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Cryptocurrency Turns to Cash in Russian Banks (2024)
- kspacewalk2 2y agoOriginal title is "How Cryptocurrency Turns to Cash in Russian Banks".
- diggan 2y agoHN titler strikes again, it automatically removes a bunch of words like "How". If submitters just take a look at their submission after hitting "Submit", they'd notice the issue and add it back. But oh well
- fermigier 2y agoWho could have guessed?
- blibble 2y agoare there any uses for crypto other that sanctions busting and drug dealing? oh and pump and dump scams
- spacemanspiff01 2y agoI guess more generally money laundering.
- diggan 2y agoCryptocurrency just by itself cannot do "money laundering", you need something that looks/works legally within your jurisdiction that you can slowly "wash" the money through. No matter what, the tax man will find you unless you pay taxes somehow on the money you use openly.
- redmattred 2y agoRemittances without fees
- kspacewalk2 2y agoThere are typically plenty of fees associated with converting real money to crypto, then back to real money in another country. I think the real draw for (semi-)legitimate use is for transfers in/out of countries that have unwanted surveillance and/or currency controls.
- throwaway74354 2y agoRansomware
- diggan 2y ago> are there any uses for crypto other that sanctions busting and drug dealing? Have you lost your creative muscle completely, or does the hate for cryptocurrency blind you to even be able to evaluate if this bad thing might come with benefits too? Personally, sending money (legal money, no sanctions nor involving drugs) between South America and Europe got a lot better as people started to learn how to receive/send USDC for example. I think that's the biggest change in my own life between before and after cryptocurrency became more commonplace. So much money spent on fees with Western Union and all those shitty platforms, before you could send USDC in half a minute with minimal fees.
- dataflow 2y agoJust to clarify: are you actually currently sending funds with cruptocurrency, or are you saying the use case for crypto currency was that it served as a forcing function for institutions to make it more convenient to send money without cruptocurrency?
- diggan 2y ago> are you actually currently sending funds with cruptocurrency Yes, actively using it as a cheaper, faster and smoother means to send money to family back in South America for the last few years. Before that we were using Western Union, MoneyGram and all those other services that like to tack on fee after fee after fee.
- dartos 2y agoThere are still fees everywhere. fees for each trade. Fees for selling usdc for usd. Fees for just interacting with the chain in the first place. What’s more is your transaction is in competition with other similar transactions based on how much fee you’re willing to pay, so the fees are extremely volatile. But it is much much faster and imo less nerve wracking than waiting for western union.
- Zanfa 2y ago> But it is much much faster and imo less nerve wracking than waiting for western union. I have a feeling you don’t do international transactions. It’s not a binary decision between Western Union and crypto.
- dataflow 2y agoWhatever El Salvador is doing might be another one?
- dartos 2y agoThe use is and always has been an extremely unregulated marketplace to exchange value. (Whatever value means is up to the buyer) I think the entire idea behind cryptocurrencies from the beginning was to have unregulatable currency. That comes with good and bad, but for most people in most situations it’s not as useful as regular currency.
- FabHK 2y agoIndeed. From Satoshi's emails: ++++++++++++ >> You will not find a solution to political problems in cryptography. > Yes, but we can win a major battle in the arms race and gain a new territory of freedom for several years. > Governments are good at cutting off the heads of a centrally controlled networks like Napster, but pure P2P networks like Gnutella and Tor seem to be holding their own. > Satoshi ++++++++++++ > It's very attractive to the libertarian viewpoint if we can explain it properly. I'm better with code than with words though. > Satoshi Nakamoto
- tzs 2y ago> I think the entire idea behind cryptocurrencies from the beginning was to have unregulatable currency. The problem with that is with sufficient surveillance and tracking a government could ban the use of non-approved currencies for tangible items, and enforce that ban by random audits where if you can't show that you used approved currencies that you can prove you acquired legally to pay for the tangible things you have you get tossed into jail. As Jean de La Fontaine said in the 17th century, "A person often meets his destiny on the road he took to avoid it".
- piltdownman 2y agoAffords a traceable and immutable prevention to corrupt financial institutions like HSBC further funding the Cartels via laundering of the petro-dollar https://www.reuters.com/article/business/hsbc-became-bank-to-drug-cartels-pays-big-for-lapses-idUSBRE8BA05N/ https://www.reuters.com/article/business/hsbc-became-bank-to...
- notavalleyman 2y agoYour link says that the bank had lax controls in 2008 which allowed bad actors to move money through HSBC. Your link did not say anything about crypto, it didnt imply that HSBC was corrupt, it didn't indicate the cartels were funded by HSBC. All of those additional points were added by your conspiracy imagination
- parineum 2y agoThe HSBC-Cartel laundering thing was a huge deal. It was much more than "lax controls". Op's link might not have the details but you can read more about it here, it's actually pretty nuts. https://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2013/investing-news-for-jan-29-hsbcs-money-laundering-scandal-hbc-scbff-ing-cs-rbs0129.aspx https://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2013/investing-n... >One memorable detail U.S. law enforcement noted was that Mexican drug cartel members employed boxes customized to fit the dimensions of an HSBC Mexico teller window for their daily cash deposits.
- ASalazarMX 2y ago> the bank had lax controls in 2008 which allowed bad actors to move money through HSBC Oh no! If only HSBC had the power to implement tighter controls that wouldn't allow it to receive boatloads of money. Oh well, it's not like they know a lot about money laundering, tax evasion, or handling large sums of money generally. P.D. other comment mentioned that money flow attracts criminals, and I interpret it as criminals working on HSBC, not cartels using their services.
