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I could not agree more as a crypto bull. Please avoid regulating us as much as possible and let everyone involved be responsible for themselves. No bailouts, ne

I could not agree more as a crypto bull. Please avoid regulating us as much as possible and let everyone involved be responsible for themselves. No bailouts, never ever. Participants will be forced to invent new ways to establish trust which is ultimately good in the long run.

SkyMarshal 4y ago
I concur. Also part of establishing trust is moving away from all the ticking time-bomb centralized intermediaries from Mt.Gox to FTX and everything in between, etc. Either figure out ways of accomplishing everything decentralized and on-chain, or accept the impossibility as a natural constraint of the tech and learn to do without.
- maxbond 4y ago
  Are you quite sure the root of the problem is centralized exchanges? Everything in "tradfi" is centralized, and there are frequent frauds and bad actors, but it remains much more robust than the cryptoasset ecosystem. I'd submit the root of the problem is finacializing things that are not economically productive. As cryptoasset supporters frequently point out, every market has some ponzenomic qualities, but pulling tokens from thin air amplifies them.
  - SkyMarshal 4y ago
    > Are you quite sure the root of the problem is centralized exchanges? That’s the big hypothesis being tested right now. So far it’s only the centralized entities that are collapsing, and crypto market values are down as a result, but that’s not the same thing as a collapse or failure of the protocols. But this train wreck is still happening, so we’ll see if it causes some cryptocurrencies to fail too. Possibly some of the weaker ones will lose too much mining/validating power and get hacked or 51% attacked. If that happens to the bigger ones then it will expose a serious problem with the tech and economics of it all. This is arguably the most valuable informational period in crypto’s history - the first high-interest environment stress test it’s ever had. Either it will cull the weak and leave standing only the ones robust enough to withstand such environment, or will cull the entire industry. Either way at least we’ll empirically know the truth of it all. > Everything in "tradfi" is centralized, and there are frequent frauds and bad actors, but it remains much more robust than the cryptoasset ecosystem. I think the GFC demonstrated “tradfi” is anything but robust. If not for the govt and Fed bailouts, the scale of the losses could have exceeded the banking system’s cumulative revenue of its entire modern history, going back to the 1800s. And that was with regulation (albeit steadily weakened since the 80s). You could potentially make the argument that certain forms of tradfi are robust, for example under the Glass-Steagal regime that separated commercial banking, investment banking, and insurance into separate legal entities, among other restrictions (a form of decentralization). Also Germany’s local community banking system, which until recent decades was the main financier of Germany’s industrial economy, and which has never had a financial crisis since its origins in the 1700s/1800s, is also quite a robust model (also a form of decentralization). > I’d submit the root of the problem is financializing things that are not economically productive I don’t disagree. Low-interest cheap money environments tend to have that effect, crypto or no-crypto.
- jgilias 4y ago
  The missing piece is having CBDCs that your bank accepts on something like Uniswap. Until that happens on/off-ramps are needed, and these can only be centralised by definition. I’m not sure having ubiquitous CBDCs with all that may entail would be better than having a few trusted centralised exchanges for fiat on/off-ramp though.
  - SkyMarshal 4y ago
    Yeah, it’s a pickle, no doubt about it. Both options are undesirable. Not sure what the best solution there is.
    - cinquemb 4y ago
      People may not like it (because it will look similar to the inner workings of the eurodollar ["Eurodollar University" on soundcloud, "Monetary Mechanics" Substack] system that we all live in now, and will continue to interface with such off chain systems in more complex ways [esp as on chain liabilities become more and more valuable in more places compared to off chain liabilities]), but I think native on-chain credit origination, built on top of on chain derivatives protocols will be the solution. Permissioned decentralized global monetary system will simply keep evolving into a more permissionless decentralized global monetary system.
esalman 4y ago
In exchange can we trust you to not scam those with little understanding of crypto?
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  I have never scammed anyone. Just as there are scams in traditional finance (see Wolf of Wall Street, Nikola, Enron) there are scams in crypto. At this point far more in crypto however. I think people need to know that no one is going to help them - caveat emptor. If the goal of crypto is to rebuild finance, eliminating taxpayer funded bailouts is a top priority.
  - esalman 4y ago
    No one said these in any of the tens of crypto ads aired during superbowl.
    - drdaeman 4y ago
      Because ad industry is equally full of scam? I guess even someone with most hardcore anti-regulation views would most likely approve of (and quite likely, support) education, including being upfront about all the unsavvy bits and dangers.
    - anonporridge 4y ago
      That's because the non scammers don't have any incentive to run superbowl ads, because we're not running casinos. The information is freely available to anyone. Sadly, it's always hard to separate the signal from the noise, especially when the herd and the wolves arrive.
    - everfree 4y ago
      They should have. Want to help fund an ad to educate the public?
      - esalman 4y ago
        No. I pay taxes and it is government's job to stop scams at this scale. Whether the government works effectively or not is a different debate.
gizmo 4y ago
