But Bitcoin, BBS stocks, weird instruments that aren't listed anywhere, those you can only sell if you can find a buyer, if there is no buyer (or no buyer at the volume you care about) then the "price" doesn't mean anything at all.
As an anecdote, I didn't buy my monthly bitcoin purchase early this month because I've been (and still am) locked out of my ~5 year old coinbase account I use constantly because they are being required to require new forms of ID and I cannot supply it.
Even if the stupid speculation markets and their off chain antics didn't exist this would be a problem.
This is why I cant stand ignorant crypto-fans.
One important future to avert is where organized crime is rampant. Even if we look at only the economic costs, one study in Italy suggests mafia domination cost 16% of per-capita GDP. Given the US's $20 trillion GDP, that's quite a lot. And that's ignoring people's preference for security and safety. As an entrepreneur, for example, I think it's great that I don't have to worry about paying for "protection" to keep from having my business burned down or my legs broken.
We also have to look at terrorism. KYC/AML work to keep cash out of the hands of terrorists. Terrorism is, moral and human cost aside, very expensive. The 9/11 incident alone sees estimates in the $2-3 trillion range for total economic costs.
So even if KYC/AML really does cost hundreds of billions, which I doubt, it's a bargain compared to the problems it's meant to prevent.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/ecoj.12235
[2] E.g., see https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-world-after-911-part-... and https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011...
You’re making two separate, tenuous extrapolations here. Can you justify them?
The point of my original comment was to point out a couple of things we'd have to include in a cost/benefit analysis of KYC/AML regulation, not to actually do a proper analysis, which I would expect to run to hundreds of carefully researched pages.
It also flatly contradicts the fact that the US didn’t lose 16% of its GDP to mafia activity before KYC laws were introduced.
I stated my point quite clearly at the very beginning of this thread. Did you miss it?
> Unfortunately, your point is shallow and dismissive, rather than engaging substantively.
In what way is requesting evidence for an implausible extrapolation "shallow and dismissive"?
> If you're saying it seems silly to you, an anonymous rando, I can live with that.
Is "anonymous rando" supposed to be an insult of some sort? Is it relevant to the topic in some way, or just a plain ad hominem?
> try asking succinctly and with at least a modicum of respect
I did. You should do likewise.
> Because people generally have better things to do than spoon-feed anonymous jerks.
The only one being a jerk here is you, my friend. Take a deep breath and re-read the thread. And no, requesting evidence rather than accepting your assumptions at face value isn't "spoon-feeding". Frankly, your response (or lack thereof) gives the impression that you've been backed into a corner and have resorted to name-calling and "spoon-feeding" accusations to try to save face.
It's not about the quality of your point. It's about who's worth my time. This is the internet, where I can be in contact with most of the planet. As I explained long ago in my bio here, anonymous people with bad attitudes get less leeway from me. If you want conversation, you have to be worth it.
In addition, when you introduce words like "silly" and "implausible", you are either a) asserting you have a technology that allows you to objectively measure those qualities in discussions, or b) asserting that you have some expertise which makes you a more qualified judge than the person you are talking to. Presuming for a moment that it's the latter case, you're the one who has introduced yourself as the arbiter of all that's right and true. It's within bounds for me to point out that from my perspective you demonstrate no qualities that would make you the expert you are acting like.
You are of course welcome to have any impressions of me you like. Again, the feelings of anonymous randos are not high on my list of concerns. Less so, of course, for the ones who start out a discussion with the assumption I'm a fool.
No tax owing and received some hundreds of dollars in refunds from the IRS.
They even corrected a mistake resulting in an even larger refund (forgot to apply for some program).
All because of increasingly draconious laws for non-filers that conveniently ignore that most Americans abroad aren’t millionaires.
Cost: hundreds of US$, data entry and processing.
Benefit to US: ?????
It means to determine the actual beneficiery of a bank account in addition to traceability of the funds used.
