Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 515 posts

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

#411

Post by afavour »

jstarfish wrote: post #403
afavour wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, no, failure predictions can either be based on evidence or they can be based on nothing. The doomsday cult is based on nothing, the submarine safety prediction is based on looking at which precautions the company is and is not taking.

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

#412

Post by iudqnolq »

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…

Tell that to Gus Farber, who was arrested for selling gold after Roosevelt banned private ownership of gold (with certain exceptions): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

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

#413

Post by simple-thoughts »

schoen wrote: post #300
simple-thoughts wrote: post #296

It doesn’t really matter to actual blockchains what the sec does or doesn’t do. It does matter to the centralized bandits like coinbase who tell people they are “buying crypto” when in fact they are buying a liability that may or may not be worth anything in bankruptcy court. I’ve never held any crypto in a exchange since mt gox, and a new cohort has learned the same lesson from ftx and the fake “defi” platforms.

Sure, but it's still a tough scenario if the vast majority of people don't have a reliable way to convert fiat currency to or from cryptocurrencies (or to or from cryptocurrencies that regulators don't approve of). That would likely mean less liquidity, less broad appeal and application of applications using cryptocurrency, and potentially more stigma.

Less liquidity between the fiat and crypto ecosystem cuts both ways - it makes fiat less valuable since low liquidity creates a class of products and services that cannot be purchased with fiat. If people still want those services, they will barter for them instead using p2p platforms. Examples that already exist include - sending Amazon packages for crypto, providing free or discounted rent for crypto, food delivery services for crypto, etc. This creates a situation where more goods and services can be purchased with crypto than without it, meaning crypto is better money than fiat.

Liquidity between fiat and crypto privileges centralized insiders who have the connections to fit into regulators molds and thus leak compliance into the wider crypto ecosystem. Thankfully regulators are too dumb to understand this and are shutting down the main threat to crypto, which is coinbase and it’s kind.

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

#414

Post by yellowapple »

majormajor wrote: post #158
cs702 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I see what you mean now. I agree with you on the Lindy effect. What I meant is that the arguments used by many past predictions of Bitcoin's demise have been proven wrong. Anyone making new predictions of Bitcoin's demise must explain precisely how and why its distributed network would fail. Sorry if that wasn't clear in my comment above!

Why should a prediction of demise (for whatever meaning of "demise" we care to choose, but we can start with the one you first mentioned, market capitalization) be required to be more precisely detailed about how and why than a prediction of thriving? Someone could say "Many past novel currencies and securities have failed; any prediction of Bitcoin's success must explain precisely how and why it will still have wort…

> To me this seems like the same argument you're making - belief that a trend will continue until proven otherwise - but I don't find either of them very convincing.

Barring a reasonable, coherent, and factually-supported explanation for why an existing trend might not continue, the existing trend continuing tends to be a reasonable default prediction.

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

#415

Post by jawiggins »

anonporridge wrote: post #380
kdragon wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use it as currency on stacker.news You can tip people on the nostr protocol. stats are on zaplife.lol you can tip musicians on wavlake there's a Minecraft server called satlantis where it is used as a currency there's a lot of plugins you can use to build your own lightning enabled apps on lnbits the space is still young so a lot of software is beta, but there's plenty to play with check out the plebdev cours…

You can also go to the entire nation state of El Salvador where it is a legal currency and many shops have integrated lightning payments.

Can you? I've read a few articles from journalists who went there only to find that vendors refused their payments, or asked for Visa instead.

The one from Bloomberg comes to mind: "He tells me surfers sometimes ask if he’ll take Bitcoin. He’s taken it on a few occasions, but the dips in price burned him. “Now I tell them it’s $25 if they want to pay in Bitcoin,” he tells me. “You don’t know when it’s going to go down.” " [1].

That's also to say nothing of the leader of the nation potentially losing millions of public funds day-trading crypto on his phone, the Bitcoin Bonds that no one bought, or the IMF refusing to offer funding to the impoverished nation as a result of this callous fiscal policy.

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-06-17/world-s-b...

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

#416

Post by HWR_14 »

polygamous_bat wrote: post #350
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.

US Dollar has value largely because the United States government is legally obligated to accept it to settle debts.

Also, any debt in the US can be paid with dollars. They even printed "for all debts, public and private" on the bills.

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

#417

Post by HWR_14 »

chii wrote: post #404
blackle wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The people in Lebanon and Venezuela trust that the US government will continue to exist and that they will either meet with people who want to do business with it, or will meet people who assume they will meet people who will, etc. So they have value.

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

#418

Post by HWR_14 »

anonporridge wrote: post #379
steveBK123 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could understand the allure of the (ahem) "stability" of BTC if you lived in say, Argentina. If you live in America with this viewpoint, its pure doomerism.

Someone with your mindset was probably saying something similar while living in Argentina in the 1920s, when it was among the top 10 wealthiest countries on the planet.

Hopefully there is no military overthrow of the US government concurrent with the largest economic slowdown in world history.

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

#420

Post by HWR_14 »

bandrami wrote: post #367
mrguyorama wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The efficient market "Hypothesis" (is it even testable?) presupposes a rational market, doesn't it? Real life markets are not rational, by definition. Humans are not rational actors.

I remember being annoyed on the 2nd day of Econ class when the prof mentioned that empirically we know human preference graphs can be cyclic but we have to pretend that's not true for any micro to work at all.

That's succinctly phrased. I don't know why it would bother you. It seems like it's admitting a limitation of the model he's about to teach.
Post reply on HN