Considering an idea is about taking everything into account. The part where it’s illegal or morally reprehensible is essential to the discussion. Also if not communicated like here it can be understood as an opinion.
I do not assume ill-intent of the other curious people here, and I think if you do, you're not following the guidelines (take the most charitable interpretation of what someone writes).
I’m not assuming ill-intent, I’m talking about the idea. Stating something is wrong or illegal seems essential to the discussion. It’s like if someone said “I should rob a bank”, I sure hope saying it’s illegal will be taken into account in their curiosity.
> Tort/civil lawsuits are about being "made whole."
Only at the “modelling a cow as a perfectly thermoconducting sphere” level of analysis.
Actual damages and preliminary injunctions to preserve a situation remediable by damages are about that, other parts of what happens in civil cases are often not. E.g., punitive damages are, as the name suggests, punitive, not compensatory.
I'm unsure I follow your "modeling as a cow" analogy. Usually, that's used to show the model does not adequately reflect reality. But that doesn't hold in tort cases. Compensatory damages are the majority, by a considerable margin. According to DOJ data[1]:
- Punitive damages were awarded in only 5% of trials where the plaintiff won
- It was lower for tort cases (3%) and higher for contract cases (8%)
- It is lower in product liability and medical cases (1% each)
Those findings show that the punitive damages awarded are both relatively rare and modest. A "spherical cow model" based on compensatory damages is probably still a very good model.
Thing is, prosecutors don't want to waste their time. Someone who made whole those who lost money or other assets (or at least made a credible effort to do so) gets lower priority and lower sentencing over someone who just sharts on laws.
That one is because Trump didn't make whole anyone across his career. Not the IRS, not his creditors, not the countless people he and his various enterprises stiffed (e.g. the tradespeople who worked on the casinos [1][2]).
There's so many people who Trump and his various enterprises left stuck with sometimes very huge bills that it's a miracle he didn't get dinged years ago. And that is why Trump is being on the receiving end of the stick at the moment... he forgot one crucial point: never make too many enemies in life because eventually they will team up to get their revenge on you.
> Putin and Xinping will be laughing because they have such a strong hold on their countries, them going to jail is unthinkable.
That’s one way to look at it. Another way is to note that they’ve done a real good job of limiting their potential future options. They get to remain in power, or be exiled and live in hiding, or be dead? They’re unlikely to resign and get to live a quiet retirement, just as they’re unlikely to be jailed by their opponents?
I think that (sadly) the key distinction in the American justice system has to do with how easily it is to justify your prosecution to the public. If you're wildly popular, you're probably able to get away with quite a lot. If you're wildly unpopular, it's probably pretty easy to get a conviction on any number of things.
That's why juries suck. For some reason we pretend that even a random group of people can't have shared biases. Especially when there's a lack of evidence, it opens a jury up to judging someone based on their race, gender, appearance etc and I've seen it happen.
Justice, in its broadest sense, is the concept that individuals are to be treated in a manner that is equitable and fair. A society in which justice has been achieved would be one in which individuals receive what they "deserve"
So, what do they deserve? It's up to a panel of peers to determine. Peers, mind you, that are representative of the society you live in.
So in a sense, public outcry and court of public opinion can sway personal opinions on what is just and fair and determine what people deserve. I find the entire system malleable and ripe for corruption.
What system, in your world, is not malleable and ripe for corruption? In your world democracy would be the most malleable and corrupt while autocracy would be the least given the boundaries you laid out.
In autocratic regimes justice is usually perverted from the top (comrade district secretary calls district judge to affect proceedings - in USSR it was informally known as "phone law"), in democracies you usually need to involve wider public pressure to achieve similar results. It's definitely makes democracy better, because to sway public opinion is costlier, more visible and at least partially deliberative endeavor. But legal justice is not moral justice in any political system, and there are always ways to at least nudge legal system in a way that is more convenient for some forces.
He wasn't arrested for raising the price of his drugs, though. He was arrested for financial fraud, but none of his victims actually lost money. Very odd case.
Securities fraud is a criminal charge. It's not about someone receiving relief from some injury like a civil case. You can be charged criminally even everyone ends up better off; it's a crime against the state.
Think about this: I hijack an airplane full of people but all I do is get them to their destination faster. Everyone is better off (i.e., no material injury occurred) but I assume you'd still think I should be charged, no?
FWIW- Madoff used the same excuse that "nobody actually lost money." According to him, none of the principal was lost, it was just unrealized gains. Most people still think he should have been charged with fraud.
He said the price increase would not affect patients directly- just insurance (can’t verify).
But he would do livestreams where he said anyone without insurance or that had insurance that wouldn’t cover it could DM him and he would take care of it for them. One of my online friends was able to get the medication this way.
This is why Ross Ulbricht was doomed from the second he did that Forbes interview as “Dread Pirate Roberts” and dared the US government to come get him.
You can do a lot of illegal things and get away with it, but questioning the US government’s ability is just asking to be made an example of.
There are limited law enforcement resources and no doubt Silk Road would have gotten a bit longer reprieve, but once he poked the bear, you damn well know they said “I don’t care what it costs, I want this guy in prison for the rest of his life”.
> Lim also acknowledged in February 2020 that some of Binance’s customers, including those from Russia, were involved in illegal activities, according to the complaint. Lim wrote in a chat message about those trades: “Like come on. They are here for crime.” Money Laundering Reporting Officer at Binance responded at the time, “we see the bad, but we close 2 eyes.”
Reminds me of my account manager at PayPal when I was running a TV torrent tracker. "We both know what you're doing, just never tell me what you're doing, OK?"
Probably the information that they (Binance) will share is really valuable to US.
Could we make a connection about Binance, and now Kraken prosecution with what happened after 9/11 where US pressed countries such as Switzerland to remove bank secrets? [1]
There is a restitution process for victims of Federal crimes. One may make a case that the victims of SBF & CZ's malfeasance may be eligible for restitution. IANAL.
SBF was convicted ~2 weeks ago and a Section 35B (federal cooperation and substantial assistance) doesn't go through that quickly, unless SBF started cooperating against CZ before his conviction.
And it sure didn't seem like SBF was interested in cooperating in any way pre-conviction.
he has infinite supply of money to pay any fine, i dont really understand the fine amount, whats the porpouse of it, u either force them to destroy the whole exchange or just try to make their complete reputation go down but this looks like the govt getting some pocket money and letting them keep doing nasty things overseas and thats it?
most people criticize fines as a mere check for the offender belonging to some moneyed elite and nothing else.
fines are not replacement for civil law. if anyone think they were wronged, that's the only way. not a magically proactive government becoming their patents.
