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Once again the use-case for crypto turns out to be... large scale criminality and fraud. Shocker.
by EA-3167 3y ago
Once again the use-case for crypto turns out to be... large scale criminality and fraud.
Shocker.
- dang 3y agoPlease don't post tedious flamewar repetitions to Hacker News. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for. We want curious conversation here. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- yieldcrv 3y ago“a” use case that is indistinguishable and unquantifiable from use cases you respect which is a major difference from “the” use case and just a use case for that company, which in any other industry we would talk about the company’s behavior not the entire asset class and industry, I find it disingenuous to have that “use case” auto reply on any article that happens to be about crypto but is really about a company
- EA-3167 3y agoThat was an "ok" argument maybe 5-8 years ago, now there's too much evidence that no legitimate use case exists, and every alleged one turns out to be a fraud or a get-rich-quick scheme.
- yieldcrv 3y agoeveryone goes through a disillusionment phase with crypto from my perspective, there is simply a lack of coverage of things that function without incident, which are very numerous and solve frictions for a lot of people, whether you’re in the market for that or not like construction sites that showed “how many days since an incident”, because people only heard about the incidents
- jvanderbot 3y agoWhere are these mystical things that function because of crypto that wouldn't function with regular money, and which also are not fraud?
- matheusmoreira 3y agoPrivacy. Censorship resistance. Monero is a great cryptocurrency.
- jvanderbot 3y agoYou can list features all day and not convince me of the existence of applications. Privacy that is obtained by obscuring signatories or blending assets is just laundering.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoThat's like saying effective cryptography is destruction of evidence. "Laundering" is a bullshit concept invented to legitimize total surveillance of financial transactions. This KYC/AML stuff is just the financial arm of global mass surveillance. We must resist it vigorously for the exact same reasons we resist warrantless dragnet data collection.
- jvanderbot 3y agoI see the misunderstanding: I used "laundering" to describe a method of obscuring a trail of exchanges, not a crime. I can exchange gold, or textiles or something, and not expect surveillance of those transactions. I do live in a country that requires some reporting of those for tax purposes, but not tracking of the assets the way crypto does. The moment I pick up a monetized piece of paper that the government printed with a serial number and all that, which is guaranteed by the full faith of the government, and is standardized by the government in a global financial system, I accept some side effects, such as the government's expectation of tracking and standardization. Similarly, the moment I pick up a crypto currency, I accept all the technical limitations / requirements of complete ledger accessibility, and methods of circumventing that are no more sophisticated than laundering. In effect, with gov-backed money and crypto, you are forced into a system of surveillance. I don't see the privacy angle one bit.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- barking_biscuit 3y agoI'm with you on this one. It was a solid argument in 2017, but even by 2018 the writing was on the wall for crypto. John Oliver recently did another segment on crypto and he absolutely nailed it in saying that the only real currency in crypto is confidence, and that tends to attract a certain kind of individual, namely scammers/fraudsters.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- htss2013 3y agoBTC has been around since 2008. Today in 2023 BTC is like $27k. Does the longevity, ubiquity, price and liquidity of BTC fit the pattern of a useless get rich quick scheme? Has any such scheme existed this long, despite so much scrutiny and hostility, based on hype and confidence alone? If no useless speculation scheme has ever thrived as long and as much as BTC, and it keeps on going, at what point do you have to ask if your opinion just doesn't fit with reality? The shady exchanges and shitcoins muddy the waters but have fundamentally nothing to do with BTC and a handful of other top cryptos.
- EA-3167 3y ago> BTC has been around since 2008. Today in 2023 BTC is like $27k. Does the longevity, ubiquity, price and liquidity of BTC fit the pattern of a useless get rich quick scheme? Has any such scheme existed this long, despite so much scrutiny and hostility, based on hype and confidence alone? Yes, Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme famously ran for decades, with everyone invested calling doubters idiots and pessimists. Until it all fell apart.
- ascagnel_ 3y ago> Yes, Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme famously ran for decades, with everyone invested calling doubters idiots and pessimists. As an aside, I can think of exactly one person who benefitted from Madoff's scheme: former New York Met Bobby Bonilla, who is set to receive about USD$1.2MM from the team every July 1 through 2035. Bonilla's contract was bought out by the Mets in 2000, and instead of paying him the USD$5.9MM he was owed, the team offered a deferred payment scheme (with payments starting in 2011), as they were looking at double-digit returns from their Madoff investments in the deferred decade.
- latchkey 3y agoThis is a common straw man argument. Madoff was a single individual controlling the narrative. Bitcoin has no central actor. The same problem existed with FTX/SBF. But when they went down, it wasn't like Bitcoin died with them.
- PeterisP 3y agoIt's "the" use case because of the scale. There are all kinds of niche use cases that constitute $0 billion of turnover, and thus don't contest that fraud is the use case.
- SilasX 3y ago[flagged]
- phoe-krk 3y agoIs ad personam a meaningful way of making HN responses, if we're at it now?
- SilasX 3y ago[flagged]
- nindalf 3y ago[flagged]
- joebob42 3y agoI think this may be sarcasm, but I also think it's literally true. Part of what I find interesting about the whole debacle is how many people really "told you so" well before the wheels started to come off (if that's indeed what's happening over the last year or so, will be easier to tell after the fact).
