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Crypto has ‘amplified financial risks’ in emerging markets, central banks warn

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Re: Crypto has ‘amplified financial risks’ in emerging markets, central banks warn

#41

Post by landemva »

Vanit wrote: post #39
landemva wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really like how the whataboutism adds useful thoughts. That guy claimed his cloud VM was compromised. Few would consider that to be a secure way to keep a secret, and it could be a boating accident story. Boating accidents do happen.

Your reaction is how everyone reacts before their own crypto is stolen. I don't know how crypto proponents think they can simultaneously wave away this level of fraud but still seek economy-wide adoption.

His cloud VM was supposedly hacked. That was not hacking crypto, it was hacking a generic cloud account.

And why presume what I may or may not be advocating?

Re: Crypto has ‘amplified financial risks’ in emerging markets, central banks warn

#42

Post by troupo »

landemva wrote: post #32
troupo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bitcoin has been very stable against the USD for a while now. But isn't stable against itself. People who got in first are infinitely richer than people who would buy it a generation from now.

Same for grandpa who got in first with farmland and just sold to housing developers. At least people a generation from now can go to GitHub and fork the btc or eth open source code and make a run at starting their own chain.

> At least people a generation from now can go to GitHub and fork the btc or eth open source code and make a run at starting their own chain.

And that will help them how exactly? There are thousands of chains and coins with total adoption and value of zero

Re: Crypto has ‘amplified financial risks’ in emerging markets, central banks warn

#43

Post by troupo »

landemva wrote: post #31
troupo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lived in both a bad economy and a good economy. Having your money in USD is always a safer bet in bad economies. > “Crypto is useless” for example, really means: “crypto is useless to me.” No. It means "crypto is useless for every single use case it's advertised as a solution for except illegal money transfers, and even then the number of caveats is as long as the equator"

Nobody can steal my crypto, I don't need a physical vault for gold coins, and I can buy stuff around the world in minutes. Am in North America.

> Nobody can steal my crypto,

"Once the victim connected their crypto wallet, it was immediately drained of $900,000 in the USDC stablecoin"

"The "interchain stablecoin protocol" Harbor announced on August 19 that they had experienced an exploit that drained some of the funds in the project pools"

"The Exactly Protocol, an attempt to "decentralize the credit market" built on the Optimism layer-2 network, was exploited. An attacker has siphoned more than 7,160 ETH (~$12 million) from the project"

"Blockchain Capital co-founder Bart Stephens has filed a lawsuit against as-yet-unknown individuals who he says stole $6.3 million in cryptocurrency from him."

"Exploiters stole around 471 ETH (~$857,000) from the RocketSwap project "

"The Zunami Protocol stablecoin-focused yield farming aggregator was exploited for more than $2.1 million"

> I can buy stuff around the world in minutes

I've been able to do that in seconds for nearly 20 years now. Was/am in Eastern Europe, Turkey, EU. No crypto necessary

Re: Crypto has ‘amplified financial risks’ in emerging markets, central banks warn

#44

Post by klntsky »

acdha wrote: post #30
klntsky wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> prevent anyone from hiding from the tax collectors and police Only if you use chains with traceable transactions.

You also have to only buy things available purely on that system from people you are certain don’t collaborate with the government. If all of those assumptions aren’t true, your activity can be tracked with increasing precision and the authorities will see local transactions which you can’t explain otherwise and demand explanations. The schemes Zcash and Monero use have never been tested at scale with a sophisticated…

> The schemes Zcash and Monero use have never been tested at scale with a sophisticated adversary

Monero's ring signatures are not the same as ZCash's zero-knowledge crypto. Monero obfuscates, but ZCash hides completely, cryptographically.

https://z.cash/learn/is-zcash-traceable/

Re: Crypto has ‘amplified financial risks’ in emerging markets, central banks warn

#45

Post by rich_sasha »

troupo wrote: post #28
J_Shelby_J wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those of us fortunate to live within a, mostly, good economic system don’t need cryptocurrency. I don’t have a problem saying that. But I also have the imagination to wonder if it will always be the case. And the empathy to understand that not every human is as fortunate as myself. People making broad statements about a technology seem to do so only from their current perspective. “Crypto is useless” for example, rea…

I've lived in both a bad economy and a good economy. Having your money in USD is always a safer bet in bad economies. > “Crypto is useless” for example, really means: “crypto is useless to me.” No. It means "crypto is useless for every single use case it's advertised as a solution for except illegal money transfers, and even then the number of caveats is as long as the equator"

How do you store your USD if you live in, say, Zimbabwe or Argentina?

