81–90 of 100 posts
Can anyone imagine laundering dirty money through purchasing apps and stickers that are just fronts? Suddenly Facebook becoming complicit in the drug trade, terrorism, human trafficking, like HSBC.
This has been happening for years with Valve videogames, so far as I know it hasn't been limited or cracked down on.
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> In real life if a casino doesn't think you got a chip from them directly as part of gaming at that casino they won't pay out on it. That actually happens with some regularity. Really? In Bringing Down the House there was a plot point of the crew enlisting strippers to cash in their chips, because they could do so easily and without attracting suspicion because it was normal for them to get paid in casino chips.
That supports the parents point — they had to go thru difficult means to actually use the chips.
This is semi-unrelated, and I've kind of lost hope of cryptocurrencies ever achieving popularity (since all everyone seems to do with them is speculate), but I recently came across a page explaining Stellar and it seems to me like it's the best of all worlds (decentralized, fast confirmations, inflationary, no mining, etc). Does anyone know what the downsides are? I haven't been able to find any posted anywhere, but…
The whole network got taken down a couple months ago when a server run by the Stellar company crashed. Not very decentralized. https://cointelegraph.com/news/stellar-node-outage-causes-tw...
EDIT: It looks like it can be decentralized, just nobody is running any nodes apart from the foundation. I wonder if that's because there isn't enough incentive, or that people just don't trust them. Either way, it's bad.
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Some people accept a chicken as payment, those are pretty untraceable... Nothing on the internet is anonymous
Most things on the internet actually are anonymous for the most practical purposes. I wouldn't know your name for example. The chicken example is nice and all, but why not just offer the same advantages as good old cash? Would be a far more appropriate comparison, don't you think? Most internet transactions are not anonymous of course, but there are options and I like to keep them. I regularly use non-anonymous trans…
And pseudonymity is good! We should allow for lots more of it.
But anonymity is a different thing. It’s not clear to me that anonymity is worth trying to achieve, anymore; instead we should be fighting for judicial oversight of when pseudonymity can be pierced, combined with dramatically less anonymity for the misdeeds of the powerful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has been happening for years with Valve videogames, so far as I know it hasn't been limited or cracked down on.
I think you’re misrepresenting things. Credit card fraud is not terrorism. There’s a plenty of illegal activity related to Valve games, but it’s not the kind mentioned in the parent (drug trade, terrorism, human trafficking). Not at any meaningful scale anyway.
Drug dealer has cash, drug dealer buys Steam gift cards from local 7-11 (or physical stores that carry them) and uses it to load into Steam.
Steam has a marketplace, dealer buys hats/skins and then sells them for real money transferred by paypal e.t.c. via the various 3rd party sites that do that kind of thing.
Cash is now converted to money in a bank account without ever going into a bank itself.
Call me dumb for saying this, but I can go to a casino or chuck e. cheese and trade in USD for chips I use at their location. I could take those chips somewhere else if I wanted to and use them with anyone willing to take them. Why is Libra so upsetting? Isn't it the same thing? It seems to me like criticizing Facebook is just the fashionable response to it right now.
The upsetting part, to me anyway, is not that it uses blockchain. It's because: a) not a true crypto-currency because it's centralized b) such currencies are not regulated yet in the slightest c) the centralized authority is a consortium of private corporations of which one, Facebook, is providing the entire infrastructure d) Facebook is known to not handle data appropriately and is not well regulated when it comes t…
Libra is the best way for payment middlemen and governments to combat cryptocurrency -- by creating something that looks like it and provides some convenience, but removes all of the teeth and allows them to continue to control and profit from it. I am sort of hoping they won't figure that out. But it seems likely that eventually they will. Maybe I should stop saying it's not a real cryptocurrency and stuff, because…
India, Indonesia, and China are already using WeChat, GoPay, PayTM. I'm not sure what Bitcoins or Libra can offer that e-wallets don't already provide. And these e-wallets, unlike crypto, work well with existing gov't regulations. Some of them, like GoPay works with the Indonesian gov't to provide loans for micro-small businesses. Since they have the data of business transactions they can forecast loan repayments. >…
Digital cash is a public system. It is not run by a monopoly company. It is auditable by all. Fees are reasonable. Wallets are entirely in your control. Wallets are private. Companies and governments can't control your money. The system is secured by strong crypto.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has been happening for years with Valve videogames, so far as I know it hasn't been limited or cracked down on.
Do you have more information on that?
[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/how-microtransactions-and-in-game-cu...
Call me dumb for saying this, but I can go to a casino or chuck e. cheese and trade in USD for chips I use at their location. I could take those chips somewhere else if I wanted to and use them with anyone willing to take them. Why is Libra so upsetting? Isn't it the same thing? It seems to me like criticizing Facebook is just the fashionable response to it right now.
Gee what could go wrong? I mean did not facebook just agree to the biggest 3 billion dollar fine in history? I do not think Mark Z's and facebook's past actions bode well for their cryptocoin venture