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US SEC sues Coinbase, one day after suing Binance

reuters.com

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Re: US SEC sues Coinbase, one day after suing Binance

#421

Post by JohnFen »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #252
JohnFen wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in a world where they're more difficult to coordinate against due to a underdeveloped crypto. This is the part I don't understand. How does cryptocurrency make it easier to coordinate people than all the other tools we have to coordinate people?

If you rely on systems that involve implicit custodial trust (i.e. not crypto) to coordinate with your homies, and you have powerful adversaries, your adversaries will compel those custodians to prevent you from communicating with your homies. They also might find you and hurt you. This happened with thepiratebay and DNS. It happened with wikileaks and paypal. It happened at the ISP level with Signal during recent un…

> If you rely on systems that involve implicit custodial trust (i.e. not crypto) to coordinate with your homies

But there are myriad ways of coordinating without relying on a systems that involve implicit custodial trust. More so now than ever.

But I get the sense we're talking about different things here. I was talking about coordinating activities with groups of people. You seems to be talking about payment systems.

> If the leader of a movement gets apprehended or incapacitated and they don't check in after a certain number of blocks, then a contract moves the leadership token to their successor.

You could use blockchain for this, but equally you can use any of several other methods to achieve the same effect.

> For me it comes down to whether you think dissent is more important than preventing all of the shady business that goes on in secret online.

For me, this doesn't enter into is. I do think dissent is critically important. I don't see how blockchain is essential to doing that. Why bring in something as tainted as cryptocurrency when there are other options?

Re: US SEC sues Coinbase, one day after suing Binance

#422

Post by JohnFen »

DirkH wrote: post #384
JohnFen wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in a world where they're more difficult to coordinate against due to a underdeveloped crypto. This is the part I don't understand. How does cryptocurrency make it easier to coordinate people than all the other tools we have to coordinate people?

Simple example is that if governments control finance you can't coordinate if the government is your opposition. If you start sharing resources as a means of coordinating, governments can always just compel the banks to shut down your account. Governments can't shut down crypto nearly as easily due to its decentralized nature.

I don't find this argument compelling at all, because I can't think of a historical example where fiat currency prevented coordination of antigovernment people.

I also find it interesting that the pro-cryptocurrency argument centers around being antigovernment. So it's a political thing, not a practical thing. That automatically means cryptocurrency has no chance of mainstream adoption. People who don't agree with the politics of it will avoid it because they don't want to be associated with those politics.

Re: US SEC sues Coinbase, one day after suing Binance

#423

Post by eggy »

timerol wrote: post #348
eggy wrote: post #153

I know their are legalities I am not an expert in on finance, but my conspiracy theorist is bubbling up given the failed crypto bank, the SEC suing Binance and Coinbase, and the US and world government move for traceable, government managed and controlled digital currencies. I was at the first HOPE in 1994[1] at the Penn Hotel in NYC when Eric Hughes (known for the Cypherpunk Manifesto) and others gave a talk on cryp…

Do you pay cash at Starbucks?

Sometimes, but I have been avoiding Starbucks unless I am 'renting' office space there. For a quick coffee the bodega, deli, or Dunkin. Some retailers have made it hard to pay cash by installing card only systems. Others have long lines for cashiers and self-checkouts sometimes only take card. It's painful to see young kids struggle with making change, because they are so used to the phone/computer figuring it all out for them.

Re: US SEC sues Coinbase, one day after suing Binance

#424

Post by jrm4 »

JohnFen wrote: post #420
hirako2000 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entrepreneur are risk takers, and they do move the needle. We easily forget to thank them. Would you say the same about music streaming, as companies were launching services without all the due dues, but knew they would finally have leverage once they have a significant user base to negociate deals for legitimate offerings? Anyhow those big risk takers are not losing because of the roulette factor here, they are hit…

> Entrepreneur are risk takers, and they do move the needle. We easily forget to thank them. You can, and should, do that without playing fast and loose with the law. > Would you say the same about music streaming Yes. As well as a lot of other companies such as Uber. Breaking the law seems to have become normalized in SV culture as a good and normal practice for startups to engage in. This is one of the many terribl…

Right, and as I was trying to say below, of the egregious ways law-breaking has occurred in SV, crypto strikes me as one of the theoretically least harmful, in kind of a caveat emptor way?

