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

Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 90 posts

Re: Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies

#51

Post by mr_toad »

rayiner wrote: post #18
CryptoPunk wrote: post #9

This is what fuels the revolving door. Regulations create a class of workers with previous experience in the regulatory and political system, that fetch an access premium. Another example of this is members of Congress who become lobbyists seeing an average increase of 1,500% in their salary upon the career change.

Consider a different example: someone participates in adding threading to the C++ standard. They then get hired at a development tools company to help implement the standard. Anything unseemly there? Your characterization rests on the premise that the regulations are a priori negative. If you start from the premise that the regulations are good things, then there isn’t necessarily anything wrong or inconsistent about…

Working on standards doesn’t usually create a conflict of interest.

Unless patents are involved; then I’d say it’s just as bad.

Re: Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies

#52

Post by rayiner »

mr_toad wrote: post #51
rayiner wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider a different example: someone participates in adding threading to the C++ standard. They then get hired at a development tools company to help implement the standard. Anything unseemly there? Your characterization rests on the premise that the regulations are a priori negative. If you start from the premise that the regulations are good things, then there isn’t necessarily anything wrong or inconsistent about…

Working on standards doesn’t usually create a conflict of interest. Unless patents are involved; then I’d say it’s just as bad.

Standard routinely involve companies lobbying to include their own technology even when no patents are involved, because those companies will have a head start in implementing the standard.

Re: Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies

#53

Post by elmar »

glup wrote: post #27

Given that this is a thread on regulation of cryptocurrencies, can someone explain to me what is good (for countries, societies, the global economy, etc. and not individuals) about cryptocurrencies? I get that blockchains are useful for recordkeeping. But then I don't see what the appeal is of having a profusion of them co-exsiting as currencies. Am I missing something? Related question, can I think of the cryptocurr…

Imagine that you want to hire a woman that is a blog writer on a radical Musulin country (where woman don't have the right to property) how you are going to pay for the services.

Imagine that you want to hire a remote software developer from North Korea.

Imagine that you want to send a donation to Wikileaks or similar organization that is banned from using the financial system.

Imagine you are a Syrian war refugee that wants to cross borders without the fear of your wealth being confiscated.

Imagine that you belong to a small ethnic minority and the government is confiscating your assets.

Imagine that you live in rural Kenya and the nearest bank branch is 50km away.

Re: Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies

#55

Post by atomical »

0800 wrote: post #50
atomical wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of a few reasons why most blockchain technology won't take off. 1) Centralized solutions are cheaper. Consider Amazon vs. Filecoin. Amazon can buy hard drives in bulk and receive large discounts. They can pass those savings onto their customers. The Filecoin users providing storage to customers will have to 1) convince customers that their technology is safe 2) offer cheaper service. There isn't a trust i…

Why blockchain technology may take off: 1) Centralized solutions are costly to freedom of choice and privacy. Consider a solution where Dropbox, Google Drive, Facebook photos, S3, and YouTube is run through Filecoin. No more "You haven't used DropBox in a year, so we are closing your account". No more "This video has been demonetized for all advertisers in our network.". No more "we ran these nets over all your photo…

1) > "You haven't used DropBox in a year, so we are closing your account".

The cost of storing data long-term is non-zero. How would Filecoin offer free storage?

> No more "This video has been demonetized for all advertisers in our network."

YouTube creators want community guidelines. They don't always like the way that they are interpreted and enforced. I'm sure a small minority wants to build something where they can upload absolutely anything without being censored. For those folks there is Gab.ai. It will never become mainstream though and the advertisers with big budgets will opt out.

> Limewire, Bittorent, Popcorn Time, DC++, Napster, Kazaa

Users chose Netflix and other centralized streaming services because of their ease of use. Also, copyright enforcement may have played a small role. Some users were claiming that they weren't using the above software to download pirated content. That was a bunch of bullshit.

2)

> Decentralized peer2peer content delivery is currently owned by centralized players, like Akamai. I see no reason why it could not work when it is owned by its users.

There's no reason why it couldn't work, but there's also no business need driving it.

3)

Once an account is compromised in a trustless environment there is no way for the owner to take ownership of that account again. Also, in a trustless environment it's always possible for A) a smart contract to be hacked and B) a bug in the virtual machine to be exploited. Both centralized and decentralized face security issues.

4)

They will still be contentious though. Look at Bitcoin. Imagine the last election but applied to software. It's not going to end pretty and unlike a normal company people in the community may not "move on."