What the government agencies and police do with money they collect will surprise many, and in many cases might be considered corrupt. I can assure you that the very last possible thing that will happen is that the money will be used to make anyone whole.
Depends if buying FTX would have stabilized the price of their FTT coin. That would have filled in some of the hole. And then CZ wouldn't have had to step down
So FTX would still be in the hole, and CZ is likely in the hole.
Sounds like kicking the can down the road to me. That won't end well.
SBF commits fraud and loses $8b, CZ pleads guilty and pays $4.3B fine and loses access to US market. I don't know why so many people think the crypto space is legit and this is just a temporary setback.
Isn't it better to just go after the scammers and fraudsters as soon as possible?
Otherwise somebody else will be left "holding the bag" eventually (and it will be a larger bag).
I might be old-fashioned but these fines and charges, to be clear, are for ACTUAL wrong-doing, you know, MONEY LAUNDERING. That's greedy-bad-guy stuff. It's not arbitrary or simply a matter of "avoiding drama".
The government wouldn’t give that fine to FTX investors and customers. They keep it for themselves. Making FTX investors and customers whole is FTX’s job, not the govt.
I've seen analyses showing even without CZ it was just a matter of time before the house of cards collapsed.
"It's only when the tide goes out that you see who's swimming naked". The tide was going out even without CZ's actions. And FTX was swimming naked to the bone.
Oh FTX was definitely a house of cards, but maybe they could have played funny money games, got more investement, and otherwise stayed solvent until their Antropic bets paid off mayyyybe. But CZ definitely swept their legs out, purely out of spite.
FWIW, CZ is (and was viewed as) a good actor in the industry. He did a lot of good not only for crypto adoption but for access to better fiat currencies for people in countries with hyper-inflating collapsing system. comparing him to SBF (like many do) is absolutely not fair.
he fcked up on AML front for sure and he is going to be punished rightfully but he did just so much good for people that he will stay remembered is positive persona. hero for many.
Who did he con? Binance wasn't found to be a rug and don't think it will be. He let people move money around freely and didn't obey anti money laundering laws. So maybe his service benefited "bad guys" as deemed by the state.
So yes there is a difference between gambling away deposits and allowing someone to use your service without taking their name and social security number and reporting it to government authorities
Why would you say it’s a con job? The settlement is for not enforcing money loundering restrictions, not conning or scamming people. Binance seems to be reputable and hasn’t done any shady things with customer funds, as far as I know.
Did you every track their tokens? The price of movement of the short and long coins was very dubious. Binance at points allowed up to transfer and 1 BTC without registration, therefore enabling a lot of shady characters to trade on their platform. A lot of scammers and fraudsters were using binance as their preferred platform.
His sentencing is in February. According to the plea deal, he waives his right to appeal any sentence not more than 18 months, so he might still be in jail for a short period.
That's obviously not what is meant by 'con', though. It's just composed of first gaining the trust of someone and then defrauding them. Forcing has nothing to do with it and would likely rule out the application of the term, since trust is an integral part of all cons. There has been no fraud yet proven, so it can't conclusively be called a con. On the other hand FTX can be called a con, as there was fraud. This is just running an overly unregulated exchange, which is still a crime but isn't fraud. This doesn't end the investigations though, there is an SEC probe into fraud by Binance still going on so while it currently can't be called a con, really, it's also the case that it could be in the future. Also, it can technically be said that Binance has taken commission and largely made its money from cons of other people that they simply enabled and took fees on, which wouldn't necessarily be incorrect. Whether that's illegal depends on whether there was conspiracy – you wouldn't indict BoA for wire fraud just because someone else used them to do wire fraud.
I am not aware of evidence that he conned someone, but as a side quibble:
>Did someone force you to use Binance?
Do you understand what a con is? People are usually 'conned' because they are tricked into trusting someone that they shouldn't, when people are forced we typically refer to it as robbery or similar.
He didn't con me as I knew from the beginning that crypto currency itself is a con. CZ profited from his con job when he sell people stuff at stupidly high price knowing it actual worth nothing.
In case this is too hard for you to understand, try this - if I walk alone the street selling people paper with your name signed on it promising that such "magic sheet" is going to bring them unconditional happiness and I manage to sell millions of such sheets with a profit of billions, is that a con job?
This is exact what CZ did. He was/is/will always be remembered as a con man.
I saw a friend being added to a Binance WhatsApp group with tens of actual Binance users, clearly violating GDPR, where bots (you could tell by the phrasing and the account name) and Binance moderators were chatting about how to invest and much money they made.
What about cofounder Yi He? If she's still in place then CZ stepping down doesn't mean much. I mean they have two kids together, don't tell me he won't be involved from the sidelines.
Binance intentionally downplayed her role in the company (and her relationship with CZ) for a long time. Now she's seen as the most likely successor to CZ.
Incoming: third party compliance monitor (as always, run by ex DOJ people) and a more risk averse CEO. I hope this doesn't mean they eventually stop operating in the unregulated markets like China, Vietnam, Turkey, etc. Bet365 and DraftKings do it but for gambling so it's certainly possible to run a major respected company while ignoring the laws of countries that don't have the leverage America does.
Why would unregulated markets have a different use case than regulated? Whatever reasons people have here is the same reasons they have in countries who haven't regulated it.
anybody else have issues with archive.is lately? Tried two computers multiple browsers and all I get is a never-ending security check, sometimes with a captcha to really laugh at me.
As in 1.1.1.1? I don't use 1.1.1.1 for my DNS provider and yet I still get the never ending validation loop.
I am on Google Fiber though, so I probably use 8.8.8.8 without explicitly meaning to. Perhaps this is a problem shared by both Cloudflare and Google's DNS proxies?
I have a lot of trouble when I use the search on archive.is, even if I use different DNS providers.
One trick that might help: I have found if I use a bookmarked page from archive.is, I can get to that. From there I can put in the original URL in the "Saved from" bar, and hit "Search", then I can usually get to an archive of the article.
CZ is much smarter, he didn't have any number 2s that could testify against him, and had already moved to a non-extradition country years ago. SBF thought he was cleverer than everybody and testified himself straight into a 8x10 cell for the foreseeable future.
PR rules the day, especially when you're VC-funded and have to maintain the charade of subject matter expertise. Although you'd think his Stanford Law professor father would have at least attempted to duct tape his son's mouth shut when it became clear he planned to testify.
He's essentially getting off with a slap on the wrist, 50m is nothing given his wealth. The fines against the company are also a pittance compared to Binance's annual revenue.
The moral for white collar criminals is: if you get caught, just cooperate and pay up, and live up crime another day. The cost of the fines is trivial.
