131–140 of 244 posts
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How are you supposed to trust the person who you are buying goods from will deliver once they receive the payment. As they will anyways be illegaly selling the goods for crypto there will be even more mistrust. If you do payment after delivery then the other side needs to be trusted.
Maybe doing your research before buying something online same as with cash payments is a good idea. I'd pick a vendor who accepts crypto besides fiat, I assure you there are lots of them.
Crypto is increasingly looking like a Ponzi scheme to me. I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion on HN but it's no less true. The fact is that blockchain solves a problem for almost nobody. The primary use seems to be to avoid real or threatened government intervention. These uses are largely illegal, by definition (eg bypassing capital controls in China). Now you can argue the morality of such laws but that…
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If you follow the Ethereum core developers on Twitter you can track the progress. Current status is (1) people have locked ~$30-40B worth of Ethereum into the proof of stake chain, money which can't be retrieved until the merge (2) the Ethereum team has a merged testnet running on which all the different client developer teams are participating. They're just hunting for edge case bugs now, too much money at stake to…
This is a part of crypto I do not fully grasp. How much power do the developers vs the miners have over the direction of the project? What happens if the devs go crazy and decide to eg. Ban transactions smaller than $1M worth of coins in code. Someone made the point the other day that miners might not fancy this PoS change because they’re heavily invested in equipment.
There are many checks and balances to all successful open-source projects.
And when that fails you can always fork it.
An interesting angle that seems overlooked in articles about India and China "banning" cryptocurrencies is that these efforts are often linked to a desire to create centralized digital currencies. e.g. from this article: "India is also looking to make a framework for the official digital currency that will be issued by the Reserve Bank of India."
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This is an important point - I think a lot of us tech people like to think "no it only exists on the internet the govt can't touch it! It's like international waters!", but then you have countries that can completely restrict or shut down the internet. As long as the infrastructure exists in the real world and is controlled by a govt, then the "imaginary online stuff" is still ultimately under their control. Even in…
Eventually efficient systems will implement zero knowledge proofs. Not necessarily because of "privacy", but because of the efficiency gains of such a system. Privacy is just a bi-product of this information theory reality.
An interesting angle that seems overlooked in articles about India and China "banning" cryptocurrencies is that these efforts are often linked to a desire to create centralized digital currencies. e.g. from this article: "India is also looking to make a framework for the official digital currency that will be issued by the Reserve Bank of India."
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If you follow the Ethereum core developers on Twitter you can track the progress. Current status is (1) people have locked ~$30-40B worth of Ethereum into the proof of stake chain, money which can't be retrieved until the merge (2) the Ethereum team has a merged testnet running on which all the different client developer teams are participating. They're just hunting for edge case bugs now, too much money at stake to…
This is a part of crypto I do not fully grasp. How much power do the developers vs the miners have over the direction of the project? What happens if the devs go crazy and decide to eg. Ban transactions smaller than $1M worth of coins in code. Someone made the point the other day that miners might not fancy this PoS change because they’re heavily invested in equipment.
An interesting angle that seems overlooked in articles about India and China "banning" cryptocurrencies is that these efforts are often linked to a desire to create centralized digital currencies. e.g. from this article: "India is also looking to make a framework for the official digital currency that will be issued by the Reserve Bank of India."
Ie creating something that could be useful as an actual currency?
That holds true of a lot of human innovations. People could not imagine automobiles or flying or computers, but that did not make them impossible.
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In this case, no legitimate seller would be allowed to sell you physical goods for cryptocurrencies - you'd have to buy some physical goods abroad and then import them or the money (India does not have free movement of capital across the border).
Just checking possibilities here. Let's say you want to buy my house and I want to sell it to you. We are in India. You transfer crypto to my wallet then I, in return, donate my house to you. Would this donation work on the legal papers today? I suspect that in Brazil, where I live today, it would.
But why would you want to sell a house this way instead for a permitted means of payment? Even if your scheme is unlikely to be detected, if does add a nontrivial risk of getting detected (or getting intentionally exposed, or blackmailed to get exposed) and get very unpleasant consequences for that, and given the extra difficulties of enforcing the deal, you would likely expect a significant extra markup above "normal price" to sell the house this way. Furthermore, if this is criminalized, then even offering or requesting this as an option carries some risk.
Also, I'm not informed of Indian law, but in most western countries this "donation of house" would definitely incur a significant tax and possibly trigger a tax audit/money laundering investigation. Combined with the risk markup, that would meant that laundering cryptocurrencies would be somewhat expensive. Not impossible, of course, money gets laundered - but it would mean that you would actually have to follow all the inconveniences, risks and costs of a money laundering process if you'd want to handle cryptocurrency, and that would discourage many people from doing so.