Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait, WHAT? Your argument is: because a ton of people have put a ton of money into it, that proves that it's a scam? So the stock market, which has a much bigger market cap is therefore MORE of a scam? What are you trying to do here?
What a bizarre bit of strawmanning. The crypto brigade has arrived so this has all gone very desperately defensive. No, that isn't what I said. I said that clearly crypto in any rational sense has failed . Not just failed, overwhelmingly, catastrophically failed. It has zero relevance to the broader market. It has retreated from even where it was five years ago, that being a massively failed experiment. BTC has held…
Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users
311–320 of 424 posts
Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users
#312Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 suspect that you misunderstood my point. My point is that if you are doing something that is against the law, then it's against the law by definition. It's just logic, not cultural bias. 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.
Perhaps it's against the written law, but I think in most countries I am aware of, laws are subject to the judges' interpretation.
Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users
#313Earlier quoted context omitted.
[US specific] Without evasion of laws, women wouldn't be allowed to vote, black folks would be slaves, interracial marriage would be a crime...I can go on and on. The ability to disobey unjust laws is absolutely essential to the health of a society.
Wow you.. really shot your argument in the foot. All those unjust laws were, you know, changed. They weren’t evaded. And there are mechanisms to challenge laws you don’t like that don’t involve simply deciding you’re not going to obey them. But those mechanisms involve real costs that tend to blow away the moralising of most crypto bros.
>And there are mechanisms to challenge laws you don’t like that don’t involve simply deciding you’re not going to obey them.
I'm curious about those mechanism to challenge laws.
Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users
#314Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that allowing people to protect themselves from authoritarian governments is often a good thing. I also think it is important to understand that if this is the killer app then we need to be honest about what it is and how that affects people in states that are more just. The benefits to those suffering in Venezuela cannot be separated from the harms done to people in non-authoritarian states.
Tax evasion is not its killer app, but I reckon cryptocurrencies can be misused that way. Tax evasion is possible with or without mechanism. Real world example in Argentina: the way most landlords evade taxes is by charging tenants in cash. They expect you to go to their place with an envelope full of 1000's ARS banknotes. So far I've not seen rents paid in cryptocurrency, but by extension, would you say cash's kille…
People making the argument that payments are hard to trace with crypto & that's the reason it should be banned or ignored are 1) ignorant because crypto transactions are easier to trace than cash and 2) making a dangerous argument against cash for which authoritarians will be thrilled to have support
Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users
#315Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users
#316Every 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…
I don’t know why it’s surprising. Cryptocurrency’s killer app was always crime, and crime is big business.
Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users
#317Earlier quoted context omitted.
BTC =/= crypto at large. Despite all the bad press, shady exchanges, bubbles and busts, a large amount of BTC owners don't sell, and that alone will drive it's price up. Other cryptos, I can't speak for.
It's not the asking price that determines market rates, nor is it the price that people who aren't currently selling believe their assets are worth. It's the price at which active buyers are willing to buy. One of the challenges with price discovery in the BTC market, though, is that there's not really an effective mechanism to prevent wash trades in place. That means that all you need to do to create a bunch of frau…
>And that can concievably become the bulk of BTC trading volume if there isn't a steady supply of new people who are willing to buy in to Bitcoin at any price.
that would end up just slowly transferring all of the BTC to miners as transaction fees... what a scam!
I uh, guess that creates liquidity though?
Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users
#318Earlier 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…
BUT - that is only due to the increase in purchasing power of BTC. At the last halving in May 2020, BTC was trading at 8-9K, so at its current value of 28K "half" the BTC is still worth MORE. In real terms the block reward has gone up, not down. And so has the hashrate.
A BTC maximalist might say that the price increases because of the halving and this will continue for all future halvings, making the real-world value of the block reward approximately consistent over the next few decades. I doubt it, because each halving should have less and less impact on the price. There are millions of BTC already mined and actively trading so is the price really going to double when we go from making 900 new ones per day to 450 new ones per day? And down the road, from 450 new ones to 225? And so on? Eventually the newly mined BTC are such a drop in the bucket compared to the already-mined ones being traded, that a reduction in emission cannot have much impact on price. I don't believe the theory that the halving was responsible for the last pump either. I think it's more the market conditions during the pandemic that encouraged speculation.
But just for fun let's pretend that this does happen. The price doubles (give or take) after each halving to maintain the real world value of the block reward. In that case it could theoretically work all the way up until the very last halving takes the reward to 0. Because the fees people are willing to pay are still going to be on the level of "a piece of candy" for a transaction. Whatever that translates to in BTC. Scaling up the real-world value of BTC works for magnifying the block reward which is denominated in a fixed amount of BTC, but not for magnifying the fees which are just a bidding war and not fixed value.
And really, it would fail a bit before then because long before the final halving, you already have ultra-low rewards denominated in Satoshi. You couldn't scale Bitcoin's real world value enough to make those one or two digit SAT rewards mean anything, without also making it totally unusable for ordinary transactions!
Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users
#319Every 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…
I'm not convinced that crypto is much worse than the rest of tech. Your average VC tech company is run as a pump and dump scheme. They take a crazy idea, get a ton of funding for it, go public and sell the shares to uninformed investors who are left holding the bag when it all comes crashing down.
To take it even further, what provides more value? Instagram or OpenSea (NFT marketplace)?
When you stop and think about it, it's the Spiderman meme. They are both pretty useless and are most likely a net negative to society.
Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users
#320Every 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…