It's obviously just speculation but someone in his position could very easily siphon off a few million in BTC/crypto at the very least, and almost impossible to detect/trace if done well
The second half of money laundering is you need a way to pretend to have income from a plausible source.
People will ask questions like "How do you pay for your groceries?" and "Where did you find the money to buy a $37M penthouse?" and your paper trail needs to convince people the answer isn't "With the billions of dollars I embezzled."
Most of those only work at a certain scale: if you launder $500, you might be able to say some people bought your comic book collection at a garage sale and get away with it. Try that with $1M and you’re going to start getting requests for evidence of your collection, how it got to have so many high value items, etc. If you’re claiming consulting revenue, then you need clients and a justification for what kind of legal work was worth paying that kind of revenue for – make the case that your advice is worth $1k/hour and you still need to be showing a year of full time work to launder a million dollars after taxes, and it’s going to be suspicious if the invoice is just “I’m awesome, pay here” with no details about such valuable work.
Every few years there will be some story about a cartel banker getting busted and one of the things which will usually stand out is that they had a bunch of people working for them, and found some legitimate businesses which had large enough volume to hide millions of dollars in criminal activity. Setting that kind of thing up isn’t usually a one man operation.
For whom did you consult? What collection did you sell? What trades did you make, with what starting capital?
If you can't answer those questions -- questions the tax man at least will expect you to answer, and probably other people as well -- you might as well say "I found money in the street."
Do not forget. Binance operates in a space full of scammers and fraudsters. They've already admitted to money laundering at scale. After that, the question isn't whether they are dishonest. The question is how dishonest they are. The history of other crypto exchanges suggests that the appropriate prior we should start with should be heavily waited towards Ponzi scheme.
Zhao can do new things with his billions. He can start new companies, work in new markets if he wants. If he can escape China's clutches with his money, I assume he can travel the world.
I'm absolutely astonished by this. He lives in the Middle East, which does not have any extradition treaties with America. Granted, he might transit a country that has a treaty, but I'm really shocked that he would give him. What did they have over him? Maybe it was China…
Imagine you’re a guy with many billions of dollars. Would you pay a few of them in order to not be an international fugitive for the rest of your life?
As another person pointed out, he may have seen the catastrophe that SBF created, and decided cooperation was the best way to avoid that. Perhaps I was shocked due to Zhao's general hubris.
> He lives in the Middle East, which does not have any extradition treaties with America.
Some Middle Eastern countries have extradition treaties with the US, but, more relevantly, a number of countries have legal extradition processes not dependent on treaties, including the UAE, the country where he lives.
Just because a government doesn't have an extradition treaty doesn't mean they won't extradite. Most countries with non-extradition policies only apply them to native-born nationals and sometimes citizens in general. For some random foreigner, it depends entirely on the geopolitical situation.
Eichmann wasn't extradited (because Israel knew Argentina probably wouldn't agree based on previous history, they didn't even try not to tip him off), he was kidnapped by Mossad operatives and smuggled out of Argentina while drugged.
Binance does a lot of business in the US. Probably in exchange for paying fines etc they will be able to keep in operation. I assume CZ himself won't suffer much. The Bitmex guy pleaded guilty of not enforcing AML properly and ended up with 6 months house arrest at home.
There are so many people who do not want to show up in the US (or elsewhere) and are living in Dubai that I would not be too worried. There is a full spectrum from former businessmen to current warlords.
Dubai has a lot to lose by damaging its reputation as a safe haven for wealthy exiles. My 2c.
Binance is also paying many billions in fines to the US and exiting the US completely. I also don't understand why - if they're presumably headquartered outside of US jurisdiction, what are they gaining by paying exorbitant fines?
They're also further inviting every country they've ever had a customer in to levy huge fines against Binance.
I suspect that the threat of something similar to Global Magnitsky Sanctions (cutting them off from all dollar-denominated accounts everywhere) is a pretty big stick to use in negotiations. For a financial firm like Binance, access to bank accounts that can send dollars to and from US firms is pretty important, even without any US customers at all (losing access to banking in France, Cyprus, etc. would be equally difficult for them).
The US has recently (gradually over the past 20 years or so) started to really weaponize access to dollar-denominated accounts, essentially conscripting all the banks that want to do business with American banks into service of American foreign policy goals. This started in the aftermath of September 11th, for terrorism, then spread with the Magnitsky act of 2012 to include international corruption, and has slowly spread to more and more areas. So far the US has been somewhat judicious about using the tool- they seem to be aware that if they use it too often people will eventually just build ways around it- but it is a pretty big threat to wield against a company that absolutely needs to do business with somebody's banks.
Btw - I never found a good explanation why all USD transfers need to be routed trough usd banks. Google is quite silent on the subject - is it common knowledge or too obvious?
all usd swift wires get routed through 2 of the major banks - think it was JP Morgan Chase & Wells Fargo. this allows them to check all of these transfers for aml/cft and other sanctions blacklists.
heard this from a guy who works closely with Tether so i'm sure he'd know well
It seems like they got a deal where they can pay a fine and continue doing business in the US.
If you were him, why would you lose ~20% of your customers when you could just pay a fine and keep going? Sure he steps down, but he still owns the company.
Happy to see this whole thing finally coming to an end, its a nice wrap to the dead market we've had for the past 2 years. I'm excited for 2024 in crypto!
The rumour about Binance indictment by DoJ has been going around for 1-2 years now. Its one of the last remaining pieces of major news that could have potentially negatively affected the industry. After two years of prosecutions, regulatory uncertainty and general poor market conditions, its only now starting to feel like there's light at the end of the tunnel.
Not really. SEC investigations are civil, not criminal. They might end up paying a fine, but there is no risk of jail time or anything similar. Also, while I like Kraken as an exchange, its market share is not significant enough for it to matter in the big picture.
SEC investigations address both aspects, when it gets past investigation to litigation, they do civil litigation themselves and refer to DOJ for potential criminal prosecution.
That’s pretty unlikely to happen at the moment though. I’m far from a Tether fanboy, but in this interest rate environment they are likely making boatloads of money just by sitting on a nice chunk of T-bills.
There are now lots of efficient cryptos and some that can run on a single wind turbine. But I am with you, hoping the energyvore ones die as fast as possible.
The efficient ones are still outright scams if not blatantly illegal. All cryptocurrencies should die. After more than a decade it's clear by now that blockchains are a useless technology and the investors are getting more and more desperate to pass the bag.
More specifically now you can get actual real money by putting your savings in a bank account (and most people are struggling to pay the increased cost of living), there's less incentive to throw it away in a casino.
