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Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

economist.com

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Re: Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

#111

Post by AngryData »

rimbo789 wrote: post #4

Crypto was a huge mistake. It should have been rigorously regulated right out of the gate to the point of being unusable for anyone. I have yet to see a use case that doesn’t amount to buying drugs or defrauding rubes.

There is lots of porn that credit card companies and proccessors don't want to touch. Plenty of kink sites have had problems with them, porn sites have blanket restrictions on keywords like hypnosis and shadow ban certain kinds of legal content in order to not get hamstrung by financial restrictions.

Also there are plenty of blackmarket goods that are heavily restricted and legally punished without good cause, and I do not believe just because something is "illegal" that it is automatically bad.

Re: Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

#112

Post by sigwinch »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #44
resource_waste wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can be objective enough to consider that not everyone likes keeping fiat currency, it was an interesting alternative. Bitcoin generally appreciated, where fiat had inflation. While the transaction costs/speed have eliminated this, there was a few years of my life that I both sent money to friends and used a Bitcoin debit card.

It’s funny, because the inflation of crypto comes not from the increase in the supply of individual coins (that’s controlled mathematically) but by increasing the number of cryptocurrencies themselves.

I’m not so sure I buy that. Do nondecreasing counts of NFTs and meme coins account for the psychological source of inflation?

Re: Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

#113

Post by okr »

safety1st wrote: post #87
repler wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the media is largely dominated by institutional players and also tech journalism as a whole is pretty abysmal to begin with

Speaking as someone who had a passion for journalism and wanted to become a journalist when I was in high school at the end of the '90s, these days I am comfortable with that industry being completely eradicated. How did we get here? The Telecom Act of 1996 legalized cross-media ownership and an unprecedented degree of consolidation across all forms of media, news and otherwise. Those rules existed to promote local j…

Commerce subsidizes journalism. Or art. Or any other "hobby", where i do something, that feels right for me.

I have time on the side, because working for the man gives me the freedom to do things other than surviving.

Long lives commerce and capitalism.

Re: Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

#114

Post by hengheng »

olelele wrote: post #67
hengheng wrote: post #41

What I'm always missing with these takes is the "what if" component. Nobody really dares to paint the whole picture in articles like this. Authors seem to go as far as to find the moral infraction, and then stop. But that doesn't do what is happening justice. No, crypto does not need regulation. Law-based order needs crypto regulation. That's a big difference already. But we can go further than that. What if we don't…

With the speed up of climate change coming due to trump administration policies Florida might not be very attractive in the future…

Hence 'mid-term'. Lots of new money taking refuge there, but it won't be for long. Harder and harder to be on the winning side in this overall.

Re: Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

#115

Post by hengheng »

sigwinch wrote: post #84
hengheng wrote: post #41

What I'm always missing with these takes is the "what if" component. Nobody really dares to paint the whole picture in articles like this. Authors seem to go as far as to find the moral infraction, and then stop. But that doesn't do what is happening justice. No, crypto does not need regulation. Law-based order needs crypto regulation. That's a big difference already. But we can go further than that. What if we don't…

The inevitable bailouts will be breathtaking. We’re in a quadratic adoption phase to legitimize a currency faster than the public discovers its downsides. The first bailout will be in this administration and won’t look like an inflection point. It’ll look like printing fiat into a dark, lucrative, inaccessible hole. Among average Americans, the biggest advantage for promoters is the widespread susceptibility to scams…

I am still wondering what money it was that predominantly went into crypto. Lots of retail investors lucked out between Tesla stock and BTC, but that can't account for all of it. I suspect a lot of shady money coming in from outside the US that raised the water level. Yet people talk about it like it's a co-op pension fund.

National bailouts going into an international fund are going to be a global power readjustment. Fun times.

My personal guess for an inflection point is civil unrest. Doge are already tightening the belts for the lower class. Nobody has really figured out how far they can take it. Police has been arming itself for the last decade or two, that started way before Trump, and they have been ready to thwart any uprising. But I am wondering if something is going to happen regardless. Civil war is only a bad idea as long as there are other options.