Should casinos be regulated or should we allow somebody to throw away their life savings if they have a bad day? “No regulation” may sound appealing but society has to pick up the pieces when people wreck themselves.
anonporridge 4y ago
As a bitcoin/monero maxi who's watched my dollar denominated net worth cut in half this year and expect it to go lower, I strongly agree. The wheat is being separated from the chaff, and I am absolutely here for it. I wish more innocent people would have listened to us and not trusted centralized exchanges or yolo'd huge money into shitcoins, but sometimes you have to watch a child touch a hot stove for their long term well-being. Tick tock, next block.
- pcdoodle 4y ago
  Indeed, Truth Engine :)
  - anonporridge 4y ago
    The timechain doesn't stop. Tick tock, next block.
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  I read that institutional investors are “afraid of crypto” and this will be bad in the long run. Bad in the long run for who? What did these VCs invest in? A huge pile of scam alt coins / alt chains, centralized exchanges, stuff no one wants. Bitcoin is digital gold. It’s boring and has operated mostly the same since the beginning. We don’t need FTX and I hope the tourists don’t come back.
  - anonporridge 4y ago
    Bitcoin and reusable proof of work is the mind blowing innovation that represents a turning point for human civilization. Mutually assured preservation via softwar. The rest will at best be iterative technology that may eventually be integrated into the traditional securities and exchange systems governed by the local monopoly on violence, but is generally uninvestable in its current form.
    - marcus_holmes 4y ago
      The whole thing is uninvestable. None of it (including Bitcoin) generates any value. Nothing is created that benefits the human race. It's speculation all the way down - the only value that a bitcoin has is the likelihood of someone else paying more for it than you paid for it. It's not a turning point for human civilisation; it's a slot machine in a digital casino. Not that the derivatives of "tradfi" are any better. But underneath all that speculation at least there is actual stocks in actual companies that are actually making real human value.
dbcurtis 4y ago
Main stream adoption will only happen if those that want it can have the security blanket of fraud coverage to cuddle in. The answer here is still a non-regulatory, market solution: Crypto Insurance. Non-transparent, un-auditable coins and exchanges simply won't be able to be insured. People can decide if they want to speculate using uninsured currencies and exchanges. My prediction is that non-transparent, sketchy schemes will wither. Of course, the insurers themselves need to be sound -- but Lloyd's seems to have solved that problem about as well as it can be back in the days of wooden ships. This is not a new concept.
- roland35 4y ago
  I'm not really a fan of having my life savings just a hack away from being stolen. I am infinitely more confident in my retirement savings being managed by Schwab or Fidelity than any possible way of crypto, online, offline, or whatever. I don't need to worry about insurance, or picking the wrong insurance vendor!
  - dbcurtis 4y ago
    But you do have insurance. For some of the amount. You just didn’t pick the vendor. Or have to think about it. You are, in a way, making my point.
    - roland35 4y ago
      I don't think I understand. Fidelity 401k - Millions of people put in their paychecks, millions of people have withdrawn successfully in their retirement. An unsophisticated investor will not lose anything. Crypto - no way to know what, if any, company is legit. If I use a hardware wallet and lose it I'm screwed. FTX seemed pretty legit a few weeks ago, they even had an NBA arena named after them! There are dozens of ways an unsophisticated investor can lose everything.
      - dbcurtis 4y ago
        Isn’t Fidelity FDIC insured?
runarberg 4y ago
Am I understanding you correctly that you basically want to normalize scams? That we shouldn’t proactively try to protect the innocent from bad actors, rather we should allow scammers to take advantage of them even when we know they can be irreversibly harmed? If I understand you correctly, this is a terribly unethical take, lacking in any sort of empathy. But also lacks any historic understanding of scammers and psychological understanding of human behavior. This plan won’t work, there will always be innocents to scam, and scammers will continue to exploit it until authorities put a stop to it. There is a reason why ponzi schemes were criminalized, if they wouldn’t have been, we would still see criminals exploit people from the same playbook today.
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  As far as I’m aware fraud is still a crime. Authorities have convicted hundreds of people of crypto frauds.
  - runarberg 4y ago
    That’s not the point. People are still harmed by scams. Many criminals do get away with scams, and even if they don’t, they are often caught well after several successful scams when victims have already needlessly suffered, and most won’t be fully compensated. Here, as in other criminal areas, prevention is always preferable to punishment.
evronm 4y ago
YES! His premises are wrong, but his conclusions are spot on. I really hope regulators learn to think like that.
JeremyNT 4y ago
Easily exchanging fiat to and from crypto is a requirement for normal users, as is something like a bank who actually manages the process. If you want this all to be an unregulated wild west of scams, eventually you won't have any normal users left as they all lose their shirts and eventually wise up. All you'll have left is crypto propeller heads (and the rubes too clueless to catch on to the risk associated with exchanges), and with such a small potential user base it'll never be useful for any practical application.
Waterluvian 4y ago
The problem I have with this is that it’s indistinguishable from “don’t protect the sheep from pyramid schemes. It’s their own weakness, let us prey on them.”
- BeFlatXIII 4y ago
  One would hope that knowledge not to trust others financial schemes would take hold quickly. It’s easier to scam people who implicitly trust you.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