A lot of the inflation seen in the U.S. is corporate profit-taking such as when the automakers used the chip shortages to steer buyers towards the highest-end models they prioritized for production while less profitable models were back ordered.
That matters because cryptocurrencies don’t help at all with the inflation consumers are seeing, while adding more personal risk and an exchange rate to arbitrage.
You have an interesting worldview. Corporations take profits to pay their employees. They do this with or without inflation and always have.
How would a crypto "help" with inflation? In the same way the Dollar "helps" with the inflation of the Euro?
Cryptos don't add to personal risk, people do that. If you think cryptos are making an impact, you should understand that the entire crypto economy is a rounding error in inflationary impact.
I think you misunderstood the point: when a large portion of the cost increases are due to companies raising their profit margins, changing how you pay for it won’t affect that.
That’s a separate factor, though. It’s definitely one of the reasons why cryptocurrencies never became popular but in the case we’re talking about it’d just be making a bad situation worse rather than the cause for it being bad.
It is. If you’ve never learned economic except from cryptocurrency marketing material, inflation simply refers to the prices of goods and services increasing, not any one specific cause. That can happen due to real changes in demand or supply, government policy changes, or other factors like changes in the labor market. It’s key to understand why inflation is happening because that tells you both whether it’s a problem - almost all serious economists think modest inflation is good for keeping the economy moving – and what kinds of fixes might be needed. For example, a crop failure will cause a spike in prices but if you don’t have reason to expect a late frost to happen again you probably don’t need to make structural changes; if some industrial component costs more because mines are running out, you might need a larger intervention.
In this case, prices went all over the place during the pandemic and the question is how they recover – companies are a lot quicker to raise prices than lower them and if you look at the business press there were a lot of record profits reported - the most since the 1950s when American companies were reaping the profits of uninterrupted production capacity selling to post-WWII Europe:
That's _part_ of how inflation works. The current inflation cycles is numerous different issues compounded (corporate profit seeking, money printing, supply chain issues, extremely high employment rate, pay increases). I know crypto bros like to say it's only money printing, so they can point to their fake money and say "you can't print money here", but the world isn't so simplistic.
There were reward halvings in 2012, 2016, and 2020. I thought the 2012 halving was the most uncertain, as it was the first and the market had little liquidity.
Actually ... since the trial ended, FTT went from ~$1.2 to ~$3.5 and has stayed up. I have no idea how these people expect it to pay out. Even if FTX restarts, they will almost certainly cast off such liabilities with the approval of the bankruptcy court.
XMR and BCH have been working great for a decade and in my mind are the ONLY Cryptocurrency projects that are not outright scams or digital ponzi schemes.
It's odd how clear the picture is but how many people have been fooled by fakes. What other industry is 99% scams and only 1% legitimate?
Why are you downvoted? XMR is among the greatest cryptocurrencies. It's everything bitcoin was supposed to have been. The fact it's not in the top charts is proof of the irrationality of the market.
The purpose of a thing is not the driver of its price. It's unfortunate that crypto's turned into speculative stocks but to say it has no purpose or utility is just wrong. It actually works.
That won't happen and would actually be much worse for Monero because it means everything becomes a giant target for thieves and scammers, even more than it already is. The reason it's failed is because the idea of cryptocurrency is fundamentally bad. Monero isn't even trying to hide it. The developers openly say that criminals should use it to commit crimes.
I believe that the ideal end goal would be that a cryptocurrency is a closed system where a person could buy, sell and earn all in one currency. At that point if it grows big enough price will stabilize and more and more day to day commerce will move to the blockchain.
Bitcoin and Monero have always been able to send transactions instantly and for Bitcoin, essentially free for over a decade with zero down time. That beats the pants off Visa and MasterCard.
Why use an inflationary currency that costs 2% to spend and takes 30+ days to settle?
For starters, any of the money laundering crimes that CZ just pleaded guilty to. That's what any of these cryptocurrencies mean when they say transactions can't be tracked.
This does have the network effect disavantage of requiring everything to move to XMR immediately.
Also, except maybe for purely digital there will be "on-off ramps" anyway, except it will be for real goods instead of fiat currency. The government can ban you from paying the gardener or buying milk with XMR.
I'm curious as to why BCH is not a ponzi vs BTC given the former is a fork of the latter - so they pretty much work the same way apart from a larger block size.
Instead of holding forever you could sell earlier. Buying coins with the intent on it going up to make money can be done with 'good' or 'shit' coins. If you have ever purchased penny stocks it's similiar in terms of risk/reward. Buying coins with a larger capitalization reduces risk/rewards.
If you believe everything is a 'shitcoin' and you want to hold them forever then on your death bed you can look at the value and determine if it really was a shitcoin or if the media made me think everything was a shitcoin.
It's nice to see level-headed crypto optimism here. It's disheartening seeing bulls who have long since stopped pretending their favorite coin has any utility beyond being a speculative asset and a get-rich-quick scheme given its poor transaction rate, or that the features they've bolted on will make it valuable, none of which make it viable as a currency.
Why would anyone bother with Bitcoin?
If you want to avoid financial regulations in transmitting value across borders or purchase black market goods and services, you're going to be caught since all/most Bitcoin is KYCd and impossible to keep private, unlike Monero.
If you want to avoid transaction fees, you're SOL since it's at $10 right now versus $0.06 for Monero.
If you want a store of value, it's poor because it's volatile, not backed, and theft is not reversible, unlike virtually any other regulated security.
If you want to make legal purchases with it, any transaction costs $10 and can take hours or days, and is not reversible if you are defrauded, unlike USD.
Bitcoin has no value proposition beyond being a speculative asset and a Ponzi scheme for early buyers.
Be mindful of potential biases. Monero is rightfully highly regarded for its privacy, but you may be overlooking certain aspects:
- Unlike Bitcoin, Monero's monetary issuance is not auditable, which could prove a major problem in case of an attack, potentially leading to inflation.
- Monero faces blockchain bloat issues due to its ring signatures. It cannot scale gracefully.
- Privacy and transaction cost concerns with Bitcoin have largely been addressed by Lightning and potentially other upcoming layer 2 solutions. A lot of work is being done here. If you are technologically inclined, you can also participate:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/lightning-dev/20...
- KYC happens on exchanges. Buy your BTC on decentralized platforms like Bisq or RoboSats and be done with KYC.
- A private-only ledger can pose challenges when transaction notarization is necessary. Bitcoin lets you choose between a private L2 transaction or a public blockchain transaction.
Lightning has grown beyond its two original creators and now has a healthy community behind it. Worth mentioning are Rusty Russel (iptables, netfilter, some network layers of the Linux kernel) and the fine folks at Acinq (acinq.co).
