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Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

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Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#351

Post by Melting_Harps »

lmm wrote: post #332
snapcaster wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably you have been saying this for a while and been wrong so far. At what point would you change your mind?

I don't think I have been wrong? Like I said, the ability to actually buy stuff with Bitcoin is in decline. I'd change my mind if I saw evidence of increasing Bitcoin adoption in the real economy.

> I don't think I have been wrong? Like I said, the ability to actually buy stuff with Bitcoin is in decline. I'd change my mind if I saw evidence of increasing Bitcoin adoption in the real economy.

Based on what evidence exactly? Consider that an entire nation state has since adopted it as its national currency, along the USD in the last 3 years; that means it works in parallel with the USD. Not to mention that merchant adoption, while as you said may be in decline (citation needed), what you have instead is more and more commerce being dealt with on LN: as was always intended due to network bloat.

Listen, I get HN is entirely averse to BItcoin at this point (look at my post histpory, I prove it time and time again it's based on stuborness rather than fact), what I fail to understand is why you persist in this folly in thiking becasue it doesn't work for YOU, you assume no one else has any use for it.

Again, most here who work in tech are not c-level corps or founders so you don't understand very much about the narrow mechanics of day to day because you are not rewarded for doing so, and quite frankly are paid very well for your ignorance on these matters.

But try to understand that if even China has backed off with Hong Kong dealing with BTC, you have to come to terms with the fact that adoption in trackable and metric based analytics are out the window at this point. Exchanges are one way to track transaction volume and that has been as healthy (perhaps more so, I don't know I'm not a trader) than it was 5-6 years ago. I know this because I was there, helping scale this tech and giving it more usecases that even it's most ardent proponents couldn't see and used similar points of view as you are making now (hence USAF and it's MANY forks before that).

You are wrong, and the fact that you can't even admit that possibility is what makes your point even more invalid because you refuse to see a contrary POV.

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#352

Post by Seattle3503 »

chromatin wrote: post #255
cs702 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...can you actually do more with it [I assume you mean Bitcoin] now than you could five years ago? Not really. To date, Bitcoin has been used successfully only as an alternate store of value -- one which, like gold, doesn't depend on the financial credibility of a particular government or country. Bitcoin's continued existence depends only on the integrity of its distributed consensus algorithm, which so far has wi…

Partially disagree: the Lightning Network [1] facilitates almost instantaneous micro and small transactions which can later settle in aggregate to the Bitcoin base layer. I've used this to purchase goods both online and in person seamlessly. Custodial solutions (trust another party to hold your funds, like a bank) are turnkey. Right now the truly non-custodial solutions (i.e., run your own lightning node) are definit…

What do you buy with the lighting network? I've always wanted to try it.

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#353

Post by tasuki »

__loam wrote: post #312
chromatin wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody can tell you what a gold oz. worth of wheat is without resorting to exchange rates of gold to actual currencies.

Gold has intrinsic value as a commodity though. It's scarce, has industrial uses, and has aesthetic value to a lot of people. Bitcoin doesn't have that. Bitcoin has value entirely because people think it has value. As an inflation hedge it fuckin sucks because it follows the market. When the fed increased rates, bitcoin crashed. As a store of value, it's too volatile to really work well for that and small mistakes ca…

> Gold has intrinsic value as a commodity though. It's scarce, has industrial uses, and has aesthetic value to a lot of people.

Yet this value is a small fraction of gold's trading price. How do you explain the current price of gold?

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#354

Post by Melting_Harps »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #348
lmm wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I have been wrong? Like I said, the ability to actually buy stuff with Bitcoin is in decline. I'd change my mind if I saw evidence of increasing Bitcoin adoption in the real economy.

[flagged]

> So long as there’s demand for contraband, there’s a utility for BTC

Drug money... while that was true at one point, you have to be the stupidest MF'er in this planet to deal with DNM tx with BTC at this point unless you have secure OPSEC (something most who operate DNM couldn't even do, see SR1/2).

The truth is BTC has more usecases than you are lining out, go look at Ukraine's Bitcoin address, that was what was using to fund early escape missions during the attacks of Russia when the central bank failed to operate and imposed liquidity collapse in the onset of the War. This was what led to the realization of United24, the official Ukrainian governments solution for continued fundraising (using not just BTC, but other alts too) for support in other critical needs--like invincibility centers that provide food/water/shelter in these war torn areas.

Want an even longer use case? Go look at Return Alive's BTC address going back a decade now, we as a community have been proving non-lethal aid to Ukraine since the Maidan Revolution in 2013 when the collapse of their currency and capital controls and rapid inflation took over.

Really I can go on, and while I don't deny our past (in fact I'm quite proud of our origins as a means to transfer value freely on the Internet) you are misled to believe it still operates much volume towards those ends these days because of the analytics and monitoring that is being done 24/7 by intelligence agencies and 3rd party affiliates for just this. Hell, I bet there are more scams/hacks by the North Korean cyber military than there is in drug money.

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#355

Post by TacticalCoder »

anon-3988 wrote: post #335
paulddraper wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe. I don't see people using gold for finances within 50km of me, but it's going to be around forever.