The bloke showing id may not be the actual owner of the funds and it's up to the bank to determine this.
It involves, simplified, reporting requirements of US account holders by foreign banks to the US authorities. It's main purpose is to avoid tax dodging by US persons.
I'm not arguing that it's a great law, since it's not. For example: it can make it extremely hard for US persons living abroad to open a bank account because foreign banks just don't want to bother with those onnerous reporting requirements.
It has nothing, whatsoever, to do with KYC / AML provisions, which are very rightfully imposed on financial instituions. And yes, I work for one.
We don't have any problem with satire and sarcasm as such, but on a large public forum like HN, with everything a mile wide and an inch deep, they are nearly always associated with really low-quality discussion.
Confidence. If enough people think rice bags or pressed and aged tea is money, then it is. At least you can eat rice and drink tea, bank notes or crypto hashes not so much.
No, commodity money typically has a variety of practical functions and its function in an exchange system is born out of necessity. Not arbitrarily because people want to start doing accounting that way. I don't understand why people repeat this. It's not clever or insightful, and worse it's definitely not correct. It's gravely concerning that presumably basically educated people tout this line without a second thought when it comes to cryptocurrency.
Cryptocurrency finds its value purely out of someone hoping someone else will be left holding the bag, not because it's useful.
Financial privacy, especially from the state, is the ultimate form of privacy.
There's a reason we have had bank secrecy [0] a long time before anything like the modern Internet-based privacy movements, with their much more expanded definitions, came along. Heck, some countries based a whole lot of their appeal on the strength of said bank secrecy laws, like Switzerland.
B) Low-level crooks and privacy minded folks are the ones that get caught.
C) Cost of compliance with KYC/AML/ABC is greater than the money recovered.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2018/09/30/the-b...
> In that connection, a senior employee from the correspondent bank in question assessed that out of ten non-resident customers from the Estonian branch, the correspondent bank would be comfortable only with servicing one given the customers’ characteristics. The employee also warned Danske Bank against Moldovan customers and customers transferring money to Moldova.
Criminal organizations just mule the cash to a friendly bank. Then things proceed accordingly and the correspondent banks will blindly play along for years.
The end goal of these things are not what is sold in PR-speak. It is about expanding the surveillance state for TIA purposes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness#/m...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_Information_Awareness
There is a reason they renamed this the "Terrorism Information Awareness" center and then "shut it down". But, of course, other agencies just quietly use the software instead with some superficial changes.
If you think any of these ever really get "shut down" because overreach or the like...yeah. They don't. They just re-named, classified, and better hidden in some intelligence agency's toolbox.
You shouldn't trust the labels on laws.
Low-level crooks getting caught is how higher-level crooks get caught.
> Cost of compliance with KYC/AML/ABC is greater than the money recovered.
Recovering money isn't even the main overt point.
AML is good because it makes it much more difficult for the proceeds of criminal activity to be blended in to the legitimate economy.
And can you explain how the average person is inconvenienced in any way, shape or form by AML / KYC regulations?
Sorry, but your argument, so far, is just libertarian drivel.
Money laundering isn't good; the actions which are termed 'money laundering' in the law are neutral.
> And can you explain how the average person is inconvenienced in any way, shape or form by AML / KYC regulations?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/09/01/police-seiz...
https://www.thestreet.com/story/12793654/1/file-10000-irs-fo...
https://ij.org/michigan-man-cleared-wrongdoing-still-fightin...
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-customs-a...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/instituteforjustice/2018/05/15/...
And on, and on, and on. It's a real problem.
Just a second, in your original post you say:
AML is bad because it makes a crime out of something which isn’t actually bad.
So which is it? You can't have it both ways.
There are three moral valences: good, neutral & evil. ‘Money laundering’ is neither good nor evil, but simply neutral. The things it attempts to hide may be evil, but it itself has no moral value.
That is my whole point: criminalising it makes a crime out of something which is neither good nor evil.
