[HN Gopher] Binance to suspend US dollar bank transfers
___________________________________________________________________
Binance to suspend US dollar bank transfers
Author : lxm
Score : 198 points
Date : 2023-02-06 18:35 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.coindesk.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.coindesk.com)
| busyant wrote:
| Can someone explain what this might mean? I'm not plugged in
| enough to crypto to get the apparent implication(s).
|
| Is this "Binance gets its comeuppance from catalyzing FTX's
| downfall?"
|
| Is this "no big deal/a triviality" as is implied in the article?
|
| Perhaps something else?
| latortuga wrote:
| Disclaimer I have no crypto or finance expertise.
|
| "We're suspending withdrawals" reads to me as "we don't have
| money to cover withdrawals" which implies they don't have
| enough liquidity or are insolvent.
| dgivney wrote:
| It means Binance is running low on USD reserves and is buying
| more by preventing large USD outflows while continuing to allow
| USD inflows.
|
| It's worth noting that Binance operates BUSD, a stable coin
| pegged to USD which according to their website saw a 25%
| reduction in net asset reserves between Nov 2022 to Dec 2022
| (https://www.binance.com/en/busd) - if that trend has continued
| that may be why they need a short-term supply of USD.
| unyttigfjelltol wrote:
| It is a comforting-sounding way to prohibit large USD
| withdrawals.
|
| In almost any other context, e.g., bonds, bank accounts,
| currencies, the next step would be devaluation, crisis, and
| default.
| busyant wrote:
| Thank you.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Put simply: it's bad. Maybe a mild bad, but still bad.
|
| Or rather: this isn't something very confident, growth-trending
| orgs do.
| [deleted]
| password11 wrote:
| > _" In the interim, all other methods of buying and selling
| crypto remain unaffected, including bank transfer using one of
| the other fiat currencies supported by Binance (including euros),
| buying and selling crypto via credit card, debit card, Google Pay
| and Apple Pay and via our Binance P2P marketplace," the
| spokesperson added._
|
| Title is misleading given primacy of USD. They're not freezing
| all outgoing transfers to fiat currency, just to US banks in USD.
| Apparently you can still cash out.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Seems logical that it might have something to do with a
| potential freeze/order related to FTX?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I don't fully get it so I'll throw this out there and someone
| will inevitably correct me:
|
| My understanding is that the happy path doesn't typically involve
| US dollar transfers, but it exists as a "see, you can check out
| any time you'd like."
|
| Bringing up "0.01%" seems like a deception.
|
| Almost nobody withdraws <large amount> from their bank in a given
| week. But imagine if banks said tomorrow that you can't do that
| anymore, but don't worry because almost nobody does it anyways.
| lazide wrote:
| That typically causes bank runs, because enough people see
| through it.
|
| Notably, that's why the FDIC exists.
|
| Also notably, there is no crypto (or Tether) FDIC.
| tialaramex wrote:
| FDIC tops out at $250 000 per bank (depending on exactly what
| you've got and in which accounts you might get to claim this
| limit more than once though). This is similar to schemes in
| the UK or the EU. They're protecting smaller individual
| savers etc. not corporations, not rich people. People who
| will be hurting the _day_ after the bank fails, not a week
| later or a month later and so need money ASAP.
|
| But that doesn't mean rich people need to be scared of a run
| on a conventional bank. Suppose you've got 10M in Big Bank,
| and it fails. FDIC will hand you $250 000, but your $9.75M
| doesn't vanish, it's just that you need to wait for
| administrators to take the bank to pieces, figure out what it
| owned and sell it for a good price, then they'll pay you some
| fraction - often 100% - of your $9.75M depending on what they
| recovered. Eventually.
|
| Landsbanki (in Iceland) for example failed in the aftermath
| of the global financial crisis, it's own government couldn't
| afford to pay to fix this because Iceland's banks had become
| larger than Iceland's own economy (oops), and the Icelandic
| people refused to allow their government to legislate to pay
| the money back over time, but eventually the bank's
| liquidators sold enough of the assets Landsbanki had owned
| for enough money to pay creditors like the UK government the
| billions of dollars owed. Took almost ten years.
|
| The thing that's a concern for a crypto institution is: Are
| there real assets?
|
| Even for a failed investment bank, where assets are sometimes
| more dubious in reality when administrators try to sell them
| than they seemed on paper (e.g. a NINJA house loan) those
| _are_ assets, they do have value. If you default on your
| mortgage the bank takes the house. The mortgage "failed" but
| it doesn't magically have zero value. On a $1.5M mortgage is
| that house worth $1.5M? Probably not. But it's also not worth
| $0.
|
| Whereas there's a good chance many crypto outfits own few
| real assets and so there is nothing for administrators to
| sell, it just evaporates.
| lazide wrote:
| FYI, there are widely used commercial services which
| provide higher (insured) saving limits by creating a
| virtual checking/savings account and then setting up
| individual sub-accounts among a huge number of FDIC banks
| and maxing them out. The person involved doesn't deal with
| the sub-accounts directly, they handle everything.
|
| They even issue ATM cards, if I remember correctly.
|
| I forget the name, but I think it does up to $10 mln pretty
| easily. That's kind of a dumb amount to keep liquid, but I
| guess if it's sub 1% of your net worth, it's worth the
| convenience?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Fidelity offers an aggregate of $1.25M with their cash
| management account, sweeping to partner banks.
| mandevil wrote:
| Yes, which is why, prior to the development of the FDIC and
| other deposit insurance systems, every 20 years or so a whole
| bunch of banks would fail, all at once, and destroy the country
| or even the world's (depending on exactly how many failed)
| economy for a while. This is why deposit insurance is so
| important, and their absence is so striking in things that want
| you to believe that they are a bank and treat like a bank, but
| are not regulated or insured like a bank.
| hammock wrote:
| Even taking everything you say at face value, the world
| economy grew massively without the need for federal deposit
| insurance, and there were plenty of banks then too- real
| banks. They were just banks without federal deposit insurance
| runeks wrote:
| Deposit insurance became necessary because the government
| started forcing banks to replace the highly commercial bills
| in their balance sheet with illiquid government bonds (cf.
| The National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864). When merchants
| realized this, they revolted by withdrawing their funds from
| the banks in question.
|
| Remember: back then, the only users of bills were merchants
| (not consumers) since bills were a highly liquid earning
| asset where businesses could park their capital while they
| didn't need it themselves. Consumers paid in coin -- silver
| or gold.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Deposit insurance became necessary because the government
| started forcing banks to replace the highly commercial
| bills in their balance sheet with illiquid government bonds
|
| Deposit insurance started (like reserve requirements,
| though initially in _different_ states) as a state-level
| mandate during the Free Banking era before the 1863 Act;
| the need for it was not driven by the 1863 & 1864 acts.
|
| > Remember: back then, the only users of bills were
| merchants (not consumers) since bills were a highly liquid
| earning asset where businesses could park their capital
| while they didn't need it themselves.
|
| No, the reason consumers would not prefer to use banknotes
| included risk (due to lax regulation and rampant outright
| fraud) and _limited_ practical liquidity for consumers
| (since they would generally only be redeemed by the issuing
| bank, and the banks then were not giant conglomerates where
| you could go to a branch of the right bank wherever you
| were, though this was in some places mitigated somewhat by
| interbank arrangements like the Suffolk system in New
| England.)
| giaour wrote:
| > Deposit insurance became necessary because the government
| started forcing banks to replace the highly commercial
| bills in their balance sheet with illiquid government bonds
| (cf. The National Banking Acts of 1863 and 1864).
|
| I'm sorry, but this is some flat-earth nonsense. It sounds
| like you have a particular ideological axe to grind and are
| trying to make the facts fit your narrative.
|
| Deposit insurance in the US arose in the 20th century in
| response to consumer bank runs. The original deposit
| insurance schemes arose in the wake of the panic of 1907,
| and the FDIC was established in 1933.
| woeirua wrote:
| Definitely a very normal occurrence for a large, credible,
| financial institution. Nothing to see here.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| My OSHA consultant once said: "most regulations are written in
| blood".
|
| I suspect we're about to see what that looks like w/r/t crypto
| and finance.
| ineedasername wrote:
| I can't find any explanation about _why_ they are suspending
| transfers. Anyone else have more luck on that?
| luxuryballs wrote:
| It's funny how every so many years there's a crypto bubble and
| then a subsequent "crypto is failed/dead" sentiment and now we
| see big exchanges failing and other failures of integration into
| more traditional systems.
|
| What people see as a failure I see as a success. The more bitcoin
| continues to function and the more attempts to wrangle and
| centralize it that fail, the more it proves itself as something
| that can stand alone, explicitly without some institution taking
| it over and managing it.
|
| The fact that it persists despite the market swings and
| frustrated attempts to leech onto it by profit-seeking platforms
| is a really good sign in my view.
|
| The true test may be if it can withstand attempts to regulate it,
| even though that's one of the biggest fears in crypto! My opinion
| is that if they can't succeed at regulating or even banning it
| then that makes it even _more_ viable as a decentralized currency
| system.
| garbagecoder wrote:
| Crypto and Rust threads: guaranteed replies.
| reef84_ wrote:
| Write a blog post about Russian crypto company powered by GPT-3
| and rust laying off 20% of their workforce.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| And making the other 80% work hybrid while expanding the DEI
| offices.
| MangezBien wrote:
| "CryptoKremlin announces Layoffs of 20% of Workforce" by
| ChatGPT
|
| CryptoKremlin, a leading Russian crypto company powered by
| OpenAI's GPT-3, has announced plans to lay off 20% of its
| workforce due to challenging market conditions and a need to
| restructure. The CEO acknowledged the difficult decision but
| emphasized its importance for the company's long-term
| sustainability and success.