- notavalleyman 2y ago
- nyc_data_geek1 2y agoGuess what happens when fascist regimes target those they deem undesireables? Often, they confiscate their property. Many cryptocurrencies are inalienable, so long as you preserve private access to your seed phrase. Also, how about when your local currency undergoes hyperinflation? Would non-sovereign currency with global consensus based value be of potential use then?
- dartos 2y ago> Often, they confiscate their property. In the real world, you need to exit crypto to realize the value of your holdings. That’s the weak link in the anti-regulation argument. You can’t pay for food or housing in most places with crypto. > Also, how about when your local currency undergoes hyperinflation? Would non-sovereign currency with global consensus based value be of potential use then? How would crypto be immune to this? Most of the extreme large holders of crypto (financial institutions) are also exposed to fiat risk and would likely liquidate their crypto assets in order to keep staff paid and buy the dips in fiat.
- nyc_data_geek1 2y agoYes, you can exit your crypto when you are deported from your local fascist regime. Crypto is immune to this because it's not tied to the value of one sovereign currency, or any particular polity or another. I am not talking about the utility of cryptocurrency to large financial institutions. I am talking about the utility to individuals as their nations gradually become insolvent and austerity fails to placate the robber barons, ultimately leading to currency collapse. Look at the localbitcoins volume data for Argentina, for instance. https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/ARS https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/ARS
- _aavaa_ 2y ago> Many cryptocurrencies are inalienable, so long as you preserve private access to your seed phrase. Your local fascist regime has a very simple and low tech answer: https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
- galleywest200 2y agoI pay for my VPN with it to be semi-anonymous. But my VPN provider also accepts cash so that is always an alternative option. Thats....about it.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoCrypto is for when you have an enemy that is powerful enough tamper with your communications. It's useful in those circumstances, e.g. Chinese journalists posted covid coverage on Ethereum to prevent the CCP from removing it. In the case described in the article, Russia is using it to keep their economy running despite western sanctions. You're not going to find a good use case for it which does not include an adversary as part of the story. But that doesn't mean it's just for criminals. Or maybe it does because this is the sort of adversary that writes laws, but sometimes the criminals are the good guys. For instance, if I wanted to set up a shadow government so that we had something to fall back on when we all stop paying our taxes in protest of the awful things our government is using that money for, it would involve a protcol where amending its constitution means getting the right set of cryptographic signatures together to publish an additional block on the chain that defined the constitution. Locking this sort of thing into a protocol prevents the kind of interference that we saw on Jan 6 2021 because if certification of change is distributed there's nowhere to attack.
- pavlov 2y agoDonald and Melania Trump recently launched crypto coins whose only utility is that buying them is effectively a donation to the token’s creators. This allows foreign entities to give money anonymously to the president and his family, yet with a convenient proof-of-donation side channel (you can just sign a message with the same private key that bought the coins). It’s a novel way to collect billions of dollars in bribes globally. And the president is both immune to prosecution and directly controls the offices that are supposed to enforce laws against this, so there’s no risk.
- freefaler 2y agoIndeed they are... As is the case with any anonymous currency (like USD bills) any transaction that 2 parties find agreeable would be performed. This might be swapping cash for tomatoes from the farm, paying your doctor, a blowjob from a prostitute, a gun from a criminal or drugs from Medelin cartel. When there is a system of transact after approval of the counterparty (like in the banks) you'd find less criminals using it, because of the risk of losing the money and tipping the law enforcement. However, when the rules/law enforcement are bad permissionless transactions are a godsend as cryto usage in Venizuela shows: https://www.americaeconomia.com/en/node/288189 https://www.americaeconomia.com/en/node/288189 Also, when the governments print money and debase the purchasing power crypto is indeed a better store of value than something like argentinian peso. Freedom is messy, because the bad guys are also free to do bad stuff. But when the game is crooked, permissionless transactions are very important.
- latchkey 2y agoMy favorite response to this question that comes up all the time is... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410
- evilsaloon 2y agoAs someone who lived in Russia for a while, I have personal experience with these mini-exchanges. They're the Internet equivalent of those currency exchange stands at airports, I wouldn't call them full crypto exchanges like Binance. They're a pretty interesting phenomenon. Some do KYC, some don't. Some are fully automatic and just need to be "topped up" occasionally, some are fully manual. They usually provide an easy on/offramp to/from crypto, but they usually have high fees and minimum transaction requirements on top of an unfavorable exchange rate. Sites like bestchange exist to aggregate all the different rates and slice a cut from the affiliate revenue. It's nice to see how they work (or don't) from the legal side. In my mind they've always existed in a grey legal area, since some mini-exchanges openly proclaim their registration in e.g. the UK and some just don't say where they're headquartered. They do work, but they've always felt a bit shady, and I've felt anxious using their services. Centralized exchanges are way better in regards to support and have a better exchange rate to boot.
- cwiz 2y agoThey started to appear after Finnish localbitcoins.com went out of business, most are vendors from there.
- r29vzg2 2y agoInteresting conversations happening in the comment sections on that site.
- wil421 2y ago> The analysis also showed nearly all 56 exchanges used services from Cloudflare, a global content delivery network based in San Francisco.
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- xracy 2y agoI will mark this as reason number 521 that Cryptocurrencies are 'bad', and we shouldn't be using them for anything real.