[HN Gopher] Coinbase is reportedly selling geolocation data to ICE
___________________________________________________________________
Coinbase is reportedly selling geolocation data to ICE
Author : rukshn
Score : 596 points
Date : 2022-06-30 13:52 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theintercept.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theintercept.com)
| mrbuttons454 wrote:
| Any recommendations for a trustworthy exchange?
| kranke155 wrote:
| Kraken
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Kraken had proof of reserves at least in January.
| gowld wrote:
| No, because Coinbase Tracer can see your public transactions
| regardless of what exchange you use.
| skybrian wrote:
| It sounds like a contract to analyze blockchains? If so,
| switching exchanges won't help much, for the immediate issue
| anyway.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Depends on what your objection is. Whether it's "they're
| selling my data" or "they're selling data to ICE".
| lostmsu wrote:
| What is the dependency here?
| cowtools wrote:
| You could take your crypto to a non-KYC exchange like
| TradeOgre or Bisq, trade it for a privacy coin like
| Monero/Zcash/Firo, churn the coins, then trade it back. Boom,
| ownership chain broken.
| rvz wrote:
| Kraken.
| api wrote:
| I guess "not your keys not your coins" applies to other aspects
| like privacy too.
| this_user wrote:
| Blockchains are a public database of all transactions. Law
| enforcement don't even need a warrant to get access to
| literally everything that has ever happened. Why anyone would
| think that a system like that offers any actual privacy is
| beyond me.
| plsbenice34 wrote:
| Monero exists
| uoaei wrote:
| Coinbase's service is a paid service, which uses analytics to
| distill that information for LE. So, while true that the
| "information" is publicly available, the signal-to-noise
| ratio is abysmal, and Coinbase offers a valuable service that
| LE would otherwise have to implement themselves.
|
| Ergo, Coinbase is effectively in the "police and surveillance
| technologies" space while they operate this service.
| gowld wrote:
| Coinbase's service uses public data that is MORE exposed if
| you use your own keys, instead of hiding inside an
| exchange.
| derekdahmer wrote:
| This article is light on details. Given that they are saying all
| the info is derived from public sources, what is "historical geo
| tracking data"?
|
| The transaction history is obviously from the blockchain (by
| design) but did IPs tied to transactions maybe leak at some
| point?
| missedthecue wrote:
| Don't you need a social security number to use Coinbase? Why
| would ICE buy Coinbase geolocation data?
| finiteseries wrote:
| _HSI 's mission is to investigate, disrupt and dismantle
| terrorist, transnational and other criminal organizations that
| threaten or seek to exploit the customs and immigration laws of
| the United States._
|
| This isn't the deportation agency, it's the investigative arm
| of the DHS (and that they _hate_ the deportation agency &
| confusion between the two is putting it lightly).
| jeffwask wrote:
| "Our mission is to increase economic freedom in the world.
| Everyone deserves access to financial services that can help
| empower them to create a better life for themselves and their
| families."
|
| If you didn't thing corporate missions statements were total
| bullshit before...
| jeffwask wrote:
| All things considered this one is pretty good too...
|
| Mission first
|
| Our mission is ambitious and important. We don't engage in
| social or political activism that is unrelated to our mission
| while at work. We seek to make the workplace a refuge from
| division, so we can stay focused on making progress toward the
| mission.
|
| ...or...
|
| Customer focus
|
| We are deeply focused on solving our customers' problems with
| technology, by enabling them to acquire, store and use crypto.
| We strive to be the easiest to use, most trusted and most
| secure platform. In every decision we make, we ask, "How does
| this create more value for our customers?"
| 2c2c2c wrote:
| is the implicit assumption here that coinbase is selling data to
| ICE leading to the deportation of poor immigrant families, who
| you are presuming are On The Blockchain?
|
| Or are they selling data that likely helps better understand
| drug/human traficking networks? Is selling data that helps with
| the latter considered bad??
| cphoover wrote:
| Much more likely to be the case, however sensationalism always
| makes a more viral story.
| upupandup wrote:
| duxup wrote:
| Aren't there a couple other Ycombinator crypto companies that
| are pretty suspect?
|
| I don't think there's anything about Ycombinator that makes me
| think they care any more or less about the effect their
| companies have.
| upupandup wrote:
| was gonna post them but all of my comments are being flagged
| regarding this
|
| really sad to see what crypto is doing and coinbase and
| others all had a part in this.
|
| https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/nation/2022/06/113_331888.h.
| ..
|
| Father kills family after crypto bet. Somebody got rich from
| this.
| dewey wrote:
| I'm not a Coinbase fan but I feel these points are very unfair.
|
| > Coinbase due to wilful negligience, incompetence
|
| What did Coinbase do that made people lose money?
|
| > They literally got rich by having people transfer over their
| savings
|
| How is it different than any stock broker, insurance broker or
| bank clerk selling risky or expensive investments to people who
| don't know better?
| dev_throw wrote:
| Also, their customer support has largely been an afterthought
| and when you combine that with dark patterns, it makes for an
| awful user experience:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26808275&p=2#26809476
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| I have to agree. If small fish want risk-free options,
| society offers banks that are heavily regulated and insured.
| Indeed, the insurance like the FDIC only protects the
| relatively small actors in the financial system.
|
| Society also offers us the freedom to choose how we invest.
| That means taking a risk and I think Coinbase always made it
| clear that the area was very risky.
| senthil_rajasek wrote:
| At least in the U.S selling financial products like stocks,
| ETFs are regulated. Bank products like savings accounts are
| FDIC insured.
|
| Crypto products are not regulated.
|
| Crypto products are new, sophisticated and poorly understood
| by the average people and can hence be manipulated easily.
|
| That's the main difference between traditional financial
| products and crypto.
| cwkoss wrote:
| Your comment seems like a disingenuous attack rooted in
| sour grapes rather than principles.
|
| Stock options are regulated and less new, but they are also
| sophisticated, poorly understood by the average people, and
| manipulated easily.
|
| The idea that traditional financial markets are 'fair' to
| the common man is pretty naive: many brokerages
| intentionally front run their customers or charge
| unconscionable fees, and the market is rife with non-
| fiduciary investment advisors who sell products based on
| what provides the largest kickback rather than what's in
| the best interest of their customer.
| senthil_rajasek wrote:
| There are restrictions to opening Options and futures
| accounts in the U.S.
|
| Equating traditional financial system to crypto using
| front running, high fees etc., is false equivalency.
| chinathrow wrote:
| > What did Coinbase do that made people lose money
|
| An easy one: Facilitate access to the cryptocurrency scams of
| the century, mainly shitcoins.
| ptero wrote:
| Facilitating access to various investment options,
| including direct speculation, is what stockbrokers do. Why
| is your grief falling specifically on the Coinbase?
|
| For example, in my Fidelity account I can, if I am so
| inclined, day trade GBTC, buy low volume penny stocks of
| sketchy miners and do a lot of other things that are not
| recommended by the mainstream financial analysts.
| chinathrow wrote:
| > Why is your grief falling specifically on the Coinbase
|
| There is simply no underlying value within any of these
| coins. Why would a sane person invest in them?
|
| With regular stocks, you have at least some sort of
| insight on how an underlying is performing.
| ptero wrote:
| > There is simply no underlying value within any of these
| coins. Why would a sane person invest in them?
|
| I remember hearing the same arguments against Ebay and
| other e-commerce companies: this is all vaporware, there
| is no physical value (meaning bricks and mortar
| storefronts), we should prohibit people from investing in
| all of those, etc.
|
| I _personally_ would not touch most cryptos with a 6 '
| pole, but that is just my opinion. We should still allow
| someone who believes in this space to invest _their own
| money_ the way they see fit. My 2c.
| wpietri wrote:
| Nah. The average person was and should have been
| prevented from investing in Ebay until they were a
| publicly traded company, which required Ebay execs to
| share with the public enough information to have a hope
| of correctly valuing the investment.
|
| Even if you don't care at all about individuals getting
| fleeced by scammers, there's a societal reason. We need
| investment capital for growth, and we need it to be
| reasonably sanely allocated. If some people raising
| capital can lie and others have to tell the truth, that
| puts truth-tellers at a structural disadvantage, meaning
| more money for fraud, less money for good investments,
| and a strong incentive for everybody to lie in equal
| amounts just to keep up.
|
| Worse, over the long term, markets with high levels of
| scamming mean that most people learn to stay out of them
| entirely. This leads to even less capital for good
| investments plus society-wide misallocation of capital.
| E.g., people just keeping money in their mattresses. So
| long-term economic growth is harmed for a generation or
| two. Because even if you clean up a market so it is safe,
| it takes a long while for people to forget previous pain.
|
| So as a society, we want what America had for decades:
| strongly regulated financial markets so that the average
| joe has a variety of safe investment options. For the few
| who really want to invest in the risky stuff, they can go
| out and get a Series 65 exam to prove they know what
| they're doing. [1]
|
| [1] Process described here:
| https://www.natecation.com/accredited-investor-investing-
| sta...
| ptero wrote:
| For tax or other community money pots, sure. For my own
| -- thanks, but no thanks. I will spend it however I like.
| wpietri wrote:
| I don't get the sense that you read what I wrote. Tax
| money pots are less worrying to me because the
| information/skill asymmetries are lower.
|
| In any case, in the US it's still illegal for most
| investments to take money from non-accredited investors.
| So yes, this includes your money.
| ptero wrote:
| OK, I should have been clearer on what I have been
| arguing with. Specifically, you expressed this sentiment
| a few times:
|
| > Even if you don't care at all about individuals getting
| fleeced by scammers, there's a societal reason. We need
| investment capital for growth, and we need it to be
| reasonably sanely allocated
|
| Anytime people start talking about what is acceptably
| sane and what is not and start restricting investments
| based on this characterization we create self-
| reinforcing, traditionalist setups that suffocate
| everything else.
| wpietri wrote:
| I don't think that's true at all. The US has one of the
| most tightly regulated securities markets in the world.
| But it also has one of the most innovative economies. And
| our markets are strong enough that foreign companies work
| to list here to take advantage of the amount of capital
| available. That apparent contradiction is easily
| resolved: strongly regulated markets create the kind of
| trust that draws in the investment capital necessary for
| innovation.
| dewey wrote:
| There's many regular investment vehicles that you can
| invest in where this also applies. This is not a crypto
| or Coinbase problem.
| ezfe wrote:
| So do you think that everyone should remove gamestop from
| stock brokers? It's not connected to the underlying
| business performance.
| SamReidHughes wrote:
| Brokers also let you trade foreign currencies and metals.
| duped wrote:
| They're still investments, first of all. Crypto is just a
| scam.
| hellomyguys wrote:
| It's pretty crazy Coinbase makes it hard to know your total
| losses/profits. I imagine it's somewhere in the app, but it's
| not top level like in any other trading/investment app.
| justinhj wrote:
| Well at least they share it with the IRS who will happily
| share it back to users should they not figure it out when
| taxes are due
| rvz wrote:
| > Already somebody committed suicide after losing their money
| in coinbase and there will be more. Anybody who invested,
| guided, allowed this to operate is directly responsible.
|
| You realise what you have just said was total nonsense and it
| isn't exclusive to Coinbase? It's no different to losing all
| your money on a SPAC stock with a stock broker that allows
| trading it.
| pavlov wrote:
| One difference is that Coinbase itself chooses the coins that
| are available for trading, whereas a stock broker just gives
| you access to shares traded on an exchange.
|
| I.e. Coinbase is both Schwab and NASDAQ for crypto. And
| they've certainly (ab)used this power by listing shitcoins
| that conveniently were owned by the same VCs that had
| invested in Coinbase itself.
|
| Speaking of the SPAC loophole, that's being plugged by new
| SEC regulations. Crypto companies wouldn't be happy to have
| their tokens be under the same regulatory framework, but
| probably they should be.
| knaik94 wrote:
| I don't think that's a fair comparison in saying it's doing
| the job of both just because coinbase self regulates which
| coins it allows. Their markets and pairs are based on
| internal risk calculations. DOGE coin was allowed
| relatively late onto coinbase. Monero is still not
| supported on coinbase. Schwab does similar with penny
| stocks and you have to do an interview with a trader in
| order to be able to do naked calls/puts or advanced
| straddles as well as trade on margin. Schwab will help you
| make otc trades on penny stocks that aren't listed on the
| main exchanges.