|
| CryptoKremlin was known for leveraging Rust programming
| language to attract top talent and build superior systems.
| The company's utilization of Rust, known for its performance
| and security features, allowed them to create highly reliable
| and secure solutions. This focus on engineering excellence
| with Rust technology was a key factor in the company's
| success and helped set it apart from the competition.
|
| The crypto industry has faced challenges during the pandemic,
| but CryptoKremlin had managed to perform well, largely due to
| its investment in GPT-3 technology. The model has
| revolutionized the natural language processing space,
| allowing the company to build highly scalable and secure
| solutions.
|
| The crypto community was disappointed by the layoffs, but
| CryptoKremlin remains optimistic and confident in its ability
| to drive innovation and growth in the space. The restructure
| is expected to position the company for continued success in
| the years to come.
| meindnoch wrote:
| This is the end... _duh duh duuuuh_ beautiful friend...
| Culleredo wrote:
| [dead]
| voytec wrote:
| I don't seem to be able to close the account with Binance. They
| received multiple GDPR-related requests, forced me to give them
| more PII than they already had (like handwritten and signed
| requests) and now their DPO team responses arrive about a month
| after my emails.
|
| I'm in Poland. All Polish banks refuse USD/EUR wires or reverse
| card charges/payments from Binance. The only way to cash out from
| Binance to Poland, was a Russian service which was receiving
| crypto from Binance and making wire transfers to Poland.
|
| After Putin's Ukraine invasion, I closed the account with the
| Russian entity and since there was no longer a way to get fiat
| from Binance - I decided to close the account with them, too.
| It's still not closed to this day, despite multiple hoops they
| forced me to jump.
| tommek4077 wrote:
| > All Polish banks refuse USD/EUR wires or reverse card
| charges/payments from Binance.
|
| How is that the fault of Binance?
| warning26 wrote:
| Wonder if/when this will happen to Coinbase.
| [deleted]
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| Why would this happen to Coinbase?
| time_to_smile wrote:
| Because the entire crypto ecosystem exists to defraud its
| users and eventually that fraud catches up to you?
|
| I'm still shocked that I hear non-tech people claiming they
| should put their extra cash into crypto. I guess there's
| still suckers out there to extract money from.
|
| I know this comment will likely be downvoted/flagged by
| someone who still has some money to make from this con, but
| there hasn't been a coherent justification of the current
| crypto ecosystem is years. All of the early hopes have been
| repeatedly demonstrated not to pan out in reality and all
| that's left is grift.
| warning26 wrote:
| HN protip: never say "I know this comment will likely be
| downvoted/flagged" because it's a self-fulfilling prophesy.
| warning26 wrote:
| Why not? Coinbase isn't necessarily immune to a similar
| liquidity crisis as other crypto exchanges.
| Aaronstotle wrote:
| Coinbase is a public company and heavily regulated, I don't
| see them suspending USD bank transfers out of the blue.
| Binance has always been a shady exchange, so this isn't a
| very surprising move.
| __derek__ wrote:
| The 2008 financial crisis centered on public companies
| that were nominally heavily regulated. As long as
| Coinbase's liquidity depends on a synthetic safe asset
| rather than actual insured deposits, it's perfectly
| capable of having its own Lehman or Bear or Merrill
| moment.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| How soon we forget companies like Robinhood that trade on
| the real dollar stock market did precisely that--disabled
| bank transfers, put in strict limits, etc.--during the
| GameStop/wallstreetbets fiasco a few years ago and they
| got away without any warnings, harm or investigation.
| tedunangst wrote:
| How quickly we just make up stuff that never happened.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/28/robinhood-interactive-
| broker...
| tedunangst wrote:
| Quote the part about them disabling bank transfers.
| birracerveza wrote:
| How quickly we reply with "How quickly we just make up
| stuff that never happened." despite the thing having
| actually happened.
| chollida1 wrote:
| > How soon we forget companies like Robinhood that trade
| on the real dollar stock market did precisely that--
| disabled bank transfers,
|
| Can you cite a source for this claim.
|
| I'm not certain you are correct here.
| [deleted]
| wmf wrote:
| Binance has a legality crisis and Coinbase doesn't.
| VHRanger wrote:
| Its not a liquidity issue so much as a banking relationship
| issue
| etchalon wrote:
| I'd bet not.
|
| Whatever their problems, Coinbase seems to be run "well" and in
| compliance with US regulations.
| Haga wrote:
| [dead]
| alexambarch wrote:
| From looking around the internet I am starting to believe I might
| be the only person holding crypto strictly because I just happen
| to think it's neat.
|
| I think it's interesting that via Ethereum, I can spend Ether to
| perform distributed computations on nodes across the globe and
| that this also serves as a store of value. I find Iota's Tangle
| interesting as an application of a DAG for financial and data
| transactions. I think it's interesting that I can send Nano to
| someone instantly and without any gas fees while still using
| blockchains.
|
| It would be nice if this technology was given a larger purpose,
| but I think any possibility of that quickly went out the window
| once someone realized they could get rich. I understand and agree
| with a lot of the hate crypto gets and a significant amount of
| the use cases are nothing more than pipe dreams (or just outright
| scams,) but from a theory perspective I can't help but think it's
| at least a little bit fascinating to see people try to apply data
| structures this way.
| j0hnyl wrote:
| You are not the only person, there are DOZENS of us!
| knorker wrote:
| You're not the only one. It's just that's i recognized this
| "neat" feeling for what it was: the same one I got when I went
| to Vegas and won actual cash from the games.
|
| I didn't truly know that seductive feeling until then, the
| feeling that will ruin you.
|
| I didn't like that I liked it.
|
| And that feeling i got LARPing with cryptocurrencies too.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| >> I am starting to believe I might be the only person holding
| crypto strictly because I just happen to think it's neat.
|
| I'm here with you. Put $100 bucks in last year and have been
| tinkering here and there. Unfortunately my $100 is now worth
| $23, but I'm going to hold it and keep tinkering and wait for
| everything to sort of pan out.
|
| I still see the potential, but am exploring what else I can do
| with it.
| rideontime wrote:
| What have you done with it?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > I find Iota's Tangle interesting as an application of a DAG
| for financial and data transactions.
|
| Every time I read about Iota I get stuck on the reinventing of
| the wheel that is trits/trytes[1].
|
| [1] https://iota-news.com/iota-tutorial-trit-and-tryte/
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| > while still using blockchains
|
| because i don't know you, is that the part that makes you say
| you think it's neat?
|
| i personally resonate with your last paragraph: i also feel
| that it's definitely interesting exploring the possibilities of
| the ideas, with reserved contemplative enthusiasm.
| alexambarch wrote:
| In my haste I guess I didn't make this clear enough, sorry.
| By "blockchains" I was trying to emphasize the fact in Nano
| that we are talking about many blockchains as opposed to one
| main chain. Every account has its own blockchain which all
| get connected via a DAG that they call a block lattice.
|
| The interesting part of this to me back when I was investing
| in 2017 was that I previously didn't think it was possible to
| get instant, feeless transactions on a blockchain due to the
| fact that transactions on the chain still had to be verified
| somehow.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| that's interesting...thanks for explaining
| piperswe wrote:
| I'm in the same camp. I think a bunch of distributed
| technologies (like Ethereum) are really neat from a technical
| perspective and fun to tinker with, but I don't live under any
| delusion that the global financial system will ever build
| itself on top of anything that even somewhat resembles the
| cryptocurrencies we see today. I remember years ago it felt
| like the community was mostly comprised of people with our
| perspective, but that feeling has basically disappeared.
| noman-land wrote:
| We need to continue to seek each other out. Finance people
| swarmed this space like locusts but they aren't who makes it
| special. It's the p2p ethos that makes it special.
| ninepoints wrote:
| > I think it's interesting that via Ethereum, I can spend Ether
| to perform distributed computations on nodes across the globe
| and that this also serves as a store of value.
|
| I find this "value proposition" highly dubious. You can
| _already_ rent compute globally and perform computation in an
| environment orders of magnitude faster than on the EVM.
| Distributed compute on its own doesn 't confer any points as a
| "store of value." The nature of the compute needs to be
| something that can be done strictly in the blockchain domain,
| and as we've seen, the result is a system that's easy to
| manipulate by spinning up new shitcoins, insider trading, wash
| trades, and worse - not to mention the loss of privacy given
| how effective on-chain analysis is. The features that make up a
| cryptocurrency make it decidedly unsuitable as the basis of a
| modern financial system. Some of the underlying principles are
| "neat," but that's as far as the tech goes for me.
| alexambarch wrote:
| > You can already rent compute globally and perform
| computation in an environment orders of magnitude faster than
| on the EVM
|
| True, but Ethereum also has the benefit of having a globally
| agreed upon state that is transparent and traceable when a
| change occurs. Not saying this setup couldn't be done any
| other way, but the fact that all you need to enable yourself
| to make those changes is a digital token is what I find
| interesting about it. The use of this token combined with the
| fact that people arguably care about the state of this system
| is what I feel gives it intrinsic value.
| yunohn wrote:
| What does this state hold exactly?
| alexambarch wrote:
| What entity an ENS record is registered to, who owns what
| JPEG, who sent who some Ether...
|
| Ethereum is one big state machine so that state holds
| everything.
| Yizahi wrote:
| For ENS - yes, for JPEG or whatever else - definitively
| no. There is literally nothing stored inside the token to
| describe who owns a digital or physical artifact outside
| of blockchain and it is technically impossible to store
| such info in the blockchain, while keeping even a current
| sham of decentralization, transaction throughput and gas
| price.
