> Michael says he was lucky that he lost the password years ago because, otherwise, he would have sold off the bitcoin when it was worth $40,000 a coin and missed out on a greater fortune.
Yes but stocks are usually tied to a business producing some sort of service that people want, and therefore have value. Crypto is tied to, checks notes nothing.
I’m no shill for crypto, but you can’t with a straight face claim that all non-crypto financial instruments are ‘tied to … some sort of service that people want’.
There’s a whole world of shady crap going on in the ‘legitimate’ financial space.
But crypto bros are often delusional about what intrinsical value exists in the normal market, compared to crypto coins where they invent the value. Therefore manipulation of value compared to real world markets becomes a lot more abstract.
Young's literal translation is pretty good for those who don't read Koine Greek or otherwise aren't eager to break out a copy of Strong's concordance. It's interesting to see the minor difference between "a root" and "the root" for example:
9 and those wishing to be rich, do fall into temptation and a snare, and many desires, foolish and hurtful, that sink men into ruin and destruction,
10 for a root of all the evils is the love of money, which certain longing for did go astray from the faith, and themselves did pierce through with many sorrows;
So you can use it to conduct illegal cross border money transfers... of course most cryptos aren't anonymous and even those are you still need to transfer it to a local currency etc. for that functionality to be useful.
Getting payment is crypto is excellent if you live in a third world country like me. And a lot of services are enabling crypto payments so illegal stuff isn’t really all of it. One example is grab app which is huge in asian market. Getting payment and transferring to local currency takes about 20 mins included manual clicks for me. Comparing this to bank system which takes a week and has at least 30x cost, it is obviously a huge improvement.
but you can't. you can't send Bitcoin or Eth around the world for "next to nothing" today. not in a reasonable time frame. and that isn't accounting at all for the massive power wastage in the Bitcoin case.
It will currently cost you $1 to send any amount of ETH to another address and that transaction will take 3 minutes. For $1.30, that same transaction will take 30 seconds.
You can do those same transfers cheaper and faster on an Ethereum layer 2.
Which requires KYC in most places, and then you're going to start getting asked about the source of those funds. You'll also need to claim it on taxes, which if lied about will cause additional issues.
So, yeah, the "no questions asked" part is wrong. You can send money to anyone on earth, after a middleman takes a cut on your fiat exchange, the transfer, and the next fiat exchange, with questions asked, public for the world to see.
It's not. It's way easier and cheaper to send a bank transfer or wire. Bank transfers and wires also offer more privacy.
Unless you're actually going to directly use the cryptocurrency (which is generally impossible), it needs to be converted to/from fiat, which requires a bank transfer.
For you maybe, but not for me. Wire is 15 usd on receiving end fixed + some percentage of the amount sent. An ethereum transfer is 2 usd or so into my exchange and exchange charges nothing for withdrawal. Wire transfer takes 3-4 days in best case and bank calls me for some bs after 10 days in the worst case and I have to talk to them to approve it.
So after 20 mins of clicking some buttons I get my fiat currency in my bank account. And it costs 2 usd + some negligible amount.
Dollars are also tied to nothing. A towel with the logo of a sports team also has zero intrinsic value. Same with a shiny lump of useless metal.
That's because being tied to something, or having intrinsic value is not how things gain value.
Things, crypto, dollars, gold, and towels, have value because people WANT them. That's it.
You even touched on it: "some sort of service that people want, and therefore have value" - crypto provides a service people want, therefore by your own words it has value.
If US dollars can be backed by a military, crypto is backed by mining networks.
The mining network is a lot more productive than the US military which has vastly negative economic output. At least ASICs doesn't wander around wrecking countries in a semi-random fashion. The mining network even operates at a profit, which is much better than the US government by a huge margin. Someone thinks they are worth the money.
