31–40 of 99 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are so close...... Honestly, crypto was an interesting experiment that has devolved into nothing more than digital penny stocks.
Penny stocks rarely have similar market caps...
Things like this truly make me wonder what the whole point of crypto is. On one hand, if it is truly "decentralized finance" and "code is law", then, well, hats off to these MIT brothers who executed their code. I mean, nearly a decade ago the DAO was hacked due to code bugs, and despite the hard fork of Ethereum (which was quite controversial), many people thought it was essentially a fair bug bounty. If though, cry…
The reason for crypto to exist is to be a secondary financial system that you didn't need to be well connected to old-money entities or families in order to "win" from. The 2008 financial crash spurred many anti-capitalist and hyper-capitalist movements, one of the latter being cryptocurrency. They saw how nakedly well-connected people absolutely cashed the fuck out with the near-collapse of the banking system permit…
And this was always a lie. One of the biggest boosters of crypto is Andreesen-Horowitz FFS, and plenty of the rest of the people well known in the industry are just Wall Street Finance bros or dotcom boom lottery winners.
At what point does a "clever technique" become a "hack" in the world where code is law? The biggest mistake I see those in the crypto space make is thinking that you can remove humans from the loop entirely and just rely on machines. It just cannot work.
"Code is law" was always just marketing. For example the original "DAO" had buggy code that allowed malicious actors to take money from the wealthy early investors. Suddenly "code is law" went out the window and the Ethereum chain was forked to get the investors their money back[1]. [1] https://www.gemini.com/cryptopedia/the-dao-hack-makerdao#sec...
The DOJ doesn't GAF what you say, they care what the laws are. Tokens are property. They technically gain all the standard property protections, like people aren't supposed to steal them from you, and fraud is still fraud.
If you want code to be law, you would have to pass legislation to that effect, and good luck. We tried wildly unregulated markets before and it was generally bad for the world economy. After FTX, good luck convincing regulators to let you play around with real money even more
This story reminds me of when people accuse domain sellers like GoDaddy on snooping their domain queries, buying their domain and then selling it to them for more money.
Apparently it was a "third party domain listing" and totally not their fault, of course.
What is surprising about that? The US tax man is making shitload of money happily taxing gains US citizens are making on cryptocurrencies. Not to mention businesses like Coinbase and Circle that are not only paying their taxes in the US but are also, at times, buying a lot of US government debt. The US government is, literally, indebted to these companies and functioning partly thanks to the taxes paid by crypto holders.
You cannot have your cake and eat it too: if you want to collect taxes, you take care of the bad actors. If you want Coinbase to operate in Dubai and all crypto-related companies in the US to move to the UAE or Switzerland, you outlaw crypto altogether in the US once and for all.
But then you don't come crying from the taxpayers dollars you don't get.
I'm uncomfortable with the tax dollars of hard working people being used to defend the likes of those who use robots with million dollar wallets to rake up the low hanging fruit of digital arbitrage on an entirely unregulated network. They wanted the rewards that came with this risk. Now that they got hustled, they cry foul, and the DOJ is going to spend huge amounts of money litigating their case? Perhaps it is in a…
> they got hustled, they cry foul, and the DOJ is going to spend huge amounts of money litigating their case? Do we know how the case originated? I similarly agree this seems bizarre. It’s probably illegal. But unless it’s setting an important precedent it seems like a waste of public money.
This is a very curious question because it’s such a technical situation that it’s hard to believe DOJ wasn’t most likely explained it by outside parties, most likely the victims I assume.
I'm uncomfortable with the tax dollars of hard working people being used to defend the likes of those who use robots with million dollar wallets to rake up the low hanging fruit of digital arbitrage on an entirely unregulated network. They wanted the rewards that came with this risk. Now that they got hustled, they cry foul, and the DOJ is going to spend huge amounts of money litigating their case? Perhaps it is in a…
I would LOVE to see a stock market that
(a) time-penalizes large orders -- 1 share trades in a microsecond, 10000 shares takes a week to execute
OR
(b) adds a random time delay to all orders in the range of [0,60] minutes for corporations, [0,10] minutes for residential traders, and [0,1] minutes for people who have provably low income
This will restore opportunities to real humans and drastically reduce the advantages that institutions and robots have.
I really don’t see what these guys did wrong. Good for them for making away with $25 million…the government should leave them alone. After all, crypto bros wanted decentralized finance where code is law. But they’ll run to the government when someone outsmarts them. Reminds me of people from corrupt countries parking their money in countries with strong rule of law, where they know it can’t be seized without due proc…
I totally see what they did wrong and here's the proof they knew too:
> "allegedly “searched online for, among other things, ‘money laundering,’ ‘exploit,’ ‘computer fraud abuse act,’5 and ‘does the united states extradite to [foreign country]."
But you may be seeing different things than others, including the perpetrators of this crime.
Interesting, I know this is possible on a few other blockchains as well. I was asked to write code to front run trades on one of them, but laughed and turned it down. Seemed like it would end up something like this article.