"Usable" is a massive stretch. The only way most people will ever be able to use it is through a custodial wallet, so it's right back to bank accounts and centralized exchanges.
But the whole thing is a distraction anyway. The majority of transactions happening off-chain means that Bitcoin is an utter failure at everything it ever set out to accomplish.
Lightning does work if you're using a large provider but it undermines the utility of BTC not requiring a middle-man. Running a lightning node with personal funds is simply not likely or safe for your average hodler.
I'm not sure you've used Bisq or RoboSats if you think they're good replacements for exchanges. Barely anyone is online at a given time.
I mean has Venezuela ever claimed it was communist? I always thought it was socialist. Also its oldest standing communist party technically sits in opposition to Maduro.
FWIW The Soviet Union never stated that it was communist. They were officially socialist with the constitutional goal of establishing communism. for that matter the Mensheviks predate the Bolshaviks and always opposed Lenin.
Saying that the Mensheviks predate the Bolsheviks is kind of odd- there was one political party, then they had a big fight and split in two. Menshevik literally means "minority" and Bolshevik "majority", that's how intertwined the two are.
By the time of the October Revolution, the Mensheviks were actually a majority, and were a significant faction in the Russian Provisional government. The Bolsheviks were not.
The Bolsheviks were a minority, but controlled key elements of the army. After months of civil unrest and violence, they staged an armed coup.
My understanding is that the Mensheviks were technically a majority on the first day of the split, because Lenin had pushed so many people out before the climax of the conference. The point still stands though, that's what the words mean.
It's a tautology, as no implementation of a concept will ever be equivalent to the pure concept. The real existing examples of implementations of concepts will still tell you something about the viability of the concept.
> no implementation of a concept will ever be equivalent to the pure concept.
True crypto does exist.
Bitcoin is true crypto.
When I mine Bitcoin, and I use that Bitcoin to buy something from someone else, that is true crypto.
When I sell something for Bitcoin, that is true crypto.
When I exchange fiat for Bitcoin at a centralized exchange, and I successfully withdraw it to a self-custody wallet. That is acceptably close to true crypto.
standing committees are necessary parts of communism that always result in permanent authoritarian control of all people and all resources. humans don't have a way around that and that necessary phase is a prerequisite to the ideological phase. there is no evidence that it is worth pursuing given that irreconcilable implementation flaw.
consumers choosing mismanaged companies are consumer discernment problems that have nothing to do with the sector they're involved in. specifically with crypto, centralized exchanges and brokerage experiences are not necessary parts of the crypto ecosystem and exist in parallel to other ways of getting fiat in and out of crypto, and other ways of getting exposure to the crypto ecosystem. many proponents of the crypto asset ecosystem have always sounded the alarm on those kinds of companies and actively track how much crypto is held by the companies or in self custody.
analogies compare dissimilar things with common attributes, what is the common attribute between observers of these two concepts?
I think so too however it looks like they may have printed their (counterfeited) way into solvency.
Basically: buy cheap BTCs, print shitload of tethers, sell BTCs for real USD to the tune of tens of billions and now store these real USD in short term US treasuries (they don't own chinese treasuries anymore) bringing in 5% and more.
They're claiming they now have excess money (!) to back their tether due to the fact that they collect 5% or more of interest on the short-term treasuries they have.
Put it this way: even if they printed $40bn out of their arses out of $80bn of tether, the $40bn of actual USD they'd have would still net them $2bn a year in interest. That'd still be a big hole but...
What if they printed "only" 10 bn out of thin air out of 80 bn: they'd have near 70 bn bringing in 3.5 bn yearly at the moment.
They don't give any of the interest back to USDT (tether) holders.
So if they printed "only" 10 bn out of their arses, in less than three years they'd have these 10 bn for real on interest alone.
It's still criminal (I guess) but it may not be "0% of tether are backed".
People have tried to run the maths on how much money entered the cryptocurrency world (with Coinbase giving a huge hint).
Centre (Circle+Coinbase) has really $24 bn backing their USDC coin (they publish the individual US short term treasuries bill number).
USDT (tether) is much older than USDC.
Did they cheat? Most certainly.
Did they "fake it 'till they made it", helped, by sheer luck, by interest rates going like crazy?
Tether absolutely had the chance to become solvent in the weekend of the SVB collapse. In that time, everyone was rushing out of USDC and DAI into Tether (USDT). Liquidity pools were drained of all their USDT and smartcontracts showed all available units being borrowed at 100+% APR. Tether was trading for $1.01-$1.10 that entire weekend, with demand insatiable. They could have repeatedly issued new Tethers and sold them for more than a dollar[1], while only incurring a dollar of liabilities.
Coinmarket cap shows the USDT market cap going up by about $2 billion during that weekend, but it's not clear if they were using this strategy. (which would have profited ~1-10% of that figure).
[1] or, depending on how much risk they wanted to take, traded them for USDC and DAI! Those were trading for as little as $0.90.
The ETF will have to be approved BEFORE Tether is brought down. The powers that be need a way to control the price, an ETF is the easiest but until then they have Tether.
Why else would the US allow the largest counterfeit money printer to continue for long?
Why does BTC need an ETF at all, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of owning one’s own wallets? Also… exchanges defeating the purpose of decentralization…
The simplest answer is that alot of people would like to hold BTC in a tax advantaged account and an ETF wrapper is the easiest way to do this.
Others would like to buy it via retirement plans and having an ETF makes this doable.
Those that want to hold BTC incase the US dollar collapses will hodl their own BTC.
Those that want to hold BTC incase it really appreciates will hold it via an ETF in a tax advantaged account so they don't have to pay taxes on their gains, depending on the account type.
> Why does BTC need an ETF at all, doesn’t that defeat the purpose of owning one’s own wallets? Also… exchanges defeating the purpose of decentralization…
Many financial institutions do not care about decentralization, but they do care about investing in an asset where they do not have to worry about managing the asset (in that regard, similar to REITs). Having the asset insured against various types of malfeasance is also a requirement for investments by many institutional funds.
>Total US retirement assets were $36.7 trillion as of June 30, 2023, up 3.1 percent from March 31, 2023. Retirement assets accounted for 31 percent of all household financial assets in the United States at the end of June 2023.
I don't think experience shows most people should or want to own their own wallets. And transactions are much easier without owning one. If you just want BTC exposure as an investment an ETF is much better.
There are no criminal charges involving Coinbase or Kraken. Litigation by SEC yes, criminal charges no. There’s a very meaningful difference there. The first type can ruin your business, the second put you behind bars too.