|
| Not listing Monero is definitely not a good financial
| decision. That's the currency darknet markets are shifting
| to. Monero also crashed along with BTC and ETH, it doesn't
| look decoupled. And crypto markets haven't meaningfully
| decoupled from the securities market either.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _due to wilful negligience, incompetence_
|
| That's generous. Slot machines aren't negligently money losing.
| They're designed to suppress your risk aversion and play into
| your greed and desperation.
| axg11 wrote:
| >To see thousands of Americans who can't afford to lose their
| savings lose it to Coinbase due to wilful negligience,
| incompetence.
|
| This is a weird take. Coinbase isn't perfect but I don't see
| this as a valid criticism. Coinbase are equally responsible for
| thousands of Americans becoming richer than they ever dreamed
| of by providing them easy access to the crypto world. Coinbase
| is a trading platform, losses and wins are to be expected.
| usrn wrote:
| There are much worse things too. At least with crypto you
| only lose as much as you put in. Adjustable rate loans can
| (and do) completely wipe people out. I'd argue those are far
| worse than pretty much anything in crypto.
|
| EDIT:
|
| As of a month ago they still do (at 2x anyway.) Also that
| still has a ceiling on it. Yes if you leverage your entire
| life savings you can get in trouble but at that point I don't
| think it matters what you're securing the loan with, that's
| just extremely irresponsible.
|
| And again, it's the debt that's causing the issue.
| kube-system wrote:
| > At least with crypto you only lose as much as you put in.
|
| Coinbase has previously offered leveraged accounts, where
| you could lose up to 3x what you invested.
| ordiel wrote:
| If you trully care about privacy, and maintaining the govenment
| and other entities on a leash, cash is your friend.... your only
| friend
| boringg wrote:
| This reminds me of what my chief legal council told me when I was
| negotiate a deal with another company for data services who we
| were really friendly with at the time. The gist: "Even if it is
| your best friend, you need to have very firm legal boundaries on
| what you are giving them access to as you don't know who will run
| the company or what their pressure points will be in the future
| and how they might use your data against your wishes".
| im3w1l wrote:
| I don't trust legal solutions. They can only provide redress
| when someone is caught, but it's just so easy to snoop without
| being caught. Only possibilities are keeping the data on
| machines you control, or using encryption.
| superkuh wrote:
| All these comments are about how this effects cryptocurrency in
| this or that way but the truth is, this story is not about
| cryptocurrency. It is about banking company doing bad things like
| all banks do regularly. It has almost nothing to do with
| cryptocurrency. The finance bros at the edge of the ecosystem are
| often mistaken for cryptocurrency by the speculator class.
| oefrha wrote:
| The link should be changed to
| https://theintercept.com/2022/06/29/crypto-coinbase-tracer-i....
| Current Coindesk article is a poor rehash of the Intercept
| article, which is a lot more clear. The key question remains
| unanswered, but the original article at least points that out:
|
| > The contract also provides, provocatively, "Historical geo
| tracking data," though it's unclear what exactly this data
| consists of or from where it's sourced.
|
| No idea how geo tracking data can be "fully sourced from online,
| publicly available data".
| conradev wrote:
| IP addresses are publicly available in cryptocurrency networks,
| tied to rough geolocation, and ephemeral. Coinbase could have
| been collecting historical IP address logs of the networks as
| one idea
| capableweb wrote:
| > No idea how geo tracking data can be "fully sourced from
| online, publicly available data".
|
| First idea was data brokers, who sit on tons of data, including
| geolocation. But that's not publicly available so... Maybe the
| "public" part is used for parallel construction rather than
| giving away the true source?
| bertil wrote:
| Photo and video files used to have lat-long in the meta-data;
| they still do, but most image hosts strip it now.
|
| Twitter used to give the ability to include the poster's
| approximate location with each update.
| oefrha wrote:
| Yeah, but in this context they should be linked to crypto
| transactions somehow.
| kube-system wrote:
| Well, one can put bitcoin addresses in photos or tweets.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, changed from
| https://www.coindesk.com/business/2022/06/29/coinbase-is-
| rep.... Thanks!
| jaywalk wrote:
| My imagination can get pretty wild, but I can't even begin to
| imagine how they could do that without severely bending the
| definitions of "Coinbase user data" and "public sources" to the
| point of breaking.
| overtonwhy wrote:
| IP address?
| jaywalk wrote:
| That would be Coinbase user data. It's definitely not on
| the blockchain.
| googlryas wrote:
| You can keep track of the IP address that you hear first
| announce a transaction. If you have enough nodes logging
| this across the bitcoin network, and someone connects a
| node running on their personal compute to the network in
| order to initiate a transaction, then you can basically
| have the location data for the person who initiated that
| transaction.
|
| (There's a whole bunch of caveats here, but that is how
| it would work at a high level)
| jaywalk wrote:
| Is that data actually tracked and available publicly?
| googlryas wrote:
| I'm sure it is tracked by interested parties, but I doubt
| you would be able to find it publicly, because why go
| through the trouble of running a bunch of nodes just to
| give your special information away...
| [deleted]
| Ekaros wrote:
| Why do they have geolocation data in first place? For what and
| how do they use it?
| bitwize wrote:
| First they fucked over DEI and now this. Looks like Coinbase has
| stealth fascists in its leadership.
| johndfsgdgdfg wrote:
| [deleted]
| aeturnum wrote:
| This is the problem with "no politics at work": work has
| political salience. Politics concerns regulation of the world and
| work happens in the world.
|
| Whenever an executive starts complaining[1] about how politics is
| impacting their workplace I see management incompetence. Politics
| exists. It exists for everyone. If your company is having an
| unusually difficult time getting work done in a given political
| environment, the conditions that are causing that probably have
| more to do with the company environment than politics writ large.
|
| Prohibition is always a largely ineffective policy. People have
| feelings about the world. If you can't find a way to make space
| for those feelings somehow they will make their own space, often
| at the least convenient moment.
|
| [1] Most recently this was Kraken CEO Jesse Powell
| tomc1985 wrote:
| While you are correct, this is the logic that is used to guilt-
| slash-shame folks who do not want to get involved into getting
| involved. It is one of the many sources of intense polarization
| that we suffer from today, and it forces people to take
| uninformed stances on things that makes them little more than
| mindless footsoldiers for causes that need a nuanced touch.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Particularly notable here since Coinbase is famously a
| "mission-focused" company [1]:
|
| _> Coinbase's mission is to create an open financial system
| for the world. This means we want to use cryptocurrency to
| bring economic freedom to people all over the world._
|
| Selling geolocation data to ICE definitely detracts from that
| mission. Whoops!
|
| [1] https://blog.coinbase.com/coinbase-is-a-mission-focused-
| comp...
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Hah, does anyone actually believe a company's "mission
| statement"?
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| When I see that it always seems to me that the real issue is
| the CEO has made a conscious choice to pick profit over doing
| the right thing, and wants employees who dislike this choice to
| leave. Which is essentially bad for society and why I think
| most firms in our economy should be co-operatively managed.
| aeturnum wrote:
| I think you're giving them a bit too much credit. I suspect
| that is what they think they are doing - but IMO they're just
| being ineffectual. The real villains manage this like any
| other aspect of company culture. Exxon doesn't ban talking
| about politics and it hasn't crippled their operations!
| dubswithus wrote:
| It's not really political at all. The government is going to
| get the data one way or another. Or shut down Coinbase and be
| done with it. It's the survival instinct of a company playing a
| very dangerous game.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Why is it dangerous?
| Imnimo wrote:
| "Why can't Coinbase just respect my privacy and let me put all of
| my personal financial transactions on a public ledger in peace!"
| nextstepguy wrote:
| All your coinbase are belong to us
| T3RMINATED wrote:
| gkoberger wrote:
| Two things.
|
| First, Coinbase has a no-politics rule. I wonder where this
| falls. Since it's something business-related, I imagine it's fine
| to discuss internally, but this is an example where (if I was at
| Coinbase) I'd feel the no-politics-rule does the company a
| disservice. I'd be pretty mad if my company was selling to ICE
| and I wasn't allowed to say anything about it.
|
| Second, it always amazes me how little these ICE contracts are,
| and how quick big companies (like Github) are willing to burn
| their credibility over such a relatively small amount of money.
| thescriptkiddie wrote:
| I've said it before and I'll say it again; "apolitical" really
| just means "supporting the status quo."
|
| This is how ideology works, it the things you believe
| subconsciously, which make you think that the dominant
| political project is natural, neutral, uncontroversial, even
| external to politics.
| gkoberger wrote:
| Totally agree; I'm against any company having a no-politics
| rule. Everything is political, for better or for worse, and
| enforcing it is really just enforcing your own political
| beliefs.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Is it? By no politics most would just mean don't talk about
| Trump or Biden or pro choice vs pro choice or pride day or
| other things like that, most of which don't affect business
| in direct way and is divisive. It doesn't mean don't involve
| any kind of politics.
| fleddr wrote:
| I don't agree. The "no politics" path taken by a few
| companies (Coinbase, Basecamp) is a blunt response against
| overexcited activists.
|
| You know the type. The ones that distract from the core
| mission of a company. The ones continuously creating outrage
| and division, the ones doing walkouts, leaking documents and
| data, constantly stirring up shit and poisoning morale.
|
| It's typically a very small minority, and these companies
| decided to get rid of them, and codified this as "no
| politics". Had these people been more reasonable and
| professional about political aspects of business, surely the
| blunt instrument of "no politics" would be unneeded.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| What about selling geolocation data to ICE? Do you think
| it's part of the "core mission" of Coinbase, or a
| distraction? Don't you think that this, too, creates
| outrage and division? That it "stirs up shit" and poisons
| morale?
| nitrixion wrote:
| This is not my opinion but instead how I view the
| Coinbase company's perspective. I'm playing the neutral
| party here.
|
| ICE is a client that wants to utilize Coinbase services.
| Coinbase "core mission" is making money. As such,
| servicing ICE is completely within their "core mission".
| hhgdsd wrote:
| gkoberger wrote:
| You mentioned some tactics. Now could you detail which
| specific "political" opinions you don't believe belong in
| the workplace?
| fleddr wrote:
| That's not my call to make, I'd say its highly context
| dependent. Some politics may be very relevant to a line
| of business, others less so.
|
| In any case I'd say the issue is often not about having
| the particular political opinion, it's about translating
| it into a type of activism that does damage, by creating
| internal division, distractions, generating bad PR, etc.
| These things can spin out of control, forcing business
| leaders to pick between multiple evils.
| cityzen wrote:
| i think your rule was truncated... it's actually no-politics-
| rule-unless-it-makes-us-money-and-what-are-you-really-going-to-
| do-about-it-,-quit?
| rchaud wrote:
| The initial contracts are cheap for a reason. It's all about
| the after-work that results from the initial deal.
|
| Today, it's ICE.
|
| Next year, it can expand to include the ATF, and perhaps after
| that, the FBI.
| gkoberger wrote:
| Coinbase made $1.17bn last year. A $1.36M contract from each
| of ICE, ATF and the FBI doesn't even come close to covering
| their Superbowl ad budget.
|
| On average, people have varying levels of
| appreciation/distaste for government agencies... but I think
| regardless of your stance, it's an easy argument to say ICE
| falls high on the list of disliked government agencies.
|
| Sources:
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/10/coinbase-coin-
| earnings-q1-20...
|
| https://www.marketplace.org/2022/02/14/how-much-did-
| cryptocu...
| undoware wrote:
| Having worked at a big tech company, I can report that there is
| an intense, career-making-or-breaking individual imperative for
| managers to prove the 'value' of soft assets like credibility
| or popularity.
|
| In my opinion, the reason these companies are willing to shed
| vast amounts of credibility for cents on the dollar is a
| systematic mistaking of asset dividends for asset value, which
| is reified into the organizational culture -- because no one in
| the C-suite really knows better, not-knowing is selected for,
| and ultimately becomes a requirement for individual careers to
| progress.
|
| The dynamic is easier to see in other parts of the economy.
| While the rent that a fancy house can earn, say, does in fact
| speak to the value of that house, _the fact that it is
| available for rent in the first place_ also impacts the value.
| For literal houses, this offset can be overcome, but for
| something like your credibility or your integrity, it 's
| lethal.
|
| But that doesn't matter if your boss doesn't know this. All
| that they see is 'number go up'. Then, often, your number -- be
| it salary or rank or both - goes up too. And six months later,
| when the consequences of the firesale become clear, it's too
| late for the employer -- but not for you, the architect of this
| terrible idea! You've already augmented your own income, and
| you can go back on the job market asking for equal-or-better
| compensation.
