Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 515 posts

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#371

Post by bandrami »

paulddraper wrote: post #331
anon-3988 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 3. Bitcoin, which the SEC considers a commodity (it's explicitly excluded from the lawsuits), is bound to become even more dominant in terms of market capitalization. The longer Bitcoin survives, the more it will get adopted and integrated into the world's financial fabric, e.g., as a store of value. If this sounds far-fetched, consider that many smart and smart-sounding people have predicted Bitcoin's demise, and…

Maybe. I don't see people using gold for finances within 50km of me, but it's going to be around forever.

OTOH there's a big and growing problem with gold exchanges, too, who often don't actually have possession of the metal they notionally sell. It's estimated total gold "holdings" by investors exceed the world gold supply by about 50%.

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#372

Post by nootropicat »

throwme_123 wrote: post #257
otoburb wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If this sounds far-fetched, consider that many smart and smart-sounding people have predicted Bitcoin's demise, and so far all have been utterly wrong Bernie Madoff pulled off one of the largest (literal Ponzi) scams and evidently stated that he started in the 1990s for a run of just over 15 years until being arrested in 2008, although some investigators thought that his fraudulent activities started as far back a…

Wow. Both parent and grand-parent seem wrong. GP: Bitcoiner, dooming everything else. Parent: Anti-crypto (the majority here), up to the point on comparing Bitcoin (which might be a bubble, that's not the point here) to a Ponzi (that it is not: Supply is fixed, there is no new deposits paying previous depositors).

A ponzi is any system in which the only way for older buyers to cash out is at the expense of later investors. How is 'supply is fixed' relevant?

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#373

Post by yieldcrv »

burnished wrote: post #75

Woof, lots of emotional and nigh incoherent responses to a pretty thoughtful little statement. Doesn't inspire confidence when the average response seems to boil down to a form of religious fervor. Which is too bad, seems like it would have been the perfect place for a thorough rebuttal.

A rebuttal:

John points out how any custodial institution gets to operate if they are not trading securities, but any other asset, while using this mere observation to bolster an alarmist view about custodial institutions that trade crypto, as if there is something unique about crypto exchanges, without considering that all spot markets currently can function in the absence of any regulatory framework.

John then amplifies the (unresolved) SEC stance about why the SEC is the most accurate regulatory authority to enact this crusade of getting exchanges into [SEC] compliance or nonexistence. In theory there are also some crypto assets that can be traded on a custodial spot exchange without SEC involvement, such as a Bitcoin-only exchange, alongside…. which other cryptos? Nobody knows but the SEC says its clear!

John hides behind the idea that its the beginning of a broader enforcement gauntlet, while talking exclusively about the SEC enforcement and not any other possibility.

The crux of his alarm is that there is no survivability path, which is also not an absolute. Even in a world where all crypto exchanges must be registered securities exchanges only trading registered crypto securities, the incumbent crypto native operators can participate in that, and establishment investment banking players are already positioning themselves to participate in that world. So custodial crypto exchanges dont go away in any of those scenarios, they just get bigger and more robust for even larger establishment beholden pools of capital.

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#375

Post by jsutton »

LexiMax wrote: post #185
fwungy wrote: post #167

There are $5T of foreign exchange transactions per day. Btc is already getting traction in the developing world as a reliable currency and that is likely to grow under de-dollarization. The entire crypto market is about $1T right now of which btc is about half. There is so much space for Btc to grow as an option for international settlement, it's already working and trusted as much or more than many sovereign currenc…

> The Feds and the bankers hate it because it's a direct threat to their business model. There's no room for a middle man to fugazi in btc. Crypto has spawned their own classes of middle-men. At best, you have a changing of the guard - new boss, same as the old boss. At worst, you have traditional finance buying a stake in crypto and ending up in the exact dominant same spot they were before. And of course, all of th…

> it merely aims to be a new mechanism by which value is transferred, which by most objective measures it's very bad at doing.

What objective measures are you using? Over $3 Billion in value is transferred over the Bitcoin network every day. There has never been any downtime, nor has it ever been hacked, and fees are flat and transparent (just a few bucks to transfer unlimited value across the world).

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#376

Post by anonporridge »

bhawks wrote: post #313
ntr-- wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll give you 1kg of wheat for an ounce of gold right now.

I'll see your 1kg and raise to 100kg.

Congrats boys! We just created a market using gold as the unit of account!

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#377

Post by sdenton4 »

snapcaster wrote: post #318
lmm wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyone who predicts Bitcoin's demise must explain precisely how and why its network would stop functioning. I've been saying for years that Bitcoin will go down like Second Life. Remember when there were news stories about Sony or whoever buys an island for X million dollars? And now... I mean it's still there (presumably), I don't think they've turned off the servers or anything, but no-one cares and it's obviousl…

Presumably you have been saying this for a while and been wrong so far. At what point would you change your mind?

I've been saying for years that the sun will eventually turn into a red giant and consume the earth. But every day a same-sized yellow disk rises in the Eastern sky. At what point should I change my mind?

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#378

Post by jeremyjh »

jfengel wrote: post #233
derbOac wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin is puzzling to me, in that a commodity usually has some value outside of a trading market per se. That is, it is usually consumable in some abstract sense. I'm not sure what you would "do" with Bitcoin other than as some form of currency. In this regard, ETH always seemed a bit more on track, in the sense that there have been attempts to use the ETH blockchain from the beginning for the purposes of computatio…

In theory, you could think of bitcoin as electricity that has already been consumed. To replace it, you would have to burn more electricity. The bitcoin concept is to manifest that burned electricity as a tradeable value. That is the sense in which it's commodity-like. It's the underlying electricity which is consumed. It's far from clear that this is really valid, but that's the sense of it.

That is a sunk cost without value. Actual commodities can be redeemed for something valuable, for example you can eat an orange. You can't turn the BTC back into electricity or anything else of tangible value.

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#379

Post by anonporridge »

steveBK123 wrote: post #337
cs702 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The longer Bitcoin's network continues to function, more and more people will become aware of its resiliency . Governments may topple; banks may fail; exchanges may go bust; Bitcoin keeps on ticking. As long as the network continues to function, Bitcoin will have a price.

I could understand the allure of the (ahem) "stability" of BTC if you lived in say, Argentina. If you live in America with this viewpoint, its pure doomerism.

Someone with your mindset was probably saying something similar while living in Argentina in the 1920s, when it was among the top 10 wealthiest countries on the planet.

Re: Former US SEC attorney: 'Get out of crypto platforms now'

#380

Post by anonporridge »

kdragon wrote: post #366
Seattle3503 wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you buy with the lighting network? I've always wanted to try it.

You can use it as currency on stacker.news You can tip people on the nostr protocol. stats are on zaplife.lol you can tip musicians on wavlake there's a Minecraft server called satlantis where it is used as a currency there's a lot of plugins you can use to build your own lightning enabled apps on lnbits the space is still young so a lot of software is beta, but there's plenty to play with check out the plebdev cours…

You can also go to the entire nation state of El Salvador where it is a legal currency and many shops have integrated lightning payments.
Post reply on HN