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CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

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Re: CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

#241
Just as a fun hypothetical to think about... an effective way to crack down on cryptocurrencies would be to do it under the table. Don't make any official policy about crypto other than recommending that US citizens don't invest in it. Attack the crypto ecosystem the way they attacked Iranian centrifuges. The damage is done by the CIA and NSA, not the SEC and FBI.

The goal is not to make it impossible to use crypto but to make it so untrustworthy that nobody wants to touch it. Host mirrors of popular software wallets with hidden malware. Add backdoors to some hardware wallets at the factory. Create trojans that sit quietly and harmlessly until you try to deposit your coins at an exchange, at which point, unbeknownst to you, your compromised browser is displaying the CIA's bitcoin address instead of the exchange's as the place to send your coins. Make smart contracts with increasingly clever obfuscated time bomb backdoors. And it all comes with easy plausible deniability, since any of these tricks could just as well be regular old crypto thieves, highly motivated by the massive "bug bounty" on any exploit, including social engineering, that lets them steal coins.

Of course, the backlash if this was ever found out would be immense. It would basically be the US government operating a cybercrime organization. Many of the victims would likely be US citizens speculating in crypto. It wouldn't be worth it unless the powers that be decided crypto is THAT dangerous to the status quo.

Re: CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

#242
post #231
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you name some use cases that aren’t trading crypto derivatives or crypto debt? Ethereum is certainly more interesting than Bitcoin but the use cases so far seem to be more speculation.

One use case: Buying something without a credit card online.

With Ethereum? That seems like one of the least interesting possible use cases.

* For one, Bitcoin can do this too (though not in many places)

* For two, you can’t do it in many places

* For three, you already can buy online with paypal, prepaid debit/credit, and other checkout solutions, for less fees. You can buy a prepaid credit card useable online in any convenience store for a low fee....

I don’t think this is what OP meant.

Re: CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

#243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great, yeah a lot of crypto builders thrive in power vacuums. So the Trump administration was convenient for the 2017 bubble, as a debilitated SEC was necessary for the token launches that made issuers millions (and billions). And a paralyzed Congress was necessary to get non-establishment people confirmed who will last many administrations. All of that lost its utility by 2020 as the outcomes were mostly solidified…

There is also an interesting argument about crypto being a convenient drain for excess liquidity in the system (injected by the stimulus), which is why it's not being regulated too heavily. If stocks & crypto were less appealing, perhaps we would all experience higher velocity of money & inflation since demand would turn to "real assets".

> which is why

Extrapolating any competence from policy makers on this is a bit too fantastic of a conclusion at this point in time. Cryptocurrency just does not have an adversarial relationship with the US government, and the musings of some policy makers that create existential threats just are not the opinion of an amorphous entity (which also doesn't exist). The longer the rest of us are familiar with the technology, the more likely the gradient shifts to a less and less probability of adversarial relationship with the US government.

Re: CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

#244
post #194

Capture US regulatory agencies while you can. This has already had varying levels of success with the Chief Legal Officer of Coinbase being the acting chair of the OCC and telling banks it was okay to custody crypto and settle transactions on cryptocurrency networks instead of just SWIFT, ACH, FedWire There are some at the SEC, and the new SEC chair was pro-crypto when he was previously the chair of CFTC Cabinet leve…

"Make the world as comfortable for your generation as older generations did for themselves." Make the world as comfortable for the early adopters [weighted from latest to earliest, so long as you're not left holding the bag] as the older generation had [before regulatory capture via industrial complexes and automation pooled more and more money to fewer and fewer]; FTFY.

speculation drives innovation.

Re: CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>NFTs have an astonishing number of use cases NFTs are the equivalent of trading cards or video game lootboxes. They enable a form of conspicuous consumption whereby you conjure up value by slapping a digital signature on something and creating artificial scarcity. From the perspective of the state none of these instruments improve supply chains, enhance military or state capacity, increase productivity or growth. NF…

Art is only one use case. NFTs can represent land ownership, driving licenses etc.

sure but putting a license on the internet isn't that innovative. Our driers licenses are pretty good and pretty cheap, and we've proven land-ownership over generations pretty well. This is not world-changing stuff.