|
| Since the number of companies suffering from this acculturated
| cognitive bias is greater than 1, you can in effect ping-pong
| between two such companies while gutting both, making larger
| and larger paycheques with each bounce.
|
| This process is even easier if you work for a _really_ big
| company, because then you don 't even have to change employers!
| You can just change divisions every six months. The next reorg
| is right around the corner.
|
| Credibility-for-sale is apoptosis, pure and clean, and it's
| lucrative to induce, even by accident.
| rdxm wrote:
| oceanplexian wrote:
| Being on good terms with Uncle Sam often isn't about the money.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Government: plato o plomo?
| hhgdsd wrote:
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| Crypto's biggest friction point imo has been that people are used
| to interacting [primarily with centralized services. Average
| people don't want to manage their own crypto wallet because they
| aren't used to being the sole person responsible for managing
| things like that. They don't want all their money to be tied to a
| single computer, or QR code, or device, they want it tied to an
| account held by a big company, where all they have to do is prove
| who they are to access their stuff. Because of this habit it
| feels like decentralized services will always end up as a
| collection of siloed centralized services. And with centralized
| services you get things like this data selling. Unless there's a
| paradigm shift in how non-technical people interact with
| decentralized services things like this are going to keep
| happening. That said, they're saying they're only providing
| publicly available data to ICE, but if it's publicly available
| and non-identifiable, why does ICE even need it, and why wouldn't
| they be able to get it themselves? (I'm actually asking, if you
| know I'd love to hear).
| bombcar wrote:
| People _are_ used to "manage it myself money" - it's called
| _cash_ and most people _do not want_ to carry large amounts of
| it around or have it at home.
|
| And cash has significant security advantages over crypto in
| that it's very hard to remotely steal the dollars from
| someone's physical wallet or mattress; even if it is relatively
| easy to just walk up and take them.
| azov wrote:
| On the other hand it's hard (and illegal) to create backup
| copies of cash :)
| bombcar wrote:
| There's a 51% _defense_ that 's available, however; if you
| have 51% of the bill or such you can get it replaced!
|
| https://www.frbservices.org/assets/financial-
| services/cash/f...
|
| https://www.moneyfactory.gov/services/currencyredemption.ht
| m...
|
| (If the government had a sense of humor that would be
| moneyprinter.gov heh)
| nybble41 wrote:
| > if you have 51% of the bill or such you can get it
| replaced
|
| What if it's the middle third of the bill that's missing?
| Does the 51% need to be contiguous? The links suggest
| that you only need 51% in total, even if the bill was
| shredded.
|
| Concretely: Could you take 1/3 from opposite ends of two
| different bills and present the pieces as 2/3 of three
| different bills to turn two old bills into three new
| ones? Putting aside the fact that this would be fraud, of
| course. Someone must have tried it at some point.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| US currency has serial numbers printed on both sides of
| the bill, and while you might be able to cut it up in
| such a way that they aren't included, I believe they also
| put it in the watermarks, so even if there is a strategic
| way to cut it that hides the watermarks and serial
| numbers, I think they'd start to catch on before you made
| much. It's an interesting thought experiment though. How
| many banks would you be able to try it at before they
| caught on?
| acchow wrote:
| Right, but this happens so rarely. If someone breaks into
| your home and finds 49% of your cash, they're taking ALL
| of those bills which would be irrecoverable.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| Which a large reason why people use banks. Even if
| someone breaks into the bank and steals the exact bills
| you deposited, you don't lose any money. Crypto is closer
| to cash in that it's anonymous but not private, with the
| advantage being you can send money wherever you want in
| the world without mailing an envelope of cash. But like
| cash if you send it to the wrong place, or someone finds
| it, it's gone. The decentralization is great because it
| means no single entity can say "That's it, you can't send
| money to XYZ anymore" but the usecase is still smaller
| than cash (maybe not forever), or a bank account
| (probably forever).
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| wyager wrote:
| Are you joking, or do you really think that cash has superior
| security properties to asymmetric key management?
|
| It's a lot easier to steal my cash, or my bank balance, or my
| securities, or any other physical or fiat asset I own, than
| it is to steal even moderately-secured Bitcoins.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| When I was writing my comment initially I wrote a comparison
| between individual crypto wallets and cash, and how
| centralized banks spawned from people not wanting to be the
| only one responsible for their large amounts of cash, hence
| banks, but I removed it because my comment was already
| running long. We're totally on the same page.
|
| Edit: Also, I know cash is the governmental evolution of bank
| notes which didn't exist before banks, and that the original
| decentralized currency would be like, pinches of gold or
| whatever.
| zimbatm wrote:
| Even technical people. Look how quickly we rushed to re-
| centralize Git.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| > why does ICE even need it, and why wouldn't they be able to
| get it themselves? (I'm actually asking, if you know I'd love
| to hear).
|
| ICE doesn't know how to get it and Coinbase does, probably.
|
| HTML is free, yet it's common for companies to hire other
| companies to build with it.
| rodgerd wrote:
| US law enforcement have been using data brokers to do an end
| run around requirements for warrants and other elements of
| due process for a while, as well as getting the data cheaply;
| I wouldn't be surprised if those drivers exist here.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| There is definitely a level in between 'all my stuff is owned
| by coinbase' and 'all my stuff is owned by me, behind a private
| key I have to manage'. For example, there are non-custodial
| wallets where the wallet is still yours and can't be claimed or
| blocked by some third party that do have social recovery
| mechanisms that just require you to trust a few people in your
| life to cooperate to help you if you lose your wallet. I think
| these kinds of services are going to be very useful if crypto
| achieves wide adoption.
|
| https://www.argent.xyz/faq/
| thinkmassive wrote:
| One very interesting technology for semi-trusted setups in
| the Bitcoin space is federated Chaumian mints[0].
|
| This provides the best of both worlds: positive user
| experience (especially for less technical users) and
| reduction of overall centralization. An implementation called
| MiniMint[1] is already in the works.
|
| 0: https://fedimint.org/
|
| 1: https://github.com/fedimint/minimint
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| Mr. Gensler put it succinctly; Every large system trends
| towards centralization.
|
| The crypto economy has slowly started to work its way into the
| traditional finance system. The only thing that crypto is
| really good for is having an auditable system of account, which
| isn't possible in the current financial system with centralized
| creation of debt.
|
| >where all they have to do is prove who they are to access
| their stuff.
|
| My prediction is that crypto does indeed become centralized
| between a few wallets & those centralized wallets can have some
| form of 'Verification' for reinstating lost keys.
|
| > it's publicly available and non-identifiable,
|
| Because they can combine it with their massive databases and
| make it identifiable is my guess.
| samstave wrote:
| >> _" The only thing that crypto is really good for is having
| an _auditable system of account_, which isn't possible in the
| current financial system with centralized creation of debt."_
|
| THIS is the reason the central banks are anti crypto.... is
| it will provide an auditable ledger (irrespective of
| anonymity) which threatens the money laundering currency.
| There are other levels of currency laundering that have been
| used for eons ; 'Art' and 'Humans'. (and the currency used at
| the even higher levels than that)
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| In a fantasy world where all currency/transactions were on
| a bitcoin ledger, the average citizen could analyze the
| data and find all the government black ops funds. All those
| transactions from the CIA to terrorist groups or whatever
| would have a spotlight on them over night.
| samstave wrote:
| Kinda like a swiss bank account?
| bendtheblock wrote:
| agreed, but consolidation in this way is a property of
| _capitalism_, not of tech
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| I would disagree tremendously based on the centralization
| of tech in search, storage, social & hardware.
| bendtheblock wrote:
| What about JP Morgan and the Railroad Trusts? The big 4
| accounting firms? Big pharma? The Magic Circle of Law
| Firms? I could keep going.
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| That all of those systems are extremely centralized? i
| don't get your point on this one as it seems to reaffirm
| my comment.
| bendtheblock wrote:
| The centralized nature of these oligopolies is a property
| of capitalism, i.e. capital consolidates power. You are
| saying that search, storage etc are centralised because
| of the tech? Why are they any more centralised than the
| other (pre-internet) examples I mentioned?
| TrapLord_Rhodo wrote:
| ahh, i was looking at those company's 'as tech'. In the
| sense of technology, not internet company's we see today.
|
| To be honest I think we agree, we are just getting caught
| up in semantics. Whether it is capitalism or tech that's
| doing it is irrelevant because we have the development of
| technology in a capitalistic world order. In other words,
| it is impossible to differentiate when the two are so
| intertwined.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| The biggest friction point for me was being required to verify
| my ID to create an account for most crypto services. If I can't
| be anonymous with crypto, I see no reason to go through the
| hassle of adding a new payment method to my wallet.
|
| The fact that it is so difficult to avoid disclosing my
| personal information tells me just about everyone getting into
| crypto right now is a speculator.
| bpicolo wrote:
| ]
|
| had to close the bracket
| babypuncher wrote:
| It's bigger than that. I think for most people,
| decentralization is an anti-feature. People do not want all
| their money to disappear because they lost their laptop on the
| subway. Being able to call your bank or credit union and have
| them freeze your cards, reverse fraudulent charges, and restore
| access to your account is a good thing.
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| Exactly
| dieselgate wrote:
| the reversal of fraudulent charges is a tremendous perk of
| credit cards in my experience
| ericd wrote:
| This isn't an issue if you have any form of backup and you
| have something like FileVault enabled on your computer.
| Which, I know, is asking a lot compared to the average
| proficiency of users. But it's also really not so hard that
| people need to throw up their hands and say it's unworkable.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| If instead of random hashes, you could generate wallet keys
| based on biometrics or some other aspect inherent and
| unique to an individual this could work. But you would be
| leaking a lot of information for others to reverse engineer
| your key.
| cowtools wrote:
| I don't think that would work as biometrics aren't
| deterministic AFAIK. That's why operating systems with
| encrypted storage like Android (and presumably iOS) don't
| allow you to unlock them with biometrics on startup.
| strgcmc wrote:
| I agree about decentralization as anti-feature, but this is a
| poor analogy.
|
| It's equivalent to saying, people do not want all their money
| to disappear because they chose to carry all their life
| savings in a briefcase on the subway and then they lost the
| briefcase. If you did that, no bank is going to reimburse
| you. The way to avoid this problem, is to keep your fiat
| savings in the bank (which means, as some number in some
| database they keep), instead of in physical bills on your
| person. It has nothing to do with fiat or TradFi being
| inherently better than crypto.
|
| Likewise, the way to avoid this problem for crypto, is to not
| carry your private keys with you all the time (or at least,
| to only carry them on devices you can afford to lose, such as
| a hardware wallet that an attacker needs time to penetrate,
| giving you time to go home and restore/move your funds).
| Obviously self-custody is still hard and still a high barrier
| to entry, but from a financial risk perspective, you should
| only "carry" as much crypto on you as you would be willing to
| carry as cash in your wallet (which of course you can always
| lose, and losing it doesn't validate or invalidate the
| banking industry).
| cowtools wrote:
| In an ideal world, every device would be secure enough that
| the user could afford to lose it.
|
| P.S. I'm using a pixel phone running CalyxOS It has a
| locked bootloader so I am reasonably confident an attacker
| could not steal my keys. I wish I could say the same about
| my laptop.
| uberdru wrote:
| Not to mention actually rolling back stock trades. . . .