| threeseed wrote:
| The problem is the shared state is so small and expensive
| that the majority of the state gets managed elsewhere and
| is merely linked to the chain.
|
| And so it's debatable if you've really achieved all that
| much.
| gus_massa wrote:
| I think it's worse. If you ask AWS for 1000 distributed
| machines, you can run 1000 different calculations and then
| somehow aggregate the results.
|
| In the Ethereum network, if you ask for a calculation then
| _all_ the miners must do it, and then _all_ the validators
| must do it. So you acually have a repeated calculation, not a
| distributed calculation.
|
| The only distributed part was calculating the next block with
| POW, but IIRC they switched to POS.
| wanderingbort wrote:
| I agree it's worse on any measure that can reduced to
| "distributed computation".
|
| But that's not what it's doing. Not really. The only
| distributed computation is the one establishing trust that
| there has been no Byzantine failure of consensus.
|
| Everything else is non-distributed non-parallel computation
| within a framework that statistically guarantees faithful
| and accurate processing.
|
| It's a competitor to trusted computing. One specifically
| designed against the single entity root of trust that
| underpins intels offering eg.
|
| [edit: fixed some typos]
| ilyt wrote:
| That kinda doesn't matter when the amount of compute is
| trivially reproduced by '90's CPUs
|
| You can just have a bunch of notes and vote out bad
| results. You can say "how do you know that 20 different
| machines you run that do not have hardware backdoor but
| how do you know software running ethereum is not
| backdoored ? There is no protection for the compute
| engine being backdoored, just the fact you'd need to get
| that backdoored software to most nodes.
| [deleted]
| mattdesl wrote:
| Placing control of the world's compute under a small handful
| of powerful megacorps is not exactly ideal. Imagining a
| future where we can use _and participate in_ (as stakers
| /validators) decentralized compute, storage, transactions,
| contracts, etc is pretty interesting.
| ilyt wrote:
| The ethereum DAO fork showed that the moment the "big ones"
| are hit there is not much stopping them from violating the
| "immutability" promise for their own gains.
|
| Instead of few big banks there are few big mining pools
| deciding the fate, distinction almost without difference.
| And in both cases you need money to get in to the inner
| circle
| mattdesl wrote:
| There are no mining pools in Ethereum today. The chain is
| "immutable" only up to the point that the social layer
| wants it to be; majority users can change the protocol as
| they see fit (see EIP 1559, PoS, and other forks).
| pavlov wrote:
| In the Ethereum PoS model, those with money perpetually own
| the network by definition.
|
| At least with AWS, Amazon doesn't also control the US
| dollar and the euro. If their service starts to suck, I can
| take my business elsewhere. But if Ethereum were to
| actually become a global standard, there would be no escape
| from the Ether plutocrats.
|
| Any participation you and I can have in a system like
| Ethereum is table scraps from the overlords.
| mattdesl wrote:
| What you are describing does exist in some blockchains,
| like Tezos. But Ethereum's governance is social: not
| driven by token stake or "coin voting." In Ethereum PoS,
| users do not cede control of the protocol to validators -
| the users who run nodes and decide what software to run
| effectively own and control the protocol.
|
| If the protocol starts to suck, users can change or fork
| the protocol (this has already happened multiple times,
| PoS being the latest example).
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > If their service starts to suck, I can take my business
| elsewhere.
|
| This is an extraordinarily good point.
|
| Centralization of Etherium means a centralization of both
| the VM and the currency. It would be as if the Fed and US
| Mint also owned AWS.
|
| If Amazon sucks, as you say, you can take your dollars
| elsewhere. If Ethereum sucks, your Ether is going to be
| worthless, even if you could bridge it to another chain.
| pavlov wrote:
| I've sometimes thought that Ethereum represents the kind
| of computing network that 1950s Soviets would have
| appreciated. Massively inefficient, every operation
| needlessly repeated across every node only for the
| pretense of equality and democracy, and ideologically
| obsessed with a rhetorical illusion of immutability and
| permanence even though data can be wiped by simple
| agreement of the Politburo that controls the network.
|
| "Now that the next five-year plan will be implemented as
| a smart contract on the Sovgosethereum, we'll be
| mathematically guaranteed to meet our economic goals." --
| Makes as much sense as the guaranteed crypto lending
| yields of 2021.
| nivenkos wrote:
| Most cryptocurrency mining still ends up being done by a
| few huge companies though.
| mattdesl wrote:
| Users cede very little control to PoS validators in
| Ethereum.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34685482
| yunohn wrote:
| There are innumerable companies you can rent cloud
| resources from - bare metal to "serverless". Ethereum, on
| the other hand, is severely limited in what you can achieve
| for any amount of rent.
| threeseed wrote:
| Who exactly do you think underpins most of Ethereum. It's
| mega corporations. [1]
|
| And decentralisation in crypto is in reality a myth when
| you have so many centralised players e.g. Binance,
| Metamask, OpenSea.
|
| [1] https://crypto.news/3-cloud-providers-responsible-for-
| over-t...
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| This blog post has a bunch of citations "showing that some
| assertion about the cryptocurrency ecosystem that crypto-
| bros make can't be true". And unfortunately decentralizing
| away from a small handful of powerful entities is one of
| these things. Below is one example.
|
| https://blog.dshr.org/2022/09/impossibilities.html#more
|
| "3) Impossibility of Full Decentralization in
| Permissionless Blockchains by Yujin Kwon et al (1st
| September 2019) provides a different formalization of the
| idea that economies of scale drive centralization by
| introducing the concept of the "Sybil cost":
| the blockchain system should be able to assign a positive
| Sybil cost, where the Sybil cost is defined as the
| difference between the cost for one participant running
| multiple nodes and the total cost for multiple participants
| each running one node. ... Considering the
| current gap between the rich and poor, this result implies
| that it is almost impossible for a system without Sybil
| costs to achieve good decentralization. In addition,
| because it is yet unknown how to assign a Sybil cost
| without relying on a TTP [Trusted Third Party] in
| blockchains, it also represents that currently, a
| contradiction between achieving good decentralization in
| the consensus protocol and not relying on a TTP exists."
| wanderingbort wrote:
| The interface to the globally available computation is a bit
| different and I think novel.
|
| In order for my application and yours to interact we had to
| both chose the same ecosystem and invest in it to some
| minimal degree.
|
| It's easy to frame that negatively.
|
| But there are some positive aspects to that mutual agreement
| to invest. Similar to how you may deploy an open standard of
| authentication inside your infrastructure, the expectation is
| that the community will improve tools and share innovations
| over time even if you aren't directly interacting with any of
| them. It's not required. It's just an expectation.
|
| Ethereum is like that. There is a community of developers
| extending the ecosystem and it's exclusively people who
| invest in and use the platform.
|
| We can mince words over the value prop of cryptocurrency and
| a decentralized ledger but, I don't get the same belonging to
| a community on AWS or GCP.
|
| FWIW most of the people I work with in the community dislike
| the same scammers that you do.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Give it a few years, the scammers will move on to greener
| pastures and the nerds will keep tinkering. I remember people
| acting the same way about ecommerce in the early 00s.
| outside1234 wrote:
| What we have learned from other financial markets is that
| scammers will only move on when there is regulation.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Which markets did you learn that from?
| koolba wrote:
| Not just regulation, you need actual enforcement with a
| high enough likelihood of consequence.
|
| Just look at telephone wire scams. They're clearly illegal,
| but if there's no teeth to prosecute then they'll keep on
| coming.
| klntsky wrote:
| > Nano
|
| > Instead [of miner fees], participants on the nano network are
| driven by external incentives, such as helping maintain an
| instant payment network they can use without fees.
|
| Is this a 1st April joke?
| alttab wrote:
| Sadly, XRB (Raiblocks, formally) was designed that way.
| Instant, fee-less.
|
| Problem was, there were races and some bugs, which caused a
| lot of reconciliation problems for exchanges that listed it.
|
| It dropped after 2017, and AFAIK, is essentially a dead coin.
| noman-land wrote:
| I'm with you on this. The overfinancialization of this tech
| bums me out hard. I stay away from conversations where people
| use words like bearish and bullish or talk about prices and
| gains and losses. That shit is so boring and uncreative I want
| to cry.
|
| I like peer to peer tech with no gatekeepers and no
| intermediaries. I like encryption and the ability to control
| how my data is used. I don't like the corporate cloud and I
| don't like gambling.
| redm wrote:
| "From looking around the internet I am starting to believe I
| might be the only person holding crypto strictly because I just
| happen to think it's neat."
|
| I'm holding crypto because I think it's neat, but I'm also
| holding it because there's little I can do with it... i.e.,
| lack of general utility, yet.
| acchow wrote:
| 100% agree. I was a big believer in the usefulness of crypto
| before all the "HODL" and "investment" mentality took over. Its
| value as a currency is eroded with the dramatic price
| fluctuations.