My sense is that KYC hurts individuals who value their privacy and maybe catches some mid-level crooks. The big criminals bypass it without much difficulty. The recent case of Dankse Bank confirmed my opinions about this. Here's a forbes piece: https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2018/09/30/the-b...
If you care about privacy, use cash. Only your income will be reported.
Even though the bitcoin network itself is censorship-resistant clearly you're having issues at the interface with the real world. Doesn't that negate a lot of what made CC attractive in the first place?
The theory is that you wouldn't really need crypto-fiat exchanges because opportunities to earn and spend cryptocurrency directly would turn up everywhere, and eventually crypto would just crowd out fiat because it's all-around better.
Well, turns out nobody really cares about censorship-resistance nearly as much as about getting rich without doing anything for it.
To a certain extent it is up to us to chose what the "real world" will be, and preferring cryptocurrencies over existing objects seems consistent with many contemporary trends and aspirations (decentralized, auditable...).
In reality, a driver license is enough.
Can't, or won't?
Does that count as can’t? How expensive does it have to be before it’s reasonable to call it “can’t”?
I think the bar is lower than the semantics of the word imply. Can’t can mean “theoretically can’t”, but also “it’s unreasonable to do”.
If you live in a country, surely you have some legal status there, which implies some sort of identification, no? How long would I be able to live in London without needing a local ID card?
But actually getting ID, that’s not an EU matter, that’s national. So it’s bound to the UK. Here, after 5 years living here you get to apply for official residency status. 10 years; nationality. But regardless of that you can live here (until Brexit).
So, yes. I’m not making this up. I’m not trying to prove a point out of spite. This is my life, and that of every EU migrant here, that I know.
None of which could be a CB user, if that requirement is enforced.
Why federations in particular?
It's very very likely because of the Bitcoin Cash fork. It has become a pissing contest between Roger Ver (Bitcoin ABC) and Craig Wright (Bitcoin SV). While Craig trolls and threatens the Bitcoin ABC side by "bleeding them dry" in a hash war.
Jihan Wu, founder of Bitmain quoted: “I have no intention to start a hash war with Craig, because if I do, by relocating hash power from BTC mining to BCH mining - BTC price will dump below yearly support; it may even breach $5,000. But since Craig is relentless, I am all in to fight till death!
The war is related to Bitcoin as the price of Bitcoin tanks because in a hashing war, both sides are likely to rent hash from the Bitcoin mining pool. This is being settled in Bitcoin, sold on the market to cover electricity, and thus suppressing the price of Bitcoin.
Since Craig is trolling around, threatening a price of $1,000 per Bitcoin in a full out hash war, people are selling before it gets even more ugly.
Another downside which reinforces the price suppression is for Proof-of-Work systems (where miners are rewarded based on their computing power), there's an unfortunate feedback loop in price drops. As said by Colin, founder of Nano currency, Low price -> low mining rewards -> turn off some miners to lower cost -> lower hash rate -> longer transaction confirmation -> lower price.
More details can be found in my Quora answer about this.
The theory of Bitcoin was basically "money without people". You wouldn't have to worry about governments and politics; value would be sent and stored in pure pieces of math. Mere governments couldn't possibly do as well as the glorious algorithms wisely fixed in advance by, etc, etc.
But if you're right, Bitcoin has way more politics than a third-world kleptocracy. And it clearly lacks the institutions and formal procedures used to shape those kinds of political currents into useful effects on the currency and the economy.
Bitcoin, in a world where it is the sole currency, has the benefits you quoted.
If Bitcoin doesn't work in the real world, that's a problem of Bitcoin.
> Bitcoin, in a world where it is the sole currency, has the benefits you quoted.
If Bitcoin doesn't offer sufficient benefits in the real world as it is without being the sole currency in the world, there's no plausible route to it becoming the sole currency.
“My clever idea is great if everyone wakes up one day and abandons all other alternatives for it, but not otherwise” is a long winded way of saying “my idea sucks”.
