321–330 of 424 posts
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I don’t know why it’s surprising. Cryptocurrency’s killer app was always crime, and crime is big business.
Cash, diamonds, etc are actually better for crime than cryptocurrency because they're less traceable.
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> If you don't like the law, lobby politicians to change it. Some laws are unjust and it's your duty as a human being with free will to disobey them.
Drop the persecution complex. You're being asked to pay taxes, not commit genocide.
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…
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…
Serious scrutiny of how exactly the hash rate in Bitcoin is generated would not reflect well on the ecosystem, because of the amount of outright corruption involved, as well as theft, that goes back a decade. A couple years ago an operation was uncovered in Thailand where something on the order of 100 million dollars worth of mining equipment had been found burning stolen electricity from government enterprises, IIRC primarily public schools, and one of the investigators involved speculated that this was likely less than 10% of the illegal mining that was happening in their country, let alone the recognized legal stuff.
Consider that similar things are happening all over the world, not just Thailand, and even entire countries (DPRK) participating due to total systemic corruption crossed with no questiins asked access to natural resources and national treasuries, to be spent in any way they choose, and an investment in destabilizing the world economy - or at least evading financial controls - is well worth the cost of subsidizing mining both within their borders and beyond. You've also got quasi crackpots in charge of places like the government of El Salvador who are also helping to support this ecosystem.
Miners, I will conjecture without offering any support on the bet that eventually this will be found out and publicized, have been sitting on a warchest of nearly free coins mined long ago, when almost nobody was looking for corruption or theft of resources, and when block rewards were multiples higher to boot. The argument that miners have barely made a profit because of the adjustable difficulty level has always been an open lie due to a willingness to completely disregard the mining done using off market access to electricity and facilities, which was rampant in the early days and is still a significant chunk of the hash rate even today.
Miners can continue to slow sell their coin bases because they have effectively paid for them for over a decade at a massive discount to "market," and since the only major source of downward price pressure are the miners themselves, they can prop the price up for as long as they like by simply selling fewer coins into the market whenever there is an adverse social signal that they need to counter with a " honey badger of money doesn't care" price signal.
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…
I don’t get the reasoning behind saying that if the market would be real, the market cap would be a fraction of what it is now. Like, how do you determine that?
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But cryptocurrencies were designed to be deflationary which makes them shitty currencies. There's no point in spending a cryptocoin today when its value will be higher tomorrow.
Most cryptocurrencies were designed that way, but some have a so-called tail emission making them disinflationary. One even has a completely linear emission of 1 coin per second forever since launch.
To adjust properly there has to be somebody who decides what "in tune" is. We're either back to centralization, or it's some sort of popularity vote which is unlikely to produce the right result.
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Drop the persecution complex. You're being asked to pay taxes, not commit genocide.
If I pay taxes I can't pay wages.
* pay a living wage
* pay your taxes
* comply with health, safety, and employment regulations
* comply with all the other laws (this is a crypto thread, so that includes weapons laws, securities laws, international sanctions, and so many more)
Then you don't have a valid business. You have no inherent right to run whatever business you think you want to.
Also, to your immediate claim, I do not believe you.
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The blockchain is a perfect tool of government surveillance. They can track the flows of money like never before, while most users think it is completely anonymous. It is the perfect weapon of state control. There has been hundreds of stories about how blockchain technology has been a boon to investigators trying to track drug, terrorism and illegal porn money flows. https://www.wsj.com/articles/bitcoin-blockchain-ha…
monero exists
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/monero-transactions.htm...
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> 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.
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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.
Couldn't agree more on the VC front. 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.
OpenSea was only profitable while there were still suckers available. Not at all the same.
Instagram is more like Exxon or something. A very profitable enterprise whose social harms may not be adequately internalized, and would require legislation to fix.