SubG posted:

the dollar going "fully digital" is good news for bitcoin because these days physical dollars are only ever used for tipping, drug deals, gambling, and evading currency controls, and so eliminating physical dollars eliminates competition in all of bitcoin's use cases

Cryptoracle posted:

gently caress, you're so close to getting it. The debt valuation inversion you've just described will prove fatal for capitalism.

Read this book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt:_The_First_5000_Years

Main Paineframe posted:

according to the article, it was the same folks, and it wasn't even a distance thing. turns out all their principles and freedoms didn't mean jack poo poo when the Thai government decided they didn't want a libertarian commune anywhere near their coast and sent the navy to support it

being in no country's territory, flying no country's flag, and following no country's laws means no country is gonna intervene to protect you if the neighbors decide to pick a fight

but the whole point of the seasteading concept is to use international waters as One Weird Trick To Evade Government Control. if you're gonna create a libertarian community that has local government approval and follows local laws, might as well just put it on land, rather than bother with all the troubles involved in permanent offshore habitation

Blotto_Otter posted:

Matt Levine of Bloomberg's Money Stuff has some thoughts on the Coinbase thing, and after reading it I've got some more thoughts on just how many ways in which Coinbase is being dumb and bad:

1) Levine points out that the lending program itself counts as an investment contract and thus a security, independent of the type of assets that the users will lend under the program. But...

2) Levine actually explains the lending program incorrectly. He seems to think users invest bitcoins (not a security, probably), but they would actually invest USDC (an unregistered illegal security offering, probably), per Coinbase's statement. So Levine is correctly identifying one problem (the lending program constitutes an investment contract and thus a security), but he's missing a second problem: Coinbase is soliciting investments by swapping them for unregistered securities issued by a Coinbase affiliate. So now I'm curious - is the SEC focusing on the lending program alone, or are they looking at the lending program and USDC?

3) He also points out that if the lending program isn't ruled an investment contract/security, then it's must be thought of as a interest-bearing deposit account - but then they intend to avoid banking regulations by accepting USDC instead of USD. How can the regulators let that stand? What the hell is Coinbase thinking here, can they really expect the financial regulators to allow them to play this hide-the-dollars shell game, did they think the feds would just throw their hands up in bewilderment and say "welp you got us, you found the one weird trick to escape securities and banking regs!"

Blotto_Otter posted:

This "bitcoin" business is getting so ridiculous lately that even the traditionally-obtuse New York Times is running (good!) op-eds about how ridiculous it is

https://twitter.com/BCAppelbaum/status/1437773005430697993

They've gotten a few such reports this year, but they're worthless (by design) at answering any of the critical questions. Even if we assume the accounting firm that did them is acting in good faith (which is a not-insignificant assumption, since it's a small shop out of the Caymans), the report is limited in scope and written in such a way that it doesn't prove anything at all to a reasonable standard. Those reports are just the accounting firm saying "they showed us some documents saying they had adequate reserves and those documents do indeed say that, but we didn't investigate the source of the assets or look for any debts they have, and we didn't test the existence or the valuation of those assets either. Also we are going to point out their stated accounting policies so that the observant folks reading this are aware that their accounting policies are weird and nonstandard and allow for big problems in how they're measuring the value of those assets."

This is my assumption too, and I became more convinced of this after reading those reserves reports. Those reports are written in a very specific way, which is exactly how I would write them if I was trying not to lie while also desperately trying to avoid making it explicit that I had simply been handing out Tethers to exchanges in return for IOUs.

Yes, this is most exchanges not named Coinbase or Kraken, because most of them can't even get bank accounts due to their unwillingness to follow know-your-customer and anti-money laundering (KYC/AML) banking regulations. Exchanges like Binance and Bitfinex can't keep USD bank accounts, so they need USDTs in order to facilitate trades on their exchange in "USD". Tether themselves had the same problem (they kept running from bank to bank as each bank they opened accounts with closed them down after the realized what Tether was doing), until they supposedly acquired a controlling interest in a bank in the Bahamas a few years back.

The entire reason for USDT's existence is to evade KYC/AML regulations. The exchanges need Tether because they're frozen out of the traditional banking system and need a wildcat bank to issue them fake-dollars that will let them pretend that they're still doing business in "dollars". This is why folks should be wary of getting drawn into bad-faith arguments over Tether's reserves - it doesn't even matter whether their reserves are good or bad, that's besides the point.

Blotto_Otter posted:

White-collar criminal prosecutions move at a snail's pace, if they even move at all, unless people actually get hit in the wallet - and big numbers of people aren't actually going to get hit in the wallet until the scheme implodes.

Jurisdiction over USDT/Tether is fuzzy: they claim they operate outside of the United States and don't have any American customers. (Which is a lie, and New York State went after them because they did business in NY - but they have less power than the feds and found it easier to settle with Tether after Tether agreed not to touch New York citizens ever.) Cryptocurrencies and related tokens are still somewhat new and there's been a lot of ink and pixels spilled by people trying to declare that they're not commodities or securities and thus the feds should leave them alone. (Which is bullshit in Tether's case, I think it's substantively a digital bearer bond being publicly traded on unregistered exchanges). So the SEC or CFTC or any other agency is gonna have to put some effort into arguing that these are in their purview, and mustering up that effort is a slow process in normal times unless someone's been seriously hurt already. Also, these aren't normal times - we're fresh off a 4-year run where the federal government was run by the type of people who are more likely to run their own crypto scam than to push the money-cops to put the brakes on crypto scams.

kw0134 posted:

reminder that Theranos was founded in 2003, was exposed as fraud in 2015, and only now in 2021 is going to trial. and people were questioning the "tech" behind Theranos from the start.