Adoption/revolution.
Kind of like how nations compete and in the process to drag everyone else down: Like US and China trade war.
The current financial system faces such battle-ordeals and isn't immune, remember the Black Wednesday.
Doesn't it? What changes if you take out the fiat intermediary and buy energy (a fungible, near-universal production input and end-consumer product in one) directly and the competition is about a commodity that is not a currency?
Long story short, the American regulator has determined that the 2017 hype-fuelled ICOs were unregistered security sales (just like everyone said they are, but ICO promoters pretended to hand-wave away by mumbling something about utility tokens). They've fined an initial wave of ICOs to the tune of $250k and mandatory refunds to all who bought tokens in the ICO.
The catch here is that the refunds must be paid in USD, but the ICOs mostly raised in cryptos. If you did an ICO in December 2017 and raised $10M worth of cryptos but never cashed out any of it, your treasury is now perhaps worth only $2M, yet you're liable for $10M USD refunds. Any ICO administrator within reach of American regulators ought to be cashing out while they can...
Anyone who ICO'd in early 2017 (including big names like tezos and filecoin) have enough USD value of btc and eth to comply with the SEC and still have 9 figures left. It's a good time to take profit if you did that, get off the hook and still be incredibly cash wealthy.
That would also explain why ripple is still stable, not as many icos hold xrp as btc and eth
The contentious fork has been very disruptive, causing BCH trading to be halted and lowering trading volume across the board. At the same time you have a huge redeployment in mining resources, up to 4exa on the Bitcoin.com pool alone pointed to BCH to defend vs a BSV takeover attempt (along with threats of 51% attacks and long range re-.org attacks) - up to 30% of SHA-256 mining power was pulled, mining at 100-200% less profitability of BTC, which also would have had some pretty big effects on the market (potentially parties dumping BTC to fund hashrate, potentially other miner related effects).
This sort of shakiness/distraction/fud drives the whole market down, which drives more selloffs, which drives articles and discussion like this, repeat.
Now that this seems to be largely over (and exchanges are opening BCH/BSV back up) you’re actually seeing a bit of a price/volume bump after this cratering, although I think people will be skittish for a while. I think it’s right to be skeptical - the people that are building real things will keep doing so, largely under the radar, and the markets will do as the markets will.
No, it's not.
The distribution of coins is affected in the short term by the actions of miners; it has periodic difficulty adjustments to intended to target a fixed long-term rate, but it is not a fixed schedule.
Each fork is dividing the value of your holdings, and most people don't have enough information to know what to do about it. Initially, they might be happy they doubled their holdings, but when the sum value of the forks don't add up to the pre-fork value, then people will eventually feel like they are getting scammed and exit.
This has been obvious to everyone paying attention for a long time, but most people in this market are there because they don't pay attention.
A more telling question is how it has held any value at all for as long as it has. There was a period where BTC's rise was rationalized via its promise to become the currency of the future. Does anyone actually believe that now, though? BTC instead has become nothing more than a speculation vehicle built on a foundation of absolutely nothing. No rational analysis sees it being the basis of really anything at all, and that mad rush has seen an outrageously inefficient system put in play. It wouldn't be bad if it were actually the basis of meaningful purpose, but instead GWs and GWs are going to effectively nothing.
I suspect at some point a psychological threshold is going to be hit and BTC is going to plummet through the floor. A lot of very specialized hardware is going to derelict.
As an aside, many of the comments in this discussion, and the moderation of the same, is indicative of how profoundly irrational people can become when they have skin in a game. If I held BTC I'd probably be trying to rationalize why it should be worth something, against all rational analysis.