SkyMarshal 4y ago

I concur. Also part of establishing trust is moving away from all the ticking time-bomb centralized intermediaries from Mt.Gox to FTX and everything in between, etc. Either figure out ways of accomplishing everything decentralized and on-chain, or accept the impossibility as a natural constraint of the tech and learn to do without.

maxbond 4y ago
Are you quite sure the root of the problem is centralized exchanges? Everything in "tradfi" is centralized, and there are frequent frauds and bad actors, but it remains much more robust than the cryptoasset ecosystem. I'd submit the root of the problem is finacializing things that are not economically productive. As cryptoasset supporters frequently point out, every market has some ponzenomic qualities, but pulling tokens from thin air amplifies them.
- SkyMarshal 4y ago
  > Are you quite sure the root of the problem is centralized exchanges? That’s the big hypothesis being tested right now. So far it’s only the centralized entities that are collapsing, and crypto market values are down as a result, but that’s not the same thing as a collapse or failure of the protocols. But this train wreck is still happening, so we’ll see if it causes some cryptocurrencies to fail too. Possibly some of the weaker ones will lose too much mining/validating power and get hacked or 51% attacked. If that happens to the bigger ones then it will expose a serious problem with the tech and economics of it all. This is arguably the most valuable informational period in crypto’s history - the first high-interest environment stress test it’s ever had. Either it will cull the weak and leave standing only the ones robust enough to withstand such environment, or will cull the entire industry. Either way at least we’ll empirically know the truth of it all. > Everything in "tradfi" is centralized, and there are frequent frauds and bad actors, but it remains much more robust than the cryptoasset ecosystem. I think the GFC demonstrated “tradfi” is anything but robust. If not for the govt and Fed bailouts, the scale of the losses could have exceeded the banking system’s cumulative revenue of its entire modern history, going back to the 1800s. And that was with regulation (albeit steadily weakened since the 80s). You could potentially make the argument that certain forms of tradfi are robust, for example under the Glass-Steagal regime that separated commercial banking, investment banking, and insurance into separate legal entities, among other restrictions (a form of decentralization). Also Germany’s local community banking system, which until recent decades was the main financier of Germany’s industrial economy, and which has never had a financial crisis since its origins in the 1700s/1800s, is also quite a robust model (also a form of decentralization). > I’d submit the root of the problem is financializing things that are not economically productive I don’t disagree. Low-interest cheap money environments tend to have that effect, crypto or no-crypto.
jgilias 4y ago
The missing piece is having CBDCs that your bank accepts on something like Uniswap. Until that happens on/off-ramps are needed, and these can only be centralised by definition. I’m not sure having ubiquitous CBDCs with all that may entail would be better than having a few trusted centralised exchanges for fiat on/off-ramp though.
- SkyMarshal 4y ago
  Yeah, it’s a pickle, no doubt about it. Both options are undesirable. Not sure what the best solution there is.
  - cinquemb 4y ago
    People may not like it (because it will look similar to the inner workings of the eurodollar ["Eurodollar University" on soundcloud, "Monetary Mechanics" Substack] system that we all live in now, and will continue to interface with such off chain systems in more complex ways [esp as on chain liabilities become more and more valuable in more places compared to off chain liabilities]), but I think native on-chain credit origination, built on top of on chain derivatives protocols will be the solution. Permissioned decentralized global monetary system will simply keep evolving into a more permissionless decentralized global monetary system.