Traditional banks aren't trying to prove that people should trust them. People already trust them, and even if they don't, they're already regulated enough that consumers know the government will step in to bail them out.
So you tell me someone has 88bn us dollar or real assets somewhere stored away safely?
Somehow I doubt that. That would mean someone invested this in a save and independent way with enough return to keep it inflation save and apparently has no other idea on how to invest that even more magical.
Most people can't redeem USDT from Tether... Read their terms. You can only redeem USDT for USD if you bought directly from them, and even then it needs to be more than $100k. If you fulfill those two requirements, they'll let you redeem if they want to. They state in their terms that redemption is entirely at their discretion, and they can just say no if they gambled the reserves away.
I'm not super savvy with money but why would anybody buy an ETF and pay their fees when the assets in the ETF don't grow or give dividends? How will they secure those assets? Cold wallet in a vault? What happens if they do their audit and the backing coins aren't there (stolen) or there's a hardware failure on the cold wallet?
Gold isn’t easy to steal because there are centuries worth of physical security demands that have evolved to protect it. Its relatively easy to take a chunk of metal from someone otherwise.
Nothing you listed applies to bitcoin besides remote theft. The whole point of a blockchain is be fault tolerant in the face of those real failures. Remote theft occurs from a failure to secure your private keys. That’s human error and will be resolved in the same way as gold with… custodians aka a bank.
Gold isn't easy to steal because it's heavy, and the more you steal, the more it weighs. There's a big difference between stealing an ounce of gold and stealing five tons of gold. But there's no difference in "weight" between stealing 0.1 BTC and 10,000 BTC.
Also, securing physical assets is much easier than securing digital assets.
If you have stored your seed securely (in a safe, preferably engraved on stainless steel), then no problem, you can re-generate your private key on a new wallet from it.
If you haven't written down your seed before generating your private key and also lost your private key, your money is lost. Thank you for this sacrifice for the common good, but you will want to educate yourself better next time.
Yes, if only one of a 2 of 3 account was lost. A person having a single seed phrase on a single cold wallet would lose coins and would probably benefit from using a service to educate them.
You can laser engrave a Bitcoin wallet seed (24 words) on titanium, store it in multiple locations and never enter your seed on a networked computer to prevent remote theft. You can also use a passphrase on top of your seed, and store it separately, so that even if the seed is physically stolen, the wallet won't be recoverable without the passphrase.
Your coins aren't stored on a computer but on a distributed ledger around the globe, secured with strong crypto, Merkle trees and proofs of work. Your (hopefully cold) wallet only stores your private key.
Gold is hard to transport, easy to confiscate and hard to divide, thus difficult to use as a currency. None of those apply to Bitcoin. Well, unless someone is dumb enough to leave his money on an exchange.
Well, BTC isn't some asset that doesn't have a track record of growth. Take a look at the rate of growth in last decade. Yes if you look in specific timeframes it will look like a wreck. but looking at a bigger picture it makes sense. And it is given that it will keep growing similarly in the long term (Why?, thats a separate lengthy conversation the answer to which also answers why some of largest finance players are rushing to put out an ETF of BTC)
Coming to the security and safety part. In theory, BTC was made with a intension to be easily usable and accessible. Once you understand it, its pretty simple and straightforward (even easier than using a bank's service). No level of hardware wallet failure will compromise the funds because the funds are not in the wallet rather the record of the funds are in 100s of thousands of BTC nodes that is being run by miners and other enthusiasts. The real threat may be letting people that share OTPs to scammer handle their private key and seed phrase. Thats where custodians like coinbase comes in.
And to the point of how to make sure the fund held by ETF/Custodian is actually there or not, This can be easily verified. Tt is a public ledger and anyone with the public key can see how much funds are held in the wallet. This aspect of transparency is one of the key selling point of BTC.
I would recommend a short and interesting read - "Inventing Bitcoin".
That’s the definition of asset appreciation. This is comparable to buying gold 100 years back vs now, no one is complaining Gold is doomed because it was dirt cheap a century ago, not did gold lose its ability to retain value because it was getting expensive. Although the rate of growth won’t be this explosive for BTC in the future as it is now.
Late adopting rich people might still get into BTC ETF for its ability to maintain its value in the long term, as simple as that and doesn’t matter at what price they buy.
Exactly they aren’t. But they have some parallels in properties (fungible, less prone to inflation etc)
But gold or any other precious metals for that matter still has a flaw of having unlimited supply. Yes the supply is limited on earth but we are only couple of decades far from mining asteroids like 16 Psyche.
Flood the market with gold, it will drastically lose its value and this will indeed help its consumption like manufacturing of electronics etc but gold as an asset would be pointless.
This cannot happen in BTC, which is programmed to have finite supply.
Most likely some sort of cold wallet. With some in hot wallets for liquidity. There are many crypto custodians who do this.
Now they do have to design redundancies for the keys. eg. they should not lose access to the assets because say they made it too safe and cant find the keys anymore :p
It's funny because it happened with Prime Trust a crypto custodian. But I'm sure a company like BlackRock can and will do better.
I have no idea, but I assume that if they get hacked they are liable for that. If the ETF is run by Bob's Bitcoin ETF incorporated in the Virgin Islands then that's not worth anything because there are no other assets to cover losses. But if it's BlackRock (or some other large US money manager) then they have plenty of other assets to pay out.
Someone correct me if this is false but it looks like so far an overwhelming majority of crypto firms have been utter scams. I frequently get job offers in this space, always decline stating I don't want to be associated with organised crime.
I have a question why is what CZ did different from what SBF did? I mean other than SBF getting caught over-extended in downgrading market they both did the same type of fraud.
FTX took funds from customers and used them to run a hedge fund. When the fund did poorly, the customers' funds were gone, leaving a $8B hole. And they lied to customers about it.
Binance is very different. While it hasn't complied with various securities laws, it's never lied to customers and
has kept customers' assets safe. They've also done steps to build confidence and be transparent like verifying proof of reserves:
While this report isn't perfect, it does show that wallets they control have as much in assets as they're supposed to, so we know they're not doing what FTX did.
SBF lost customer funds by spending them as if they were his own. CZ isn't accused of spending customer funds, he's accused of letting people trade too freely.
AFAIK, commingling means that customer funds went into the same account as business funds.
SBF is accused of then using those customer funds for business expenses, while Binance _seems_ to have stopped at just not separating them properly.
If you commingle customer funds, by definition you’re spending some of them when you use that account to pay business expenses, it’s impossible to differentiate them and makes several other types of fraud more likely.