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| Well yeah, the US government couldn't stand having an actual
| currency to compete with so they relabeled all of crypto as
| investements. Suddenly all of those rules, tax implications,
| etc are more important than the tech itself.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| We just watched FTX implode and fleece thousands of people,
| including many of their own investors. Plenty of other
| exchanges and currencies tanking hard the last few months,
| too.
|
| These regulations exist for a reason, and it's why actual
| investments work.
|
| If you think they're a bad idea then I have a bridge in the
| Bahamas to sell you...
| HN_is_for_gemes wrote:
| [dead]
| antupis wrote:
| I think Etherium has real chanse to be the SSO provider of the
| internet value proposition is just too good vs current big
| providers.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| > From looking around the internet I am starting to believe I
| might be the only person holding crypto strictly because I just
| happen to think it's neat.
|
| I also think a lot of the distributed systems work and
| technological achievements are neat.
|
| But I don't have to hold crypto to appreciate it, or even to
| use it. It's trivially easy to log in to an exchange and buy
| crypto whenever I might need it to _do_ something.
|
| The concept of holding (or HODLing) isn't related to the
| underlying technology. It's a speculative investment.
|
| I also hold a token amount of crypto from back when I was
| playing around with the neatness of it, but it's just that: A
| token amount. You don't need to invest in it or make the number
| in your wallet go to an arbitrarily high number to experiment
| with the technology.
| IanCal wrote:
| There's definitely a lot that's interesting to me in it. It's a
| tricky programming environment, which I find personally fun,
| but it's an entirely public global database with stored
| procedures and custom row level security. Every stored
| procedure can call others written by anyone and there's a
| strong direct push towards open interfaces and
| interoperability.
|
| Unfortunately one of the easiest things to make with it is a
| new "currency" because it fits so well with the security model.
| EGreg wrote:
| Not everyone is focused on "number go up". Some teams actually
| care about making distributed systems that serve communities
| around the world, and prefer to see people not have to trust
| centralized middlemen. Blockchains are not the best
| infrastructure for this, but they're good enough (Polygon Edge
| for instance), for many applications:
|
| https://intercoin.org/applications
|
| Having said that, blockchains are going to go the way of
| mainframes and vacuum tubes eventually. Here is the roadmap of
| what has to happen for Web3 (smart contracts) to go mainstream:
|
| https://intercoin.org/presentation.pdf
|
| I see a lot of use cases for it. Unfortunately many activists
| on HN love to comment how useless smart contracts are, while
| also silently downvoting any comments that disagree with that
| position.
|
| I think the profit motive really did derail a lot of Web3 --
| but also the same can be said for Web2, it's just that VCs were
| the only ones who could invest (until the JOBS act, at least).
| So Web2 got stuck in near-monopolies, buying up competition,
| and extracting rents, while completely dominating our public
| forums.
|
| It didn't have to be this way. Mark Z was an open source bro
| who turned down Microsoft's $1M offer in high school, and put
| his software online for free. Even after he coded facemash and
| facebook, he was going to build a _decentralized, open source
| file sharing system_ called Wirehog -- but then Sean Parker and
| Peter Thiel "put a bullet in that thing"[1]. They killed Mark
| Z's decentralized visions and turned him from an open source
| bro who loves hacking things together into a corporate golden
| boy who loves acqui-hiring competition (WhatsApp, Instagram,
| Oculus[2] etc.) and then trying to _turn them_ into corporate
| teams, until they bounce when their golden handcuffs vest
| (founders of those companies).
|
| The people who did this to Zuck were themselves peculiar. Sean
| Parker himself used to be for open sharing (Napster) but
| rentseeking corporations in that sphere (RIAA, MPAA) sued and
| destroyed it. He learned a lesson and started Plaxo, and other
| VC-backed companies to basically lock up people's data in giant
| centralized server farms. It was he who told Zuck to basically
| cut out the decentralized open nonsense. And Peter Thiel with
| Clarion Capital had a far more radical vision: _Competition is
| for losers! Build a monopoly._ [3].
|
| The result in our society is that Big Tech oligopolies have
| totally captured Web2 and own all our public forums. Elon and
| Zuck own our largest public forums and messengers. TikTok,
| WeChat and others have had a meteoric rise but they are even
| more closely tied with the government of China than FB and
| Twitter are with the US government. You'd think We the People
| should have an open source alternative. But HN loves Web2 and
| hates Web3.
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2010/05/26/wirehog/
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Carmack#Open-
| source_softw...
|
| [3] https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-
| for-...
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| The problem with "serving communities around the world" with
| radically de-centralized systems is that _in order to
| interact with the real world you need to have trusted
| parties_. And with blockchain, once you have a trusted party,
| you might as well have them host a database. So you get to
| choose: either you have your trustless, radically-
| decentralizable system that only is relevant in its own small
| ecosystem (like cryptocurrency) or you have trusted parties
| and thus have no need for the trustless, decentralized
| system, and would be better served with a federated system of
| trusted parties (like "real" money).
| OkayPhysicist wrote:
| That was my view on it back in the early 2010's when Bitcoin
| was just taking off. Back then, the only people interested in
| it were either geeks looking at this new weird thing, or drug
| dealers. And frankly, the drug dealing was "healthy" for the
| ecosystem as whole: because people were actually using it as a
| medium of exchange, there was a dampening force opposing
| changes in value, and so while it was volatile compared to real
| currency, it was nothing like it is today.
|
| Frankly, the fact that the takedown of the Silk Road didn't
| kill the entire market is still surprising to me. I'm not sure
| at what point the speculation bubble started, because I had
| well and proper lost interest at that point, but the idea that
| people willingly were/are pouring money into an system that has
| fundamentally broken its own economics is baffling to me.
| Transactions take too long and cost too much for it to be
| useful as a means of exchange, and if everybody is going
| through big exchanges than the anonymity factor doesn't exist
| either.
|
| Long story short, it was an interesting experiment while it
| lasted. If we could stop wasting the carbon footprint of a mid-
| sized country now to prop up an ecosystem of scams and baseless
| speculation now, that would be great.
| jon-wood wrote:
| I'm genuinely curious to hear this from someone who's clearly
| more in that world than I am - is anyone at all using
| Ethereum's distributed nodes to do calculations for anything
| that isn't some sort of abstract financial instrument? I ask
| because people constantly seem to tout the fact you can build
| anything with blockchains, and they'll change the world, but
| I've never seen anything actually useful made with it beyond
| the dubiously valuable ability to transfer currency around the
| place.
| noman-land wrote:
| ENS is my go to example for something novel and useful that
| Ethereum enables. Instantly propagating private key based
| DNS.
|
| https://ens.domains
| status200 wrote:
| It brings a tear to my eye when i read through well crafted ERC
| proposals [0] and then remember these developers are awash in a
| sea of scammers, blind hatred, vitriolic ignorance, and of
| course the traditional systems that fight against any sort of
| distributed ecosystem that they cannot control.
|
| [0] https://eips.ethereum.org/erc
| colesantiago wrote:
| This is great, we just need more of these shadow banking crypto
| exchanges to implode and for the entire crypto industry to
| disappear.
|
| There really and objectively is no reason for cryptocurrencies to
| exist at all.
| rationalist wrote:
| I dislike having liabilities: whether that's cash in a
| precarious financial system, or physical assets that I have to
| protect from theft. Cryptocurrency is the answer IF it was
| reliable, stable, and ubiquitous. It is none of those things
| for me.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| I think one may say "there really and objectively is no reason
| for _me to use_ cryptocurrencies at all. " And that's totally
| fine. But your statement is out of place in a free society, in
| my opinion. It resembles what I see in authoritarian regimes.
| rnk wrote:
| Why is it out of place in a free society to point to
| questionable value based donations? If you want to send
| someone something that you believe has value that they can
| convert to dollars or regular fiat currency, like tether or
| magic the gathering cards you can. The question is really is
| this a good way to do it. Bitcoin has value of billions of
| dollars currently, it has convertible value to dollars, just
| like the supposed crypto dollar coins. But they fluctuate a
| lot. After the next few huge crypto exchanges die, will there
| be any left? Bitcoin will still "work" because the blockchain
| exists, but the value would probably be reduced.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Questioning the value is fine, refusing to acknowledge
| others' point of view is the authoritarian bit. Like I'm
| not going to use magic the gathering cards as a store of
| value, I think they're dumb, but I recognize others think
| differently and I wouldn't rejoice in a magic the gathering
| card broker going out of business. It's existence does no
| harm to me or anyone else.
| jMyles wrote:
| > There really and objectively is no reason for
| cryptocurrencies to exist at all.
|
| Are we just destined to loop over this argument `while True`?
|
| Without byzantine-fault tolerant decentralized currencies, how
| do you deprecate state control of economies?
|
| If the answer is "you don't", then you are positioning yourself
| outside the extremely obvious long-term evolutionary path of
| the internet. Why would the internet, and AI, continue to abide
| rent-seeking central banks?
|
| A simple litmus test is this: can you buy prohibited plants and
| compounds over the internet with a given currency and its
| ecosystem of marketplaces? If the answer is "no", then you that
| currency probably has more state control than the internet is
| likely to tolerate in the long-term.
| birracerveza wrote:
| People are so blinded by their hatred for crypto that they do
| not understand that yes, crypto has been mainly been used to
| transact scams and ponzis and whatever it is, but we're still
| talking about an absolutely insane amount of value being
| transacted with no middleman.
|
| How is that useless? What even is your definition of useless?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| There's also a lot of value being transacted in WoW gold,
| FF14 Gil and other such coins - not to mention the hundreds
| of billions of Monopoly money being exchanged every day all
| around the globe, in a fully decentralized system.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Fuck, half the younger people on this blog probably sold
| or bought Runescape accounts, that doesn't make them a
| useful currency.
| jMyles wrote:
| WoW gold and FF14 Gil are not decentralized, and Monopoly
| money cannot be sent over the internet.
| yunohn wrote:
| > absolutely insane amount of value being transacted with
| no middleman
|
| The miners are the middleman. They literally take a cut.
|
| The only reason there's "less delay" is because they have
| zero qualification or filtering process to handle any
| KYC/AML/Anti-fraud/Anti-scam situations and blindly accept
| any valid transactions.
| washedup wrote:
| Millions of people in nations with severe currency and asset
| issues (inflation, access, or otherwise, often in third world
| countries) disagree.
|
| But yes, I am glad to see these shady institutions taken down.
