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> It's essentially a financial weapon aimed at the West, and adversaries of the West will not let it fail. An interesting way to phrase it but do you have any

> It's essentially a financial weapon aimed at the West, and adversaries of the West will not let it fail. An interesting way to phrase it but do you have any sources to back your claim? I know that Binance is being investigated for money laundering and sanctions violations. But this could just be a consequence of corporate greed and operating in unregulated markets (not some conspiracy against west).

rvnx 4y ago
In Europe, wire transfers work exceptionally well since the introduction of SEPA Instant Credit Transfer. You have the choice between a free, transparent, technically stable, instant payment system (< 10 seconds until 100'000 EUR), using a stable currency. or an unregulated system where unknown people create and control the currency, that is generally slow, often with high payment or exchange fees and where you need to trust a lot of unknown parties (software, tools, network, coins, etc), where you can lose your key, that is falsely transparent (you see transactions, but you don't know who control the network). Mhhh...
- superjan 4y ago
  True, but how is it relevant to the comment you replied to?
  - rvnx 4y ago
    It's to say that "West" has a quite established and efficient transaction platform. Because of that, as part of the "West", I hardly see any benefit of crypto, unless you are in some other camp (aka: "anti-West"). This is what I meant.
    - m00dy 4y ago
      - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
        > what happened to Jews in the 2nd WW in europe Bitcoin is now a solution to a second Holocaust?
        m00dy 4y ago
        TchoBeer 4y ago
        Making it marginally harder to steal wealth from Jewish people would have only slightly abated the negative effects of the holocaust, but it would not at all solve any of their problems.
        acdha 4y ago
        That works as long as you already have liquid assets you can just flee with. The flip side is that bitcoin would have been the SS’ dream for punishing anyone who transferred funds to fleeing Jews and, of course, the ability to taint entire chains of transactions would mean that anyone hiding in country wouldn’t be able to use those funds like they would cash or gold. I also don’t like the possibilities were, say, refugees trying to buy passage suddenly hit with the German government reporting all of their accounts as stolen. It’s an interesting thought exercise but ultimately the lesson is “don’t let fascists gain power” because technology can’t save you.
        ineedasername 4y ago
        You are badly missing the point in a very fundamental way by focusing on the assets lost by Jewish people during WW2. Two out of Three Jews died. Most Jewish people died, often horribly. The greater awareness these days of efforts to repatriate some relatively minor bits of lost wealth to Jewish descendants has perhaps distorted the problem space of those times quite a bit for an unfortunately vocal group of strong crypto advocates who hold up theft from the Jewish people as a pillar of reasoning in favor of crypto. It’s fantastic when repatriation can happen, less so (in my mind) for monetary reasons and more so for the symbolism of regaining at least some small bit of what was lost in the horror and injustice. But focusing on ww2 in the way some crypto folks do… the closes analogy I can think of (and maybe not a great one) is that it’s like focusing on the people caught in the twin towers on 9/11, but below the impacts and able to escape. And then saying “My goodness, they lost all their laptops and computers! If only they’d had VM cloud desktops!
    - superjan 4y ago
      I think I read the parent comment differently: when crypto is claimed to be a weapon against the west, it is not because it is in any way an alternative, it is a weapon as a system supporting illicit activities against the west (money laundering, sanction evasion, state sanctioned ransomware). The fact that it slow, unscalable and expensive does not matter for those type of activities. So I thought it does not really matter that our banks are efficient.
    - RestlessMind 4y ago
      > It's to say that "West" has a quite established and efficient transaction platform. That part of "West" you are referring to also had ultra low or even negative interest rates, thus eroding the buying power of Euros and other peripheral currencies. No wonder European countries also account for some of the highest numbers of bitcoin nodes (per capita).
- corv 4y ago
  SEPA only works within the EU whereas what you are comparing is a global payments system. In Europe it is also necessary to report any transactions over 10,000 EUR which causes more friction than you imply. It is not transparent as to how much currency debasement is taking place, nor does anybody outside a small group at the ECB have any control over it. It is quite clear who owns decentralized networks - the participants. Are they perfectly equal? No but they are more egalitarian than what they seek to replace. Decentralized networks are more resilient to outages than the electrical supply of some countries. It may not make sense for you to use but millions around the world have found a use for it.
