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The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

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Re: The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

#311

Post by spiralx »

oblio wrote: post #231
dsco wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great take. I never see this type of anti-crypto sentiment on HN. What does it feel like to be a contrarian?

Did you ever wonder why HN has so few vaccine contrarians but it has a lot of cryptocurrency contrarians? Smart people are generally[1] better at seeing through scams and dishonest deals. [1] Not always, of course, and hype can infect everyone, for a while at least.

Really? HN is one of the most anti-vax and COVID conspiratorial sites I browse regularly, it's pretty right-wing.

Re: The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

#312

Post by top_sigrid »

monero-xmr wrote: post #305
top_sigrid wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It baffles me, that the people that are the most cryptocurreny-enthusiast are the ones most likely to confuse the proof for a _usecase_ of a technology with the sheer _price_ development a digital token on a completely volatile market. What your comment says is that more people decided to pump money into a cryptocurrency over (completely biased chosen) x amount of time than people cashing out (if put differently one…

I mean I could list a ton of milestones and use cases and things but on HN few people care about that. The price is an easy way to quantify the value to the market holistically.

And yet again you confuse monetary "value" (more like exchange value) with value as in there is a use for it.

Re: The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

#313

Post by DSingularity »

93po wrote: post #130
gerdesj wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I idly played with BTC one evening and I let it mine for about a week or so on a fairly poky PC and got bored of it eventually. I was more interested in Folding@Home. As it turns out I was both right and wrong. That BTC was going to be worth up to $64,000 at one point in time. However, protein folding might save lives. I ditched that PC and didn't copy over the wallet because I'd forgotten about it - it wasn't that i…

I always console people by telling them there's no way you'd have held on to that BTC all the way to $64k. You'd probably sell it for a few hundred

And if not — definitely when it hit a thousand.

Re: The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

#314

Post by zirgs »

andirk wrote: post #269
zirgs wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

51% attacker has the ability to block any transaction. The whole selling point of Bitcoin is that nobody can do that.

> The whole selling point of Bitcoin is that nobody can do that. It is absolutely possible but not practical. The selling point of bitcoin in this regard is that the work needed to take over the network is relative to the size of the network. You can 51% a small shitcoin all day. It might cost you $50,000 to do it and now you control a coin that has become worthless because it got hacked by you.

It's not practical right now, but if block reward and bitcoin price go way down then what are the options? Only the most die hard bitcoin fanatics are going to mine at a loss without getting anything in return. Are there enough of them to prevent 51% attacks?

I would not be surprised if a large crypto exchange takes over bitcoin mining some time in the future. Crypto gamblers don't really care about decentralisation or censorship resistance. They only want the number to go up.

Re: The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

#315

Post by zirgs »

kavalg wrote: post #267
zirgs wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A tiny amount of gold costs a shitload of money. 1kg of gold costs around 60k eur. More than most people have in savings. No problems to transport something like that if you don't brag that you own it. But the same applies to BTC. Telling others that you own a large amount of it is not a good idea. It can be stolen in various ways too. Like by an exchange that's owned by a trustworthy and altruistic billionaire. It's…

I don't think it is so simple. There is already a EUR 10k limit on the amount of cash that you can carry across EU border without declaring it. In case of violations the money may be confiscated. I would assume that the same would apply for gold above some reasonable value (e.g. a really big gold necklace :) ).

OK and why would you choose not to declare it?

I think you meant external borders, because there are no border checks between Schengen area countries.

Re: The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

#316

Post by spiralx »

blackoil wrote: post #261
nwah1 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banking is digital, and thus functionally money in general is digital and has been since the 60s. The dollar itself is physical. No central banks are proposing the use of a blockchain, as that would be a completely ridiculous and counter-productive thing to do. But some are investigating good old-fashioned centralized ledgers that work, can scale, are cheap to run, have reversibility, have fraud protection, have iden…

> The dollar itself is physical. That's not true in practice. Dollar may exist in physical form but most of them or any currency exist in purely digital world. When Fed announces a trillion dollar stimulus, printing press don't go burrr. They just make some entries in computer an a trillion dollars are created.

CBDCs are a digital equivalent to cash more than currency as a whole - they are something you hold yourself in a "wallet" instead of existing as bank deposits, and in fact they could end up reducing the need for current accounts by providing digital and automated payments directly, although banks will still serve other purposes and most will likely still not want to hold all their own money for security and just general change aversion.

Re: The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

#317

Post by mrguyorama »

lottin wrote: post #157
tosihakkeri wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the problem: the problems Bitcoin is solving aren’t problems in the first place.

Yeah, I can't imagine anybody wanting to buy a car and being deterred because they didn't have a means of exchange.

When someone bought my car we used cash. How is bitcoin superior to being able to take physical property in my hand that I know will be respected 1:1 by every legitimate institution, business, or person I know?

Re: The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

#318

Post by red-iron-pine »

ozim wrote: post #219
renewiltord wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. Crypto was the sort of thing you might hear about from a cabbie or at the barber shop. It was definitely something for the normal person on the street. In fact, that was used as a common sell signal with people quoting the "When your shoeshine boy gives you stock tips" stuff.

I just wanted to add perspective that for these cabbies and normal people it was gambling. It was not “get free from the government” it was not about convenience of digital payments or whatever crypto promise was there. For normal people it was get rich quick scheme and that is why advertising was so annoying. I agree with parent comment - in the end it never really mattered for normal people.

It was gambling for everyone. Investors just had more to lose, more options to help hedge, and, in theory, more financial knowledge.

It's not a commodity, and it's utility as a currency was debatable.

Re: The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

#319

Post by nwah1 »

blackoil wrote: post #261
nwah1 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Banking is digital, and thus functionally money in general is digital and has been since the 60s. The dollar itself is physical. No central banks are proposing the use of a blockchain, as that would be a completely ridiculous and counter-productive thing to do. But some are investigating good old-fashioned centralized ledgers that work, can scale, are cheap to run, have reversibility, have fraud protection, have iden…

> The dollar itself is physical. That's not true in practice. Dollar may exist in physical form but most of them or any currency exist in purely digital world. When Fed announces a trillion dollar stimulus, printing press don't go burrr. They just make some entries in computer an a trillion dollars are created.

The Fed doesn't create new base money, and they cannot really offer "stimulus" the way Congress can. They can just change the asset classes on their books. But because of their unique position, the choice of those asset classes affects how much money ends up back in their reserve accounts.

Only the Treasury can create new money. The proliferation of banknotes, which are considered legal tender, makes it a bit more complex and thus money in your checking account is money by some definition, but could not exist without base money. The Fed can change the incentives that drive the level of debt, and in that way manage the money supply.

It is for this reason that some call CBDC "digital base money." It is the money that is in reserves or cash, not merely an IOU... even if that IOU is federally insured.

But yea, monetary reserves held in Federal Reserve accounts is also digital already.

Re: The number of banks willing to do business with the crypto industry is shrinking

#320

Post by comte7092 »

jamiegreen wrote: post #224
windex wrote: post #110

So many HODLers in this thread. For the normal person on the street, Bitcoin or Crypto never mattered. The endlessly breathless PR was irritating. Whatever happens, this wont be missed.

It never mattered if you live in a country with a stable currency and access to modern financial services. If that is you, you are in a very small minority of the world population. For the rest of the world, there seems to be some value... https://blog.chainalysis.com/reports/2021-global-crypto-adop...

Having some friends in such countries (Argentina), my anecdotal reports are that they end up holding dollars rather than crypto.
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