| Only once they are gone, and SEC puts proper regulations in
| place, the industry will likely thrive.
| LastTrain wrote:
| Lol "...and that is what crypto is all about Charlie Brown.."
| root_axis wrote:
| > _Millions across the world in nations with severe currency
| and asset issues (inflation, access, or otherwise, often in
| third world countries) disagree._
|
| Oft repeated but not actually true. The people living in the
| places you describe often don't have the luxury of access to
| stable electricity, internet, capable technology, technical
| knowledge etc. More importantly, people living in these
| places can't afford to tie up their money in useless crypto
| tokens, they need real money they can use to buy goods and
| services.
|
| Cryptocurrency is a game for the affluent.
| washedup wrote:
| You clearly haven't done much research on these topics
| (world wide adoption of internet, mobile banking,
| electricity, and crypto). Hilarious way to end your useless
| paragraph with an emotional, rather than logical, statement
| about your view on what "crypto" is.
| brokenkebaby wrote:
| Poorer part of the world is absolutely not like you might
| saw it in cinema. There are plenty of places where it's
| hard to obtain safe drinking water, but mobile connection
| is pretty decent, and one can find a "BTC exchange" in a
| local market.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Also - if regulations don't allow them to have stocks &
| dollars - then either the regulations are there for good
| reason, or we should change the regulations - not just
| skirt them.
| lazide wrote:
| Nuking KYC/AML rules (the biggest issues) would certainly
| help bank large swathes of the population that currently
| are excluded.
|
| If you think that is a good thing or a bad thing depends
| a lot on various highly polarizing religious and
| political discussions that are unlikely to be solved...
| well, at all, frankly. Maybe ever.
|
| Based on the human history I've been able to find and
| read, anyway.
| nradov wrote:
| In developed countries very few legitimate customers are
| unable to open bank accounts due to KYC/AML rules. You
| can probably find a few examples where people were turned
| down due to identity theft or procedural errors but those
| cases are rare and temporary.
|
| In the real world when banks reject customers it's
| because they have negative items on their credit reports
| or a history of fraud (like bouncing checks).
| lazide wrote:
| Or for unexplained reasons. There are numerous examples
| from early crypto where well known banks froze
| individuals accounts merely for getting a transfer from
| coinbase.
|
| also, gun retailers, porn companies, marijuana
| dispensaries, etc. all have a LOT of experience having
| account applications denied or accounts frozen.
| notch898a wrote:
| I like to tell the story of the time I was moving from
| one state to another and did not have housing yet.
|
| The bank refused to open an account. With a passport,
| plus license with outdated address. Said it violates KYC
| w/ no proof of address. Meanwhile, with no documentation
| (no id, passport, etc) I could legally conceal carry a
| gun in the bank.
|
| I can't believe it's gotten to the point where you can be
| trusted to legally have a gun in the bank but considered
| too dangerous to hand over $5.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| There's no bill of rights amendment to give you access to
| a bank account. Also, a lot of people think it would be
| stupid and not good to bring a gun into a bank, but if
| you try to codify that in any way, including a sign on
| the outside of the bank that says "please don't bring a
| gun in here", certain really angry people get even
| angrier and will publicize such a thing to fellow very
| angry people as if it isn't a perfectly normal thing to
| not want a gun in your bank.
| notch898a wrote:
| I would argue the bill of rights, specifically the 4th
| amendment, should protect you from a _government imposed_
| search of your papers to open an account.
| lazide wrote:
| It's hard to imagine that standing up to the situation
| that is required, which is someone must provide gov't
| issued identification to have a bank account (because
| terrorists). After all, I don't think anyone has a right
| to privacy from the gov't regarding gov't issued IDs.
|
| Maybe 10th amendment/interstate commerce clause
| overreach? (Why is the federal gov't mandating what my
| local branch requires for acceptance of ID?!?)
|
| But then the Gov't would pull out the whole 9/11 patriot
| act justification, national security, blah blah blah, and
| chances are the supreme court would give them even more
| justification.
| [deleted]
| PeterisP wrote:
| > There's no bill of rights amendment to give you access
| to a bank account.
|
| Interestingly, the EU does take this exact approach,
| having a directive that mandates that everyone has the
| right to a basic bank account and banks can't refuse
| opening one just because you're a refugee or a convicted
| fraudster or a homeless unemployed drug addict. Access to
| financial infrastructure is a key part of participating
| in modern society and interacting with the state (e.g.
| receiving any benefits), so it is imperative that
| everyone, including the most downtrodden, can access it.
| lazide wrote:
| I agree, it's absurd. But.... maybe you'd send those $5
| to ISIS?!?
|
| /s
| brokenkebaby wrote:
| Sure, if someone happen to be a citizen of a repressive
| dictatorship - then either it's for a good reason, or we
| should change the dictatorship! Sounds easy!
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| The total investments in BTC from places like that are
| less than 0.1% of all investments.
|
| BTC is not a tool helping the world operate more freely.
|
| 99.9% of it is something else... Namely speculation and
| scams.
| mannerheim wrote:
| But which one is it? Are those regulations there for a
| good reason, or should we just change the regulations,
| presumably e.g. via military intervention to topple their
| governments?
| brokenkebaby wrote:
| Here's me. I use crypto to help my relatives. Btw, your
| stats apparently should have a source, and definition of
| what "investment" is in the context. Why not to show it?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| The vast majority of inflows into crypto happen in USD
| (>85%).
|
| So - ballpark - a max of 15% of crypto inflows can come
| from people without access to dollars.
|
| JPY, EUR, and KRW aren't much easier to access and make
| up almost all of the missing 15%.
|
| The amount of inflows from North Korean Won, Zimbabwean
| Dollars, etc are virtually zero.
|
| Sure, maybe people like you are using crypto as a way to
| transfer money to people somewhere like North Korea
| (which would be illegal in dollars).
|
| That's a tiny, tiny insignificant portion of crypto usage
| & investment.
|
| It's almost like saying - Elon Musk donated $X billion
| dollars in stock to charity (mostly to avoid taxes).
| Don't tell me stocks exist to invest in companies! Other
| people are using stocks to transfer money to charities!
|
| The _vast_ majority is of fiat inflow is coming from the
| US, Japan, and the EU - and it 's mainly for speculation
| (or, as crypto people claim "investment").
| brokenkebaby wrote:
| Your reasoning seem to be based on a very wrong
| assumption that people from poorer countries, or sending
| to poorer countries would not buy BTC with dollars or
| euro. Just for starters, USD is the first currency of
| choice for major (relative to relevant economy, buying a
| small fridge can fall in such category) operations in
| such regions, with EUR being second. Inhabitants of
| poorer countries do a lot of cash transactions in USD,
| EUR, and I'm not even sure what do you mean by "access to
| USD" in such context. And majority of those shadowed
| migrant remittances comes from US/EU, not vice versa. So
| there's no inflow in Zimbabwean dollars, and many other
| unstable currencies because they are unsuitable, at times
| to the point of being useless.
| lostmsu wrote:
| It is good even if it only helps people in these places who
| have electricity, internet, capable technology and
| technical knowledge.
| cma wrote:
| To be decentralized they will have to run a full node as
| well.
| root_axis wrote:
| The affluent don't need cryptocurrency, it's a game, and
| it's a game where you often lose money anyway.
| lostmsu wrote:
| Now your claim is just baseless. The uses for the
| affluent in those places are listed above. Risks are to
| be accounted for.
| colesantiago wrote:
| No. We don't need crypto to thrive at all.
|
| We already have Pix (Brazil), UPI (India), M-Pesa (Africa)
| and now the US is beginning to roll out FedNow in the US.
|
| The legitimate and regulated solutions are already being
| built and have been proven as it has been in India at scale
| to the tune of hundreds of millions of users.
|
| Crypto or blockchain cannot and can never scale at all.
| rmbyrro wrote:
| Pix is 100% controlled by the Brazilian government, which
| does not have a trustworthy track record in taking care of
| its citizens' money. Buy they do apologize... 30 years
| later [1].
|
| [1] https://www.riotimesonline.com/brazil-
| news/brazil/politics-b...
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| If you held crypto on an exchange that imploded you don't
| even get an apology.
| colesantiago wrote:
| > Pix is 100% controlled by the Brazilian government...
|
| I would argue this is still better than losing your money
| completely in crypto or getting your money hacked by
| connecting your wallet.
|
| There are thousands of examples of people losing hundreds
| of millions of their money in crypto and the criminals
| who are going this are not sorry.
|
| https://web3isgoinggreat.com/?theme=hack%2CrugPull%2Cshad
| y%2...
| [deleted]
| idiotsecant wrote:
| We don't need crypto if we're OK with permissioned currency
| systems being the only ones that are allowed to exist. I'm
| not sure I'm OK with that.
| super256 wrote:
| > No. We don't need crypto to thrive at all.
|
| I know two people from Argentina and Colombia, and both of
| them use USDC to get their hands on US Dollars. Apparently,
| crypto dollars are popular among countries with massive
| inflation.
|
| I really have no idea about the countries you mentioned
| (Brazil, India, Africa), but I assume those apps introduced
| there don't offer the option for foreign exchange? When a
| currency is under massive inflationary pressure,
| policymakers will introduce heavy restrictions on FX. This
| would happen to any app like those you mentioned in
| countries like Argentinia and Colombia, rendering those
| apps worthless like Pesos.
|
| And this is also the very reason, why those countries have
| a parallel black market currency like Dolar Blue [1].
|
| Edit: ok, I got the crypto part wrong. Apparently, they
| only use USD paper money. I always assumed they are using
| crypto for this for some reason. I apologize.
|
| [1] https://bluedollar.net/
| comte7092 wrote:
| Crypto hasn't changed the reality on the ground all that much
| in any of those places.
|
| In all instances I'm aware of, what matters is the ability to
| get your hands on _dollars_. Crypto, at best, ends up being
| an intermediary for that exchange, and at worst ends up being
| a scam for people who aren't technical enough to understand
| how it actually works.
| [deleted]
| washedup wrote:
| "In all instances I'm aware of..."
|
| It helps to research this stuff in depth a bit. USD is
| definitely still very much desired in many many parts of
| the world, but there are many instances where people still
| need to send "value" across borders. Bitcoin is, in a lot
| of places, the only way to do this. That's just one of many
| use-cases for people where there are massive asset and
| currency restrictions.
| comte7092 wrote:
| I'm speaking from directly reported experiences of people
| I know who live in such countries.
|
| They've dabbled in crypto, gotten scammed, successfully
| used it for a bit, but now moved away from it entirely.
|
| At the end of the day, the only reason why you'd _need_
| to use Bitcoin for this is to evade the law, which, if
| you're living under an unstable government with a
| collapsing currency, may not be the best course of
| action.
| [deleted]
| infamouscow wrote:
| https://twitter.com/ukraine/status/1497594592438497282
| colesantiago wrote:
| This doesn't mean anything.
|
| I can do the same with good old USD, EUR, GBP and other
| regulated currencies to send to Ukraine.
|
| How is the price doing with BTC and ETH today since then?