E.g. Google etc. violated intellectual property rights; Uber et al broke "rules of the road" and other liability related issues, real people stuff.

Crypto? Strong argument of "if you don't like it, don't use it?" It absolutely sucks, but you could argue most of the people who got harmed by it were looking for a quick buck, something about "you can't cheat an honest man."

(Again, I don't actually fully subscribe to this, I think it's still bad to prey on people with money problems, but I still think its worth considering)

Re: US SEC sues Coinbase, one day after suing Binance

#425

Post by mindslight »

WinstonSmith84 wrote: post #312
mindslight wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have written this comment 15 years ago, on the heels of an unnecessarily large military being abused to wage two poorly thought out elective wars. Continued market arbitrage away from wasteful US dominance seemed inevitable, just as the break up of the Soviet Union was. Now, after economic integration with China has run its course and not produced democracy? After Russia's attack on Ukraine demonstrated that…

> There is certainly the open question of whether China will surpass the US military and become a world reserve currency based on the draw of military might alone. But that doesn't have anything to do with decentralization, rather just a different centralizer. You're right, but it does have something to do. The US dollar is the best weapon the USA have at the moment, far more efficient than all the nukes. When the US…

I agree that USD forms a very powerful (and suffocating) global jurisdiction, but I wouldn't describe it as a weapon (Russia seems to be getting along just fine). It's somewhere between soft and medium power, on countries that have committed to the USD empire.

> That's when possibly we will see a mass adoption of cryptocurrencies where powerful countries will search to dominate mining, innovation, etc.

This is cryptocurrency maximalism. I used to believe in this before Bitcoin was even a thing. Now almost twenty years later, seeing it mostly play out as a vehicle for speculation (most of the popular coins are still non-fungible!), I'm not so sure.

> As long as we have a single country policing the world, adoption will be incredibly slow and mass adoption will not happen unless we have some visionary politicians ...

Visionary of what? It was plausible to handwave this multipolar desire back when other countries weren't starting major wars (so countries could exist independently) and the whole world seemed to be democratizing. Now with openly aggressive Russia plus a looming seemingly-competent China, the demand for US military support, and by extension USD, has drastically increased.

> Republicans seem to have a more open minded approach

Don't confuse entertaining foreign interests as "open mindedness". Republicans are further from the incumbent US power structure, and are thus more willing to sell out to foreign power structures.

Re: US SEC sues Coinbase, one day after suing Binance

#426

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

JohnFen wrote: post #421
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you rely on systems that involve implicit custodial trust (i.e. not crypto) to coordinate with your homies, and you have powerful adversaries, your adversaries will compel those custodians to prevent you from communicating with your homies. They also might find you and hurt you. This happened with thepiratebay and DNS. It happened with wikileaks and paypal. It happened at the ISP level with Signal during recent un…

> If you rely on systems that involve implicit custodial trust (i.e. not crypto) to coordinate with your homies But there are myriad ways of coordinating without relying on a systems that involve implicit custodial trust. More so now than ever. But I get the sense we're talking about different things here. I was talking about coordinating activities with groups of people. You seems to be talking about payment systems…

You keep saying that there are many alternatives, but I don't know what you mean. I'd like to outline a scenario and you can tell me which technology you think would scratch the itch:

Suppose you're a journalist in a place with an oppressive government. You have information about government behavior that you expect will cause protests. You're not an activist though, so you don't want to actually plan those protests.

Suppose I'm an activist in the same country--I'll plan the protest--but we don't know each other. We've got a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend... kind of relationship.

Ideally you could post the information somewhere, and then our mutual friends could post annotations which validate it. They'd be attaching "I was there and I saw this happen" kind of information. I would then see this information because I explicitly/transitively trust people who have validated it. The government can inject disinformation about it, but it just gets ignored unless they manage to get us to explicitly trust their agents about this kind of thing (presumably this will be prohibitively expensive).