Article 12 – dealing directly with the acquisition and disposition of interests (including security interests) in “controllable electronic records,” which would include Bitcoin, Ether, and a variety of other digital assets ... Control under Article 12 is designed to be a technology-neutral functional equivalent of “possession.” It generally encompasses circumstances when a party has the “private key”
Let's be realistic here, most of dictators evading sanctions do it (i) with good ol' bags of $/€/CHF/£, (ii) gold/platinum/diamonds/..., (iii) whatever ad-hoc currency satisfies the two parties (promises, shares, goods, ...); in short everything but traceable-in-the-open digital currencies where most of the in/egress feature mandatory KYC.
If you believe e.g. that the US/EU firms still doing business in Russia are doing it in ETH/BTC, I have a port in Serbia to sell you.
That's why I specified 'electronic'. Moving physical items around the globe is obviously within the ability of an independent state, but it has logistical overhead. ETH/BTC is comparatively cheap to move.
But dictators don't want electronic things – especially the one whose very design imply them being fully traceable such as ETH/BTC.
If you are in the circles where having to move $10M illegally is a common occurrence, paying a guy $10k to take a train between Russia and China with a bag of cash and bribe the border guards another $10k is much better than trying to weasel your way through the KYC process of Coinbase.
I'm not sure if you're being "technically correct, the best kind of correct" or trying to actually specify the definition.
Actual definition:
In the Western world, a "criminal" is any person tried and convicted of breaking the law.
Your definition is, however, correct for how it sometimes works and how "they" would like it to work. (where your use of the word "mandate" means "whichever direction the wind is currently blowing").
Oh god this gets trotted out every time someone points out the evil that crypto facilitates. Give it a rest. It pales in comparison and there are many other solutions that your argument conveniently ignores.
> For example, illegal transactions, scams and gambling together make up less than 3% of volume.
Sure there's the odd dumb criminal who doesn't understand the prosecutorial implications of an immutable public ledger. But it pales in comparison, according to the actual data.
Yes, because most of the transfers happening are speculative investment trades, arbitrage, etc. People moving money around, without paying for anything.
That source says, when it comes to the demand in terms of spending crypto for goods or services:
> 46% of transactions are due to illegal transactions
If Bob transfers $10 back and forth between both of his bank accounts 99 times and then buys $10 worth of crack, would you say that 1% of Bobs money was used for illegal purposes or 100% of it was used for illegal purposes? Depends on what specifically you're trying to measure.
There are two things here that are simultaneously true:
1. A small percent of BTC transactions are for illicit purposes.
2. A large percentage of the goods and services purchased with BTC are illicit.
Moving the goalposts. GP was only talking about illegal activity. But since you brought it up -
Global GDP is $101T. Global yearly forex volume is $2738T. So by this logic you should conclude that 96% of transaction volume in the traditional financial system is also not tied to economically meaningful activities. You're going to be disappointed if you want to believe society as a whole is any less financialized than bitcoin.
What do you think would be an acceptable percentage of speculation?
I think it's absurd to say that only say 3% of crypto transactions are criminal, if the majority of other transactions are meaningless.
Surely what we actually care about is how many useful, legal, meaningful transactions there are.
For example if for every 1 legal transaction there is 3 illegal transactions and 96 speculative or maintenance transactions... it starts looking like this is predominantly for criminal uses even though only 3% of transactions are criminal.
Part of the reason that the US Government has been trying for the last few years to squash it is because it's threatening the US Dollar's hegemony in, cough, international trade.
If you're buying illegal black market shit, you're darn well gonna do it using the Red, White, and Blue's Green!
This is also proof of cryptocurrency's use-case as a method of value transfer (ie. currency). Crime and porn are the traditional testing grounds for new disruptive technologies. I remember this thing called the Internet...
You're making this up. Doing illegal transactions on a public ledger where the off ramps are all KYC makes it easier for them to trace criminal activity than the traditional international banking systems.
Stocks arent tied to company performance unless they have divendends. Which would mean most stocks are also tied to nothing. Except stocks have recognizable logos I guess.
Cryto is excellent for keeping money and transfers. Especially if you don’t live in eu our us. Big coins are getting very stable and are good long term investments depending on how you see it will go :)
Bank system is terribly inefficient comparatively and it is a huge market
This is so true for stocks too