- SilasX 3y agoThere are people who claim they “told you so” all along, who had heard about bitcoin in 2011[1]… and it’s still up 100x since then. ”But you could say the same of a legit Ponzi scheme or fraud!” No, not really. Those crash after the details emerge and everyone knows the truth. Here, the full “details” have been out for a very very long time. [1] the year the infamous /r/buttcoin sub was formed, btw
- Name_Chawps 3y agoWere those people saying crypto would not take off as an alternative currency, or did they claim the value of crypto as a speculator asset would not increase?
- labster 3y agoCrypto is also good as a form of market speculation and to make gaming GPUs too expensive for gamers. Don’t sell it short!
- ianferrel 3y ago>Don’t sell it short! Especially not without very carefully considering counterparty risk!
- geraldwhen 3y agoCrypto is no longer mined on gpus. The gpu apocalypse is over.
- nytesky 3y agoJust in time for AI to slurp up all supply?
- latchkey 3y agoDifferent class of compute. GPUs for mining didn't need to be the latest/greatest or a ton of RAM. AI needs the fastest/bestest/mostest.
- latchkey 3y agoTechnically, ETH is no longer mined on GPUs. Bitcoin stopped being mined on GPUs a decade ago. There are still plenty of other cryptos that are mined on GPUs, but their market share is tiny. The interesting thing is that ETH switching to PoS, completely decimated the GPU mining market. This had the side effect of lowering cryptos power usage significantly and also countering all of the anti-ESG arguments against ETH.
- alphanullmeric 3y agoExactly, nobody needs encryption anyways. Cryptography is a waste of energy and is bad for the environment. All it’s used for is planning terrorist attacks and Russian military invasions. We should simply use state communication channels and require third party messengers to provide KYC documents to the government. We as a society decided on taking away communication privacy, so even if you voted against it you still consent.
- EA-3167 3y agoUnless you just woke up from a deep coma and think "Crypto" in this case means "Cryptography" and not "Cryptocurrency"... I don't know what to tell you.
- GoblinSlayer 3y agoWhat's the difference? Cryptocurrency is said to be used for crime and cryptography is said to be used for crime.
- EA-3167 3y agoYou need me to explain the difference between a field of math and a single implementation of that field? Really?
- GoblinSlayer 3y agoExplain the difference between criminal use of cryptocurrency and criminal use of cryptography.
- EA-3167 3y agoThe entire basis of how the internet works is based on cryptography, and while everything has the potential to be misused, it's impossible to argue that the primary use of cryptography is criminal, unethical, or wasteful. The same cannot be said for cryptocurrency.
- senectus1 3y agoYou say that like Fiat money isn't as well :-P
- drexlspivey 3y agopeak Reddit comment
- latchkey 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills.
- lost_tourist 3y agoor the US government is just afraid of not being able to easily track all monetary transactions legal and illegal. Big brother needs to see all in order to control all.
- j0hnyl 3y agocrypto makes things much easier to track
- matheusmoreira 3y agoNot all crypto is created equal. Monero is pretty much the state of the art for private electronic money.
- latchkey 3y agoAnd the market cap for monero is tiny compared with the ones that are easy to track. Which implies that the nefarious actors are smaller than portrayed in the news.
- j0hnyl 3y agoI've heard folks that work at Chainalysis claim that they can track monero better than zcash.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoHere on HN? Can you link me to their posts? If you have reason to believe monero has been deanonymized, please post details.
- mnky9800n 3y agoi feel like the move towards cashless, all transactions are tracked, society is real and if you don't see maybe you are not looking around. This is happening agnostic to crypto anything.
- eggy 3y agoYeah, back in my day when we used cash, it was never used by criminals ;) As I get older I want the anonymity or immediacy without a paper trail for normal day-to-day small transactions. For big transactions maybe not. Also, just try and walk in nowadays to a car dealership and hand over $35k in cash for a car. See what happens.
- raincom 3y ago$35k cash makes the dealership to file a currency transaction report with FinCen. For that matter, any entry/exit of untraceable monetary instruments(cash, money orders) > $10k is filed as a CTR. This is not a big issue; people get panicked, then structure their transactions(multiple cash transactions each < $10k, but > $10k in total over time), thereby leading to a SAR(suspicious activity report). Mandatory reporters(banks, dealerships, remitters, etc) are obligated to file these reports. These can be used under Beria’s law ‘show me the man and I’ll show you the crime’.
- latchkey 3y agoI have some inheritance cash that I received when my grandma died. Right now, it is soaking up some nice 4.9% apy, but eventually I'd like to buy a car (waiting for the prices to crash a bit more). It is what she would have wanted (she bought me my first car). I can't wait to walk into a dealership, with cash, and find out what sort of criminal I am.
- tialaramex 3y agoThere's no reason you would be a criminal, if they're comfortable taking so much cash (you didn't specify how much, dealers may vary in how willing they are to accept very large cash purchases) they will doubtless be comfortable filling out the mandatory reporting. The investigators are looking for patterns, and latchkey having one dead grandma and buying one car isn't a pattern. They can't see patterns if the data which would make up the pattern isn't recorded, so that why the data is collected.
- 3y ago
- timcavel 3y ago[dead]
- tmn 3y agoReally deep stuff here. It has nothing to do with an over controlling government trying to protect their moat.