grandalf

40 ms·

301.
by grandalf 9y ago
https://www.irs.gov/uac/overview-money-laundering
302.
by grandalf 9y ago
After decades of Federal policy to encourage investment in housing, the consequences are getting harder and harder to ignore, yet the blind faith in these sorts of paternalistic policies remains unabated. The many tax breaks and loopholes f
303.
by grandalf 9y ago
Money "laundering" is used to hide transactions from view so that the parties involved in the transaction can avoid scrutiny or legal consequences for their actions. The DoD accounting scandal is an example of the US Government ef
304.
by grandalf 9y ago
> cryptocurrency's primary raison d'être I don't think this is accurate. Let's talk about intermediaries: I buy a shirt online using cryptocurrency. The merchant teams up with an intermediary to ship it to me. I buy a
305.
by grandalf 9y ago
I look at it like a company is a group of predator birds who happen all to be flying together in formation for a while. Individuals temporarily have self-interest that aligns beautifully and lends itself to pattern flying. Individual incen
306.
by grandalf 9y ago
> much of the "liquidity" created by high frequency trading is fake Are you referring to the strategy of placing and canceling limit orders that were never intended to clear? I think it's just a matter of your definition o
307.
by grandalf 9y ago
You'd have to use one of the cryptocurrency desks (dark pools), and it would probably take place the same day or the next day.
308.
by grandalf 9y ago
> Does that argument still hold up if you're going to have human insurance and human arbitration? I think it does. You don't need human arbitration, but there are so many cases where having it makes people more likely to tra
309.
by grandalf 9y ago
I think blockchain-based proof of solvency is one of the most compelling use cases of cryptocurrency, fwiw. Your argument is valid, but consider that most contracts execute very quickly and so the scope of the insurance is quite limited. F
310.
by grandalf 9y ago
If money laundering is illegal, and the owner of a BTC address sends money to a mixer, it's pretty easy for law enforcement to identify the person involved in money laundering. If a person isn't linked to KYC in any way and the co
311.
by grandalf 9y ago
> it is called a contract. Think about what puts contracts at risk. - enforceability. If your neighbor borrows your car and agrees to pay you $20 but never does, you are screwed. With Ethereum the smart contract could lock the door to t
312.
by grandalf 9y ago
These are valid and clearly articulated points. I do not disagree. I would simply point out the following: You point out the non-trivial nature of building a system like we have today. I'd argue that Ethereum, with smart contracts and
313.
by grandalf 9y ago
I think your confusion is that you think the immutability mechanism is a flaw. Addressing the fraud should be done via insurance, since otherwise we need to trust yet another party to be sure transactions can't be mutated/rever
314.
by grandalf 9y ago
Exactly. Also, the cost of bad regulation is not just in the aftermath... it's mostly in the period leading up to the crash when so many billions of dollars were invested in the wrong stuff. The great thing about the modern economy is
315.
by grandalf 9y ago
Proof of work allows participants to trust the ledger in a way that is enforced by cryptography, not by law. This creates a powerful deterrent for certain kinds of fraud and abuse. I agree that waste-heat-generating proof of work is ineffi
316.
by grandalf 9y ago
Very Interesting. I will read those links. What if Ethereum offered a non-turning-complete subset of Solidity (that included formal verification) which could optionally be used in smart contracts. Would this cause you to view the platform d
317.
by grandalf 9y ago
> I think the point is that if mutability and trusted third party oversight is actually usually a necessary and desired fraud prevention feature in a payments system, there's probably not huge demand to replicate all that using bloc
318.
by grandalf 9y ago
> but pretty clearly trying to use insurance on the platform to insure against risk that are in some sense endemic to the platform seems quite misguided Absolutely, the risk posed by a malfunctioning VM is a systemic risk that applies to
319.
by grandalf 9y ago
> because a fundamental problem in Solidity Problems in Solidity are a systemic risk faced by all contracts and are thus not something that can be hedged within the system. Correspondingly, fixes to VM bugs are the sort of thing that the
320.
by grandalf 9y ago
> It is possible to have trusted contracts, iff their logic is (mathematically) proven. Suppose a non-Turing-complete language were used instead. Now, imagine a contract that is highly complex. If a layperson decides to trust that cont
321.
by grandalf 9y ago
These are good points. What if the default behavior of a contract was to reset the world to its previous state if the program does not terminate within 30 seconds? Arguably unclear termination semantics would be a good reason not to trust
322.
by grandalf 9y ago
> Chargebacks are a blessing when you need them and a curse when you receive them, but something that the economy has deemed a necessary evil mostly because there are a lot of fraudsters in the world This is an excellent point, and I thi
323.
by grandalf 9y ago
Right. It will take time, but eventually Solidity (or some other alternative smart contracts approach) will likely be very trustworthy and secure.
324.
by grandalf 9y ago
> Which would make such contracts significantly more expensive than regular contracts that are reversible by trusted intermediaries and legal authorities. You assert this but don't offer proof. The cost of fraud is baked into all a
325.
by grandalf 9y ago
Hah I am not sure if you are joking. > The crypto currency space is currently so fraught with fraud and crime The lack of KYC requirements has led to some criminals using cryptocurrencies, but BTC is fully public and so money laundering,
326.
by grandalf 9y ago
There is money to be made providing vetting services as well as insurance services. You could argue that all parties offering either of those services are 100% going to be fraudulent, but this only makes sense if you assume that there is m
327.
by grandalf 9y ago
I use the term unpredictable behavior simply to describe a case where the contract has behavior that was not fully anticipated by at leat one user of the contract. Of course, the code is deterministic and so the behavior was unambiguously d
328.
by grandalf 9y ago
> Why not just use a traditional financial institution then? Insurance via smart contracts is still far simpler and more efficient to implement than in meatspace. Consider things like insurer solvency risk and the way that meatspace regu
329.
by grandalf 9y ago
Various insurance contracts could be applied redundantly and/or recursively, and of course over time the real-world characteristics ought to become known and the price of insurance for well understood contracts should approach free.
330.
by grandalf 9y ago
> Transferring "value" for goods and services is really more of a social problem than a scientific/engineering one Do you mean on the margin where there is debate about the contract or whether the goods/services were

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