esalman 4y ago

In exchange can we trust you to not scam those with little understanding of crypto?

monero-xmr 4y ago
I have never scammed anyone. Just as there are scams in traditional finance (see Wolf of Wall Street, Nikola, Enron) there are scams in crypto. At this point far more in crypto however. I think people need to know that no one is going to help them - caveat emptor. If the goal of crypto is to rebuild finance, eliminating taxpayer funded bailouts is a top priority.
- esalman 4y ago
  No one said these in any of the tens of crypto ads aired during superbowl.
  - drdaeman 4y ago
    Because ad industry is equally full of scam? I guess even someone with most hardcore anti-regulation views would most likely approve of (and quite likely, support) education, including being upfront about all the unsavvy bits and dangers.
  - anonporridge 4y ago
    That's because the non scammers don't have any incentive to run superbowl ads, because we're not running casinos. The information is freely available to anyone. Sadly, it's always hard to separate the signal from the noise, especially when the herd and the wolves arrive.
  - everfree 4y ago
    They should have. Want to help fund an ad to educate the public?
    - esalman 4y ago
      No. I pay taxes and it is government's job to stop scams at this scale. Whether the government works effectively or not is a different debate.

gizmo 4y ago

Should casinos be regulated or should we allow somebody to throw away their life savings if they have a bad day? “No regulation” may sound appealing but society has to pick up the pieces when people wreck themselves.

anonporridge 4y ago

As a bitcoin/monero maxi who's watched my dollar denominated net worth cut in half this year and expect it to go lower, I strongly agree. The wheat is being separated from the chaff, and I am absolutely here for it. I wish more innocent people would have listened to us and not trusted centralized exchanges or yolo'd huge money into shitcoins, but sometimes you have to watch a child touch a hot stove for their long term well-being. Tick tock, next block.

pcdoodle 4y ago
Indeed, Truth Engine :)
- anonporridge 4y ago
  The timechain doesn't stop. Tick tock, next block.
monero-xmr 4y ago
I read that institutional investors are “afraid of crypto” and this will be bad in the long run. Bad in the long run for who? What did these VCs invest in? A huge pile of scam alt coins / alt chains, centralized exchanges, stuff no one wants. Bitcoin is digital gold. It’s boring and has operated mostly the same since the beginning. We don’t need FTX and I hope the tourists don’t come back.
- anonporridge 4y ago
  Bitcoin and reusable proof of work is the mind blowing innovation that represents a turning point for human civilization. Mutually assured preservation via softwar. The rest will at best be iterative technology that may eventually be integrated into the traditional securities and exchange systems governed by the local monopoly on violence, but is generally uninvestable in its current form.
  - marcus_holmes 4y ago
    The whole thing is uninvestable. None of it (including Bitcoin) generates any value. Nothing is created that benefits the human race. It's speculation all the way down - the only value that a bitcoin has is the likelihood of someone else paying more for it than you paid for it. It's not a turning point for human civilisation; it's a slot machine in a digital casino. Not that the derivatives of "tradfi" are any better. But underneath all that speculation at least there is actual stocks in actual companies that are actually making real human value.