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Decentralization does not necessarily mean loss of trusted
| asset recovery, it just means more flexibility around who you
| trust. Earlier in another comment I linked argent, which at
| the risk of looking spammy I will post again not because I
| have anything to gain by promoting them but because I think
| it's legitimately a well thought out system and a model for
| the future of how this all works.
|
| https://www.argent.xyz/faq/
| plsbenice34 wrote:
| You can't have the good parts without the bad. Most people
| hate banks. Russians dont like not being allowed to withdraw
| their money from ATMs and being restricted from foreign
| exchange. Merchants don't like being scammed by fraudulent
| chargebacks. People don't want the risk that their funds are
| stolen by the custodian.
|
| Your comment is disingenuous and seems to be willfully
| misrepresenting the situation by ignoring that there are two
| sides
|
| These forms of decentralised digital money are very new;
| nobody understands the potential for it if it were supported
| by social structures and education. Currently it exists in an
| incredibly hostile social environment where institutions are
| actively harming the user experience.
| jstanley wrote:
| > for most people, decentralization is an anti-feature.
|
| Before general literacy, written documentation was an anti-
| feature.
|
| As people gain technical literacy, decentralisation will
| become more broadly relevant.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| No, as people gain (technical) literacy, decentralization
| becomes less relevant, because literacy and legibility are
| the enablers of higher forms of centralization and
| organization.
|
| Who is more centralized, technologically and literate
| civilizations or ones in so called 'primitive' states?
| wyager wrote:
| No one leaves all their Bitcoin on a laptop. Even casual
| users today most likely have a backup of some kind. The
| process is easy now; buy a hardware wallet or use a phone
| app, write down the backup words, done.
|
| > Being able to call your bank or credit union and have them
| freeze your cards, reverse fraudulent charges
|
| The only reason I've ever had to do this is _because
| traditional payments security is so shitty_. Forgive me if I
| 'm not impressed that the fiat payments system has measures
| to deal with problems _that it created_.
|
| No one can make a fraudulent charge on my Bitcoin wallet.
|
| The last time Chase detected a fraudulent charge on my credit
| card, they helpfully did a chargeback on a bunch of other
| random non-fraudulent transactions without asking me, which
| led to many hours of bullshit for me to deal with. I had to
| move insurance companies because progressive stopped letting
| me pay with a credit card.
| DennisP wrote:
| The advantage of crypto over cash is that you can keep
| redundant copies, or keep portions of a key in different
| places so there's no single point of failure. It'd be pretty
| silly not to have backups.
|
| For most people, a friendlier ideal is probably social
| recovery wallets, as advocated by Vitalik. You can restore
| access much like centralized services can, except instead of
| relying on a big company you're relying on your circle of
| friends and family. You can also include a company or two, if
| you want, without the company being a single point of
| failure.
|
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html
|
| Reversing charges is a different point, which could be
| accomplished pretty simply with 2-of-3 sigs if there's market
| demand for it. At the moment, scaling issues have kept crypto
| from being used much for retail payments anyway (though
| that's gradually getting fixed).
|
| As for freezing cards, that's something we have to do a lot
| because we hand over full account credentials to everyone we
| pay and just trust them to keep those details safe and not
| abuse them. I've replaced two credit cards due to fraud, and
| it was a hassle. It boggles my mind that we've had public key
| cryptography for fifty years and we're still not using it for
| payments. Never mind blockchains, just upgrading the banking
| system to use public keys would be a huge improvement.
| uncomputation wrote:
| > It boggles my mind that we've had public key cryptography
| for fifty years and we're still not using it for payments.
| Never mind blockchains, just upgrading the banking system
| to use public keys would be a huge improvement.
|
| This ignores the number one lesson of PGP - key management
| is hard, up there with naming things and cache
| invalidation. I honestly don't see how public keys, which
| are vastly more complicated to use and store than
| passwords, would be an improvement for the general, non-
| technical public when getting them to use long, unique
| passwords is already a challenge. You have to copy over or
| update your public key with each new computer you get,
| assuming the account owner even has a permanent computer.
| What about accessing your account on someone else's
| computer in a quick pinch, or on your phone? Coupled with
| the fact that keypairs would be unable to be force reset
| (assuming you want to use them to their full potential)
| unlike passwords, and it would be a disaster.
|
| I will say that minimizing the sensitive information sent
| for payment with crypto is a huge plus, as the merchant no
| longer needs to handle the card information to send to the
| payment processor, but can just accept the transaction hash
| (with some sort of signature of course).
|
| This also doesn't really address the issue that Coinbase
| will still send your info to ICE, of course. Not that banks
| are any better. But cash is!
| uncomputation wrote:
| > Reversing charges is a different point, which could be
| accomplished pretty simply with 2-of-3 sigs if there's
| market demand for it.
|
| You can't reverse transactions. Once validated and included
| in a block, the transactions are forever, which is of
| course one of the main appeals of cryptocurrency in the
| first place. You would have to get the fraudster to send
| the money back (potentially covering gas fees) or else
| there is literally no other way without their signing key
| (also one of the key appeals of cryptocurrency).
| tylersmith wrote:
| Blockchain transactions are really just messages that can
| optionally include payments. A logical retail transaction
| that can be reversed can be modeled on top as a series of
| messages, very similar to how credit card clearing works.
| uncomputation wrote:
| > messages that can optionally include payments
|
| This is a weird way to put it. Transactions include state
| transitions which modify the state of the global
| blockchain permanently. Miners (in the case of bitcoin)
| validate these transitions and publish the block to the
| chain. If there is a reversal, it must come from the
| merchant's account, because only they can produce a valid
| state transition to "return" (ie send back) your money.
| ineedasername wrote:
| That's an advantage of crypto over _cash_. In the US, and
| probably similar trends in many places, only about 20% of
| transactions are in cash.
|
| Merely being better than cash isn't much of a selling
| feature, especially when it's worse than cash in some ways
| as well: keep your crypto in an exchange and it might get
| hacked. Keep it offline in a local wallet(s) and it stops
| being useful as a medium of exchange in most places you'd
| use cash.
|
| I'm not saying these problems are insurmountable, but if
| they are then there's still a very long road ahead to get
| there.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| Probably the most common vector for crypto theft is
| phishing people to sign malevolent transactions. So I have
| a hard time believing that there's a technical solution to
| this problem _at all_ -- much less with current blockchain
| technologies.
| cowtools wrote:
| Having separate "hot" and "cold" wallets is a good start.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Or have no wallets, which solves that problem completely.
| cowtools wrote:
| Cryptocurrency is more secure than cash or credit cards
| in this regard, so who is being made the fool here?
| arcticbull wrote:
| Crypto is way less secure than a credit card of course,
| since with a credit card I'm not liable for any fraud,
| loss or theft. I don't even have to front the charge
| until the issuer resolves it. As the issuer itself is
| liable (not me) they are incentivized to detect and stop
| as much fraud as possible.
|
| I can even take advantage of chargebacks to ensure
| merchants give me what I paid for. Chargebacks are
| incredibly customer-friendly - but of course they're good
| for businesses too as it affords folks a degree of
| confidence at unfamiliar merchants. And I get various
| kinds of insurance - they'll even reimburse me if I drop
| and smash what I bought 90 days _after_ I bought it.
| cowtools wrote:
| Credit cards need those systems in place precisely
| _because_ they are insecure in the first place.
|
| I can even use chargebacks to commit fraud against
| merchants.
|
| P.S. You think you're so smart for using paypal or
| something, wait until you set up a business and
| adversaries falsely accuse you of fraud. No system can
| completely prevent fraud, but the credit card system is
| insecure by design and blind to the externalities of
| fraud.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Really? Are you sure? Give it a go and see what happens.
|
| All you're doing is moving the fraud potential from the
| customer to the merchant. Without the network and with
| instant finality, you've left them with no recourse.
|
| Both credit cards and crypto as a payment primitive in
| isolation are secure. However, that's a very myopic view
| of a transaction. A transaction extends beyond simply the
| payment rails. You're leaving customers significantly
| worse off by forcing them into no-recourse payments with
| instant finality. Merchants, being businesses, are
| significantly better able to protect themselves - as they
| are able to insure against these losses - _and_ the
| ability to charge back transactions increases the
| transaction volume at the store because it gives
| customers confidence in the payment.
|
| [edit] I already have :)
|
| Have what? Committed fraud? Bold statement. How much did
| you steal and how often?
|
| There's zero basis to believe that crypto reduces the
| incidence of fraud. Citation needed.
| cowtools wrote:
| I already have :)
|
| P.S. all transactions rely on some basis of trust between
| the merchant and the customer. Cryptocurrency doesn't
| prevent fraud altogether, but it does severely limit the
| extent and direction of fraud.
|
| P.P.S. (response to your edit)
|
| >Both credit cards and crypto as a payment primitive in
| isolation are secure. However, that's a very myopic view
| of a transaction. A transaction extends beyond simply the
| payment rails. You're leaving customers significantly
| worse off by forcing them into no-recourse payments with
| instant finality. Merchants, being businesses, are
| significantly better able to protect themselves - as they
| are able to insure against these losses
|
| No, the credit card payment system is insecure because
| the information you need to authorize a payment is the
| same as the information you need to receive a payment
| (give or take a 4-digit PIN). In cryptocurrency (or even
| non-cryptocurrency, cryptographic payment systems like
| GNU Taler or DigiCash) there is the distinction between
| the public/private key.
|
| Also, on what basis are you supposing that all recipients
| of a payment are merchants? I don't agree with that
| assumption.
|
| >the ability to charge back transactions increases the
| transaction volume at the store because it gives
| customers confidence in the payment.
|
| Cryptocurrencies are (ideally) designed for payments
| between low-trust parties, like a drug transaction or a
| donation to a pseudo-anonymous party. Senders are
| expected to have the same vigilance that they do with
| cash payments in an alleyway.
|
| P.P.P.S.
|
| >There's zero basis to believe that crypto reduces the
| incidence of fraud. Citation needed.
|
| Cryptocurrency makes identity theft attacks impossible by
| having payments signed by the payee (e.g. rather than
| requiring proof of open source, personally identifiable
| information)
|
| Cryptocurrency makes chargeback fraud impossible insofar
| as the attacker cannot conduct a 51% attack or a finney
| attack.
|
| As for merchant fraud, users are expected to establish
| business relationships with trustworthy vendors and hold
| them accountable themselves. If these trust networks work
| for the DN and private trackers, then it's secure enough
| for me. You learn about the trustworthiness of vendors
| directly through the reviews of your peers, and you limit
| your risk accordingly.
| danans wrote:
| > As for merchant fraud, users are expected to establish
| business relationships with trustworthy vendors
|
| That might work for large transactions, or repeated small
| transactions with the same vendor (assuming there isn't a
| major regression of trust), but it utterly collapses at
| scale and diversity of buyers and sellers who can't
| possibly vet each other for trust (AKA any modern
| economy). It also would balkanize/silo trade.
|
| > and hold them accountable themselves.
|
| Sounds a lot like the old "break some kneecaps" approach.
| There's a reason such accountability mechanisms tend to
| be utilized in criminal enterprises.
| uoaei wrote:
| You seem to be suggesting "systems requiring regulation
| don't work without regulation" which is true. What you
| are maybe missing is that cryptocurrencies today,
| regardless of how much people _want_ it not to require
| regulation, still do require it to function effectively
| instead of the pain and suffering we see now. The sooner
| the zealots admit this to themselves, the sooner we can
| have productive conversations about moving forward.
|
| Moving forward could also mean "designing better
| decentralized systems that don't require regulation" but
| that would mean that they would have to acknowledge that
| the thing they've been throwing their money and voice
| behind is a faulty prototype not destined for mass scale.
| cowtools wrote:
| I believe cryptocurrencies are self regulating. If you
| want to convince me otherwise, you have to do better than
| just stating the opposite is true.
|
| I'll admit that some (many even!) cryptocurrencies make
| claims about decentralization and security that are not
| based in evidence. That is fine. I don't believe that
| cryptocurrency itself is sufficient for
| freedom/decentralization/security, but that it is
| necessary. Not all cryptocurrencies will meet my critera,
| and it's even possible that none do.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I mean they're clearly not, just look around you. You are
| the one making a claim, and therefore the burden of proof
| is on you - not us.
| cowtools wrote:
| I don't claim that all cryptocurrencies are self-
| regulating. see my parent comment.
| cycomanic wrote:
| But you claim some are, so you still need to back up that
| claim with evidence.
| ultra_chad wrote:
| And it only uses about 500,000 times as much energy per
| transaction as credit cards do. Nice!
| bendtheblock wrote:
| your last point isn't true - EMV cards with a chip (modern
| credit cards) use public key cryptography and don't reveal
| more than they need to to the merchant. Typing in the card
| numbers (or swiping it) will slowly stop in the US, as it
| has in most other developed countries by now.
|
| I disagree with the rest also - mainly on the grounds that
| for a normal person, there isn't any benefit and as the OP
| says, the status quo is preferable
| DennisP wrote:
| Is there any solution in the works for online purchases?
| knorker wrote:
| In several countries you now have to approve practically
| all online payments with second factor, the bank app on
| your phone.
| bendtheblock wrote:
| not cryptographically no (and would be nice to see, but
| crypto is not the answer). But as a consumer when I shop
| online I never worry - if I am defrauded the
| (centralised) bank will give me the money back, that's
| the solution and it works for everyone
| DennisP wrote:
| And that's how I ended up having to change my card
| numbers on file with a bunch of businesses, and why every
| couple months a purchase fails until I respond to a fraud
| email. It's a hassle and it's unnecessary, especially
| when phones have secure enclaves for private key storage.
| I'm not even arguing for blockchains now, just for using
| public keys in online purchases.