And? I am not advocating for gold either. Gold hinges on the fact that its yellow and nice to look at or whatever. It is entirely feasible for the world to be possessed by zeitgeist such that gold or anything yellow doesn't mean particularly much. This could happen, for example, if gold and diamonds can be manufactured artificially. What then?

Wait... Is it not that within our current understanding of physics gold can only be manufactured artificially from an already heavier metal? (which are already more expensive than gold I think).

I don't know the details but, basically, it's not because we can manufacture synthetic diamonds that we'll one day be able to manufacture non-radioactive synthetic gold.

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#356

Post by yyyk »

cs702 wrote: post #102
otoburb wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If this sounds far-fetched, consider that many smart and smart-sounding people have predicted Bitcoin's demise, and so far all have been utterly wrong Bernie Madoff pulled off one of the largest (literal Ponzi) scams and evidently stated that he started in the 1990s for a run of just over 15 years until being arrested in 2008, although some investigators thought that his fraudulent activities started as far back a…

The comparison to Madoff is not apt. Madoff hid losses by committing accounting fraud, whereas every single transaction in the Bitcoin network is visible to everyone and, moreover, cryptographically verifiable by everyone. As long as the distributed consensus algorithm continues to function, Bitcoin will continue to exist. Period. (Government regulations cannot kill it; they can only drive it underground, as with gol…

>(Government regulations cannot kill it; they can only drive it underground, as with gold.)

>Anyone who predicts Bitcoin's demise must explain precisely how and why its network would stop functioning.

This can be done pretty easily, once enough countries ban and condemn it for its contribution to the climate crisis and to crime. There's no need to catch every transaction, just to ban it enough to shrink the mining pool. Once the active network has shrunk enough, the transparent permissionless structure ensures we can ran the obvious attacks on it.

Since it's now underground and these actors aren't the nicest of people, coordinating the forks to resist the attacks will be difficult and costly. People give up after each attack, which makes running another attack easier and so on. Eventually maintaining the network as is won't be worth it to anyone.

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#357

Post by tasuki »

peteradio wrote: post #304
dvt wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no such thing as "payout" in free markets—someone buys your thing for money (sometimes less money than you paid for it, sometimes more money than you paid for it). So, while it might be a speculative bubble (like Beanie Babies, or Tulips, or whatever), it's certainly not a Ponzi. Also, the bigger fool theory (which is what you're conflating it with) is also not a Ponzi. This might be confusing, because many o…

Who the hell cares. If it's a pump and dump of fundamentally worthless stuff relying on bigger fools, it's all the same.

I care. You made a claim, were given a thoughtful explanation why your claim was wrong, and you don't care. Not cool.

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#358

Post by everfree »

LexiMax wrote: post #338
everfree wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At best, you have a changing of the guard - new boss, same as the old boss. At best you send some of it directly to someone else with no trusted middleman, which is impossible to do over the internet with any other kind of system. At worst you have a changing of the guard.

> At best you send some of it directly to someone else with no trusted middleman This is impossible. If you trade crypto, at some point that money has to become fiat for you to pay bills, pay taxes or cash out. If the currency _is_ crypto, you either have to transact on-chain where it is inefficient and slow by design, or off-chain, where you are trusting a middle-man by definition. Either way, you are beholden to th…

> If the currency _is_ crypto, you either have to transact on-chain where it is inefficient and slow by design

Not slow or inefficient enough so as to be unusable.

> Either way, you are beholden to the currency controls of your country, and unlike you, they have the resources of a nation-state and can de-anonymize and use violence to force you to bend the knee.

Everything a person does is beholden to law. I don’t see how that’s really relevant.

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#359

Post by tasuki »

cyanydeez wrote: post #284
otoburb wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If this sounds far-fetched, consider that many smart and smart-sounding people have predicted Bitcoin's demise, and so far all have been utterly wrong Bernie Madoff pulled off one of the largest (literal Ponzi) scams and evidently stated that he started in the 1990s for a run of just over 15 years until being arrested in 2008, although some investigators thought that his fraudulent activities started as far back a…

Think of Bitcoin like the martingale betting method. In theory, it does win. In practice, few people have enough liquidity to keep up and even then, they need to know when to quit.

I fail to see any kind of equivalence or similarity. Mind elaborating?

Few people have enough liquidity to keep up with bitcoin... what does that mean?

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#360

Post by deevolution »

otoburb wrote: post #97
cs702 wrote: post #58

Three highly speculative predictions: 1. The courts are more likely than not to rule that many crypto-assets -- but not all -- should be regulated as investments. It won't be fun for a lot of crypto traders. 2. Over time, the usual giant financial institutions are bound to become the dominant market makers in crypto-assets. In all likelihood, one of them will end up buying Coinbase. Those giant financial institutions…

>> If this sounds far-fetched, consider that many smart and smart-sounding people have predicted Bitcoin's demise, and so far all have been utterly wrong Bernie Madoff pulled off one of the largest (literal Ponzi) scams and evidently stated that he started in the 1990s for a run of just over 15 years until being arrested in 2008, although some investigators thought that his fraudulent activities started as far back a…

There's no promises of future gains or profits made explicitly by the protocol, nor is there any central party pushing/benefiting from its adoption. There are plenty of other crypto coins you could accurately label as Ponzis. It's unfortunate that bad actors have tarnished the Bitcoin name...
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