That said one guess on a trigger for the most recent sell off was that Bitcoin Cash, a fork of "reference" Bitcoin, forked in a bigly hostile way, resulting in two new Bitcoin Cash chains (Bitcoin Cash ABC and Bitcoin Cash SV - for satoshi vision lol) each now with its hash power majority controlled by one group e.g. highly centralized. The market is confronting the possibility that proof of work -- the most widely used consensus mechanism -- is way more centralized than it thought, and way more subject to value destruction from a tiny % of people.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-20/bitcoin-r...
> As Bitcoin plunges, the U.S. Justice Department is investigating whether last year’s epic rally was fueled in part by manipulation, with traders driving it up with Tether -- a popular but controversial digital token.
> While federal prosecutors opened a broad criminal probe into cryptocurrencies months ago, they’ve recently homed in on suspicions that a tangled web involving Bitcoin, Tether and crypto exchange Bitfinex might have been used to illegally move prices, said three people familiar with the matter.
I can't speak of other coins as they are a very different market (and I'm a Bitcoin maximalist).
About the downside: I hope using coal as an energy source will be shut down ASAP. Bitcoin protocol would easily work with only sustainable energy sources, but it doesn't work without the security of proof of work (all other algorithms for decentralized concensus so far decrease security of the protocol).
Luckily China already took some steps to close down the most polluting Bitcoin miners.
When it hit 18k-20k last december it was absolutely nuts. Bitcoin is not there: it has no mainstream product market fit. Its pretty useless. And it hasn't been fulfilling its expectations of not being so.
Moving dirty money, or escaping capital controls is great, but still a very limited use case. Its really impractical to do any mundane thing. I.e. replacing credit cards and buying your coffee would be a massive human landmark event. But its not close to that, and there's no clear path to that.
So why would you spend 6k to hold this piece of land today, when that buys you a 3% secure yield or a many other investments with greater returns.
"Here we show that projected Bitcoin usage, should it follow the rate of adoption of other broadly adopted technologies"
There are several startups that have made progress but not enough progress that the value of their token has increased through network effect. The Brave browser has 5MM MAU. There is still a lot of development to be done to whitelist ads and pay users for their attention. It's a good start though.
Other startups are starting to realize that on boarding new users with Meta Mask doesn't work. The users unfamiliar with cryptocurrency exit the funnel early because installing a plugin and depositing money makes the experience much more difficult. This is the case with FunFair currently.
Increased adoption probably won't happen until 2022. Because these assets are liquid it's likely we'll see an even bigger drop until then.
It has no inherent value, is a poor currency substitute, it is a poor store of value, and is on a long term trajectory to zero. People are realizing this and liquidating large/low basis cost positions.
I think you might have a typo, I believe it would be btcabc:
One could probably write pages on the topic, but here's my one sentence summary: reality didn't match the hype, and markets are coming to that realization. Corollary: hype-driven price goes up much more slowly than reality-driven drops.
Simplistic though it might be, it's the reason for most big drops in equities markets. That biotech that might be on to a cure for prostate cancer? Up and up she goes...until the FDA trial says it doesn't work. New battery tech company says they'll have batteries that can drive you SF->NY and a full charge takes 30 seconds! Buy, buy! Oh, BTW, the batteries will cost $10K/kWh. <effect: dying_PacMan_sound/> New way of paying for things that will eliminate cash, and all the geeky kids are into it? Those nerds know what they're doing, right? 'cuz I sure don't, and I don't want to miss out! Oh, all I can buy are illegal drugs of unknown quality, and I can lose all of my money if I forget my password or make one tiny mistake and the hackers get it? I bought in at $19.5K, why isn't it still going up? Be glad it's only down to $4500.
It has to decline, I was giving it 2-5 yeas, but it seems it dropped much faster: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15760415
As for the faster than usual now, my guess is few things. Main contribution is NVidia that had their earnings report, they told the planet flat out gpus aren't selling as well, so the gig that everybody is increasingly mining was called up. Normal people check out, traders can't trade if they can't short it and it's starts going downhill. So anybody that's in the business of not losing money stops the bots. But nvidia the most visible thing that creates sentiment among the crypto-evangelist population it seems.
