291–300 of 424 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This really is the key thing. Crypto allows for the evasion of laws. That's its key contribution. In authoritarian states this is probably a net good. In the rest of the world this is a harm. "The killer app for this technology is crime."
> Crypto allows for the evasion of laws. Uber allowed anyone to drive without a taxi medallion. AirBnB allowed anyone to turn a home into a hotel. Amazon allowed anyone to buy a book online, without having to go to a book store. Not everything is about evasion of laws.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks to Ethereum (and specially now that there are L2s which have cheaper tx costs) I can distribute revenue from my business between different types of collaborators, without incurring in paying 120% in taxes for having "employees". In Argentina if someone works for you more than 15/20 hours in a given month you are legally obliged to hire them for, at least, 3 months. The legislation doesn't fit in tons of cases,…
This really is the key thing. Crypto allows for the evasion of laws. That's its key contribution. In authoritarian states this is probably a net good. In the rest of the world this is a harm. "The killer app for this technology is crime."
I mean, let’s buy in on the idea that it is good to enable tax evasion in dysfunctional countries, just for the sake of argument.
Isn’t the bitcoin ledger publicly visible? It seems to me that bitcoin isn’t providing a good way to perform tax evasion. It is creating a totally immutable record of tax evasion, that local authorities just aren’t looking at yet. This is, like, the last place I’d store records of my crimes. If anything it seems more like a (maybe) unintentional honeypot.
Of course, it is possible to obfuscate your identity through various means when using bitcoins, but it doesn’t happen automatically. And the US government basically beat Tornado cash, right? If you want to be anonymous on the ledger you have some pretty scary enemies I think…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nobody "prefers" it (psychopaths need not apply), but against a regime where literally their prevention method to getting replaced is "bloodshed", what is your suggestion?
To starve the government financially, through mechanisms of tax evasion. As a very last resource, because again, I do not condone crimes, but : When tyrants rule, it's our human right to disobey. Would you accept to be subservient to a power structure that doesn't work for you? For the "We The People"? Vote them away yes, given voting is not a deceptive theatrical show like it is in Venezuela. So, what are the other…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, thank you for your comment. Altcoins are terrible, NFTs are terrible, it was all a trend and I'm glad it's gone now. Bitcoin is different, always has been, always will be. Bitcoin is the digital gold. In my opinion it's not a currency and will not function like a currency but rather like gold. You don't buy your latte with gold, but you own gold stocks. Same thing with Bitcoin. It's the safest, oldest, most test…
One problem I see with the store of value idea, in the long run, is that I don't know if BTC's double spend prevention will survive its design. The point of mining is to prevent double spend attacks. It does this in a rather brute-force way: the network as a whole always maintains a higher hashrate than any attacker. The network always out-spends the attacker to maintain security. As described in my prior comment the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you think that's a crime you are delusional about the uses of money Tax evasion is against the law and therefore is objectively a crime. Whether or not the law is good is a different discussion entirely.
Maybe you have a heavy US centric point of view? I don't condone tax evasion, but if I can't work because the State wants to go broke before I can even start running my business sorry but no one will do it.
I'm not commenting on whether this particular case of lawbreaking is morally supportable or not. Even if it's 100% morally justified, it's still lawbreaking.
Every bit of evidence is that the crypto boom has crashed to Earth. In tech it is basically a dirty word now and is overwhelmingly associated with the worst products, the worst teams and the worst get rich and quick sorts. In the rest of the market it has made little to no impact. Yet somehow BTC is still trading at close to historic highs. Now to be fair the market cap of all of BTC is 1/4 Apple, but if it were remo…
BTC went from like 3-4k covid lows to 69k. BTC is a symptom of clown world economics money printing. investing in BTC is a bet that people in power of money will continue to act in their own selfish interest. it's a bet on clown world continuity. i love that. i think it has utility but is there good reason for it to be $30k and not $1k outside of money printing...i doubt it.
For the present price that is approx 48 mil x $10k / 16 mil = $30k
Early 2017 would have been 1.6 mil x $10k / 16 mil = $1k
It's rough and ready but kind of how things play out. Most of the growth in price over the years has come from more people buying in. Not sure where it ends. We might get another 10x and 500 million people at some point?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As much as I would like to believe BTC's market is completely fake, there has to be some real liquidity there. The hashrate is ~421 EH/s which represents a tremendous amount of ongoing spending on mining equipment and energy. That spending has to be funded somehow and the only way that makes sense is by selling the mined BTC. So there may be a lot of wash trading and games played with stablecoins trying to prop up th…
Yes, thank you for your comment. Altcoins are terrible, NFTs are terrible, it was all a trend and I'm glad it's gone now. Bitcoin is different, always has been, always will be. Bitcoin is the digital gold. In my opinion it's not a currency and will not function like a currency but rather like gold. You don't buy your latte with gold, but you own gold stocks. Same thing with Bitcoin. It's the safest, oldest, most test…
Also - how much actual real-world money backs a USDT? When Tether comes undone and people realize there is only a suitcase of IOUs, there is going to be a run for the exits and BTC will sell at a huge discount.
Real world commodities don't have that problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This really is the key thing. Crypto allows for the evasion of laws. That's its key contribution. In authoritarian states this is probably a net good. In the rest of the world this is a harm. "The killer app for this technology is crime."
> Crypto allows for the evasion of laws. Uber allowed anyone to drive without a taxi medallion. AirBnB allowed anyone to turn a home into a hotel. Amazon allowed anyone to buy a book online, without having to go to a book store. Not everything is about evasion of laws.
Every bit of evidence is that the crypto boom has crashed to Earth. In tech it is basically a dirty word now and is overwhelmingly associated with the worst products, the worst teams and the worst get rich and quick sorts. In the rest of the market it has made little to no impact. Yet somehow BTC is still trading at close to historic highs. Now to be fair the market cap of all of BTC is 1/4 Apple, but if it were remo…
Why would anybody buy something that they can't sell for real money any more? Shouldn't that convince even the dumbest acolytes that there is no value to be had?