  - sbolt 4y ago
    From a legal perspective do Crypto transfers over 10k have to be reported too?
    - corv 4y ago
      According to newly announced regulations crypto transfers over 1000 Euros are to be scrutinized. How exactly this will be enforced is not clear to me. Also noteworthy, cash payments are limited to 10,000 Euros (1000 Euro in Spain)
      - sbolt 4y ago
        Awesome, thanks for the reply!
  - lottin 4y ago
    What a whole lot of nonsense. Blockchains operate on the basis of one dollar one vote. There's nothing egalitarian (not to mention democratic) about this. A central bank, on the other hand, is a public institution with a public mandate. By the way, currency debasement is not an economic term. The only people who use it are conspiracy theorists and crackpots, as far as I know.
    - m00dy 4y ago
- patrickaljord 4y ago
  > You have the choice between a free, transparent Transparent you say? Could you point me to the SEPA explorer where I can inspect every single transaction and account balance please? Here is the one for ethereum https://etherscan.io/ https://etherscan.io/ and for bitcoin https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transactions https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transactions
  - JanSt 4y ago
    SEPA is transparent for authorities though. Ethereum and Bitcoin are transparent on transactions but intransparent on beneficial owner. Who is Satoshi?
    - patrickaljord 4y ago
      So SEPA allows the government to spy on us while being a black box to the rest of us while Ethereum and Bitcoin are fully transparent while protecting our privacy. Not sure how this is a good point in favor of SEPA but ok.
      - raverbashing 4y ago
        > while Ethereum and Bitcoin are fully transparent while protecting our privacy Transparency plays both ways, and be sure that every address can be deanonimized
      - csomar 4y ago
        Every year millions of people start running in circles around a black box building in the middle of the desert. I'm not sure if that's a useful analogy. Might explain why they get so violent if you question their god or their beliefs.
        survirtual 4y ago
        When you put it that way, the landscape makes a lot more sense. Just as there would be no convincing people on a Ramadan pilgrimage to Mecca of a better option, there may not be any convincing people who worship the black box of legacy banking. In fact, they might ridicule / murder you if you do — a tale of caution? Seems people everywhere are largely the same.
- MomoXenosaga 4y ago
  Absolutely true and I use it daily however some people want to dodge taxes or pay for child prostitutes. In which case the official banking channels are unusable.
- mopsi 4y ago
  You forgot to mention UX. SEPA payments have horrible user experience. The "modern" way of receiving money in automated manner in Europe and using SEPA is through payment providers. On checkout, customers get redirected to payment providers with strange startup names they've never heard about to initiate a transaction, and then redirected to their bank to log in and approve the initiated transaction. This is basically training people to accept phishing and MITM attacks. Checkout via Paypal or debit/credit cards is much more straightforward and user-friendly, which is why they are still widely used (along with local services like Swish). A crypto wallet app that just requires scanning a QR code is even better, and miles ahead of anything SEPA/PSD2 offers in terms of user experience.
  - KarlKemp 4y ago
    How do I scan a QR code on my phone? Do I need a mirror? If it’s so great, why is nobody using it? If people are so easily fooled into MITM attacks, why do they not happen? Have you used Apple Pay? Works quite well.
    - lmm 4y ago
      > How do I scan a QR code on my phone? Do I need a mirror? > If it’s so great, why is nobody using it? Where I live people pay by scanning QR codes all the time. > If people are so easily fooled into MITM attacks, why do they not happen? They do! People are getting scammed on these systems all the time; usually the provider agrees to repay the funds to keep them quiet.
  - omnimus 4y ago
    If QR codes are such a big UX plus then i hate to break it to you but all bank apps in my country read and create QR and people use it all the time. SEPA included. Its quite lovely on invoices i must say. Whats probably not there is that not every EU country uses this but that is matter of time. The banks are international, popular features spread. It will probably become standard very soon.
- seydor 4y ago
  if only they did the same for gold
FormerBandmate 4y ago
There are no sources to be found because no one even knows what country Binance operates out of. They're deliberately as opaque as possible
spamizbad 4y ago
I mean, that's basically the pitch I've personally received from various web3 founders trying to recruit me. It's overtly political and is some flavor of "Boy howdy the US dollar hegemony sure is a big problem. It sure would be nice if we had true economic freedom. Want to be part of the solution?"

