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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'

#401

Post by knocte »

jeremyjh wrote: post #383
tromp wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Miners could just decide that they don't like you very much and refuse to process your TX. Some miners perhaps. But others will like every tx that pays a decent transaction fee and these tend to eventually get your tx included.

I like the part where you just ignore GP's famous example of miners colluding to void a transaction, quite successfully.

First: I guess you guys are talking about mining pools, not miners.

Second: so long as there's one single mining pool that is not colluding, then any censorship attempt is going to be moot. You would need to have, not just 51% of mining-pool collusion, you need 100%!

Third: even if you had 100% collusion, this "problem" is actually being solved with technology, it's called Stratum V2 protocol. Stay tuned.

Last but not least: I'm really surprised this level of ignorance still exists in the HN community wrt crypto. I guess we are still early.

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

#402

Post by XorNot »

juve1996 wrote: post #222
cs702 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The longer Bitcoin's network continues to function, more and more people will become aware of its resiliency . Governments may topple; banks may fail; exchanges may go bust; Bitcoin keeps on ticking. As long as the network continues to function, Bitcoin will have a price.

The US government has been around for quite some time. The British pound, longer. It will take hundreds of years to compare to that level of resiliency.

The British government has completed repayments on historically held debt which dates back to the 18th century[1] as recently as 2015 (they were related to the South Sea Bubble).

That's a 162 contiguous years of financial records.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/repayment-of-26-billion-h...

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

#403

Post by jstarfish »

afavour wrote: post #345
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?

Predicting the demise of something does not mean you are incorrect until the day it collapses. People have criticised Oceangate’s approach to security for years. By your logic I could have turned around to all of them and said “you’re wrong”, up until a few days ago when the CEO got trapped inside a submarine to die. The people who said their safety approach was a ticking time bomb were right all along, it just took…

There's no right or wrong answer to this since failure predictions are logically flawed.

Doomsday cult leaders no longer insist the world will end on a specific day; they insist it will end imminently after a series of vague events. Your skeptics will die of old age before you can ever be proven wrong.

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

#404

Post by chii »

blackle wrote: post #315
lbotos wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a bitcoin maximalist, but you have to acknowledge that in this day and age that your definition pretty much applies to USD as well. People believe it's worth something. And so it is.

USD holds value because the government says it does. The government holds authority because they have a monopoly on violence. Or, if your less pessimistic, it's because people believe in the government.

> USD holds value because the government says it does.

so how do you explain dollarization of failed economies? Such as lebanon, or venezuela etc?

Surely, you're not saying that the US gov't somehow is exerting violence on another country to make the dollarization happen.

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

#405

Post by prepend »

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…

> whereas every single transaction in the Bitcoin network is visible to everyone and, moreover, cryptographically verifiable by everyone.

It’s pretty easy to hide wash trading in the ledger to manipulate the price of bitcoin to artificial levels.

Just because transactions are public doesn’t mean that there isn’t associated data hidden (eg, identities, if dead wallets are really dead, etc etc).

Bitcoin may be great, but to say it must succeed because it’s transparent doesn’t address the risk that there is no basis for value and it’s only purpose is speculation and tricking a greater fool to keep the price up.

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

#406

Post by XorNot »

mminer237 wrote: post #113
cs702 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gold is pretty volatile too. Its price has gone up and down between 5x and 10x a few times in just the past century: https://www.macrotrends.net/1333/historical-gold-prices-100-... -- no one sane would call it stable. And yet, despite its volatility, gold has been used as a store of value for millennia .

In the last 5 fives, gold's highest price was 60% higher than its lowest point. That is indeed pretty volatile. Let's see if Bitcoin is comparably volatile… Oh, it's highest point was only 1920% higher than its lowest point. That's definitely the exact same as gold. /s Also, that ignores that gold has been a store of value for millennia. It's almost synonymous with wealth. In a total financial collapse, if all modern…

Gold has a perception of wealth but history makes clear what it actually is. For example, the hordes of gold the Spanish plundered from the Americas directly contributed to the bankruptcy of the monarchy.[1] Because they hadn't actually seized/mined "wealth" - they'd simply inflated their currency away without any commensurate expansion in productivity.

People who believe that it would be "easy" to trade gold for other goods have also clearly never tried - since the entire modern banking system came into existence on the basis of the sheer difficulty of directly trading gold for other goods. No one knows how to value gold, they don't know what it's worth other then a brick is probably a lot. If they could, then the fake jewellery scam wouldn't be as successful as it is[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution

[2] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/just-say-no-walk-away-fake-...

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

#407

Post by chii »

bandrami wrote: post #363
tasuki wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Gold, like stocks and real estate, trades at some multiple of book (with metals this ratio is generally between 0 and 1, with stocks it's generally greater than 1). In fact, looking at the P/B ratio is often one of the first things someone does when evaluating an investment. That ratio for bitcoin is infinite which is why it's not an "investment" in the usual sense of the word.

why is BTC ratio infinite, but not gold?

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

#408

Post by politician »

lostmsu wrote: post #126
derbOac wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is puzzling to me, in that a commodity usually has some value outside of a trading market per se. That is, it is usually consumable in some abstract sense. I'm not sure what you would "do" with Bitcoin other than as some form of currency. In this regard, ETH always seemed a bit more on track, in the sense that there have been attempts to use the ETH blockchain from the beginning for the purposes of computatio…

My inner conspiracy theorist would say that given the crypto market situation and state of ETH and Bitcoin as platforms SEC actions indicate that Bitcoin might have something in its design that US government wants vs ETH.

I'll bite: Bitcoin transaction networks are fully transparent to analysis.

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

#409

Post by prepend »

Melting_Harps wrote: post #354
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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 us…

> 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

Lots of stupid MFers out there. I know quite a few people who have mail ordered their drugs for 10 years using bitcoin. There’s lots of atms that cash in bitcoin out and have dubious identity checks. And there are still in person meetups to swap cash for bitcoin.

Not perfect, but easier than mailing cash or burner PayPal accounts.

This is also like the only use case for bitcoin in the developed world.

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

#410

Post by [deleted] »

afavour wrote: post #345
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?

Predicting the demise of something does not mean you are incorrect until the day it collapses. People have criticised Oceangate’s approach to security for years. By your logic I could have turned around to all of them and said “you’re wrong”, up until a few days ago when the CEO got trapped inside a submarine to die. The people who said their safety approach was a ticking time bomb were right all along, it just took…

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