Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tax evasion is not a victimless crime.
Taxation is not a victimless crime.
Taxation is the price you pay to live in civilization. You can always give that up. Most people prefer the benefits they get from it though.
Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users
361–370 of 424 posts
Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users
#362Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sucks because in theory all the "smart contacts" exist to create an instrument that holds its value. But that whole space has been saturated by wannabes, grifters and imitators. With all the day traders out there, I'm sure you could find a counterparty for a 5% X-year CD (dollar pegged, let's say). And I'm sure somewhere on the cryptosphere this exists, but good luck distinguishing it from a rugpull.
>But that whole space has been saturated by wannabes, grifters and imitators. You are missing the extremely important point that crypto is saturated by these types exactly and explicitly because of design decisions that are inherent in crypto ! The lack of transaction reversal is an explicit choice and explicitly empowers fraudulent activity over legitimate. What business or individual wants to lock up any value/cash…
I don't disagree with you. I think it's a strange case where the tech-smart "code is law" proponents really think, in their minds, that it's invincible "because encryption!", and every time a new heist/scam occurs they dig their heels in deeper and say "that's different, it wasn't the _crypto_ that failed..."
Even if it wasn't for elaborate rug-pulls, you could still lose everything to an evil-maid with a $5 key logger. That is just untenable.
Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users
#363Every 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…
Maybe people outside of HN have a different perspective on this.
Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users
#364Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The hotel must be trusted to actually provide the room, so why not trust the hotel to also store the booking information? Because the hotel then has to swap the reservation whenever it's traded. Let's say I want to book a hotel in the future for downtown Chicago Cubs making it to the World Series. As the season progresses it's a future whose value goes up and down depending on how they are playing. If the hotel is…
If the hotel ultimately owns the room then I'm pretty sure they would simply have software to look at exchanges on the chain and could charge you if you've swapped it. They could also simply not honor your booking. I think this is the point regarding "the real world" vs the idea of "digital ownership". You can have a token that says you get to stay a week in a given room and I (as the hotel) can say "no, this token i…
> Crypto/blockchain can't enforce anything in the real world.
Exactly! At some point a real person has to choose to honor your hotel room NFT or not, just as easily as they could choose to honor your driver's license or not. There's no advantage to mucking up the entire system with crypto and blockchain.
Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users
#365Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that alone will drive it's price up Wrong; you need people buying the roughly $25M worth of daily new bitcoins just to maintain the current price.
What's the $ in your remark? Hint: Its not USD. For an exchange like Binance, its USDT, or Tethers. Its not so hard for them to print USDT and pretend that they're dollars.
It's whatever currency the miners use to pay for their power. That's almost certainly not USDT or Tethers, or any other cryptocurrency.
Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users
#366Every 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…
What's the mystery? Bitcoin doesn't need actual dollars to prop up the price. Unaudited virtual dollar IOUs like USDT that can be issued out of thin air will be sufficient.
At some point the crypto ecosystem hits the real economy and miners need to pay for power and datacenter space with real currency.
A lot of the people employed in the crypto space are also out there buying houses, cars, taking vacations, and buying the odd pizza. That all requires real currency.
Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users
#367Earlier quoted context omitted.
By extension of the argument, does this mean you also won't use USD? Plenty of people and even governments use it to break laws too.
That's not a parallel argument. It would be a better one if I avoided using Uber because other people used Uber for criminal activity. That's not my stance. My stance is that I avoid Uber because of Uber's criminal activity.
“I avoid USD because of US govt criminal activity.”
Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users
#368Earlier quoted context omitted.
That doesn't help because inflation needs to be in tune with the economy, so somebody has to be able to adjust the amount. If the tail emission is too small then it's still deflationary. If it's too big, then there's too much inflation. 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 r…
It might be possible to have it self-tune to transaction volume, no?
It's not about the volume, but about the economy though. If somebody keeps sending coins back and forth between their own wallets, that's not economical activity.
Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users
#369Every 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…
Money laundering, gambling, flight capital from Russia and China, and scams are all very active niches that could be responsible for a lot of that liquidity.
Re: Binance US No Longer Allows USD Withdrawal for Users
#370Earlier 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…
You have to consider that mining has traditionally been gently and benignly disregarded by most of the media interest in crypto. This is not an accident, the miners are very aware that calling attention to themselves would reveal exactly how suspiciously the valuations in crypto are constructed, and they've done a fantastic job of deflecting attention (with enormous help from the unbelievably clownish behavior of cer…
Stolen electricity is just part of it. Miners in Texas (and probably other places) have negotiated shockingly corrupt deals where they get electricity at low rates and then are paid to shut down when the grid needs more power. They're getting paid like a grid scale storage provider when in reality they're just a sink.