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if Ukraine hasn't cashed it out yet,
| and even if they did, i'm betting they are completely in
| drawdown which obviously makes crypto completely useless as a
| currency.
|
| USDT, UST and other unregulated stablecoins are not even
| stable at all which defeats the point of them, not to mention
| the massive ongoing issues at Tether which will inevitably
| cause a huge crash in the crypto industry.
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-10-07/crypto-
| my...
|
| Stablecoins, crypto and other fictitious tokens are not
| stable at all.
| infamouscow wrote:
| The fact the tweet exists disproves the premise.
|
| Thankfully, society has progressed to a point where it's
| socially acceptable to call out fools changing the goal
| post.
| colesantiago wrote:
| > The fact the tweet exists disproves your premise.
|
| No.
|
| You would like to think that, however after seeing what
| happened since 2022 (FTX, Luna, low NFT usage, crypto
| rugpulls, crypto layoffs) i'm afraid these examples
| cement crypto as completely useless.
|
| In fact, nothing that crypto does is entirely novel nor
| it is a legitimate significant improvement to the current
| financial system, in fact it is even worse since it isn't
| even regulated.
| infamouscow wrote:
| You're clearly arguing in bad faith.
|
| You asserted "[t]here really and objectively is no reason
| for cryptocurrencies to exist at all." Evidence was
| provided demonstrating the assertion is false. Burying
| your head in the sand won't change that.
| [deleted]
| vkou wrote:
| Why, when you can just wire USD to Ukraine? It's not
| sanctioned.
|
| Hell, you can even wire USD to many Russian banks. It's
| sanctioned, but not _that_ sanctioned.
| infamouscow wrote:
| Sanctions have nothing to do with it.
|
| Go to your local bank and ask to wire 100 USD to the
| government of Ukraine. Let me know if they do anything
| except give you a blank stare.
| nl wrote:
| Assuming you have a helpful teller they might Google for
| you and find the details here:
|
| > The National Bank of Ukraine has decided to open a
| special fundraising account to support the Armed Forces
| of Ukraine.
|
| > ...
|
| > Also NBU Opens Fundraising Account for Humanitarian
| Assistance to Ukrainians Affected by Russia's Aggression
|
| https://bank.gov.ua/en/news/all/natsionalniy-bank-
| vidkriv-sp...
|
| Wire details are on the page.
| yunohn wrote:
| Go to your local blockchain and ask to wire 100 USDC to
| the government of Ukraine. Let me know if they do
| anything except give you a blank stare.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Have you ever actually wired money to someone before?
|
| Gotta have an account number. The routing number for Bank
| of Ukraine is 222382221. Easily found via google. Any
| bank in the US isn't going to look these things up for
| you, you walk in and say "I wanna wire money" and they're
| going to ask for the account and routing numbers.
|
| Or failing that, search for "Ukraine Charity" and several
| of them have options for paypal and other ways to donate
| money. Like, literally just 30 seconds on google. I bet
| plenty of them will take wire donations, and most of
| them, probably, will make it to someone in the Ukraine.
| infamouscow wrote:
| Did the official government of Ukraine tweet about taking
| wire transfers?
|
| There's a difference between donating to a charity and
| donating to the official government account. We are
| discussing official government accounts rather than
| charities.
| notch898a wrote:
| A sizeable portion of Ukrainians live(d) in Russia. Which
| is easier / lower risk for them, a wire from their Russian
| account or a crypto transfer? I would be surprised if it
| even went through.
|
| Also, there are a lot of things you can do that fall under
| "legal but the less explicitly obvious the better."
| Frequent wire transfers to Russia by some random Joe
| probably falls under that one.
| epgui wrote:
| I personally have no interest in buying any crypto, and I find
| the whole ecosystem super sketchy, but to say that there is
| "zero" use case or rationale is just as unreasonable as the
| hodl-zealots... Replace "zero" with "limited" and you're back
| in reasonable territory IMO.
| colesantiago wrote:
| I'll go further:
|
| There is no solution crypto has legitimately solved that
| isn't already solved by the current system that has hundreds
| of millions of users that is not pure speculation, fraud,
| ransomware or complete gambling.
|
| Seriously, crypto, blockchains and all the rest of it has no
| legitimate use case.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| don't forget buying drugs
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I will add to this: The oracle problem prevents crypto from
| having any useful interaction with the real world, and
| prevents crypto from having any useful purpose that isn't
| just playing around with money.
| m00dy wrote:
| I feel like something is cooking...
| skc wrote:
| Binance has this very uncanny ability to plausibly explain their
| way out of any hint of red flags.
|
| And they are still here. It's pretty remarkable.
| hammock wrote:
| Reminds me of the Epstein suicide
| hdjjhhvvhga wrote:
| When they finally go down all the red flags will be crystal
| clear in retrospect.
| [deleted]
| amluto wrote:
| It helps to have a giant red herring that isn't directly
| related to a liquidity or solvency problem. In Binance's case,
| it's their incredibly dubious USD banking arrangements. It's
| not a secret, and it's a great distraction for Binance to point
| at if they don't want to move real USD at any given time.
| fuzzylightbulb wrote:
| "You know, it's funny; when you look at someone through rose-
| colored glasses, all the red flags just look like flags." -
| Wanda the Owl, BoJack Horseman
| ilyt wrote:
| But red just looks like red in those glasses
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Or from an even earlier poster / TV show -- "I Want To
| Believe"
| HN_is_for_gemes wrote:
| [dead]
| patrickaljord wrote:
| Only SWIFT USD transfers are suspended. ACH are still allowed
| which is what most US users use and Euro SEPA are still ok which
| what all of EU uses. Other countries uses their own currencies.
| So this only affects a small portion of 0.01% of their userbase.
| lazide wrote:
| So no wires?
|
| Anyone moving significant money (> $50-100k) is almost
| certainly going to want to use a wire.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| 0.01% of user base != 0.01% of withdrawal volume.
| lazide wrote:
| Good point. Also != balance or percent of assets.
|
| My guess is wires in USD are _very_ highly correlated with
| high percentage of total held assets accounts (aka whales).
| pedalpete wrote:
| I think we'd need to look at the use case for this, and the
| _apparently_ short time that this will be out of service at
| binance.
|
| If it's a few days, and I need to move money
|
| 1) They've given a heads up so I have time to move it before
| if needed
|
| 2) Assuming my money is in crypto, I can easily move it
| elsewhere
|
| This isn't to say this isn't strange, and suspect, but the
| impact seems to be limited.
|
| At the same time, if I were to have a binance account, I'd
| make sure I also have an account on another exchange.
| gruez wrote:
| Is there a reason why wires (presumably SWIFT transfers)
| would be preferable to ACH?
| runeks wrote:
| They're international
| lazide wrote:
| 1) ACH transactions are potentially refundable/reversable
| for quite a long period of time. I think the official
| period is only 30 days, but it's not unheard of for ACH
| transactions to be approved a year+ later. Wires are
| (generally) not reversible, and doing so requires
| intervention of someone manually at the Fed.
|
| 2) ACH transactions are 'pull' by their nature. ACH stands
| for Automated Clearing House, and it was created for
| checks. Unless denied by the bank being pulled from, all
| someone needs to withdraw or deposit funds in an account is
| the routing number and account number. If someone is
| playing games, that really doesn't require anything.
| Someone could print checks with that info and just start
| writing them, for instance, until they get arrested. Wires
| are send only, direct bank to bank (through the Fed), and
| are heavily controlled by the banks.
|
| 3) Send/Receive limits for ACH (because these are checks)
| can be arbitrarily low, at the banks discretion. It's not
| uncommon for it to be $100k/$250k or lower to help limit
| fraud, and often automated. Wire limits (if any) can be
| very high, and are generally more a matter of bank policy
| around authentication, and it's not that unusual for 8 or 9
| digit wires to be happening regularly without problems.
|
| If someone is going to be liquidating $10 mln in something,
| 99.99% of the time it will be handled via wire.
| lxgr wrote:
| > ACH transactions are 'pull' by their nature.
|
| Besides ACH debit, there's also ACH credit transfers,
| which are "push" payments. I'd assume that this would be
| what a crypto exchange would use to pay out customer
| funds.
| Ayesh wrote:
| > So this only affects a small portion of 0.01% of their
| userbase.
|
| I feel like this is definitely a lot more than that. Local
| banks in many countries, along with many online banks allow USD
| wire transfers that do not get converted. In countries like Sri
| Lanka, where the local currency is rapidly depreciating, many
| people actually never withdraw funds to local currency accounts
| to protect against this.
| patrickaljord wrote:
| I doubt these kinds of countries represent more than 0.01% of
| users. Sure sucks for these tho they could use other
| exchanges to cash out or local OTCs.
| jrumbut wrote:
| It's funny to hear someone say the quiet part loud.
|
| Wasn't servicing exactly those customers (people without
| recourse to stable currencies and the international banking
| system) always the answer to "what do crytocurrencies do
| well besides speculation and crime?"