| dataflow wrote:
| > especially when phones have secure enclaves for private
| key storage
|
| Can you convince the powers that be to allow rooted
| phones to store card credentials?
| DennisP wrote:
| It's already used for Apple Pay so...yes? And:
|
| > Crucially, iOS itself cannot directly access data
| stored in the secure enclave, so even if malware could
| make its way onto an iPhone, it would have no access to
| the data.
|
| https://9to5mac.com/2020/02/12/apples-secure-enclave/
|
| Even if it's not a perfect solution, it's better than
| handing full account credentials to every online merchant
| I use. A dedicated FIDO fob would be even better but the
| phone is something most people already have.
| dataflow wrote:
| Google Pay refuses to work on rooted devices
| unfortunately.
| _the_inflator wrote:
| > The advantage of crypto over cash is that you can keep
| redundant copies, or keep portions of a key in different
| places so there's no single point of failure. It'd be
| pretty silly not to have backups.
|
| I believe that this looks simple on paper, but does not
| really work. And then: this is called service. Coinbase
| offered a service, that just deals with all the hassle you
| are describing.
| cowtools wrote:
| coinbase offers a service which is completely orthogonal
| to what he is describing.
|
| How difficult is it to set up a wallet, then use the same
| seed phrase when setting up a wallet on another device?
| If one of your devices gets stolen, make a new wallet and
| transfer the funds with your other device before they
| extract your keys.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| For the audience that reads HN? Probably not that
| difficult. For the average person who is comparing this
| to the alternative of a bank where they can just talk to
| a human who manages all this for them and also get
| benefits like a credit card with rewards, built a credit
| score, and have a throat to choke when there's an
| issue... it doesn't seem like that good of a tradeoff
| oceanplexian wrote:
| I keep seeing the argument repeated ad nauseam about how
| a bank protects from X and Y you and can reverse
| fraudulent charges and so on.
|
| But as a customer of several national US banks and having
| gone through the dispute process dozens of times in my
| life, in reality, I find that to be completely nonsense.
| I've had to deal with numerous incidents where someone
| stole my card, and the bank blames me (the customer) and
| then asks me to prove the money was stolen, only to have
| them make an arbitrary denial months later. It's the same
| bogus argument people make for all kinds of insurance,
| until you go to make a claim, get denied for some obscure
| legal text in the policy and find out you were just being
| ripped off the whole time.
| crummy wrote:
| Have you ever had your crypto wallet stolen? What was the
| process like to get that back?
| DennisP wrote:
| I have a lot of friends in the crypto space, and only one
| of them has lost any to theft. In that case, it was a
| SIM-swap for funds he had stored on a centralized
| exchange, rather than an attack on his own wallet.
|
| Meanwhile, my own credit card numbers were stolen twice.
| cowtools wrote:
| What is an "average person"? An average person in a first
| world country who has access to "trustworthy" financial
| system?
|
| Centralized systems work great... until they don't.
|
| P.S. Our grandchildren will wonder why we allowed the
| free world to export the means of surveillance to the
| third world. The financial system is a huge part of that.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| > P.S. Our grandchildren will wonder why we allowed the
| free world to export the means of surveillance to the
| third world. The financial system is a huge part of that.
|
| While I agree with the sentiment, this won't happen. Did
| the Banana Wars and using the military might to control
| South America prevent all the American wars in the middle
| east? Nope. Just as those are forgotten about, we
| Americans will conveniently forget anything else that
| puts a bad spot on our record.
| atlasunshrugged wrote:
| Even developing countries have access to useful financial
| networks. I did a few projects in Kenya and Cameroon and
| traveled around Uganda last year, the traditional banking
| sector isn't great but telco's have filled the gap and
| it's easy to use mobile money instead (and in a way that
| doesn't chew up data). Not sure about exporting the means
| of surveillance, I think it's much more useful as a
| geoeconomic tool to enforce things like sanctions for a
| country like the U.S. than it is to spy on the average
| person.
| staticassertion wrote:
| Who are these people who are well educated and live in
| first world countries, competent enough to do these
| tasks, but also are in a position to benefit from crypto?
| To me the only (incidental, not at all fundamental)
| benefit of crypto is if you live in a country with
| sanctions and you need to get money in/out.
|
| > Centralized systems work great... until they don't.
|
| There has yet to be a decentralized cryptocurrency. We
| can't even say things like "decentralized systems work
| great until they don't" because so far they don't exist,
| and what does has been less than "great".
|
| > Our grandchildren will wonder why we allowed the free
| world to export the means of surveillance to the third
| world.
|
| I don't even know what you're going for here? Crypto
| solves surveillance now? The global, distributed ledger
| that everyone can fundamentally access because that's the
| whole point?
| cowtools wrote:
| I'm not sure what you even mean by that statement that
| there has never been a functioning decentralized
| cryptocurrency. I would need you to explain what your bar
| is for decentralization, and why it's so high.
|
| As for privacy, the technology has come a long way in the
| last decade due to the development of Zero-Knowlege
| Proofs. I can share a few links if you are interested.
| staticassertion wrote:
| > I would need you to explain what your bar is for
| decentralization, and why it's so high.
|
| A single entity being capable of significant or total
| disruption of the network.
|
| > As for privacy, the technology has come a long way in
| the last decade due to the development of Zero-Knowlege
| Proofs. I can share a few links if you are interested.
|
| I am interested. I'm aware of some progress being made
| here theoretically, but I have not seen implementations
| (I do not follow closely at this point).
| jollybean wrote:
| For the 'audience that reads HN' it's plausible, but
| still rife with risk.
|
| Which is the problem.
|
| We can all learn to 'press a button'. But it's that time
| we accidentally 'double click' because we were not paying
| attention, that is the problem.
| jyounker wrote:
| The number one reason for using a credit-card is that
| your losses are contractually limited. Not only that,
| they perform automated fraud detection for you.
|
| And now you want me to give that up, and take on the
| responsibility myself?
|
| That's not a strong argument in your favor.
| cowtools wrote:
| Cattle have all their needs taken care of them by the
| farmer: they are well fed, they have good shelter, and
| they are "safe" from predators. It is easy to make
| arguments for how the cow is better off than his
| ancestors; In every measurable aspect its life is
| "better" than that of a wild animal. It all comes at the
| low, low price of his complete autonomy and freedom.
|
| Is it better to be cow or a wildebeest? The answer is
| simple: is life greater than the sum of its individual
| (hedonistic) parts?
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| I take it you live Thoreau-style, in a cabin in the
| wilderness completely off-grid? You farm and hunt your
| own food and do not rely on civilization for any of your
| needs?
| jamiek88 wrote:
| And Thoreau was only a few miles from a town and had his
| food brought in.
|
| Man has relied on a society since we had tails.
| cowtools wrote:
| I would certainly prefer to live like that once that is
| within my means and skills.
|
| But until then, is there no middle ground between
| surveilance state and free society?
| jollybean wrote:
| Please just do a little Google/Wikipedia on Adam Smith.
|
| Everyone trying to do 'their own stuff' is basically,
| stupid.
|
| We gain immensely by the division of labour: the cobbler
| makes the shoes, the farmer grows food, the banker
| manages money. Were you to try to 'make your own iPhone
| in your back yard' you would fail.
|
| We are 'rich' because of this.
|
| Otherwise, we'd be literally feral monkeys.
|
| Bitcoin has little to do with 'control or surveillance'.
|
| You do not need to 'hold' USD in order to live. You just
| need to use USD in a 'current account' for purposes of
| transaction. In that context, monetary policy should not
| matter that much to you - or even frankly anything the
| Fed does.
|
| If you only buy dollars when you need the to do something
| else, then frankly, everything about the USD should be
| basically irrelevant.
|
| And you can still do most things in cash, if you really
| want. You can put your USDs under your bed, in the closet
| if you want.
| DennisP wrote:
| > does not really work
|
| Having tried it myself, it does work and isn't that hard.
| Why do you think it doesn't work?
| ckolkey wrote:
| Right, and dropbox could be recreated with rsync and some
| python in a weekend. Just because _we_ can, and have the
| interest and inclination to do so, doesn't mean it's easy
| for everyone else.
| DennisP wrote:
| That's a drastic exaggeration of the effort required. The
| backup is to write down 24 words. For more redundancy,
| write them down again on another piece of paper. Put them
| somewhere safe enough considering the amount you have
| stored, and you're good. I know people with crypto who
| are not especially technical, but have no trouble with
| this.
|
| (Or, follow Vitalik's recommendation to use social
| recovery wallets, which are available for phones and I
| think have decent UI.)
| caseyohara wrote:
| I think ckolkey was referencing this now-HN-famous
| dismissal of Dropbox when it was first announced in 2007
| (top comment) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
| DennisP wrote:
| I admit I missed that. But backing up your self-hosted
| wallet is way less technical than rolling your own
| Dropbox, so I don't think it changes my argument.
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| I have family members that have done the following:
|
| * Email me photos because they don't know how to add them
| to a shared google photo album.
|
| * Aren't on Facebook because they can't figure out how.
|
| * Forget their email password so just made a new email
| account.
|
| * Make a different decision on iOS vs Android every time
| they get a new phone.
|
| A very large segment of the population behaves in this
| way. How will self-hosted hardware wallets work for these
| people?
|
| What do you say when Grandpa calls you (because he
| doesn't text or email) and asks who to call to recover
| the money he was defrauded of?
| cowtools wrote:
| Dropbox exists because people don't know how to use
| bittorrent. You can grift off that ignorance for a while,
| but not forever
| camjw wrote:
| You're saying Dropbox is a grift with a $7bn market cap?
| yellowapple wrote:
| People keep saying cryptocurrency is a grift despite
| having multiple orders of magnitude greater of a market
| cap, so sure, why not?
| ultra_chad wrote:
| Because it is a grift.
| yellowapple wrote:
| And so is Dropbox, then.
|
| See? We both can play that game!
| jollybean wrote:
| Dropbox is a useful service. The comment about 'bit
| torrent' makes little sense. Having cloud storage 24/7
| high availability has utility. (Yes, if the interent were
| designed a bit different, that config might be slightly
| different, but there'd be some value in Dropbox in there
| somehow).
|
| Bitcoin has no utility.
|
| It has the 'promise' of utility, which is the current
| utility it rests upon, making the underlying value quite
| difficult to determine.
|
| If BTC were to dissapear, the world wouldn't skip a beat,
| and we would have no need to 'reinvent' BTC.
|
| We would likely to continue to think about and experiment
| with other things, but as it stands so far, BTC isn't the
| solution to anything.
| knorker wrote:
| Heh, sounds like they're saying "the cloud is just
| someone else's computer", which is the same as "the
| bakery is just someone else's oven".
|
| The bank is just someone else's ledger.
|
| Yes. As a service. Which is what people want.
|
| Nobody wants to run their own bakery just to get a bagel.
| camjw wrote:
| > Heh, sounds like they're saying "the cloud is just
| someone else's computer", which is the same as "the
| bakery is just someone else's oven".
|
| I've not heard this before, I will remember it. This is
| such a good retort.
| cowtools wrote:
| Yes. The internet is broken, and a lot of these companies
| are based on selling "solutions" to these artificial
| problems.
|
| Another example is Cloudflare. If the internet was
| designed properly, you wouldn't have DDoS attacks in the
| first place. There would be no one to sell DDoS
| protection to, no one to rent out botnets to.
|
| You wouldn't even need most web/file "hosting" in the
| traditional sense if you could just share static files
| with bittorrent/IPFS.
| thephyber wrote:
| How do you think the internet should have been designed
| to make CDN, DDoS protection, and file hosting better
| than the existing services?
| camjw wrote:
| Right. I'll bite, how is Dropbox not a _real_ solution to
| a _real_ problem of "I want to share this file with
| someone else or somewhere else"? Hate to say it but I
| feel like the answer is going to involve "web3 fixes
| this".
| cowtools wrote:
| Peer-to-peer file transfers will always be faster than
| having an intermediary. Why not use bittorrent or IPFS?
|
| P.S. The problem dropbox "fixes" is that there is no
| decent file transfer protocol that is IP agnostic. Using
| something like bittorrent's or IPFS' DHT fixes this.
| Dropbox "fixes" this by making file transfer into a paid
| service
| crummy wrote:
| > Peer-to-peer file transfers will always be faster than
| having an intermediary. Why not use bittorrent
|
| One reason is that such a scenario relies on one of my
| computers with bittorrent-dropbox to be online for me to
| access my files elsewhere. Syncing it in the cloud means
| they are available reliably.
