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

You Can Forget About Crypto Now

theatlantic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 238 posts

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#141

Post by bogwog »

x86x87 wrote: post #92
slaw wrote: post #3

> despite the ricketiness of the whole system, despite the constant feeling that everything might fall apart at any moment, there will come a time when crypto really arrives. For me crypto was always Ponzi scheme and nothing more, but it is because I don't laundry money or sell drugs, so I am not the target for crypto.

The narrative that crypto is usefull jusy for buying drugs or laundering money is ridiculous. A couple a weeks ago I did a wire half way across the globe. It took almost 7 days for the money to arrive. With bitcoin? 60 minutes. Remember when OnlyFans was in trouble because of the payments processors wanting to pull the rug? You probably don't and you probably are not aware how many people would have been impacted. Do…

So the use cases you're going with are:

* Wire transfers

* Paying for porn

* Avoiding civil asset forfeiture

I think 99% of people watch free/ad-supported porn, and anyone concerned about civil asset forfeiture is likely either a criminal, or a conspiracy theorist and/or paranoid schizo (i.e. a small minority of the population).

Wire transfers are a legitimate use-case maybe. I don't really know much about that as I've never personally had to do it. But if that's the only legitimate use case for cryptocurrency, then it's probably a better idea to try and improve the efficiency of traditional wire transfers than to use fake money that's a magnet for fraud/scams/crimes.

> Blockchain tech is here to stay.

This I agree with. Blockchain as a general technology is useful, but not for financial products/services.

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#142

Post by grobbyy »

rhaway84773 wrote: post #123
x86x87 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The narrative that crypto is usefull jusy for buying drugs or laundering money is ridiculous. A couple a weeks ago I did a wire half way across the globe. It took almost 7 days for the money to arrive. With bitcoin? 60 minutes. Remember when OnlyFans was in trouble because of the payments processors wanting to pull the rug? You probably don't and you probably are not aware how many people would have been impacted. Do…

You do understand that Wiring money is not slow because of the technology right? And it has everything to do with government regulations around anti-terrorism, anti-money laundering, anti-fraud, etc.? I think it’s hilarious that you think your wire was slow because of the geographical distance the message had to travel (“halfway across the world”) as opposed to the fact that it had to travel across jurisdictions with…

Many of us don't want everything we do monitored and tracked. I understand this leads to more financial fraud, laundering, and terrorism, but if I were to list my problems in life, those are nowhere near the top. Privacy is much higher.

That's not a universal statement -- that calculus could change -- but this is the case for me in the developed world in 2022.

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#143

Post by azangru »

thr0wawayf00 wrote: post #116
azangru wrote: post #67

When they say "crypto", what do they mean. No, I understand that it's something to do with cryptocurrencies; but, confusingly, they must mean something more specific than that; because isn't bitcoin the OG of cryptocurrencies? And doesn't it still hold the promise of a parallel peer-to-peer non-inflationary currency, suitable for self-custody, which is totally orthogonal to the meltdown of a cryptoexchange? Does The…

> And doesn't it still hold the promise of a parallel peer-to-peer non-inflationary currency, suitable for self-custody, which is totally orthogonal to the meltdown of a cryptoexchange? The meltdown of FTX is not orthogonal to bitcoin, it's an outright vulnerability of the system. You can't have a crypto exchange crash without underlying crypto tokens, period. If you're going to argue the merits of the design of cryp…

> system of recklessness that drove the price of Bitcoin to astronomical heights only to crash.

I am probably going to sound extremely naive and uneducated; but when we say "price of Bitcoin", don't we normally mean its value relative to fiat currencies? And isn't it true that our regular fiat currencies are inherently inflationary, and thus not a good long-term storage of value? Wouldn't the lack of trust in fiat currencies drive the price of Bitcoin too?

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#144

Post by eduction »

rhaway84773 wrote: post #123
x86x87 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The narrative that crypto is usefull jusy for buying drugs or laundering money is ridiculous. A couple a weeks ago I did a wire half way across the globe. It took almost 7 days for the money to arrive. With bitcoin? 60 minutes. Remember when OnlyFans was in trouble because of the payments processors wanting to pull the rug? You probably don't and you probably are not aware how many people would have been impacted. Do…

You do understand that Wiring money is not slow because of the technology right? And it has everything to do with government regulations around anti-terrorism, anti-money laundering, anti-fraud, etc.? I think it’s hilarious that you think your wire was slow because of the geographical distance the message had to travel (“halfway across the world”) as opposed to the fact that it had to travel across jurisdictions with…

> I think it’s hilarious that you think your wire was slow because of the geographical distance the message had to travel

I don’t see anything in the post you are replying to that indicates they believe this. They noted the distance, which makes clear many practical issues (it was not only another country but not in a trading or common regulation block like the EU).

It’s clear the amount of time involved is the obstacle the person had issue with. This seems like a use case for crypto (even if I personally would tend to just do the wire whenever practical).

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#145

Post by Kinrany »

rhaway84773 wrote: post #123
x86x87 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The narrative that crypto is usefull jusy for buying drugs or laundering money is ridiculous. A couple a weeks ago I did a wire half way across the globe. It took almost 7 days for the money to arrive. With bitcoin? 60 minutes. Remember when OnlyFans was in trouble because of the payments processors wanting to pull the rug? You probably don't and you probably are not aware how many people would have been impacted. Do…

You do understand that Wiring money is not slow because of the technology right? And it has everything to do with government regulations around anti-terrorism, anti-money laundering, anti-fraud, etc.? I think it’s hilarious that you think your wire was slow because of the geographical distance the message had to travel (“halfway across the world”) as opposed to the fact that it had to travel across jurisdictions with…

> I think it’s hilarious that you think your wire was slow because of the geographical distance the message had to travel (“halfway across the world”) as opposed to the fact that it had to travel across jurisdictions with different laws.