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| >Wasn't servicing exactly those customers (people without
| recourse to stable currencies and the international
| banking system) always the answer to "what do
| crytocurrencies do well besides speculation and crime?"
|
| And that's exactly what crypto does. As far as I'm
| concerned, the ability to store, send and receive crypto
| without the consent of a 3rd party is the greatest
| utility of crypto. Using a 3rd party like Binance or FTX
| to store, send or otherwise manage your crypto entirely
| defeats the purpose of crypto. The failures we seen
| haven't been failures of crypto, they have been
| spectacular failures of exchanges and 3rd party platforms
| that frankly nobody with any brains would use. I find the
| common argument that it is "too complicated" for "normal
| people" to manage their own wallets ridiculous. If
| someone isn't willing to put forth the extremely minimal
| effort to learn how to set up, manage and secure their
| own wallet then I have very little sympathy when obvious
| scams like Binance or FTX separate them from their money.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| What's the quiet part? It's sort of helping some people,
| mostly as a side effect, and not particularly well, all
| while generating massive negative externalities for
| everyone else.
| notahacker wrote:
| I think he means "the quiet part" because
| cryptoenthusiasts were very loud about the idea of
| 'uncensorable' financial inclusion for the developing
| world being a major use case until it was "does it
| matter? they're a tiny fraction of users anyway". If
| there were many people in the developing world countries
| whose currencies Binance doesn't support using the
| service, I suspect they relied on wire transfers in
| USD....
| nl wrote:
| This implies these specific people in the developing
| world have access to a US bank, in which case they aren't
| exactly the people meant when referring to "financial
| inclusion".
|
| Instead the international transfers are generally done
| via crypto (one thing it does well) and then you "know
| someone" who will give you cash on the other side
| (usually in US Dollars).
|
| Over the last few years in Lebanon this has become pretty
| common:
|
| _n absence of a formal framework, traders use a peer-to-
| peer swapping system, contacting one of a handful of
| established crypto-to-cash brokers in Lebanon or finding
| a buyer through social media._
|
| https://www.arabianbusiness.com/money/wealth/alternative-
| ass...
|
| I don't really understand what the "quiet part" they are
| referring to is supposed to be.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| The message is pretty crafted and has to mean 0.01% of users
| did use SWIFT in the last month vs at all.
| humanizersequel wrote:
| Always been a bit perplexed by the anti-blockchain attitude here.
| One would think that the "hacker" in "hacker news" would imply a
| certain affiliation with (or at least respect for) Cypherpunk
| ideals. Maybe I'm letting the aesthetics of this place get to me
| though, it is literally a venture capital messageboard...
| twblalock wrote:
| I'm not anti-blockchain, although I have to say that so far the
| blockchain has not really been useful for anything other than
| crypto.
|
| I am anti-crypto, because I know some history, and I know that
| the situation that existed before state-backed fiat currency
| and regulated banking was worse in many ways for normal people.
| Many crypto enthusiasts are essentially extreme financial
| libertarians and view crypto as the enemy of those good things,
| are they are trying to drag us back into a situation that is
| like the 1890s but with computers.
|
| On top of that, many bad actors, scams, and manias (e.g. NFTs)
| have come out of the crypto movement, but few real benefits
| have been realized.
| andrewmutz wrote:
| Freedom to transact with other people is good. Freedom to
| defraud others through complex pump-and-dump, ponzi, or rugpull
| schemes is bad.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| And it's still not widely understood that they're synonymous.
|
| Ideological adherents of crypto deal with this fact by
| denying it. But ultimately you either have laws and
| stability, which require restrictions and regulations, or you
| have a scammy free-for-all that attracts opportunists and
| speculators who will prey on others.
|
| There is no chance whatsoever that an unregulated system of
| exchange will not head in that direction. Opportunists and
| predators gonna opportune and prey.
|
| TBF mainstream markets have the same issue, and the official
| financial industry is hardly a model of good behaviour.
|
| But at least it's somewhat controlled, even if not by much,
| as opposed to not being controlled at all.
| RestlessMind wrote:
| > Freedom to defraud others through complex pump-and-dump,
| ponzi, or rugpull schemes is bad.
|
| Sadly, HN seems to think Crypto is only about that. HN's
| loss, I'd suppose. Though YC, the real motivation behind HN,
| seems to get Crypto[1]. So probably not that big of a loss
| really.
|
| [1] https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/29/the-25-crypto-startups-
| tha...
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| Not the flex you think mon ami. All you're proving is that
| a lot of people who wagered a lot of money have every
| reason to flex on crypto, and force it down people's
| throats.
| warning26 wrote:
| I think it's because most blockchain articles are just pushing
| weird scammy stuff. From a technical perspective the blockchain
| is an interesting concept, and I'd love to see some articles
| about things that aren't just scams, but there just hasn't been
| much of that.
| [deleted]
| EamonnMR wrote:
| Hacker in hacker news refers to the usage before it came to
| mean cybercrime.
| jgilias wrote:
| I'm sure the majority of the users on this platform believe (at
| least subconsciously) that they are the smartest person they
| know. Many of them likely know about bitcoin since it cost less
| than a hundred bucks. So here's this thing that they themselves
| don't see any value in, that still _somehow_ manages to have a
| market cap of billions. And this _despite_ the worse economic
| conditions in decades.
|
| So it's the classic case of reality not corresponding to what
| one has decided it _should_ be. And this invokes defensiveness
| and strong emotions.
|
| Note that if bitcoin goes to zero, there would be a lot of
| hodlers experiencing the same.
| r00fus wrote:
| I mean, aside from fraud, money laundering, scams, and bribery
| ... what has blockchain done for us?
| unity1001 wrote:
| The early web was precisely like this - from scam sites that
| were for stealing your cc to criminal sites that openly sold
| illegal stuff. Beyond that, user generated content in the
| community forums and sites on the fringes of the internet
| were seen as 'littering' the Internet and a waste of space
| because they weren't generating any economic value, hence
| they did not have any 'use case'.
|
| Then everything suddenly changed when a few large-scale use
| cases appeared. User-generated content now drives the
| Internet. Those small sites, shops, forums evolved into giant
| outlets, businesses, communities.
|
| Same with the blockchain - we do see that we can do stuff
| with it. We do see that it gives the technical capabilities
| to do more stuff. But the actual use cases are scarce and
| small, mostly due to the technical infrastructure not being
| able to support large scale activity and the crypto space and
| apps still not being user-friendly enough to allow the public
| to use anything at large.
|
| Precisely the situation with the early web in which only
| those who knew could get to the forums on the fringes of the
| internet and use them for anything while the non-technical
| users were left to use the corporate sites that they would
| find in the 'portals' that fired up when they clicked on 'the
| Internet' (IE, Firefox etc - the browser icon was 'the
| internet').
|
| When the infrastructure improves and/or someone finds an easy
| to use use case with large scale appeal, everything will turn
| around in a second.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >The early web was precisely like this
|
| Except it wasn't. The "early internet" was ARPANET in like
| the 60s, and it was already being used by researches and US
| government agencies to coordinate and share information and
| cooperate. The internet was already decades old by the 90s,
| with an extensive track record of being useful. The 90s
| weren't an early age of the internet, it was the early age
| of internet security that allowed you to use your credit
| card through the internet and be sure it wouldn't be
| stolen.
|
| Pretty much right away after that was possible, Sears had
| an integration to buy stuff from them over the internet.
| Shortly after that, Amazon was founded.
|
| The early days of bitcoin was the 2010s, and several
| companies tried to integrate with it, including web stores
| and Steam, and they all eventually removed their
| integration because crypto makes terrible money, so nobody
| was using it.
| unity1001 wrote:
| > Except it wasn't. The "early internet" was ARPANET in
| like the 60s
|
| 'Early Internet' as in public usage. Not its research
| roots.
|
| > The 90s weren't an early age of the internet, it was
| the early age of internet security that allowed you to
| use your credit card through the internet and be sure it
| wouldn't be stolen
|
| That must be an alternate internet in an alternate
| timeline. From mid 90s to mid 2000s the Internet was a
| pretty dangerous place for any non-technical folk to use
| their credit cards anywhere. You must be looking from a
| tech-savvy person's perspective just like how you took
| the 'early Internet' to be ARPANET.
|
| > crypto makes terrible money
|
| If your understanding of crypto is limited to that, its
| no wonder you have the perspective that you have. Just
| like how many people said that the community forums back
| in early 2000s were 'plebs' spamming the internet.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > > The early web was precisely like this
|
| > Except it wasn't. The "early internet" was ARPANET
|
| While the Web may be the face of the internet most people
| are familiar with, the "early web" is not the same thing
| as "the early internet" which, in turn, is not the same
| thing as "precursors to the internet". It wasn't the
| internet, or even _an_ internet, until non-ARPANET
| networks were connected (e.g., CSNET), and there wasn 't
| a world wide web until HTML & HTTP & browsers were
| designed and deployed on the internet.