Re: Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

#116

Post by simonw »

bediger4000 wrote: post #99
simonw wrote: post #5

That's the thing where if you have significant assets your family members get kidnapped until you irreversibly transfer those assets to criminals, right? I'm not sure how crypto continues to gain mainstream adoption in the face of that , no matter how much excitement there is for it in the current US administration. My previous argument was that a technology where losing your password means you lose your net worth wa…

The irreversible transfer is a large part of the attraction isn't it? Your business policy may be "no refunds", but customers paying with credit cards have a decent chance of a refund from Visa or MasterCard. Now your "no refunds" business, which might be on the scammy side, has to deal with Visa's lawyers per charge backs. Irreversible transactions make scammy businesses more profitable.

Sure, that's attractive to vendors. It's not attractive to consumers.

Re: Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

#117

Post by simonw »

pawelduda wrote: post #13
simonw wrote: post #5

That's the thing where if you have significant assets your family members get kidnapped until you irreversibly transfer those assets to criminals, right? I'm not sure how crypto continues to gain mainstream adoption in the face of that , no matter how much excitement there is for it in the current US administration. My previous argument was that a technology where losing your password means you lose your net worth wa…

Kidnapping and ransom existed before crypto

Reducing the barrier to successfully executing a kidnapping-for-cash turns out to make that crime more common.

Re: Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

#118

Post by ecocentrik »

cherryteastain wrote: post #102
ecocentrik wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cryptocurrency also empowers kleptocrats, dictators and warmongers to bypass sanctions and international banking controls, making it more likely that politically and economically oppressive states will thrive and persist for longer. The benefit to the individual is marginal compared to the benefits to actors that might limit that individual's other freedoms. Also, foreign exchange controls aren't the only form of tax…

Kleptocrats, dictators and warmongers have been around for way longer than crypto. If sanctions worked, the likes of Kim family or Iran's ayatollahs would have fallen in the 90s or 2000s. Crypto allows my family members to bypass arbitrary restrictions set by one such kleptocrat right now so the benefit is very much more than marginal.

They had to transfer gold, US dollars or other physical assets to finance their operations before which made them significantly more vulnerable and restricted. Sending crypto to your family is a temporary solution to the problem of the kleptocracy economically handicapping their capacity to generate and retain wealth. Crypto enables the kleptocrat to transfer the wealth they steal from their country internationally with a significantly lower transactional cost and at significantly higher volume.

By sending your family money, as crypto or US dollars, you have to assume some percentage of that money is going to end up in the kleptocrat's pocket. If the funds are eventually settled through official exchanges in the country, its very likely that the government gets a cut of the exchange transactions. If its being settled by unofficial exchanges like street exchange vendors, those individuals probably pay some bribe or tax to operate that eventually makes its way back to the kleptocrat. Additionally you are offering the kleptocrat increased liquidity by operating with crypto. Assume the kleptocrat is the largest buyer of cryptocurrencies in their country.

Re: Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

#119

Post by bediger4000 »

simonw wrote: post #116
bediger4000 wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irreversible transfer is a large part of the attraction isn't it? Your business policy may be "no refunds", but customers paying with credit cards have a decent chance of a refund from Visa or MasterCard. Now your "no refunds" business, which might be on the scammy side, has to deal with Visa's lawyers per charge backs. Irreversible transactions make scammy businesses more profitable.

Sure, that's attractive to vendors. It's not attractive to consumers.

Hence advocating cryptocurrency based on other aspects of it. Irreversible transactions plus decentralized means scammy businesses are more profitable and harder to be rid of.

Re: Crypto has become the ultimate swamp asset

#120

Post by throw0101b »

Spooky23 wrote: post #103
keiferski wrote: post #38

The history of crypto is pretty much a story of technical people creating something interesting with a cyberpunk/ open ethos - then the financial industry realizing it can be exploited to make money in ethically dubious ways, while simultaneously destroying the philosophy behind it. The bitcoin paper is still one of the most elegant technical documents I’ve ever read, a decade+ since it was published. I’m not sure wh…

Crypto is the way it is because there are behaviors that are driven by perceived anonymity. We’ve seen it time and time again and fail to learn or understand the lessons. I’m a child of the 90s. The exuberant promise of the wonders of free access to information really fell short and transformed the world in odious ways. We gave access to a vast swath of human knowledge, but instead consume gambling, porn and think th…

> Crypto is the way it is because there are behaviors that are driven by perceived anonymity.

See Penny Arcade comic from 2004:

* https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...

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