The other reasons wound be, end of a 40 year bull run across western democracies, end of the minor cycle economy run, add to that a trade war, QT, people overexposed on the houses with HELOCs and stuff from that QT, and everybody will be pulling cash from everywhere since cash will matter fairly soon.
The rest is standard, stock market drop by 20% or much more, asset bubble deflation, etc etc. It's all fairly cyclical.
You've got cause / effect backwards. The slide started on Nov 13th, while NVidia's earnings report is Nov 15th.
The NVidia thing was my first hypothesis too. But it doesn't seem to hold up to scrutiny.
So... you know absolutely nothing about Bitcoin, do you?
There is zero connection between Bitcoin and GPUs, except maybe indirectly via other cryptocurrencies, but then those would show the effect stronger.
This is so unreasonable for a piece of data which was worth $0.1 a decade ago and is easily cloneable (trivially if not for network effects and integration)
Huge influxes of Tether: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/13/technology/bitcoin-price-...
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/vti
Tech stocks aren’t the whole market.
Were you alive in 2008?
Uh, what? An index stock mirrors, as closely as possible, the market it's indexing. If the market goes down 1.5% - which is extremely common - so will VOO.
https://thumbor.forbes.com/thumbor/960x0/https%3A%2F%2Fblogs...
Per this chart, almost 20% of Dow trading days fall in the 1-2% change range.
Any time something loses 75% of it's value (and still dropping) and you say, "what crash?", you're not fooling anyone but yourself. Even if you got into bitcoin on day one.
An individual's stocks being up during a recession doesn't mean there's no recession, does it?
("Lexiphanicism" does not refer to a person, but to their use of language.)
Since Bitcoin was always leading the charts, in my opinion the whole market had to crash, and out of that it will show which ones offer true value.
You shoudn't focus too much on price, but mainly focus on applicability and adoption/use.
Most doctors here only offered cash payments, but nowadays a lot of them offer smartphone payments. They lose 6 cent on every transaction.
Imagine a world where I can pay instantly, worldwide with a single currency, 0 fees. The technology is already here, the adoption not (yet ;).
We have email, which is basically instant, free and worldwide. Why can't we have the same for payments? Only time will tell if such a major shift can happen.
Its really a reflection on the doomed state of the mainstream crypto mindset to only really care about getting rich quick in fiat off cryptocurrency bubbles. Bitcoin doesn't matter as a currency, it matters as a pyramid scheme. The people investing in it for personal financial gain dramatically outpace those trying to use it to overthrow fiat hegemony.
There have been coins like peercoin and Steem that have in small regards or parts tried to push the adoption envelope as a usable exchange medium over the pyramid scheme, but they are few and far between and their general unpopularity really shines a light on where the scenes true values lie.
What's the opportunity cost of adopting a completely new payment system versus losing 6 cents on an already very expensive transaction?
We're getting there, but we're doing it in the mainstream space, not the cryptocurrency space. Within and between an increasing number of countries and groups of countries, this is becoming possible.
But between banks, not with distributed wastes of power like Bitcoin.
Ever had a free email account compromised? Good luck. Not to mention email isn't free. Someone is paying for it and making money from it. Even if that is concealed behind several layers that aren't obvious to most users.
Being a cryptocurrency-skeptic I won't pretend that I don't experience a little bit of schadenfreude when I see CC crash, however if I'm trying to be a bit more constructive I suppose that means that we're nearing the "make or break" point: if the huge investment in cryptocurrency-related technologies over the past four years or so manages to produce something actually useful over the next year I have no doubt that this is only a temporary set-back and we'll see BTC (or some other coin) breach $20k again.
On the other hand if, like I believe, it's mostly scams, empty promises and poor understanding of technology and/or economy, then this might be the beginning of the end. Hype can only sustain a $100 billion market cap for so long. That being said I wouldn't be the first Pythia to erroneously predict the downfall of cryptocurrencies...