It's the same violation of law but it doesn't quite look like the same kind of fraud. What's illegal is co-mingling funds; but you can co-mingle funds and do at least baseline proper accounting to make sure you're not too in the hole, vs. co-mingle funds and just straight up lie about how you're doing. Y'know, you're just a regular libertarian guy looking to get rich by breaking the law and not some coked-up wunderkind thinking he gets to save or destroy the world.
I just saw the headlines that Binance knowingly let ISIS, Hamas, Al Qaeda and Iran use their platform to launder money. Hot take: that doesn't seem great.
We both know that crypto is only used for and that the main use case is criminal activities, so it's only right that the whole thing should be shut down by law.
It's already impossible for crypto to become part of the current financial system so the only way to stop this scourge is to make crypto illegal starting with the exchanges down to the blockchains.
Both your sources show that only 30-35% of nodes run on AWS. They seem to support my point that Ethereum would continue running during an AWS outage, not your point that Ethereum runs "solely" on AWS.
Furthermore, the cointelegraph article misquotes a Messari report as if it's discussing the current state of Ethereum as having central points of failure, when it's really discussing a hypothetical upgrade to Ethereum that was never considered nor built.
Finally, node percentages don't actually matter in terms of chain uptime. What really matters are staking validator percentages, since they are what determine chain building and finality.
This doesn't change the fact that centralisation is still a massive problem with Ethereum and it is still a big enough problem that everyone knows that the crypto infra of choice is to coalesce on AWS.
Infura deploys Ethereum nodes solely on AWS further centralising Ethereum on there thanks to a Consensys and AWS partnership.
The entire opposite of decentralisation in crypto.
Again, you're free to hold whatever additional opinions you want. I'll respectfully pass on discussing those, as my original intent was to correct a particular piece of misinformation.
If you could please elaborate, for the free curious spirits of HN.
Crypto has brought good in underdeveloped countries like Venezuela and Argentina. Venezuelans use USDT to purchase real, physical goods. Sometimes groceries.
Have any numbers on this? The only numbers I could find are very modest[1]. IIRC Zeke Faux, the author of "Number Go Up" also noted that adoption is very illusory - like the "Accepts Bitcoin" stickers you see all over the place Canada when there's no functioning bitcoin payment processing inside.
But besides all that, I think it's criminal to leave people in underdeveloped countries at the whims of unaccountable central-bank-style institutions like USDT. What will proponents of this crap say if/when USDT collapses? "They knew the risks"? Is the "crypto community" going to bail out people who invested their life savings in this garbage[2]?
Reflecting on how crypto once fit with the HN ethos. Hard to say where the community is now, partly because I don't spend as much time here. But it definitely seems to not be the darling it once was.
Don't know if this is because it's mainstreamed in a way that makes it less "hacker"-appealing (quotes intentional), the HN community has changed, or because crypto went full crypto-bro so hard.
Probably because the brave new world of cryptopunk anonymity and liberation has turned into this mess of fraud and in-your-face centralisation and crime.
I have to admit I do find it pretty funny when the people who have touted blockchain and cryptocurrency as great because of its decentralization have discovered /why/ a central authority is incredibly important in finance. All of the crypto pumpers start crying for government support when they're the ones who get fleeced, when that's literally built into the technology as a feature.
I honestly don't remember the time you are describing. As far as I can remember, the most prevalent voices about crypto from HN have been from the naysayers by far. The craze just simply isn't there anymore, which is a very good thing. People who refuse to try and understand cryptocurrencies but tout fanciful things about them shouldn't be the ones representing them.
Anyone in the variety of South American countries experiencing massive inflation would have been worlds better if they had just parked their money in BTC. Crypto is full of scams but there is also a world of positives and opportunity there.
They would've also been worlds better if they had parked their money in Gamestop, or honestly even in a casino, but that doesn't make it a sound investment
“Orange reddit” was one of the first places that Bitcoin was discussed. Consequently there’s an awful lot of people here who know exactly how much they missed out, and express this by being saltier than dead sea whenever the topic comes up. The accepted wisdom on HN, when the bitcoin price was in the single digits, was that it was a “tulip bubble” and you should absolutely not buy it under any circumstances.
The accepted wisdom is still that it's a bubble and you should not buy it, the price going up does not necessarily mean that the price isn't higher than it should be. Projecting everybody who disagrees with your viewpoint as somebody who is angry they missed out is simply a quick way to hand-wave away people who disagree with your crypto-is-the-future dogma. I wasn't in the early adopters per-say but I did do some crapcoin trading back in the day and made a decent sum at the time, and yet I still hold crypto and blockchain technology as a whole as almost entirely pointless. I have still yet to hear any real valid use of the technology that is better than existing/alternative solutions. It speaks volumes that the people who would know the most about the technology (software engineers, who are prevalent here), are the ones who (outside of the general public) believe that the technology is largely pointless, if not downright idiotic.
I find it really hard to reconcile this viewpoint with reality. I personally know businesses who use stablecoins for international money transfers because it’s just faster and cheaper.
Also, every month or so an article pops up here where either some business is rekt because their payment processor’s automated process kicked them off, or someone’s bank account got closed in a similar way screwing them.
Yet the only way to self custody electronic money and transact without intermediaries is somehow ‘pointless and idiotic’.
The key differentiating factor in your hypothetical reasons why traditional finance is inferior to defi is that there are systems to remediate the exact issues you mentioned, whereas if you send your crypto to the wrong address- it's gone. If you lose your seed words to your wallet and can't access it, or someone else gets access to them- it's gone. If you get scammed- it's gone. Literally all of these things (which are a /feature/ of the tech!) make it essentially unusable for any business that isn't looking for an adrenaline rush. What I love most about all of these shortcomings of the technology is how much people who push it minimize all of these issues by saying that it's user error, and people who utilize good practices won't have these issues. It's almost as if all of these people have literally never talked to a real person. No regular person cares or would ever want to care about hard wallets versus alternatives, seed words, verifying addresses, and avoiding phishing scams. All of these issues which can be mitigated by being technically inclined fall flat on their face with any person who just wants to send money to their grandson or pay a friend for dinner.
The reasons are really not hypothetical. That being said though, I don’t personally believe that crypto will or necessarily needs to totally replace all fiat usage. It’s more along the lines of the realization that the possibility to have electronic money kept and transmitted outside of the fractionally reserved banking system is immediately useful.
Given the state of crypto adoption now, I can’t imagine a non-dystopian future a century from now where what we now call crypto or digital assets haven’t become a very boring and non-remarkable part of the civilizational fabric.
