law are complicated. This is not like science where measurement can be unambiguous. Most facts in topics such as thes…
That's called "expressing an opinion." What world would we live in if the very fact we wanted to talk about something meant we couldn't? You're welcome to write a rebuttal but you're attacking the messenger repeatedly instead. She wrote a cogent concise article that describes what's going on in the real world. Now, we await your brilliance, as soon as you're done repeatedly telling us it's "her career."
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That's called "expressing an opinion." What world would we live in if the very fact we wanted to talk about something meant we couldn't? You're welcome to write a rebuttal but you're attacking the messenger repeatedly instead. She wrote a cogent concise article that describes what's going on in the real world. Now, we await your brilliance, as soon as you're done repeatedly telling us it's "her career."
Nothing wrong with expressing an opinion, it's just sad to consistently see these highly biased and political opinions being upvoted on a website that's supposedly about rational thinking, not political incentives. I would expect upvoted articles here to strike a fair balance in presenting both sides of the argument, not just one.
Again, we await your cutting dissection of, well, anything from this horrid bias-ridden article your peers saw fit to upvote.
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It doesn't mean that companies can't be licensed. It just means that they will move out of the USA (to another country that has strong financial infrastructure but sane securities laws like the UK), get licensed there, and exclude US customers from their platforms. Coinbase and a16z have already publicly stated that they have plans to set up international arms to hedge against US regulatory risk. So your statement "t…
"It doesn't mean that companies can't be licensed" Licensed in this discussion obiviously meant the US. "Coinbase and a16z have already publicly stated that they have plans to set up international arms to hedge against US regulatory risk." Which is great for them I guess. "the USA's strong fintech industry" A tiny, and some might argue irrelevant, part of the US fintech industry is moving offshore. Crypto to me feels…
You'd better be very sure of its irrelevancy before sending it all to the UK, where they're embracing it with a clear regulatory framework. If you are right, the US pushes a small ("irrelevant") amount of crime offshore. But in the off chance you are wrong, the USA risks losing their position as the world's financial superpower. This is not a gamble you want to take if there's even a very small chance that this technology could catch on.
> Crypto to me feels like fusion, it's super relevant, and you just wait some time, you'll see! and then there is another year and another decade and it is still not relevant.
It gets discussed multiple times per week on Hacker News. It's talked about constantly in congress. It's beginning to polarize people so much that it creates single issue voters in both directions. The word "NFT" has been etched into the public's consciousness as a meme. Banks and central governments are issuing bonds and other paper on public blockchains. The US is itself planning a version of the US dollar with a design inspired by distributed ledger technology. More than 1 in 5 Americans own cryptocurrency now. I don't know what measure of "relevant" you are using, but it's obviously very different from mine.
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It seems like a massive regulatory failure to let Coinbase IPO if there are the sort of glaring issues they claim. Coinbase has a market cap of around $10 billion, and is owned by retail investors as part of standard index funds. If it goes to zero tomorrow because of the SEC, that is billions of dollars in losses that could have been avoided by more responsible regulatory behavior. Meanwhile insiders will have cashe…
> It seems like a massive regulatory failure to let Coinbase IPO if there are the sort of glaring issues they claim Did you read the article? Specifically the part where it explains why the SEC does not evaluate the business models of companies?
Did you read it?
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The bias is obvious, but is there anything factually wrong in the article?
It's not about what's wrong, it's about the selection bias of what's included in such an article. You can write a technically "factually correct" article by only including statements that heavily favor one side of the argument, which is what's done here. Also, "facts" in topics that touch politics and law are complicated. This is not like science where measurement can be unambiguous. Most facts in topics such as thes…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems like a massive regulatory failure to let Coinbase IPO if there are the sort of glaring issues they claim. Coinbase has a market cap of around $10 billion, and is owned by retail investors as part of standard index funds. If it goes to zero tomorrow because of the SEC, that is billions of dollars in losses that could have been avoided by more responsible regulatory behavior. Meanwhile insiders will have cashe…
> It seems like a massive regulatory failure to let Coinbase IPO if there are the sort of glaring issues they claim Did you read the article? Specifically the part where it explains why the SEC does not evaluate the business models of companies?
Yeah that part doesn't make sense. A "merit-based judgement" that requires that kind of expertise is obviously not what is being asked for! The request is for them to look at [sufficiently big] securities [or possibly-securities], in the exact same way they would look at them post-IPO, using their normal realm of expertise.
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My understanding is that the corporate framework that securities licenses require is literally impossible to satisfy when trading current public blockchain assets. As in, to trade crypto as a security on your exchange, you would need to walk up to every dev team of every crypto you wanted to trade and kindly ask them to KYC/AML every single user of the blockchain so that you could be in compliance. In practice this j…
Say your understanding is true. The whole point of regulations is to make various business models impossible. The job of the SEC is to enforce the existing regulations and the job of lawmakers to (maybe) change the regulations if they think it's important to make this type of business possible in the US. In doing so they have to weigh potential benefits and harms caused by doing so. The guiding priciples behind the S…
I guess that's the job of congress, then. I think the SEC Stabilization Act is an excellent start. There's nothing unreasonable about wanting to broker securities on a public ledger.