Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a dozen better ways than Crypto to bribe politicians.
A Boeing. Straight cash. Naming anirports or other public spaces. The aforementioned shitcoin. What are the others?
donations to an inauguration fund.
Binance fired employees who found $1.7B in crypto was sent to Iran
161–170 of 279 posts
Re: Binance fired employees who found $1.7B in crypto was sent to Iran
#162Isn't this like the #1 use case for crypto? Everyone wants an untrackable unblockable currency that is out of government control until the day it is used for things they don't like, then suddenly "government please control this!"
It's also the #1 use case for $100 US dollar bills. Most US $100 bills, in fact, are not even in the US.[a][b] US $100 bills are the currency of choice for small-time crooks and evildoers around the world. They are also the currency of choice for big-time crooks and evildoers. Briefcases of US $100 bills have long been used for illicit payments, as depicted in numerous books and movies. Just because crooks and evildo…
I knew someone who ran an exchange house (like the kind you find in airports)
He said that euros are very popular because there are 500 euro bills.
I guess they stopped making them.
Re: Binance fired employees who found $1.7B in crypto was sent to Iran
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also the #1 use case for $100 US dollar bills. Most US $100 bills, in fact, are not even in the US.[a][b] US $100 bills are the currency of choice for small-time crooks and evildoers around the world. They are also the currency of choice for big-time crooks and evildoers. Briefcases of US $100 bills have long been used for illicit payments, as depicted in numerous books and movies. Just because crooks and evildo…
> Just because criminals and evildoers use US $100 bills doesn't mean they are not useful and valuable to honest people too. Like all of the ATMs near a dispensary that was always out of cash because 20 individual $20 bills runs out a lot faster than 4 $100 bills. Until dispensaries became legal, it was rare for me to see an ATM with anything other than $20s. Now, I see $20, $50, $100 dispensing machines regularly.
> Now, I see $20, $50, $100 dispensing machines regularly.
There's also been a lot of inflation.
If you held a $50 bill in 1997, or a $20 bill in 1978, then you held a note worth more than a $100 bill today.
Re: Binance fired employees who found $1.7B in crypto was sent to Iran
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a dozen better ways than Crypto to bribe politicians.
A Boeing. Straight cash. Naming anirports or other public spaces. The aforementioned shitcoin. What are the others?
Vanity movie productions for family members. Real estate deals in various places, if necessary you first bulldoze them with the local military.
Re: Binance fired employees who found $1.7B in crypto was sent to Iran
#165Isn't this like the #1 use case for crypto? Everyone wants an untrackable unblockable currency that is out of government control until the day it is used for things they don't like, then suddenly "government please control this!"
I thought the #1 use case for crypto was ransomware, followed by shitcoin rug-pulls, and the ability to commit theft without recourse. Sending money to Iran is just a minor edge case.
I like to amuse myself that if Robert Preston had lived another 20 years that Stephen Colbert or John Oliver would have paid him a heap of money to explain cryptocurrency to us all and it never would have happened.
Re: Binance fired employees who found $1.7B in crypto was sent to Iran
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pointing at the BTC transaction fee and saying it is super expensive is like pointing at a problematic car model and saying all cars are bad. There are any number of other popular coins out there that have the same or better liquidity as BTC that charge tiny fractions of the fees. And also settle in seconds. You're saying Bitcoin like BTC, but the parent commenter was probably referring to the giant ecosystem of coin…
What? I was replying to someone who explicitly referenced the Bitcoin whitepaper, they were clearly talking about BTC. And the protocol from the whitepaper was actually pretty bad, from a cost and transaction time point of view. It's gotten a bit better with some hacks layered on top of it. And yeah, the thing is, payment systems that work approximately as well as BTC exist without being cryptocurrency and using up s…
What’s your point? That BTC was the first and it has these flaws? Ok, fine, but that also doesn’t discount the point being made here which is that shitcoins DO have an actual use case that people are using them for in the real world. It might be the only actual valid (legal) use case, which is kind of what some other responders implied, but it doesn’t mean that there is no value.
If payment systems that aren’t shitcoin based are working just as well, then why are these coins absolutely destroying the incumbent players like Western Union in the remittance space? If the existing solutions are good enough you wouldn’t expect incumbents to be taking such a beating here right? The systems are equivalent enough? WU does for instance 100B ish a year currently, which is around 12% of the global market. A fat share of that global remittance market is… checks notes… crypto based remittances.
I’m all for trashing the next shitcoin. Don’t mistake me for some crypto apologist. I personally don’t own or use them outside of narrow use cases where they are a transient thing that gets liquidated into actual fiat as soon as possible. It’s a world ripe for fraud and abuse and the whole concept of shitcoins is probably not great for society. But to take some poorly thought out implementation that was, mind you, the first attempt at actually doing this in the real world, and try to extract it to some general conclusion that the technology is not useful 15 years later is just patently false. If the alternatives you mention are so great, why are they not winning on mindshare worldwide? Certainly seems like crypto is winning in the remittance space.
Re: Binance fired employees who found $1.7B in crypto was sent to Iran
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's like saying every currency note is traceable because it has a serial number. If someone hands you a dollar today can you trace it starting from where it was printed to everything it was used for until it eventually got into your hands? Yeah you can look up bitcoin wallet IDs on the ledger, but you can also generate an unlimited number of wallets, and pass coins in any combination through any number of mixers a…
The difference is that with cash we don't write the serial number of every bill for every transaction in an easily-accessible central ledger. There's no such thing as an off-the-books Bitcoin transaction, by nature.
Most bitcoin transactions actually happen off-chain (aka "off the books"), mostly through exchanges but also through decentralized layers like Lightning Network. It's also possible to physically transfer value by exchanging a signing device or seed phrase.
Re: Binance fired employees who found $1.7B in crypto was sent to Iran
#168Re: Binance fired employees who found $1.7B in crypto was sent to Iran
#169Isn't this like the #1 use case for crypto? Everyone wants an untrackable unblockable currency that is out of government control until the day it is used for things they don't like, then suddenly "government please control this!"
I thought the #1 use case for crypto was ransomware, followed by shitcoin rug-pulls, and the ability to commit theft without recourse. Sending money to Iran is just a minor edge case.
Crypto is just temporary regulatory arbitrage. Same as BNPL which is totally not just payday loans.
Re: Binance fired employees who found $1.7B in crypto was sent to Iran
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a dozen better ways than Crypto to bribe politicians.
A Boeing. Straight cash. Naming anirports or other public spaces. The aforementioned shitcoin. What are the others?
Boeing has an enormous number of subcontractors. If boeing gets orders they'll make sure the subcontractors are in your district.