Blotto_Otter posted:

So the head of the SEC testified before Congress today on the topics of cryptocurrencies and stablecoins. The senator from PA, a cryptocurrency fan, offered up the crypto industry's attempt to finesse this:

https://twitter.com/jeffjohnroberts/status/1437788617078939651
i anal but I think Toomey here is wrongly implying that all stablecoins are the same, and grossly oversimplifying how we should analyze certain stablecoins under the Howey test, and gliding past all of the other issues that remain even if a given stablecoin isn't a security under the Howey test (is it a derivative that should be regulated by the CFTC? is it functionally a deposit account that should be subject to banking regulations?)

Seems like the SEC chair might have similar thoughts:
https://twitter.com/jeffjohnroberts/status/1437788990992683019
https://twitter.com/jeffjohnroberts/status/1437800351579652103
https://twitter.com/jeffjohnroberts/status/1437802503031201795

While this is all moving painfully slowly, it is nice to see that the feds are getting skeptical of the Schrodinger's dollars scam that Circle and Tether are running

Computer Serf posted:

helium is using LORAWAN and licensing their "hotspot miners" to "hardware" companies that sell $300 raspberry pis

if you try to ask who the target user of the helium network is you’ll get answers like iot, rental scooters, farmers paying to use sensors, and scientists who all would definitely have access to cheaper devices and free/cheap data but someone apparently is setting a price floor for all the helium tokens

a16z is a venture capital firm that’s basically pumping money into a bunch of these crypto schemes

https://youtube.com/watch?v=kv1EKsxDrdQ

FAUXTON posted:

iirc the original explanation was that he wanted to buy model trains from japan without the currency conversion though, I only assumed there was some underlying "I need to make a database for my trains but it needs to be real secret so people can't mess with it" thinking beforehand because blockchain poo poo always comes off like it's basically a rolodex but complicated for no reason.

gschmidl posted:

Grace Baiting posted:

https://twitter.com/business/status/1441343293858611201 -3.47%, not great, not terrible

https://twitter.com/KoruKinshi/status/1441333239616970760

EorayMel posted:

Bitcoin is a P2P currency that could topple governments, destabilize economies and create uncontrollable global bazaars for contraband. (...) After month of research and discovery, we've learned the following:
1. Bitcoin is a technologically sound project.
2. Bitcoin is unstoppable without end-user prosecution.
3. Bitcoin is the most dangerous open-source project ever created.
4. Bitcoin may be the most dangerous technological project since the internet itself.
5. Bitcoin is a political statement by technotarians (technological libertarians).*
6. Bitcoins will change the world unless governments ban them with harsh penalties.

Boxturret posted:

possibly real bitcoiner in gibbis?

Alan Smithee posted:

https://twitter.com/Lexialex/status/1450918775549616128?s=20

streetlamp posted:

https://twitter.com/op450099/status/1457113883513085958?s=21

knox_harrington posted:

My brother is an IP/media lawyer and told me yesterday his company is positioning him as their crypto/NFT expert, and apparently something specifically to do with CumRocket.

I did immediately share with him that the key phrase is "it can't possibly be that stupid, you must have explained it wrong"

I suppose profiting out of people doing dumb crypto stuff by writing their contracts is less bad than actually getting involved in crypto, but I will be keeping a close eye out for any pooptouching

gschmidl posted:

https://twitter.com/jkass99/status/1462859405859307520

Shifty Pony posted:

and people don't do that because one of the responsibilities of a bartender is to cut off drunks.

the payment isn't the problem. there's nothing for Bitcoin to solve here, or anywhere really.

Sombrerotron posted:

anyway does anyone have any idea what the legal concept is behind buying this episode? i went to the bit.ly link and it told me nothing except that somehow at the time of writing it has 211 owners. are you supposed to be entitled to a cut of whatever revenue it might make, or be able to decide in any way on how this IP is used, or is it simply another case of "idiot people are expected to be willing to pay massive amounts of money for this for no remotely sensible reason whatsoever, so you'd better get in on it right now if you want to get rich"?

Paladinus posted:

Apparently, just for 25K dollars, you can get your NFT scam promoted by Soulja Boy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryEQhaRQ6V4

SubG posted:

of course you want to pay for your bitcoin pizza with worthless fiat. remember that guy laszlo who paid 10k btc for a pizza? if he'd held onto those bitcoins, today they'd be worth nearly half a billion dollars to whoever ended up stealing his wallet

infernal machines posted:

well, good luck with that. let us know how it goes

Blotto_Otter posted:

rrrrrrreally curious to know what OP's W-2 looks like in a month and a half, if they live in the US. not putting it on there would be obvious tax evasion, but putting in on there is gonna be a PITA and piss off a bunch of employees, so, either way it should be entertaining

epitaph posted:

https://twitter.com/DoesItPlay1/status/1472517736722960388

the “everything’s a ponzi scheme” era is upon us

Erenthal posted:

nothing better than seeing these rotten corpses of business long since faded into history try to claw their way into some sort of twisted come back based on this god awful pyramid scheme construction, just to join this doomed fellowship of the nonces

Shame Boy posted:

found this to post in the bubel thread originally but y'all should know that proof of steak is coming soon as of 2018

https://twitter.com/CowCoinCrypto/status/1031325991958970368

Luigi Thirty posted:

crypto is at it again folks, complete with 100% real definitely not made up ceo in europe

https://twitter.com/dhm/status/1472958413009268738

https://defector.com/what-the-hell-is-this-company-the-76ers-just-partnered-with/

EorayMel posted:

Greatest ever. Thank you lawd jesus for giving us this story with accompanying pictures. Roo - were you ever planning on skinning a pig in Hawaii, because if not - that's a major life changing thing!

6 shots though SM? Really?

EorayMel posted:

Sorry nothing.