| [deleted]
| Kye wrote:
| I'm not going to deliver a commission over BitTorrent or
| IPFS. That's absurd.
| camjw wrote:
| Okay, cool, the majority of Dropbox users I know do not
| use the product because of speed or because of any IP
| agnosticism. It's a shame all these users are so stupid
| and don't use IPFS or bittorrent instead, amirite?
| IanCal wrote:
| > Why not use bittorrent or IPFS?
|
| The last time I used IPFS it took four hours before I
| could access the file just using the hash or even the
| public gateway after pushing it to several major pinning
| services.
| tcmart14 wrote:
| I don't know if I would jump straight to a grift, it
| comes down to use case. If people are just dumping random
| documents, sure. And selling people that they need to
| back up every picture they have taken on their phone that
| they will probably not look at again is a bit grifty.
| However keeping digital copies of important documents is
| not a bad idea, like a house burnt down situation.
| Ideally, you maybe have family you can trust to keep a
| USB with those documents, but that is not always an
| option for some people.
| [deleted]
| cecilpl2 wrote:
| I have been using bittorrent for 15 years and still pay
| for Dropbox because it's a very useful service.
| agentdrtran wrote:
| People dislike doing this. It's not a technical
| limitation, it's a social one.
| dragontamer wrote:
| The fact that companies like Celsius, Gemini, even
| Coinbase and other "cryptobanks" exist, and that people
| are using them at far higher rates than relatively simple
| (to us techies) wallets.
|
| And when Celsius suddenly halts withdrawals to a huge
| portion of the cryptocoin community, the only answer is
| "oh, you shouldn't have been using that" or "not your
| keys, not your wallet" and other such "Advice". Its a
| fundamentally hostile environment.
| nightski wrote:
| A large reason people use these services is due to them
| paying ridiculous and unsustainable interest rates for
| custody of the crypto atm. That won't last forever.
| davidcbc wrote:
| and when it stops the vast majority of people will have
| no reason to use cryptocurrency at all and it will go
| back to being a niche thing for libertarian nerds
| cowtools wrote:
| Good.
| mhoad wrote:
| This is like the PGP debate in the security community
| back in the day, where they generally agreed that while
| this all works great in theory it's actually a lot of
| work to do it correctly and mistakes at any stage are
| incredibly costly so despite the fact that it technically
| works, it's never going to be a good solution for regular
| people.
| 300bps wrote:
| The Bitcoin Whitepaper was published almost 13 years ago.
|
| It still hasn't solved basic use cases that have been
| solved in traditional finance for many decades.
|
| Illegal uses of cryptocurrency are the only real use case
| that makes any sense. Pyramid schemes, ransomware, illicit
| purchases, money laundering, asset hiding, tax evasion.
| That's what has kept cryptocurrency alive, for now.
| jollybean wrote:
| Cool. Or you can put the cash in a 'bank' where you don't
| have to worry about 'multiple copies'.
|
| The 'friction' of Bitcoin is that it little to no sense as
| a currency, and only from a certain fairly narrow
| perspective might have some advantages.
|
| Nice experiment, but not very useful.
|
| Maybe one day the crypto folks will figure something out.
|
| I'm sure something in there is useful.
| williamtwild wrote:
| Average Joe and Sally in midwest america going to do any of
| that ? Not bloody likely.
| DennisP wrote:
| I'm friends with an elementary school teacher in Kansas
| who does it. Average people aren't as dumb as HN denizens
| seem to think.
| grey-area wrote:
| The central point is that crypto has features most people
| don't want (decentralisation, shared public ledger,
| trustless) which actively sabotage things most people do
| want - speed, security, privacy, trust etc.
|
| This is a fundamental design error.
|
| Stop comparing crypto to cash, the competitor is
| centralised electronic bank accounts and credit cards.
|
| Banks use lots of cryptography to secure and sign
| transactions, including public key cryptography. Some banks
| now issue numberless cards.
| wyager wrote:
| > speed, security, privacy, trust
|
| Every single one of these factors is _significantly_
| better in Bitcoin than in the legacy payments system.
| Your proposed tradeoff is not based on reality.
|
| The only one of these things that might plausibly be
| called "better" for legacy payments is speed, but A) this
| is no longer plausible at all with lightning and B) any
| comparable appearance of speed in a legacy payments
| system is fictitious. The fiction holds up only if you
| are a "casual" user of the system, transacting in small
| amounts of money in non-complicated transactions. The
| costs even of this fictitious speed are high, but they
| are hidden from casual users.
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| _> The fiction holds up only if you are a "casual" user
| of the system, transacting in small amounts of money in
| non-complicated transactions. The costs even of this
| fictitious speed are high, but they are hidden from
| casual users._
|
| To be clear, what sort of transactions are you referring
| to here? If you mean things like buying a bagel, or
| clothes, or groceries -- the vast majority of
| transactions, for which the system should be optimized --
| then the existing centralized system is _extremely_
| successful.
| wyager wrote:
| Yes, no argument from me that the fiat system is adequate
| for buying a bagel.
|
| If all you're ever doing is engaging in small-scale
| consumption, there's not a ton of reason you personally
| would care about or even notice a transition away from
| fiat payment systems.
|
| Realistically, the UX of payments and money management
| will not change for 90% of people (who aren't doing
| anything interesting with money and don't have a lot of
| it). This is fine; we're talking about swapping out the
| back-end for people who actually have to deal with it.
| uncomputation wrote:
| > Speed
|
| Bitcoin can handle 7 transactions per second, on average.
| VISA can handle 1,700.
|
| > Security
|
| Your bank account is secured with a password. If
| compromised, you can prove your identity in person at a
| bank with government documents and obviously physical
| appearance. Bitcoin has one method of authentication, the
| signing key, and once you lose it, you have lost your
| account.
|
| > Privacy
|
| Every transaction you make as well as your balance is
| public on a blockchain. Your bank account is private only
| to you and the bank itself.
|
| > Trust
|
| This one is more subjective and I won't really comment if
| I trust Chase or Coinbase more, but I will say this is
| somewhat ironic on a post about how Coinbase is selling
| IP data to ICE.
| wyager wrote:
| > Bitcoin can handle 7 transactions per second
|
| Look up Lightning. To be honest, saying this is a pretty
| reliable reverse-shibboleth that you have no idea what
| you're on about.
|
| > Your bank account is secured with a password.
|
| secp256k1 is a lot stronger than a shitty bank website.
|
| > the signing key, and once you lose it, you have lost
| your account
|
| Good thing we have invented backups. Even multisig if you
| wan to get fancy.
|
| > Every transaction you make as well as your balance is
| public on a blockchain.
|
| On a pseudonymous address that's difficult to impossible
| to correlate with an individual, and effectively
| impossible when using lightning.
|
| > Your bank account is private only to you and the bank
| itself.
|
| And the state comptroller, and the police, and the bank's
| advertising partners, and any number of federal agencies,
| and anyone who looks at frequent bank data leaks, and...
|
| > This one is more subjective and I won't really comment
| if I trust Chase or Coinbase more
|
| Do I need to explain why it's not accurate to conflate
| coinbase with bitcoin, or was this just for rhetorical
| effect?
| thesz wrote:
| >Speed
|
| Bitcoin has Lightning network which is peer-to-peer and
| is quite fast.
|
| >Security
|
| It is up to you on how to generate your keys. You can use
| your passport number combined with whatever, you can
| split your secret between notaries (which would require
| your ID just like banks), etc.
|
| > Privacy
|
| Bitcoin has Lightning network which is offchain.
|
| > Trust
|
| Here you equate Coinbase with Bitcoin. I think it is
| wrong to do that, on the brink of logical fallacy.
| grey-area wrote:
| Let's compare the most popular cryptocurrency:
|
| 1. Speed - 1s vs 10 mins for Bitcoin
|
| 2. Security - Money guaranteed by banks and governments
| vs do your own security or trust a dodgy exchange
|
| 3. Private transactions vs public ledger
|
| 4. Trust - counter-parties from merchants to banks are
| known and have a stake in the system
|
| 5. Fees - free instant transfers vs $1-2 per tx
|
| 6. Taxes...
|
| You're right there is no comparison but it's not the
| current payments system which is left eating dust, it's
| bitcoin.
|
| The speed you decry as fictitious is there because of
| trusted counterparties and is very real.
|
| And there's always a promise of new technology to fix
| bitcoin but the world has moved on and the only ones left
| are the moonbois and hodlers, and none of them even care
| about the currency except as a fairytale to sell it on.
| wyager wrote:
| > Speed - 1s vs 10 mins for Bitcoin
|
| This is a clear indicator that you aren't at all familiar
| with the payments industry, and probably not familiar
| with Bitcoin either. There is no extant fiat payment
| system that settles in 1 second. You are the "Casual
| user" I was talking about who doesn't know how e.g.
| credit cards work behind the scenes.
|
| If you want any semblance of payment finality in a fiat
| system, it's going to take days to months. Bitcoin is ~10
| minutes on chain, <1s on Lightning.
|
| > Security - Money guaranteed by banks and governments vs
| do your own security or trust a dodgy exchange
|
| "Guaranteed" is pulling a lot of weight here. What,
| exactly, do you think "guaranteed" means?
|
| > Private transactions vs public ledger
|
| "Private" transaction visible to any government agency,
| the bank's data/ad partners, in any of the abundantly
| available financial data leaks, vs a public ledger with
| strong pseudonymity or a totally opaque mesh network on
| Lightning.
|
| > Trust - counter-parties from merchants to banks are
| known and have a stake in the system
|
| I trust asymmetric key crypto more than I trust HSBC.
|
| > Fees - free instant transfers vs $1-2 per tx
|
| Fiat transfers are neither 'free' nor 'instant', in any
| meaningful capacity. Do some research on e.g. credit card
| settlement cycles. "Months" is more accurate. Credit card
| (along with most other widely used fiat payment gateways)
| charge usually something like 25 cents + 2.5%. Bitcoin is
| (on-chain) a few cents + 0%. Lightning is something like
| 0.01 cents + 0%.
|
| It only looks cheaper because the details of what's
| actually going on have been (intentionally, for marketing
| purposes) hidden from casual users.
|
| > The speed you decry as fictitious is there because of
| trusted counterparties and is very real.
|
| Again, look up how payment settlement cycles work. You
| are the type of person I was describing who believes in
| the fiction. I don't blame you; unless you are a "power
| user" of the fiat system or have done a lot of research,
| it's not clear why you would notice.
| juliendorra wrote:
| > There is no extant fiat payment system that settles in
| 1 second.
|
| In Europe all banks now offer instant wire transfers. (A
| regulation pushed by the European Commission to counter
| VISA...)
|
| It's still often not free (0.75 euros at my bank I
| think), when 24h/48h wire transfers most often are, but I
| think I read the goal is for instant wire transfers to
| eventually be free (by regulation)
|
| It's really instant! Across any European (IBAN) account.
|
| There's also a growing use of a standardized QR code for
| IBAN account numbers, making the scan and instant
| transfer UX at least possible (but I never saw anyone do
| that yet)
| grey-area wrote:
| I transferred money for free in less than 1 second today
| using 'legacy' payments.
|
| The currency I used to do so also didn't decline or rise
| in value by 5% in a day, which would have been awkward.
|
| It doesn't matter to me if banks exchange csv files at
| midnight to settle that, or what other archaic processes
| they use, because the verified identities and trust allow
| that to seamlessly happen behind the scenes without
| involving customers. The end user experience is all that
| matters here.
| wmeredith wrote:
| Thanks for saying this. A lot of the crypto peeps seem to
| think that we'd all carry around cash if we could, and it's
| simply not true. People don't use much cash anymore because
| it's not convenient. There's a reason cash went away for the
| most part.
| mbesto wrote:
| This is just more evidence that crypto is just re-realizing
| 200 years of the development of modern finance.
