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Is the problem with crypto that it has no useful purpose or is it just riddled with fraud, like what happened at FTC? It's a useful thought experiment to consi

Is the problem with crypto that it has no useful purpose or is it just riddled with fraud, like what happened at FTC? It's a useful thought experiment to consider how much faith we would have in the banking industry today if it were as poorly regulated as the crypto industry.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> problem with crypto that it has no useful purpose or is it just riddled with fraud It’s riddled with fraud. But so are other things. That it has no redeeming value makes the cost of crackdown palatable.
salawat 4y ago
The "problem" with crypto is that it was specifically designed as anti-finance. Finance is a loaded term in the U.S. it's a composition of a few activities and responsibilities that you must fulfill to stay in business. You must firewall customer deposits. You must do OFAC. You must do KYC/AML. All of these responsibilities are tied to the act of money transmission. Keep in mind, money here is USD. Most "Crypto" tries to sidestep those extra responsibilities. You still do money transmission like activities and account management, but all that squicky social responsibility like maintaining transaction records, OFAC, KYC/AML, and sane institutional controls over customer assets? Naaaaaah. If you implemented constructs like Monero and Tornado.Cash in USD, and tried to operate, you would be shut down faster than you can say "FIN-wha?" The only reason crypto hasn't, is because the on-ramps to crypto-USD have largely been locked down/brought into compliance. The cryptocurrencies in play are treated more as commodities than currency, and the tooling to integrate financial surveillance of the public ledgers crawls forward as resources to handle it come into awareness at the institutional level. The old one about crypto speed running the history of finance applies. Every regulation they didn't bother implementing has proved that, yes, the regulation in trad fi is still, in a sense, justified.
ChainOfFools 4y ago
Crypto is an ideological position first, and a technology second (and only in a subordinate role as a framework for the ideological objective). So whether it is useful depends on how one feels about the tradeoff between highly efficient but potentially more oppressive centralization of public capital (the incumbent position), vs. ineluctably, stupendously inefficient but notionally less corruptable decentralization of public capital (this is the crypto-blockchain position). And notionally is pulling a heavy load here indeed, as we have seen time and again that cryptocurrency might as well be called kleptocurrency given the endless fiasco parade of rugpulls, outright fraud, concentration of the market's very thin real liquidity in a few hands (thus enabling Number Go Up chart puppetry), facilitation of rampant ransomware and extortion to the point of inflicting naked cruelty on innocent people, shutting down city services, hospitals and more.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> problem with crypto that it has no useful purpose or is it just riddled with fraud It’s riddled with fraud. But so are other things. That it has no redeeming value makes the cost of crackdown palatable.

salawat 4y ago

The "problem" with crypto is that it was specifically designed as anti-finance. Finance is a loaded term in the U.S. it's a composition of a few activities and responsibilities that you must fulfill to stay in business. You must firewall customer deposits. You must do OFAC. You must do KYC/AML. All of these responsibilities are tied to the act of money transmission. Keep in mind, money here is USD. Most "Crypto" tries to sidestep those extra responsibilities. You still do money transmission like activities and account management, but all that squicky social responsibility like maintaining transaction records, OFAC, KYC/AML, and sane institutional controls over customer assets? Naaaaaah. If you implemented constructs like Monero and Tornado.Cash in USD, and tried to operate, you would be shut down faster than you can say "FIN-wha?" The only reason crypto hasn't, is because the on-ramps to crypto-USD have largely been locked down/brought into compliance. The cryptocurrencies in play are treated more as commodities than currency, and the tooling to integrate financial surveillance of the public ledgers crawls forward as resources to handle it come into awareness at the institutional level. The old one about crypto speed running the history of finance applies. Every regulation they didn't bother implementing has proved that, yes, the regulation in trad fi is still, in a sense, justified.

ChainOfFools 4y ago

Crypto is an ideological position first, and a technology second (and only in a subordinate role as a framework for the ideological objective). So whether it is useful depends on how one feels about the tradeoff between highly efficient but potentially more oppressive centralization of public capital (the incumbent position), vs. ineluctably, stupendously inefficient but notionally less corruptable decentralization of public capital (this is the crypto-blockchain position). And notionally is pulling a heavy load here indeed, as we have seen time and again that cryptocurrency might as well be called kleptocurrency given the endless fiasco parade of rugpulls, outright fraud, concentration of the market's very thin real liquidity in a few hands (thus enabling Number Go Up chart puppetry), facilitation of rampant ransomware and extortion to the point of inflicting naked cruelty on innocent people, shutting down city services, hospitals and more.