5)

There may be services in the future, but that would be anathema to the movement. The cryptocurrency apologists want each individual to manage their private keys. They would argue that 1) if you don't have control of your private keys you do not have control of your cryptocurrency 2) it's centralization.

6)

This didn't address my criticism. There is no proof that anything like this is even remotely possible.

Re: Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies

#56

Post by DSingularity »

rifung wrote: post #42
tw1010 wrote: post #26

Could anyone explain to me a scenario where bitcoin and/or blockchain does not make a huge impact on the world within 5-10 years? There seems to be so much excitement and real action moving in its direction that I have a hard time imagining how exactly this would all just go nowhere.

This is merely a made up scenario and not a prediction but.. The bitcoin bubble could burst as all the people who only bought it thinking it would just keep going up panic and sell. Nobody wants cryptocurrencies anymore after this event and the negative connotation of anything related to cryptocurrencies/blockchain is so strong that nobody cares to do anything with it anymore and it just dies.

Yeah. I’ve always thought if there was one thing that might kill it is all the manipulation and Pump and dumps that are happening. It’s not a free market and if people get burned hard, they’ll never come back.

Re: Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies

#57

Post by paulie_a »

psyc wrote: post #44
user5994461 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, content providers are responsible for the content they distribute so that's not a good comparison.

They have certain limited responsibilities, but are on the whole not liable. In layman's terms, they're mostly not responsible, otherwise the RIAA could have bankrupted the whole internet years ago. http://technology.findlaw.com/modern-law-practice/understand...

I think you over estimate the actual power of and financial backing of the riaa..Google/apple could just buy most of the members in cash and call it a day. they are a small dog with a big bark

Re: Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies

#58

Post by nostrademons »

tw1010 wrote: post #26

Could anyone explain to me a scenario where bitcoin and/or blockchain does not make a huge impact on the world within 5-10 years? There seems to be so much excitement and real action moving in its direction that I have a hard time imagining how exactly this would all just go nowhere.

I don't suppose you remember the last P2P bubble, which started with Napster in 1999 and effectively ended when Mark Zuckerburg decided Facebook was a better bet than WireHog in 2004?

That also was a period of incredible excitement and real action - within 5 years, we got Napster, Gnutella, FreeNet, Kazaa, Audiogalaxy, Bittorrent, and Skype, along with lots of little programs that nobody's heard of (among them Red Swoosh, Travis Kalanick's first startup, and WireHog, the product that Facebook almost became) and academic research projects like Chord and Kademlia. The recording industry was being eviscerated - it did manage to kill Tower Records - and everyone was saying that movies would be next, and that P2P technology (with no central server, no single point of failure, and nobody to sue or imprison) would lead to the downfall of nation states and dictatorships and a fundamental change in the power balance of the world.

It did change the world, in that Tower Records is still dead, nobody buys albums anymore, and peoples' music tastes have diverged markedly. But the change everyone wanted - where power devolves from government entities and big corporations to ordinary people like you and I - never happened. Instead, the public lost interest. Instead of decentralized systems like IRC and Jabber, they got on Facebook. Instead of censorship-resistant systems like FreeNet, they got the Great Firewall of China. Instead of easy music sharing like Napster and Audiogalaxy, they got streaming services like iTunes and Spotify. Change came, but it just meant replacing one set of overlords with another.

It's very likely the same will happen with Bitcoin & Blockchain. It already is - that's what the article is about.

Re: Veteran Wall Street enforcers are landing new roles in virtual currencies

#59

Post by cageface »

atomical wrote: post #30
tw1010 wrote: post #26

Could anyone explain to me a scenario where bitcoin and/or blockchain does not make a huge impact on the world within 5-10 years? There seems to be so much excitement and real action moving in its direction that I have a hard time imagining how exactly this would all just go nowhere.

I can think of a few reasons why most blockchain technology won't take off. 1) Centralized solutions are cheaper. Consider Amazon vs. Filecoin. Amazon can buy hard drives in bulk and receive large discounts. They can pass those savings onto their customers. The Filecoin users providing storage to customers will have to 1) convince customers that their technology is safe 2) offer cheaper service. There isn't a trust i…

#5 seems like the deal breaker to me for a lot of use cases. The average user is not nearly savvy enough to be trusted to secure their private keys. I can't count how many of my non-tech friends have been locked out of their email accounts or fallen prey to some kind of password fishing attack. With centralized solutions they still have a reasonable chance of getting their account or data back. With a blockchain they are screwed. For most consumers this will be more than enough to scare them off.
Post reply on HN