They meant exactly that. The claim that blockchain is faster because of technology is obviously a complete strawman.

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#146

Post by rhaway84773 »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #105
slaw wrote: post #3

> despite the ricketiness of the whole system, despite the constant feeling that everything might fall apart at any moment, there will come a time when crypto really arrives. For me crypto was always Ponzi scheme and nothing more, but it is because I don't laundry money or sell drugs, so I am not the target for crypto.

1) the article is very good news, because Crypto the hype newsline word is dead. This means we are past the hype phase of the hype cycle and collapsed to the steady climb of actual usefulness. The US Dollar is a big scam too, if COVID didn't highlight that then... well, it doesn't really matter.

How the hell did COVID, a period over which the dollar’s value has increased, reveal the USD as a scam?

What COVID did is reveal what a currency actually is. It’s a bet on the reliability of the backers of the currency. In the case of the USD, that would be the US government and economy.

BTC only has value because people don’t seem to understand this basic fact of a currency.

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#147

Post by TacticalCoder »

Once again, as usual, only negative things about crypto being talked about on HN, with only negative comments and nothing positive ever.

Despite dang constantly asking people to not boast.

Outside of the HN bubble, I see a lot of people into crypto who are all posting: "I told you so".

As simple as: "Your keys, your coins".

We're talking about Bloomberg, Sequoia Capital and oh so many others coming up with hit pieces up until a few days ago about how SBF was a "philantropic genius". The issue is not cryptocurrencies here. The issue is scammers and the financial world having, once again, turned a complete blind eye to people running scams.

Cryptocurrencies are just an excuse here.

Isn't the bigger story how, every single time scammers, be it people packaging synthetic CDOs and selling them to investors as AAA investments before the subprime crisis or the SBF of this world, there are big names lauding these products as creation from geniuses?

There were people calling out SBF as a fraud. A trader pointed out, more than a month ago, that the only picture of the CTO, called "Wang" (most common family name in the world: 65 million people have that family name), was a picture taken from behind.

That same person noticed that one of the person high up the chain in the SBF fraud was already linked to an only poker scandal where the poker site was defrauding users.

Meanwhile Bloomberg was lauding SBF as the biggest genius of our time.

Why isn't that the story?

Why isn't the story about Gary Gensler being accused by a congressman of working hand in hand with FTX/Alameda to allow FTX to acquire a monopoly on crypto exchange by regulatory capture? All the while a colleague of Gary Gensler is the father of Alameda's 28 years-old CEO.

Serious people: wake up.

I'm not the one making these accusations. A US congressman is accusing Gary Gensler, the very chair of the SEC, of allegedly working with (for?) SBF.

But, no, according to most of HN the culprits are... People who want something else than a currency of which the central banks can print trillions of at will?

We're talking about officials and politicians receving $40 millions in donation from a fraudsters and "respected" magazines presenting that fraudster as one of the biggest genius of our times.

That's the real story.

But, no, let's focus instead on the angle: "Cryptocurrencies are dead now".

I'm sure that the corrupt officials, politicians and the very dubious players who lauded SBF as a genius do love that angle.

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#148

Post by peterweyand »

The promise of crypto was that someone found a way to make a non-duplicable, tradeable token. First by proof of work and then by proof stake.

The problem is that they forgot the 1 against all adversarial nature of internet security. A trillion dollar empire set against one way of securing assets is in essence a trillion dollar bounty on breaking your security regime. And what was found? That the system was complex enough that most security "hacks" were mostly social engineering with a sprinkling of insecure gateways and passwords. Neither the users of wallets or the engineers of exchanges put in enough time and effort to secure their holdings in relation to the dollar values they held. Wild swings in the stability of coin values created arbitrage opportunities which made some users exceedingly rich, prompting more dumb money to enter the system. That's a bug, not a feature.

I still think there's value for crypto to evade censorship and manipulation of populations via legislation of the money supply. But that requires a whole slew of low level techs to maintain and verify transactions. At some level that may make it as onerous and bureaucratic as our current financial systems.

I just hope that this doesn't cause financial contagion in the traditional sectors.

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#149

Post by themihai »

popol12 wrote: post #13
otikik wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is also what makes it impossible. Trust is a prerequisite to any commercial exchange, since it requires at least two different parties. Big centralized systems use a third party for “scam protection”. Math alone can’t replace trust.

DEX are working nicely and constantly improving. Today, CEX are only useful for on/off ramp of fiat.

The high fees made DEX impractical

Re: You Can Forget About Crypto Now

#150

Post by malermeister »

mhluongo wrote: post #135
rhaway84773 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do understand that Wiring money is not slow because of the technology right? And it has everything to do with government regulations around anti-terrorism, anti-money laundering, anti-fraud, etc.? I think it’s hilarious that you think your wire was slow because of the geographical distance the message had to travel (“halfway across the world”) as opposed to the fact that it had to travel across jurisdictions with…

> I think it’s hilarious that you think your wire was slow because of the geographical distance the message had to travel (“halfway across the world”) as opposed to the fact that it had to travel across jurisdictions with different laws Condescending straw man here. Being able to use BTC to do this, routing around the various jurisdictional settlement layers, is a huge practical improvement. Those 7 days don't make s…

You think preventing fraud, money laundering or terrorism funding (the specific examples cited above) doesn't make society better?
Post reply on HN