dbcurtis 4y ago

Main stream adoption will only happen if those that want it can have the security blanket of fraud coverage to cuddle in. The answer here is still a non-regulatory, market solution: Crypto Insurance. Non-transparent, un-auditable coins and exchanges simply won't be able to be insured. People can decide if they want to speculate using uninsured currencies and exchanges. My prediction is that non-transparent, sketchy schemes will wither. Of course, the insurers themselves need to be sound -- but Lloyd's seems to have solved that problem about as well as it can be back in the days of wooden ships. This is not a new concept.

roland35 4y ago
I'm not really a fan of having my life savings just a hack away from being stolen. I am infinitely more confident in my retirement savings being managed by Schwab or Fidelity than any possible way of crypto, online, offline, or whatever. I don't need to worry about insurance, or picking the wrong insurance vendor!
- dbcurtis 4y ago
  But you do have insurance. For some of the amount. You just didn’t pick the vendor. Or have to think about it. You are, in a way, making my point.
  - roland35 4y ago
    I don't think I understand. Fidelity 401k - Millions of people put in their paychecks, millions of people have withdrawn successfully in their retirement. An unsophisticated investor will not lose anything. Crypto - no way to know what, if any, company is legit. If I use a hardware wallet and lose it I'm screwed. FTX seemed pretty legit a few weeks ago, they even had an NBA arena named after them! There are dozens of ways an unsophisticated investor can lose everything.
    - dbcurtis 4y ago
      Isn’t Fidelity FDIC insured?

runarberg 4y ago

Am I understanding you correctly that you basically want to normalize scams? That we shouldn’t proactively try to protect the innocent from bad actors, rather we should allow scammers to take advantage of them even when we know they can be irreversibly harmed? If I understand you correctly, this is a terribly unethical take, lacking in any sort of empathy. But also lacks any historic understanding of scammers and psychological understanding of human behavior. This plan won’t work, there will always be innocents to scam, and scammers will continue to exploit it until authorities put a stop to it. There is a reason why ponzi schemes were criminalized, if they wouldn’t have been, we would still see criminals exploit people from the same playbook today.

monero-xmr 4y ago
As far as I’m aware fraud is still a crime. Authorities have convicted hundreds of people of crypto frauds.
- runarberg 4y ago
  That’s not the point. People are still harmed by scams. Many criminals do get away with scams, and even if they don’t, they are often caught well after several successful scams when victims have already needlessly suffered, and most won’t be fully compensated. Here, as in other criminal areas, prevention is always preferable to punishment.

evronm 4y ago

YES! His premises are wrong, but his conclusions are spot on. I really hope regulators learn to think like that.

JeremyNT 4y ago

Easily exchanging fiat to and from crypto is a requirement for normal users, as is something like a bank who actually manages the process. If you want this all to be an unregulated wild west of scams, eventually you won't have any normal users left as they all lose their shirts and eventually wise up. All you'll have left is crypto propeller heads (and the rubes too clueless to catch on to the risk associated with exchanges), and with such a small potential user base it'll never be useful for any practical application.

Waterluvian 4y ago

The problem I have with this is that it’s indistinguishable from “don’t protect the sheep from pyramid schemes. It’s their own weakness, let us prey on them.”

BeFlatXIII 4y ago
One would hope that knowledge not to trust others financial schemes would take hold quickly. It’s easier to scam people who implicitly trust you.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]