| tsimionescu wrote:
| The blockchain is just a hard to use DB. Sure, it's
| "trustless", but there really isn't value in that for any
| kind of social interaction. The more you understand this
| tech, the less interesting it becomes.
| humanizersequel wrote:
| The more I think about it, the more conceptually profound
| a trustless database (and in the case of more
| sophisticated chains like ethereum, execution
| environment) seems.
| r00fus wrote:
| > The early web was precisely like this
|
| I was around before the web days so I quite remember that
| time well. While there may have been scam sites, it was a
| significant minority to the main usage of the web at the
| time (mostly hobbyist pages and early corporate usage in
| addition to a lot of porn).
|
| Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem. Maybe some
| day someone will figure out a legitimate usage that isn't a
| cover for all the stuff I mentioned. It will be very
| interesting to see what survives after the end of QE/ZIRP.
| unity1001 wrote:
| > it was a significant minority to the main usage of the
| web at the time
|
| It wasn't. Your perspective seems to be skewed just like
| the other commentators who think that the early internet
| was a 'nice place' because their usage was specifically
| shaped by academic research, corporate and government
| usage and their tech-savviness.
|
| The public Internet was a pretty wild and dangerous place
| for the non-tech savvy masses. Which is one reason why
| the Internet did not take off to become what it is now
| until after mid 2000s and many business practices and
| trust-generating systems and services were established,
| along with mobile devices enabling everyone to access it.
|
| > Blockchain is a solution looking for a problem.
|
| Blockchain is not a solution. Its a technology.
| rnk wrote:
| There was fraud but there were useful things happening on
| the early web, building communities was one of those that
| crypto has done inadvertantly, but there were actual useful
| things happening with the web in the early days, it wasn't
| all fraud - I see hardly any use for crypto other than
| people benefitting (and others hurting) from the ponzi
| scheme aspects of it.
| unity1001 wrote:
| There is still a lot of useful things happening on the
| web. The quagmire of social networks or how various state
| and private actors anywhere on the planet (including the
| 'free' world) abusing the internet or the extreme fringe
| socioeconomic segments which were formerly invisible now
| becoming visible thanks to the Internet do not make the
| Internet a place in which less useful things are
| happening. All of those existed before. Its just that
| they were out of your sight.
|
| > I see hardly any use for crypto other than people
| benefitting (and others hurting) from the ponzi scheme
| aspects of it
|
| It already facilitates easy transference of funds, an
| investment tool, citizen-governed, transparent
| organizations in the form of DAOs from everywhere and
| anywhere on the planet - which is likely the most
| important thing at the moment -, impossible to censor
| apps and publishing on distributed databases and many
| other things.
|
| Especially the DAOs are something new in human
| civilization's history, and them being away from your
| sight or you not having much insight into them does not
| make it any less important than online credit card
| payments. Which were originally invented and used by -
| surprise - porn sites on the early Internet.
|
| So again it comes to the same thing that I stated in the
| original comment: The early Internet was similar to the
| blockchain space that exists now - a space that was
| dangerous for the ordinary non-technical citizen to enter
| even while it enabled many things that were at the time
| seen as 'useless' and 'detrimental' to the society.
|
| I reiterate that even the user-generated content, now
| celebrated as the democratization of content with all its
| benefits and ills, was seen as 'useless spam' back then.
| Major publications, newspaper sites did not have any
| comment section. Corporate sites did not have any kind of
| user feedback, less, any consideration for users aside
| from them being able to buy whatever they were selling at
| the time without making any noise - after all, who were
| us, the plebs, to be able to comment under the article of
| a 6-figure/year columnist or give product feedback to an
| illustrious company. It took a decade for them to come
| around and have to submit to such democratization of
| content and the Internet in general after blogosphere,
| user-driven forums and whatnot changed the landscape.
| Even today NYT still doesnt permit anyone commenting
| under its articles.
|
| Its absolutely the same with blockchain today - if you
| know about it, being savvy enough, if you follow the
| right stuff, you will find a lot of good stuff. If you
| aren't, and instead, if you see it as how old people saw
| the Internet back then, you will see all the bad stuff
| and it will be a dangerous and unnecessary place for you.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Circumvention of sanctions and paying of ransomware hackers.
| Admittedly, those two have a significant overlap with your
| list.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Binance is (likely) just a ponzi scheme built on crypto like
| FTX. All of this financial speculation on Bitcoin is what true
| crypto diehards and fanatics loathe. The goal of crypto is not
| for people to be rich off speculation. For the real enthusiasts
| the goal is to replace every dollar bill in their wallet and
| bank account with Bitcoin or similar currency. Every
| transaction--food, rent, etc.--all paid in crypto. No one
| really cares about a company built solely to speculate on
| crypto imploding.
| achillean wrote:
| I disagree on why people are into crypto, at least based on
| my own experience as a vendor
| (https://blog.shodan.io/accepting-crypto-a-vendor-
| perspective...) and every time there's a survey about why
| they're in crypto on Reddit. Most of them are in it for the
| speculation and to get rich. I'm sure there's a small
| contingent of Bitcoin users that are truly in it for the
| concept but most of them see it as their lottery ticket to
| get rich.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| > it is literally a venture capital messageboard...
|
| Venture Capital is about sorting through good ideas and bad
| ones, and finding the diamond in the rough, or persevering when
| no one else thinks an idea is good -- and being proven right.
|
| Crypto has been a thing for a while now, and is mostly
| imploding. A few folks made a lot of money and laughed all the
| way to the bank. But a lot of people are eating it, hard. I had
| my hopes before, but after losing $2k and watching a lot of
| folks around me lose more, with no hope of a real system or
| change coming out of this, it's hard to see what's left to
| support.
|
| Furthermore a lot of blockchain use cases and opportunities are
| absolutely unrelated to currency. The chain may yet have uses,
| but at this point I'll stick to EUR, USD, or maybe Yuan.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| To be fair, Binance and most of how modern crypto is used has
| nothing to do with crypto's founding cypherpunk ideals.
| m00dy wrote:
| I think the same. What are the alternatives ?
| crypt1d wrote:
| I used to wonder this a lot as well. It struck me as odd that a
| crowd of people with whom I'd often share a lot of the same
| values and beliefs, would be pretty much point blank against a
| whole industry that I've been so heavily involved with for many
| years. On a few occasions, it even shook my confidence and made
| me wonder if I'm doing the right thing. If so many smart people
| are against crypto, am I the crazy one?
|
| I have since learned to live with it. In the same way that I
| live with the fact that crypto is full of grifters, I've
| learned to live with the fact that majority of the world has a
| very narrow view of what the space is about. The only thing
| that I find unfortunate now-a-days is how quick people are to
| turn towards radical thoughts and approaches, without even
| considering that they might not know what they are talking
| about.
| jMyles wrote:
| > Always been a bit perplexed by the anti-blockchain attitude
| here.
|
| It's very small but _very_ loud. I surmise that the vast
| majority of us are curious and hopeful for blockchain tech as a
| socioeconomic critique.
| nradov wrote:
| There is no anti-blockchain attitude here. There are
| acknowledged use cases, as clearly documented in the NIST
| blockchain technology overview.
|
| https://www.nist.gov/publications/blockchain-technology-over...
|
| Currency is not one of those use cases. But some people keep
| trying to pretend otherwise because they are technically
| incompetent, or have a financial interest in doing so.
| creeble wrote:
| I don't think the NIST paper actually acknowledges ANY use
| cases. It does a fair job of pointing out the Oracle Problem,
| which is overlooked or underestimated by many, many crypto
| enthusiasts (and, IMHO, investors).
|
| Currency _is_ a real use case (there 's an existence proof),
| and NFTs could be considered a use case, if being a "digital
| collector" could be considered useful and not just another
| way to perform pump-and-dump scams.
| rideontime wrote:
| It's not VC that's anti-crypto.
| thinknubpad wrote:
| There was a reasonably punk book called _Cryptonomicon_ which
| came out in the 1999. Spoiler alert: it follows a group of
| people loosely based on real figures who worked on cryptography
| in WWII, and their fictional descendants ' quest to eventually
| create a cryptocurrency.
|
| Thing is, the book's cryptocurrency had two important features:
|
| * It was backed by real assets (recovered WWII gold bars).
|
| * It did not insist on radical decentralization as a hedge
| against meddling by institutional powers. Instead, the currency
| was headquartered in an oil-rich nation which was too
| economically important to be invaded, and which knew that it
| would eventually need an alternative to oil.
|
| The point is, cyberpunk is not the same thing as anarchy.
| Blockchains and defi are concepts which are being pushed by
| corpos. The sudden deregulation gives them a quick, easy, and
| arguably legal way to participate in illicit markets while
| bilking money out of suckers.
| notahacker wrote:
| Also, despite obviously sympathising with the cryptography
| nerds minting their own currency and going on a side quest
| for lost gold, Stephenson sets up his ending by having
| another key character rant about the ills of stored wealth
| versus people getting up to do stuff every day...
| rnk wrote:
| That book so brilliantly covered the pre-Satoshi crypto
| world. I love that book, which has so many interesting
| stories about the history of computers and the impact of
| technology. I always thought there should be more
| consideration of whether that book's author, Neal Stephenson,
| could have been involved in the Satoshi saga.
| qzw wrote:
| I'm a big fan of his work, but now that you mention it, the
| story of cryptocurrency in our timeline does have a
| Stephensonesque quality to it: brilliant world building at
| the start, a wild ride in the middle, and a messy and
| controversial ending at the finish.
| sacrosancty wrote:
| [dead]
| wolongong942 wrote:
| Binance and all the other centralized institutions in crypto
| that mandate KYC are anti-Cypherpunk.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-02-06 23:01 UTC)