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We are at the "then they fight you" stage. The banks have every incentive to kill crypto because if it's successful, they are going to become irrelevant similar
by rawtxapp 5y ago
We are at the "then they fight you" stage. The banks have every incentive to kill crypto because if it's successful, they are going to become irrelevant similar to newspapers that lost majority of their market shares to tech disruptors.
The biggest battles for Bitcoin are ahead in my opinion, but if it survives, which I'm convinced it will, it'll come out stronger than ever before.
- paulmd 5y agoThat is not at all what the article is about. The article is about bankers deciding that banks should not be able to leverage against the value of their crypto holdings - which is perfectly sensible given how volatile they are.
- rawtxapp 5y ago> Growth of crypto-assets threatens financial stability and could increase risks faced by banks, they warn > Crypto-assets have given rise to a range of concerns including consumer protection, money laundering and terrorist financing, and their carbon footprint Sounds to me, it's little more than just limiting borrowing.
- throwaway6734 5y agoThere is no chance the US (nor China if it takes control) gives up the dominance of its currency. Both state actors have more than enough means to squash Bitcoin or any other crypto
- rawtxapp 5y agoWhich is why I say the toughest battles are ahead. Once US decides to use every tool in the toolbox to undermine Bitcoin, Elon's tweets are going to look like a joke. They can ban on/off-ramps, they can crater it's value by making it illegal, but they can't stop the network itself, in the same way that torrents are still very much alive today.
- throwaway6734 5y agoThey can also physically attack miners/users and cyber attack miners and exchanges
- only_as_i_fall 5y agoThey can literally stop the network though by perpetrating their own attacks. Even if the bitcoin network is perfectly secure to a subtle cyber attack in the vein of stuxnet, all the US or any major power would need to do is bring the mining power low enough that it can undermine the block chain through brute force. Honestly seems more likely to be a tactic employed in China though due to the more top down nature of that country's power structure.
- smt88 5y agoYour comment seems to be unrelated to the issue in the article. This development actually seems like it institutionalizes crypto more, not less.
- AlexandrB 5y agoActually I would argue we're at the "recentralization" stage. Kind of like what happened to the internet. Now that the banks smell profit in the water, they have every incentive to get some concrete rules written around crypto so they can treat it like any other asset on the books. Once that happens they can easily dominate any PoS network due to their access to capital. Even at my most optimistic I don't think the Bitcoin story is going to end differently than other applications of the internet, most of which are now highly centralized.
- rawtxapp 5y agoWhich is why I'm personally anti-PoS, I think it's a fundamentally broken system which codefies "rich gets richer" down to the protocol and brings us to the old world where those with capital control everything. PoW requires constant spending on energy and hardware.
- QuadrupleA 5y agoRephrasing an earlier comment, sorry, but - is Bitcoin really that great as a practical technology? An asset with dubious value (some bytes in a decentralized database) that's so staggeringly inefficient to run that the transaction fees are astronomical and speeds are glacial, and that nobody uses for any real purpose besides speculation - pumped by a million and one influencers and "coin news" sites parroting empty bullish propaganda in hopes the price of their portfolio keeps going up. I was originally fascinated by crypto, but the more I've come to understand it the more I suspect the world has lost its mind.
- rawtxapp 5y agoLightning network enables almost instant and practically free Bitcoin payments, that's what they are using in El Salvador. Current financial system is pretty broken in my opinion, for example, I'm trying to transfer money into a business checking account I have, my options are: - using Plaid, which will take banking credentials in clear text and store them somewhere for transactions, which is insane to me that this is what we need to enable all the FinTech stuff, - using wire transfers which costs 20$ each, - using check deposits (with 500$ limits), which is like the 1990s. Current financial system has a trust problem, especially for new users, Bitcoin solves that.
- rantwasp 5y agowhat do you think money is? some bytes in a centralized database. asset of dubious value? unless you can literally eat it, wear it of use it, all assets are of dubious value. It’s an asset of dubious value that you don’t like. Big difference. The value of crypto comes from the decentralized trust. People don’t seem to grasp this at all, but this is a groundbreaking invention being dragged though the mud because it doesn’t serve the interests of out overlords.
- specialist 5y ago> what do you think money is? Opinions differ, mostly on context. Currency, commodity, record of debts, measure of value. > groundbreaking invention being dragged though the mud Bitcoin is not the first collectable, the first escrow system. > because it doesn’t serve the interests of out overlords True. For now.
- overtonwhy 5y agoWe are at the "Tether had to disclose it's holdings and it is effectively insolvent" stage. "The new composition report is part of Tether’s efforts to stay in compliance with a settlement agreed to with the New York Attorney General’s office (NYAG) after the prosecutor investigated it and its sister crypto exchange Bitfinex over the cover-up of some $800 million in losses." https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.coindesk.com/tether-first-reserve-composition-report-usdt%3famp=1 https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.coindesk.com/tether-first-r...