The government will find us and hurt us if they catch three or four of us coordinating in this way. But if there are thousands of us, it will be a different story. So we need to collect a critical mass of validations, and we need to plan the protest, and we need to do it in a way that the government can't prevent and which doesn't betray our actual identities to the government--at least not until we all show up at the protest site.

I'm working on this app, by the way. I intend to have pluggable backends so it won't be coupled to a specific blockchain--you could use it over ssh for instance, or a thumb drive, or via a shared S3 bucket--but it's the blockchain backends that I expect to be most useful in situations with many stakeholders and truly aggresive adversaries because it's not realistic to expect users to maintain the system of file transfers necessary to ensure that the annotations dataset converges in a way that gets the message and its validations from journalist to activist, or from activist to other activist.

Sneakernet / file transfer will be the first backend that I support. What should I support second?

What is tamper-resistant enough that the government can't remove the data, lacks dependency on a naming system which can be tampered with to hide the data, and is also public enough that all parties can access the data and know that the version they're accessing is the real one, if not a public blockchain?

Granted, there may be solutions that are not technically a blockchain. I'm curious about Kademlia DHT's, for instance. I wonder if SSB can be used here. But so far as I can tell, all serious contenders are, if not blockchains, blockchain-like.

Re: US SEC sues Coinbase, one day after suing Binance

#427

Post by dontupvoteme »

timerol wrote: post #356
dontupvoteme wrote: post #334

Curious how authoritarian hackernews is - is this just a knee jerk reaction to annoying cryptobros? Sounds like a board of police officers/retired army men right now commenting on how "that boy had it coming"

It's a long-simmering annoyance at the decline of the cryptocurrency ecosystem: from the really cool technology underlying Bitcoin, to exciting whitepapers with different solutions to hard problems on other coins, to intractable whitepapers designed to create hype for coins that do nothing, to the clear creation of exchanges as places to gamble, to the sidelining of anyone in the cryptocurrency world trying to solve…

That checks out. I got out of crypto a long time ago, back around when people were creating doge based coins for a laugh, i can imagine it only got a lot worse.

Re: US SEC sues Coinbase, one day after suing Binance

#428

Post by dcow »

davidgerard wrote: post #412
dcow wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitcoin isn't any different than cash except it’s got a decentralized public immutable ledger and therefore isn't a bearer currency. But like cash its transactions are not governed by an authoritative financial institution that can repudiate and/or reverse them. (It’s proven effectively easier to regulate than cash on the tracking transactions front, though.) That’s the “anarchy” the paper refers to. In the paper, th…

this thread is about your claim: > Then a bunch of crypto anarchists showed up you've just posted a pile of opinions that aren't about the actual history, which you were just wrong about

Care to explain? FWIW I was around when crypto was born and know very well the initial scene and motives. The crypto anarchists showed up pretty quickly, sure, but they weren't the seeds of the technology.

Re: US SEC sues Coinbase, one day after suing Binance

#430

Post by CuriousCosmic »

qeternity wrote: post #249
CuriousCosmic wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> investment of money in a common enterprise with profits to come solely from the efforts of others This is where I see the "staking makes a cryptocurrency a security" fall apart. There are a handful of definitions for "staking" and some of them definitely meet the criteria of "a common enterprise with profits to come solely from the efforts of others" however many do not. 1. Ethereum's staking at a protocol level re…

You’re ignoring all the ICOs which are almost certainly unregistered security offerings. Ethereum was funded as a public ICO.

It was however an ICO does not make it inherently a security. Per the SEC:

    ICOs, based on specific facts, may be securities offerings, and fall under the SEC’s jurisdiction of enforcing federal securities laws.
And I think it's ultimately up to the courts (unless the SEC eventually gives a definitive answer) to determine what specific qualities make an token offered via ICO into a security, especially because what qualifies as an ICO really kinda varies and how they are structured also really widely varies.

https://www.sec.gov/securities-topics/ICO

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