If you want radical innovation build some robots that make house construction 90% cheaper, whether the license for my house is printed on paper or a blockchain doesn't matter to anyone.

NFTs and virtually any crypto tool have no impact on the material world, and we very much still live in the world of atoms.

Re: CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or make it illegal and have the NSA directly attack the compute used to secure it

Hah! :)) So naive. No way this is possible. Attacking compute used to secure it means attacking a whole lot of machines. And the people near those machines will patch them. An you need to attack 51% of them at the same time. Even if you manage to do a 2x spend, they will live with it and patch the stuff and people will still use it. Because what is a couple of 2x somewhere along the way compared to the rest of the bl…

If government agencies can hack into and disable secured nuclear facilities (this happened... yesterday), I dont see why it would be "impossible" to attack random Bitcoin mining facilities. When state level intelligence agencies are your adversary, I wouldn't assume you can "just patch it" either.

Re: CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

#247
post #53

Is the timing of this statement a coincidence, or is it possibly a jab to take the wind out of the sails of another top exchange set to go public in two days?

Judging by the market's non-reaction to this, I'm going with the latter.

Coinbase's IPO isn't until Wednesday.

Re: CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

#248
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Whatever your stance on cryptocurrencies are, what is of little dispute is the business opportunities they have created. Binance and Coinbase are large, successful companies. Poloniex was sold for ~400M. I find this argument a little weird, because I think we can all agree that bubbles and fad tech isn't really great for society as a whole. If you believe cryptocurrencies aren't a fad and actually provide useful be…

How can you not see what the importance of this new infrastructure? I come here and read these comments and am just at a loss for words at this point. Forget Bitcoin and look at Ethereum. This tech is so powerful I am in some ways scared of it and you call it a fad. The gulf between our interpretations drops my jaw to the floor :)

Maybe that might make you question your assumptions?

I mean, we've had a decades of cryptocurrency and just one actual application has arisen - crime. Money laundering, tax evasion, purchasing illegal items, and that sort of thing.

When it comes down to it, cryptocurrencies say that people trust some obscure algorithm that almost none of them could evaluate over society and governments.

It's a bad sign.

Re: CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

#249
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DeFi's main value proposition is the automation of money. NFTs main value proposition is fractional ownership and assertion of ownership rights in a transparent manner. Imagine owning 1% of a Drake song - and getting paid 1% of the royalties every time it plays on Spotify. Or creating a yield earning strategy that automatically moves money around based on fixed paramters without ever interacting with a banker or fund…

The reason we don't have fractional ownership of pop songs is because that's a bad idea, not because we can't figure out how to organize it.

David Bowie famously did securitize the rights to his songs for 10 years (1997-2007): https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/bowie-bond.asp

Re: CEO of a top Bitcoin exchange warns: crackdown on cryptocurrencies may be coming

#250

> U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and other officials have warned about the use of cryptocurrencies for illicit transactions. Wait until you hear about cash. More seriously (and hopefully less reductionist) i feel nations who embrace cryptocurrencies early will see mixed results as the landscape matures. I am more confident that nations which turn their back on it, or shut it out completely, will see a loss of o…

Crypto maximalists - and I know a LOT of them - are drawn to crypto because of ideology, not just the money. The idea that a person should own his/her own assets, be able to share and use them whenever they want, and be free from government censorship and foolhardy economic stewardship is incredibly powerful. When governments talk about banning crypto, what scares them isn't crypto; it's this ideology. And this ideol…

> You can create all sorts of regulations but that will only harden the stance of crypto maxis because it will only prove them right.

They can harden their stance all they want, but breaking the crypto ecosystem is incredibly easy if governments really wanted to. All you have to do is ban companies from interacting with crypto currencies in any form, be it accepting, exchanging, holding, or producing them. That would immediately shut off the gateways between the crypto ecosystem and the real economy, which reduces crypto to P2P transactions in parking lots.

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