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| and remaking scams from before banking
| noSyncCloud wrote:
| And remaking the scams of current banking
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| and making the future of scamming. #trailblazer?
| arcticbull wrote:
| Not really IMO, modern 'banking scams' are either
| conspiracy theories, or super duper complicated to evade
| regulators.
|
| Why run complicated scams when you can run simple scams?
| Just rug 'em.
| cortesoft wrote:
| I think you are wrong to say this is just because of a 'habit'
| people have around managing their money; I would say it is more
| of a preference. It isn't that people are just USED to those
| things, they actually want them.
| whatisweb3 wrote:
| It is easier to build centralized on top of decentralized than
| the other way around. This is the whole idea.
|
| People trend to centralization but it doesn't mean: let's give
| up on decentralization and just give one company, or a select
| few, the keys to the entire kingdom.
|
| besides, as uximproves it will be easy to just use the
| blockchain directly. like using an on-chain long or short
| position, or staking some value, rather than only doing it on a
| centralized exchange.
| bendtheblock wrote:
| but why? what advantage is there to using the slowest ledger
| ever created?
| whatisweb3 wrote:
| Zk rollups are about as fast as visa network - and
| recursive zk snarks can scale further if needed. The
| benefit is that they inherit the security of the main
| network - users can withdraw tokens from them trustlessly,
| and at no point can the rollup owner steal user funds or
| block them from withdrawal.
|
| For financial services like lending and swaps this is great
| and avoids some of the CeFi and CEX problems we are seeing.
| For other apps like art sales, public groups, and ENS
| domain name aliases, it allows ownership of assets to be
| held non custodially rather than a single company's servers
| and records.
| lewisl9029 wrote:
| This really is the eternal struggle of all decentralized
| technology:
|
| They all eventually gravitate towards centralization as they
| gain mainstream appeal, as the very tangible competitive
| advantages from networks effects and economies of scale win
| over the mostly philosophical benefits of decentralization that
| have always failed to sway the masses.
|
| We see this play out time and again, with email, git, and are
| already starting to see the same pattern emerge with
| cryptocurrencies.
|
| Though that is not to say there is no benefit to having
| decentralized technologies. The fact remains that centralized
| platforms built on top of decentralized technology have a much
| harder time locking users in due to the low switching costs
| enabled by the underlying tech. This is why products like
| BitBucket and GitLab are still viable today despite the
| undeniable dominance of GitHub, and similarly alternative email
| providers like Fastmail and Outlook in the age of Gmail.
|
| We rarely see this in markets built on top of centralized tech.
| In social networks, for instance, there really isn't any viable
| competitor to platforms like Facebook and Twitter because
| switching isn't possible without losing all of your investments
| in the product.
|
| This low switching cost makes upstarts more viable alternatives
| compared to in markets built on top of centralized tech, and
| keeps incumbents on their toes and forces them to keep
| innovating in order to stay dominant instead of just simply
| riding high on the strength of their moats. As such I do still
| think the pursuit of decentralized technology is worthwhile,
| even if a large degree of centralization in itself might be all
| but inevitable in the long term.
| bogomipz wrote:
| >" That said, they're saying they're only providing publicly
| available data to ICE, but if it's publicly available and non-
| identifiable, why does ICE even need it, and why wouldn't they
| be able to get it themselves?"
|
| From the linked Intercept article:
|
| >"Homeland Security Investigations, the division of ICE that
| purchased the Coinbase tool, is tasked not only with
| immigration-related matters, aiding migrant raids and
| deportation operations, but broader transnational crimes as
| well,..."
|
| One possibility is that ICE could use this to trace the source
| of remittances being sent back to undocumented worker's home
| countries. The wire transfer fees are known to be extortionate
| and there's many crypto exchanges that see an opportunity in
| disrupting wire transfers for remittances.[1] If this happens
| then I could see this of being of interest to ICE.
|
| As to "Why wouldn't they be able to get it themselves", it's
| probably just pure convenience. It's probably more attractive
| to just spend tax payer money on some expensive off the shelf
| solution
|
| Incidentally I found this paragraph from the linked Intercept
| piece pretty damning:
|
| >"The Coinbase Tracer tool itself was birthed in controversy.
| In 2019, Motherboard reported that Neutrino, a blockchain-
| analysis firm the company acquired in order to create Coinbase
| Tracer, "was founded by three former employees of Hacking Team,
| a controversial Italian surveillance vendor that was caught
| several times selling spyware to governments with dubious human
| rights records, such as Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan."
| Following public outcry, Coinbase announced these staffers
| would "transition out" of the company."
|
| [1]
| https://www.coindesk.com/layer2/paymentsweek/2022/04/27/mexi...
| mandevil wrote:
| Almost certainly the is the OTHER half of ICE: ICE is two
| organizations, Enforcement and Removal Operations (what is
| widely thought of as ICE, they focus on civil deportations)
| and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). HSI is targeting
| actual crimes that occur across borders, not deportations. So
| international money laundering, plus smuggling goods, drugs,
| people, etc. As a quirk, they are the agency that brings the
| most possession and distribution of underage sexual materials
| charges against US citizens (because so much of that involves
| bouncing to foreign servers etc.). They are a legitimate law
| enforcement agency that focuses on crime that goes across
| borders, and their interest in the blockchain should be
| obvious and clear- pretty much every crime I listed above is
| currently being done on the blockchain.
|
| HSI has wanted to separate from ERO for years, because they
| feel that no one outside of ICE understands the difference,
| but it has not happened. I only understand the difference
| because I spent a few months supporting HSI (and only HSI) as
| a government contractor, and everyone I interacted with from
| HSI went to great pains to differentiate themselves from ERO,
| and clearly considered themselves better than ERO.
| opportune wrote:
| Decentralized just means that you can roll your own if you want
| to.
|
| IIRC coinbase is just selling a chainalysis tool. ICE is
| stupid, they aren't going to be able to convert a blockchain
| into a graph of transactions that lets them track payments from
| one wallet to another on their own - they are going to buy a
| tool off the shelf to help them do that.
| px43 wrote:
| It would probably be more stupid if they tried to build their
| own.
| dieselgate wrote:
| yeah just from a bottom line perspective this seems valid,
| think the article says it was $29,000 for the software?
| doesn't seem too high
| luxuryballs wrote:
| That seems fine to me, it's well worth it to have the option
| for freedom and control even if it means also having the option
| of a third party service for the less adventurous types.
| dpratt wrote:
| Thanks for pointing this out, I didn't even know about the
| existence of these deals. I've had a Coinbase account for a
| while, but based on this I'll be moving everything to a private
| wallet and closing my account ASAP. I have no desire to do
| business with a company that would do this.
| gowld wrote:
| Coinbase is a cryptocurrency company. This just one of dozens
| of contrversial associations that everyone in cryptocurrency
| has.
| kache_ wrote:
| coinbase bad
| forgetfulness wrote:
| It would appear so, yes.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > "All Coinbase Tracer features use data that is fully sourced
| from online, publicly available data, and do not include any
| personally identifiable information for anyone, or any
| proprietary Coinbase user data," the spokesperson told CoinDesk.
|
| If true, then all they're doing is analysis of data from the
| public blockchain. That sounds fine to me - the feds could have
| done it themselves.
| akudha wrote:
| _the feds could have done it themselves_
|
| Let them do it themselves then. Usually "if I don't do it,
| someone else will" is an ethically dubious excuse, though it is
| a good way to make money I suppose
| ryanmcbride wrote:
| That's my main question, if it's all public why would they buy
| this info from Coinbase?
| sixothree wrote:
| The only reason to say this would be to deceive the audience.
| I can see no other reason.
| LegitShady wrote:
| I'm assuming that somehow coinbase is correlating it to
| wallets somehow, and tht might be the valuable part
| newfonewhodis wrote:
| Yeah I guess that's not really just public data anymore.
| kube-system wrote:
| Repackaging public data is big business. It's often easier to
| pay someone who has already done the work than reinventing
| the wheel yourself.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| It's public data, but it's time consuming to get the data
| "ready for analysis". Instead of doing this prep work
| yourself, you can pay someone else (in this case Coinbase) to
| do that part.
|
| source: I run a competitor to Tracer (https://luabase.com/)
| Dma54rhs wrote:
| Cheaper than hiring in house expertees?
| 0des wrote:
| expertise
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| Likely, yes. A decent data engineer is probably six figures
| minimum, whereas data is cheap.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| The article claims _geolocation_ data, which you aren 't going
| to get from the public blockchain.
|
| Where's that coming from? Maybe other unspecified "public"
| sources.
|
| It seems suspicious though, like they are getting it from
| geolocating IP addresses of their users, and correlating those
| to transactions -- that is not public info at all. But perhaps
| they get the geolocation info from some other source unrelated
| to their users?
|
| Personally if my bank was also in the business of spying on
| financial transactions commercially... I wouldn't feel super
| secure about my choice of bank.
| londons_explore wrote:
| There are lots of public sources for the IP address each
| transaction was first broadcast from as it propagates across
| the network..
|
| That gives you a clue where the user is located.
| trhway wrote:
| >If true, then all they're doing is analysis of data from the
| public blockchain. That sounds fine to me - the feds could have
| done it themselves.
|
| 2 points :
|
| 1. doing analysis form public sources when you can cheat by
| looking up private information is a very different beast.
|
| 2.parallel construction
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| At this point, making fun of the crypto industry is like shooting
| fish in a barrel.
| testplzignore wrote:
| That is offensive to guns, fish, and barrels :)
| max51 wrote:
| if it was that easy, writers wouldn't have to rely on
| misleading headlines like this one. They are not selling their
| data, they are selling a tool that process publicly available
| data.
|
| title: "Coinbase is reportedly selling geolocation data to ICE"
|
| content: "All Coinbase Tracer features use data that is fully
| sourced from online, publicly available data, and do not
| include any personally identifiable information for anyone, or
| any proprietary Coinbase user data."
| jollybean wrote:
| Of course they are!
|
| This is such a sweet headline!
| aaomidi wrote:
| So much for "less state control over finance".
| modeless wrote:
| "All Coinbase Tracer features use data that is fully sourced from
| online, publicly available data, and do not include any
| personally identifiable information for anyone, or any
| proprietary Coinbase user data."
|
| Misleading headline. This is a public blockchain analytics
| service that has nothing to do with Coinbase's other services.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| The headline is "Coinbase Is Reportedly Selling Geolocation
| Data to ICE". What you say doesn't dispute this. How is it
| misleading?
|
| You say that Coinbase is selling geolocation data to ICE, which
| is exactly what the headline says.
| bertil wrote:
| I'm assuming that the implication of the title is that
| Coinbase is using the location data of its active users; data
| that it obtained through geo-locating user IPs; IPs collected
| from the necessary exchange of information over TCP/IP.
| That's how I read it first. The story is a little different.
| You could imagine a title saying that "Coinbase is collecting
| third-party location data and selling it to ICE" closer to
| the report.
| rchaud wrote:
| > a public blockchain analytics service
|
| That just happens to be designed by some very fine people:
|
| > In 2019, Motherboard reported that Neutrino, a blockchain-
| analysis firm the company acquired in order to create Coinbase
| Tracer, "was founded by three former employees of Hacking Team,
| a controversial Italian surveillance vendor that was caught
| several times selling spyware to governments with dubious human
| rights records, such as Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan."
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| That begs the question; why would Coinbase build this service?
| bogomipz wrote:
| It sounds like they mostly acquired it, see:
|
| https://blog.coinbase.com/living-up-to-our-values-and-the-
| ne...
| prvit wrote:
| And coinbase acquired this because they need it to address
| compliance concerns. Might as well sell it to third parties
| too.
| thedracle wrote:
| I would guess just having a lot of blockchain experts on
| staff, and since the blockchain is pretty much an open,
| unencrypted, public ledger; analyzing it is a pretty natural
| and not entirely unethical thing to do.
|
| I think the issue is really just working with ICE, and the
| ethical concerns that brings up.
| anbotero wrote:
| Yes, to me this would be a better addition to the article,
| explain the tool real goal.
|
| Now... you need metrics and analytics over what's going on
| with your products. This sounds like something that helps
| address that somehow, staying anonymous from what it looks
| like (it says it has no identifiable information linked to
| people), but even the contract linked makes it hard to
| understand.
| spamizbad wrote:
| I'm guessing this started in good faith as a way to track
| down money launderers and other nefarious users and naturally
| ICE caught wind and demanded access as well. Coinbase is
| proudly apolitical so it has no reason to refuse compliance
| with an alphabet agency.
| sneak wrote:
| First, begs the question does not mean raises the question.
| You mean to use the latter.
|
| Second, because laws and enforcement thereof in the USA are
| arbitrary and wielded as a weapon. Coinbase is a crypto
| company who would get absolutely obliterated by regulation
| and legal hassle if they don't play ball with the federal
| government - on the latter's terms, of course. The US federal
| government expects complete and total dragnet suspicionless
| surveillance of all electronic payments in the USA. Anyone
| doing payments in the USA is expected to cooperate fully or
| face destruction.
|
| The idea that you're free to do anything in the US that isn't
| illegal is an illusion. Get big or important enough and what
| you are doing will be made illegal (or existing laws will be
| reinterpreted to apply to you) if you don't play ball with
| TPTB. See also: FISA section 702.