I can imagine dystopian futures where that’s the case though. One would be where the infrastructure we use to run crypto on (the internet, telecommunications) doesn’t exist. Another is where all the regulatory environments for digital assets that currently exist (UK, EU, Canada, etc) have been totally rolled back, and self-custody has been made a criminal offense. Probably some type of society straight out of hunger games.
One is a run of the mill software engineering consultancy, the other a startup making a development as a service platform where they link companies needing work with engineers in the developing world.
And many people were scammed and lost their savings to BTC and other crypto schemes. It's funny how the Ponzi promoters always forget that part when touting whatever cooked-up reason they promote crypto for.
But sure, in a sector where most of the biggest names are fraudsters, some people still manage to be adherents.
I first read about Bitcoin on Slashdot. I thought it was a stupid idea back then, and I think it's a stupid idea now. Buying bitcoin in 2008 would have been a terrible investment decision regardless of whatever result it might have produced. If you don't understand that an investment decision can't be evaluated after the fact on the basis of the outcome of single random event you know nothing about investing.
If you would have looked at the geopolitical landscape and what they've been doing to our money for 100 years it would have been an easy investment to make. Geopolitics and monetary policy is your due diligence.
Crypto bros harp on about that they don't need the legacy financial system or it needs to be decentralised away from the big banks and duopolies.
It turns out that these entities are only getting into crypto for hiking up fees and centralisation, defeating the point of crypto in the first place.
Projects such as UPI in India doesn't use Visa or Mastercard and is rolling out worldwide, the exact solution crypto was supposed to solve, yet 15 years later no progress whatsoever has been made on the crypto front.
So crypto proponents have just been screeching for nothing but price speculation which isn't a use case at all.
Ethereum has negative inflation, unlike many fiat currencies.
I have used Bitcoin to donate money to organizations the state would prefer me not to, such as Ukrainian defense, or Wikileaks (famously blockaded by banks without/before criminal charges).
There are lots of truly amazing cross-border use cases; permissionless internet money has huge utility.
NFTs allow fans to financially support visual artists via collectibles (potentially with resale value) in exchange for donations. (I say donations because buying an NFT does not purchase the art the NFT represents.)
Usually when I offer these use cases, people move the goalposts, saying how these things are somehow already possible (they aren’t, at least in the same way, or same speed, or same cost, or same level of privacy-preservation).
It’s nice to be able to transact without identity attached to every transaction.
> I have used Bitcoin to donate money to organizations the state would prefer me not to, such as Ukrainian defense, or Wikileaks (famously blockaded by banks without/before criminal charges).
So?
You can do all of this without crypto, there is nothing new or novel that crypto has done here.
> There are lots of truly amazing cross-border use cases; permissionless internet money has huge utility.
Same again, and in fact we have PayPal, Xoom, Wise, etc.,
Instead, you are asking normal people to rely on crypto exchanges to convert their crypto into fiat (with extra costly fees) through a complicated process in order to receive money.
This is neither innovative or novel, it just adds more needless complexity and is a regression from what already exists in the current financial system.
> NFTs allow fans to financially support visual artists via collectibles (potentially with resale value) in exchange for donations. (I say donations because buying an NFT does not purchase the art the NFT represents.)
This highly wash traded 'market' is down big, so by using NFTs you're not really supporting artists at all, you are driving down the 'value' of the collectible down to 0.
> Usually when I offer these use cases, people move the goalposts, saying how these things are somehow already possible (they aren’t, at least in the same way, or same speed, or same cost, or same level of privacy-preservation).
The reason why we have the current system is to reduce the amount of bad actors trying to defraud people, crypto just blows this right open to create a wild west of fraud.
How would the privacy preservation work with businesses, It wouldn't as no business would want to touch crypto and it is not worth the accounting hell for them.
> It’s nice to be able to transact without identity attached to every transaction.
Cool, but that’s not what you asked, and you’re moving the goalposts. I suggest you slow down and think about the pros/cons/tradeoffs instead of automatically going down the decision tree of this argument.
Any authoritarian state will label dissidents as "criminals". If you want to flee Russia or Venezuela today without forfeiting all your property, crypto can come in handy.
This is very much a positive use case if you value individual freedom. Remember that any wall and border has 2 sides.
I can only name 1 person who is in this position you describe yet they are not fleeing Russia any time soon.
So according to your logic the North Korean hackers who borrowed $2BN in crypto are not criminals in North Korea's eyes despite the US government calling them criminals?
You might want to come with real world examples with a larger impact instead of tiny selective scenarios where almost nobody other than that 1 person would get themselves into.
How does this in any way deter crypto, if anything it strengthened it. Binance continues to operate, Zhao won't face any actual penalty and continues to be a billionaire.
Seems to me like Binance and crypto is the winner here.
for money laundering, few use binance. Everyone uses wallet to walllet USDT transfer. If US is serious about money laundering, they should ban USDT and the like.
would crypto investors or optimists consider the recent legal woes in the space to be a much needed clearing out of bad actors or a sign of falling confidence in crypto?
> plead guilty to violating criminal U.S. anti-money-laundering requirements
This has nothing to do with crypto. What forces him to comply with supposedly US dictatorship? Apparently this was a move against Iran and maybe Russia.
If I were you, I'd be much more concerned about a very influential company like Citadel which just keeps breaking law years after years despite numerous lawsuits, than about a crypto company that probably is not affecting you the slightest.
The weird thing is they try to enforce US rules on an international company also. If they are in say Singapore and some guy from Iran use is, US has 0 business to to with it
Frankly evidence of laundering is everywhere, but it depends on whether you are looking for it. Like , the average UK 'invesment' mansion or the 'azeri' natural gas that europe purchases
It depends on how you see things. Some would argue, the SEC is good at doing business. Others would say that Binance will pay cause it's just the cost of doing business. Every trading / security / exchange company is in the same boat, they just have to keep paying to do their business.
But SEC shouldn't be "doing business". They should tell what the law is and what the regulation is and so on
I argued the same on HN yesterday actually, it's quite shocking to me how many here is for anything with "hacking" or free markets when it comes to stuff like Airbnb or self driving, but they are SEC bootlickers for some reason
The SEC and DOJ don't exist to stop crimes in real-time - that would be basically impossible. They exist to uncover and punish crimes that have already occurred in order to dissuade others from doing the same.
They appear to be doing a fine job of both. Or were you looking to prosecute thought crime?
>My point is they go after the most regulated and serious ones, and let the others run
But they really aren't and you already know that. If you have proof otherwise, report it, or post it here and I'll report it. You get paid on any penalties that are doled out.
Govt collects a big crypto fine, fine makes the big losers in FTX whole, problem solved.
CZ should have just bought FTX and closed the deal and made people whole, woulda saved himself some drama.