rvnx 4y ago

In Europe, wire transfers work exceptionally well since the introduction of SEPA Instant Credit Transfer. You have the choice between a free, transparent, technically stable, instant payment system (< 10 seconds until 100'000 EUR), using a stable currency. or an unregulated system where unknown people create and control the currency, that is generally slow, often with high payment or exchange fees and where you need to trust a lot of unknown parties (software, tools, network, coins, etc), where you can lose your key, that is falsely transparent (you see transactions, but you don't know who control the network). Mhhh...

superjan 4y ago
True, but how is it relevant to the comment you replied to?
- rvnx 4y ago
  It's to say that "West" has a quite established and efficient transaction platform. Because of that, as part of the "West", I hardly see any benefit of crypto, unless you are in some other camp (aka: "anti-West"). This is what I meant.
  - m00dy 4y ago
    - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
      > what happened to Jews in the 2nd WW in europe Bitcoin is now a solution to a second Holocaust?
      - m00dy 4y ago
        TchoBeer 4y ago
        Making it marginally harder to steal wealth from Jewish people would have only slightly abated the negative effects of the holocaust, but it would not at all solve any of their problems.
        acdha 4y ago
        That works as long as you already have liquid assets you can just flee with. The flip side is that bitcoin would have been the SS’ dream for punishing anyone who transferred funds to fleeing Jews and, of course, the ability to taint entire chains of transactions would mean that anyone hiding in country wouldn’t be able to use those funds like they would cash or gold. I also don’t like the possibilities were, say, refugees trying to buy passage suddenly hit with the German government reporting all of their accounts as stolen. It’s an interesting thought exercise but ultimately the lesson is “don’t let fascists gain power” because technology can’t save you.
        ineedasername 4y ago
        You are badly missing the point in a very fundamental way by focusing on the assets lost by Jewish people during WW2. Two out of Three Jews died. Most Jewish people died, often horribly. The greater awareness these days of efforts to repatriate some relatively minor bits of lost wealth to Jewish descendants has perhaps distorted the problem space of those times quite a bit for an unfortunately vocal group of strong crypto advocates who hold up theft from the Jewish people as a pillar of reasoning in favor of crypto. It’s fantastic when repatriation can happen, less so (in my mind) for monetary reasons and more so for the symbolism of regaining at least some small bit of what was lost in the horror and injustice. But focusing on ww2 in the way some crypto folks do… the closes analogy I can think of (and maybe not a great one) is that it’s like focusing on the people caught in the twin towers on 9/11, but below the impacts and able to escape. And then saying “My goodness, they lost all their laptops and computers! If only they’d had VM cloud desktops!
  - superjan 4y ago
    I think I read the parent comment differently: when crypto is claimed to be a weapon against the west, it is not because it is in any way an alternative, it is a weapon as a system supporting illicit activities against the west (money laundering, sanction evasion, state sanctioned ransomware). The fact that it slow, unscalable and expensive does not matter for those type of activities. So I thought it does not really matter that our banks are efficient.
  - RestlessMind 4y ago
    > It's to say that "West" has a quite established and efficient transaction platform. That part of "West" you are referring to also had ultra low or even negative interest rates, thus eroding the buying power of Euros and other peripheral currencies. No wonder European countries also account for some of the highest numbers of bitcoin nodes (per capita).
corv 4y ago
SEPA only works within the EU whereas what you are comparing is a global payments system. In Europe it is also necessary to report any transactions over 10,000 EUR which causes more friction than you imply. It is not transparent as to how much currency debasement is taking place, nor does anybody outside a small group at the ECB have any control over it. It is quite clear who owns decentralized networks - the participants. Are they perfectly equal? No but they are more egalitarian than what they seek to replace. Decentralized networks are more resilient to outages than the electrical supply of some countries. It may not make sense for you to use but millions around the world have found a use for it.
- sbolt 4y ago
  From a legal perspective do Crypto transfers over 10k have to be reported too?
  - corv 4y ago