Re: Crypto has ‘amplified financial risks’ in emerging markets, central banks warn

#46

Post by nicholasbraker »

LatteLazy wrote: post #26
nicholasbraker wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So to evade hyperinflation one uses an asset which is more volatile, and in the case of BTC, is deflationary by nature. Which as in _investment_ is fine, but as a means of payment not, as the whole essence of a _sensible_ amount (2-3%) of inflation is a driver for economic growth. The problem with this statement is that using one evil to escape the other which doesn't make sense. Countries with a weak rule of law sho…

Bitcoin has been very stable against the USD for a while now. And that's just bitcoin, stable coins are more reliable. And of course inflation only robs holders, at least volatility goes in your favour half the time. I also would not call it an investment: there is no reason to expect prices to rise. Bitcoin does not grow in the way a company can (making shares an investment) or pay interest like a bond. It's at best…

Agreed with this nuance w/ regards to investment vs. asset. But IMHO even if volatility goes in your favor half the time it's still not a viable alternative. If the value of an asset is dependent on what a future buyer is willing to pay for it without taking the implicit value into consideration I leave it as an exercise to the reader how this will end ;-)

Re: Crypto has ‘amplified financial risks’ in emerging markets, central banks warn

#47

Post by troupo »

rich_sasha wrote: post #45
troupo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've lived in both a bad economy and a good economy. Having your money in USD is always a safer bet in bad economies. > “Crypto is useless” for example, really means: “crypto is useless to me.” No. It means "crypto is useless for every single use case it's advertised as a solution for except illegal money transfers, and even then the number of caveats is as long as the equator"

How do you store your USD if you live in, say, Zimbabwe or Argentina?

Cash. You store them as cash.

Many countries that are unstable from the "first-world" point of view, but stable enough to provide a banking system with deposit or savings accounts in USD or Euro. And yes, people use those (I did).

Re: Crypto has ‘amplified financial risks’ in emerging markets, central banks warn

#48

Post by soco »

klntsky wrote: post #19
acdha wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a totalitarian state has imposed top-down laws that interfere with that productive economy — then crypto will help "route around" that totalitarian state, and thereby help the economy. I don’t think this fits the technology: blockchains are perfect for totalitarian states since they prevent anyone from hiding from the tax collectors and police. The only way it helps is if the government is too weak to enforce its l…

> prevent anyone from hiding from the tax collectors and police Only if you use chains with traceable transactions.

It's incredible how often we must refer to this classic xkcd when talking about crypto "security": https://xkcd.com/538/

Re: Crypto has ‘amplified financial risks’ in emerging markets, central banks warn

#49

Post by cryptobruh »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #20
derefr wrote: post #6

Cryptocurrency is, in a sense, a bottom-up tool against top-down state control of a finance system. This is not strictly a good or a bad thing; just a thing. If the people of a country have a "common law" underlying their bottom-up interactions, that already works on its own as a basis for a productive and growing economy — but a totalitarian state has imposed top-down laws that interfere with that productive economy…

Those of us fortunate to live within a, mostly, good economic system don’t need cryptocurrency. I don’t have a problem saying that. But I also have the imagination to wonder if it will always be the case. And the empathy to understand that not every human is as fortunate as myself. People making broad statements about a technology seem to do so only from their current perspective. “Crypto is useless” for example, rea…

My arguments against crypto are never about 'not useful for me'.

You either never heard arguments or ignore them but there are not just theoretical but also real life shows us that it doesn't work.

Your poor person who needs to save their hard cash in a dictatorship can either buy things, get dollars or euros (like what they do in Iran) or try to find someone to take their risky local currency to exchange it for a better digital one.

One were this poor person needs to understand backup strategy, fraud, computer and smartphones.

This is so naive it's ridiculous.

And continue to ignore EVERYTHING bad which happens to crypto the last 3 years.

Of course Sam and others those are NEVER crypto issues right?

Btw the poor people would benefit more from less CO2 instead of some crypto shit.

Re: Crypto has ‘amplified financial risks’ in emerging markets, central banks warn

#50

Post by acdha »

klntsky wrote: post #44
acdha wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also have to only buy things available purely on that system from people you are certain don’t collaborate with the government. If all of those assumptions aren’t true, your activity can be tracked with increasing precision and the authorities will see local transactions which you can’t explain otherwise and demand explanations. The schemes Zcash and Monero use have never been tested at scale with a sophisticated…

> The schemes Zcash and Monero use have never been tested at scale with a sophisticated adversary Monero's ring signatures are not the same as ZCash's zero-knowledge crypto. Monero obfuscates, but ZCash hides completely, cryptographically. https://z.cash/learn/is-zcash-traceable/

That’s the hope anyway - even if the cryptography is perfect against all future attacks (remember they’ve already had at least one flaw in earlier versions) there are still things like timing attacks:

https://crypto.stanford.edu/timings/

Nation states are some of hardest attackers since they can do things like monitoring network traffic to correlate with chain activity or compel some fraction of the participants to surrender data. I know some smart people work on Zcash but there’s no safety net when all of the transactions are public and immutable.

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