|
| The same sort of pressure is applied to Apple, which is why
| they maintain a backdoor in the end to end crypto of iMessage
| for the FBI. No amount of money or commercial success allows
| you to bypass these power structures.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| >which is why they maintain a backdoor in the end to end
| crypto of iMessage for the FBI
|
| That's a very large claim to make without any further
| citation or sourcing. This would be very big news if true.
| sneak wrote:
| Reuters reported it and mostly nobody cares. I have
| linked this link on HN dozens of times.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-fbi-icloud-
| exclusiv...
|
| iCloud Backup (non e2e) backs up the endpoint keys for
| iMessage. Apple knows this is bad and they were going to
| do e2e backups (like Google does for Android) and Apple
| Legal killed the project on FBI request.
| anbotero wrote:
| Doesn't matter much: Damage done; you can even see from other
| comments here already. They probably didn't check the so called
| contract linked, much less the article itself which is pretty,
| pretty light on any kind of legitimate details.
|
| Complain, I don't know, about actually having a contract with
| ICE, perhaps? More meaningful that whatever the article
| complained about. I would complain about what the quote from
| the spokesperson really mean, that doesn't really say what the
| product does, making us look at the contract to even try to get
| a proper summary.
| 4oh9do wrote:
| > This is a public blockchain analytics service that has
| nothing to do with Coinbase's other services.
|
| Are you familiar with the concept of parallel construction?
| It's a tactic LEOs use when they don't want to reveal how they
| actually obtained information. For instance, if they obtain
| information using method A, but want to conceal method A, they
| state that they actually obtained the information using method
| B (because the information actually is, after the fact,
| obtainable via method B as well, once you know what to look
| for).
|
| In Coinbase's case the way this would work is Coinbase sources
| data from their internal databases (method A), and then after
| the fact they do let's say a Google search or some other public
| search for the names or whatever they found in their internal
| databases, and state that all data is sourced from online,
| publicly available data (method B).
| TameAntelope wrote:
| You have absolutely zero evidence whatsoever to support this
| claim, and as such you should not make it.
|
| _This_ is how disinformation is spread; not through some
| conspiratorial plot to confuse, but from fear, uncertainty,
| and doubt.
| forgetfulness wrote:
| Privacy is important because these hypotheticals are
| enabled by the lack of it, you don't need to ask if, to
| give a more extreme example, unrestricted backdoor access
| to your account login to law enforcement agencies has been
| used for arbitrary surveillance, you demand that these
| things not be done so you don't have to find out years
| later.
| 4oh9do wrote:
| I am not making a claim, I am laying out how the process
| could hypothetically occur, hence the use of "would" in my
| post.
|
| I'm curious, however, why did you not make a similar post
| to the parent comment...in that the parent comment has
| presented no evidence whatsoever to support the claim that
| Coinbase is only using publicly-available information, and
| therefore by your own reasoning the parent poster should
| not make the claim.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| > Coinbase Tracer allows clients, in both government and
| the private sector, to trace transactions through the
| blockchain, a distributed ledger of transactions integral
| to cryptocurrency use.
|
| Because both the parent comment and I have read the
| article, so we both have evidence to support the claim
| that Coinbase is only using publicly-available
| information, as that's how Coinbase Tracer, the license
| to which was reported as sold to ICE for $29,000, works.
| braingenious wrote:
| I think the person you're talking to is theorizing about
| the possibility that Coinbase may not be completely
| honest in their statement about the nature of the service
| they provide to ICE. The article does not provide _proof_
| aside from repeating Coinbase's statement.
|
| If your standard of proof is "somebody wrote something
| online," then GP provided you with proof that it's
| possible that Coinbase lied.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| > If your standard of proof is "somebody wrote something
| online," then GP provided you with proof that it's
| possible that Coinbase lied.
|
| I literally cannot parse this sentence, can you rephrase?
| braingenious wrote:
| I'm not sure how this is unclear. If Coinbase wrote a
| paragraph about their practices and that paragraph is
| "proof" of their practices, why wouldn't another party
| writing a paragraph constitute "proof" of their position?
|
| The topic of this sentence is "the definition of proof."
| seoaeu wrote:
| You have absolutely zero evidence the parent comment is
| disinformation, and as such you should not have made the
| claim
| TameAntelope wrote:
| The author outright admitted what he wrote was
| speculative and not factual. You may not agree with my
| conclusion, but I do have evidence.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Speculation does not equal fud
| TameAntelope wrote:
| I didn't say it does generally.
| uoaei wrote:
| A lovely display of ideology-borne bias! Thanks for the
| potent demonstration!
| apeace wrote:
| Or, Coinbase's statement that it "sources its information from
| public sources" is misleading. After all, the blockchain does
| not provide geolocation data. So what public source would that
| come from? That's why this article was written: because it
| looks like a company selling its users' geolocation data but
| claiming not to. Publicizing that fact may lead to an outcome
| where we know for sure, one way or the other.
|
| If Bob is found standing over a bleeding corpse with a smoking
| gun in his hand, would it be a misleading headline to say "Bob
| found standing over bleeding corpse with smoking gun in his
| hand"?
| axg11 wrote:
| This is still a problem even if their product only uses public
| data. Coinbase has access to non-public data, which they can
| use to validate any analysis or algorithms. Until they
| explicitly say that no private information was ever used to
| validate the analytics, it's reasonable to assume they're doing
| so.
| tedivm wrote:
| >Coinbase Tracer, formerly known as Coinbase Analytics, has
| faced controversy before. The branch of the exchange
| responsible for the software's development emerged from
| Coinbase's 2019 acquisition of blockchain intelligence firm
| Neutrino, whose executive team previously worked with a startup
| that sold spyware to several governments, including Saudi
| Arabia, known for human rights abuses.
|
| I don't know why we should assume good faith on coinbase's part
| when the same group of people working on this used to sell
| spyware to human rights abusers.
| gowld wrote:
| Please share a link with more info.
|
| Are you referring to Neutrino?
|
| https://decrypt.co/36608/coinbase-ceo-reflects-on-
| neutrino-a... > Armstrong said that after realizing that
| Coinbase could've hired some "black hats," he insisted on
| first speaking to Neutrino staff to find out how much of this
| was true. After assessing the situation, he sacked some of
| the ex-Hacking Team members but did not specify who.
|
| > All of the key people who had "some kind of question mark
| or reputational or values issue" were let go from the
| company, he said. While some lower-level engineers who "were
| not the decision-makers and weren't as culpable" remained
| with the company
| tedivm wrote:
| I literally quoted the article that this entire page is
| about, and I'm also obviously referring to Neutrino seeing
| as how I directly quoted them. Please read the articles
| before telling people they need to share more.
|
| Regardless, I don't trust Brian on this. This is the same
| guy who shit all over his own staff for being "whistle
| blowers", claiming that these things have to stay in house.
| Coinbase failed to do their due diligence, bought a company
| that made spyware, and then claimed that they fired some
| people but never clarified who. He also explicitly said he
| only fired some of the "hacking team" that was responsible
| for the issues, not the entire team itself.
|
| At the end of the day there's absolutely no reason to take
| them at the word here, and plenty of reason not to.
| cphoover wrote:
| FYI ICE does a lot of good work too like fighting child sex
| trafficking in other countries. ICE does a lot more than just
| immigration enforcement within the US borders.
| finiteseries wrote:
| ICE HSI (Homeland Security Investigations) = transnational
| crime
|
| ICE ERO (Enforcement Removal Operations) = brownshirts,
| entirely immigration
|
| Two separate agencies with two separate missions, and this is
| about HSI.
| jjulius wrote:
| This suggests that HSI _only_ focuses on transnational crime,
| while ERO is "entirely immigration". In actuality, HSI
| _also_ works on immigration. From an article linked to in the
| Coinbase article that this thread is about:
|
| >According to ICE, HSI agents "encountered 97 individuals who
| are subject to removal from the United States" during its
| execution of a federal criminal search warrant at the
| meatpacking plant.
|
| https://theintercept.com/2018/04/10/ice-raids-tennessee-
| meat...
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >ICE HSI (Homeland Security Investigations) = transnational
| crime
|
| >ICE ERO (Enforcement Removal Operations) = brownshirts,
| entirely immigration
|
| >Two separate agencies with two separate missions, and this
| is about HSI.
|
| Folks keep mentioning these separate groups within ICE. Which
| makes a great deal of sense if you actually say the words
| that make up ICE: _I_ mmigration and _C_ ustoms _E_
| nforcement.
|
| ERO == Immigration (the issues surrounding _folks_ coming
| into the country)
|
| HSI == Customs (the issues surrounding _stuff_ coming into
| the country
|
| Broadly related but distinct areas of enforcement.
|
| Edit: Fixed formatting.
| [deleted]
| uoaei wrote:
| Talk about scope creep... and it happens here for the same
| reason as in business: contract inflation. The government is
| more than happy to throw money at contractors and the more they
| ask for, the more they get, generally.
| papito wrote:
| Hey, the U.S. Secret Service is responsible for enforcing
| currency counterfeit crime.
| samstave wrote:
| >>... _fighting child sex trafficking in other countries_...
|
| -
|
| I know this isnt a topic HN likes, but F that statement.
|
| --
|
| I won't go into what I know of the USG and child sex
| trafficking (a victim) -- but its ridiculous to think that ICE
| does anything but protect and enable child sex trafficking.
|
| As a child in the 1970s sex cults enabled by the CIA were a
| thing. (I am living proof of this, see the interview and
| statements about 'the purple people' (only clue Ill leave
| you.))
|
| ---
|
| Look at Haiti.
|
| I could write a book, but wont, about how just insanely pedo-
| ruled the USG is.
|
| Have you ever looked at a badge of a sheriff?
|
| This is what Swartz died trying to reveal, not JSTOR.
| ianhawes wrote:
| I've read your comment and I want you to know that there are
| resources[0] for you.
|
| [0] https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/find-help
| samstave wrote:
| jjulius wrote:
| >Have you ever looked at a badge of a sheriff?
|
| Sure have! There are all kinds of different badges, some with
| very simple designs and others with lots of great detail.
| This is a very, _very_ vague piece of innuendo that does
| nobody any good if you 're hoping that we'll research it
| ourselves.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=sheriff%27s+badge
| homonculus1 wrote:
| They also do a lot of good work enforcing US borders.
| rodgerd wrote:
| Today the excuse is that it's child sex traffiking, tomorrow
| it's persecuting women who get healthcare that the Texas
| attorney-general doesn't like.
| animex wrote:
| Wow, these folks are the Uber of Crypto.
| wpietri wrote:
| The hilarious thing to me is their goal was surely to be "the
| Uber of Crypto" given when Coinbase got started.
| capableweb wrote:
| When Coinbase was created/founded, Uber had just launched in
| Chicago, didn't have UberX and wasn't the brand it is today.
| Looking at Google Trends data
| (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Uber),
| the peaks of interest happened in 2016 and in 2019.
|
| So no, the goal of Coinbase before/at launch was unlikely to
| have been "The Uber of Crypto".
| wpietri wrote:
| I didn't say it was their goal "before/at launch".
|
| The notion of "Uber for X" was already such a cliche by
| 2014 that people were joking about it in general-audience
| publications: https://qz.com/311217/poem-theres-an-uber-
| for-x/
|
| That poem was published between Coinbase's B and C rounds.
| By that point Uber had done a series E with a post-money
| valuation north of $40 billion. If Coinbase wasn't looking
| at that with envy and trying at points to cast their story
| in the Uber mold for investors, I'd be amazed, because most
| other startups of the time were.
| capableweb wrote:
| > I didn't say it was their goal "before/at launch".
|
| That's true, you did say "when Coinbase got started",
| which I took to mean before the official launch, which
| must have been sometime before 2012.
|
| But, seems I misunderstood, so my bad.
| gowld wrote:
| "Uber of" means "gig economy", not at all what Coinbase does.
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| I like to say they are the Facebook of Crypto
| pyuser583 wrote:
| > "Coinbase Tracer sources its information from public sources
| and does not make use of Coinbase user data."
|
| That's seems pretty important. If it's public, it's public.
| paul7986 wrote:
| Once Coinbase legally noted if they go bankrupt their customers
| would go bankrupt the crypto craze took a nosedive. When markets
| went down during COVID so did crypto but it shot up pretty
| quickly. So far not seeing that and personally after being
| reminded I could lose all my money if they went bankrupt Im less
| then thrilled to jump back in.
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