    According to newly announced regulations crypto transfers over 1000 Euros are to be scrutinized. How exactly this will be enforced is not clear to me. Also noteworthy, cash payments are limited to 10,000 Euros (1000 Euro in Spain)
    - sbolt 4y ago
      Awesome, thanks for the reply!
- lottin 4y ago
  What a whole lot of nonsense. Blockchains operate on the basis of one dollar one vote. There's nothing egalitarian (not to mention democratic) about this. A central bank, on the other hand, is a public institution with a public mandate. By the way, currency debasement is not an economic term. The only people who use it are conspiracy theorists and crackpots, as far as I know.
  - m00dy 4y ago
patrickaljord 4y ago
> You have the choice between a free, transparent Transparent you say? Could you point me to the SEPA explorer where I can inspect every single transaction and account balance please? Here is the one for ethereum https://etherscan.io/ https://etherscan.io/ and for bitcoin https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transactions https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/transactions
- JanSt 4y ago
  SEPA is transparent for authorities though. Ethereum and Bitcoin are transparent on transactions but intransparent on beneficial owner. Who is Satoshi?
  - patrickaljord 4y ago
    So SEPA allows the government to spy on us while being a black box to the rest of us while Ethereum and Bitcoin are fully transparent while protecting our privacy. Not sure how this is a good point in favor of SEPA but ok.
    - raverbashing 4y ago
      > while Ethereum and Bitcoin are fully transparent while protecting our privacy Transparency plays both ways, and be sure that every address can be deanonimized
    - csomar 4y ago
      Every year millions of people start running in circles around a black box building in the middle of the desert. I'm not sure if that's a useful analogy. Might explain why they get so violent if you question their god or their beliefs.
      - survirtual 4y ago
        When you put it that way, the landscape makes a lot more sense. Just as there would be no convincing people on a Ramadan pilgrimage to Mecca of a better option, there may not be any convincing people who worship the black box of legacy banking. In fact, they might ridicule / murder you if you do — a tale of caution? Seems people everywhere are largely the same.
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
Absolutely true and I use it daily however some people want to dodge taxes or pay for child prostitutes. In which case the official banking channels are unusable.
mopsi 4y ago
You forgot to mention UX. SEPA payments have horrible user experience. The "modern" way of receiving money in automated manner in Europe and using SEPA is through payment providers. On checkout, customers get redirected to payment providers with strange startup names they've never heard about to initiate a transaction, and then redirected to their bank to log in and approve the initiated transaction. This is basically training people to accept phishing and MITM attacks. Checkout via Paypal or debit/credit cards is much more straightforward and user-friendly, which is why they are still widely used (along with local services like Swish). A crypto wallet app that just requires scanning a QR code is even better, and miles ahead of anything SEPA/PSD2 offers in terms of user experience.
- KarlKemp 4y ago
  How do I scan a QR code on my phone? Do I need a mirror? If it’s so great, why is nobody using it? If people are so easily fooled into MITM attacks, why do they not happen? Have you used Apple Pay? Works quite well.
  - lmm 4y ago
    > How do I scan a QR code on my phone? Do I need a mirror? > If it’s so great, why is nobody using it? Where I live people pay by scanning QR codes all the time. > If people are so easily fooled into MITM attacks, why do they not happen? They do! People are getting scammed on these systems all the time; usually the provider agrees to repay the funds to keep them quiet.
- omnimus 4y ago
  If QR codes are such a big UX plus then i hate to break it to you but all bank apps in my country read and create QR and people use it all the time. SEPA included. Its quite lovely on invoices i must say. Whats probably not there is that not every EU country uses this but that is matter of time. The banks are international, popular features spread. It will probably become standard very soon.
seydor 4y ago
if only they did the same for gold

FormerBandmate 4y ago

There are no sources to be found because no one even knows what country Binance operates out of. They're deliberately as opaque as possible

spamizbad 4y ago

I mean, that's basically the pitch I've personally received from various web3 founders trying to recruit me. It's overtly political and is some flavor of "Boy howdy the US dollar hegemony sure is a big problem. It sure would be nice if we had true economic freedom. Want to be part of the solution?"