For those who can read long books, see Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_We_Live_Now
The 2001 television version was also excellent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_We_Live_Now_(2001_TV_s... , and only four episodes, instead of 100 chapters.
I would rather see people be more scrutinizing when giving their money to others. It doesn’t matter if there are rules and regulations, people are always going to be duped. When I read about FTX I just think that people need to be better educated.
Maybe one could argue that the rules and regulations are specific to providing consumers with tools to make educated decisions about financial investments.
"I just wish everyone is better" is never a solution for anything that has mass appeal/is used by the general public. You can't ever depend that individual actions will solve a systemic issue, it's not realistic.
I don’t buy it, there are a ton of examples where not only does the gov get it wrong but also have the opposite effect of what they were trying to achieve. Good intentions is not realistic.
The systemic issue is education.
It may have, in a way.
It's too early to tell, but it's possible that FTX's USA-based corporation ("FTX US") is still solvent. I believe it's the Bahamas-based entity that's in bankruptcy - the one that's in an offshore haven not subject to US regulations.
The only difference is that the bank-analogs do not get to face era-appropriate "frontier justice", but instead get to hide under the skirts of 20th century bankruptcy laws.
Just want to remind ppl to not put them in the same bucket.
Unfortunately, people leave tons of money on exchanges, for long periods of time. That's the problem. That's what the majority of exchange users are doing.
All of these problems are solvable with ludicrous levels of complication and confusion, and the average person doesn't even realize they need to take these sorts of measures until they've irrecoverably lost everything.
Don't you think that maybe people should start becoming more educated about how our economy runs? Or what protects their assets?
Don't you think someone with millions of dollars to lose should take some responsibility and become informed about how to protect them?
The information is available to those who are interested or want to further that area of human expertise, but the collective knowledge of humanity is too great for all of us to know everything. That's why we pay (mostly) regulated experts to handle these things for us.
(2) Having a general idea of many areas in life is important for a functioning society and becoming a healthy human being.
I really dislike this narrative that we must not think for ourselves. Always delegate. Always leave it to the experts. I see the same anti-intellectual sentiment in programming communities.
- Don't write assembly, compilers are smarter than you.
- Don't think about building your own networking stack. It's too complicated.
- Don't write your own OS. Do you think you can outperform Linux? Lol
I really just think that if someone thinks an institution might disappear with their money they won't use the institution. If the alternative is too much of a hassle, or also seems like it could lead to loses then people will just not use crypto.
In medieval times, if you "declare bankruptcy" your family and dependents get sold into slavery and your wife is sold off to the highest bidder who will buy your debt.
In many previous times, if you couldn't pay debts you'd just be killed.
What I found was actually weirder:
> In medieval Italy and southern France, it was common for the cedens to stand nude but for his shirt and strike a stone with his posterior ('vituperii lapis') while declaring 'cedo bonis'." The patent purpose of this ceremony was as much to satisfy the anger and frustration of creditors as to publicize the debtor's bankruptcy.
The promise of DeFi has a higher barrier of entry for those unfamiliar with the technicalities of interacting with decentralized systems, but they generally have more transparency in management of funds than crypto-centric businesses. All code running on the blockchain can be audited and so can the funds held within smart contracts. There are plenty of valid criticisms that can be made of various cryptocurrencies with those models of on-chain finance (and even with the value of cryptocurrencies themselves), but criticism of cryptocurrencies deriving from bad businesses that manage them shouldn't be one of them in my opinion.
Like dollars under my mattress? Sure, self-custody can be useful sometimes. But (almost) anyone with substantial quantities of "tokens of value" generally appreciates that delegating custody of them to a (regulated and insured) institution provides a lot of both convenience and protection that's difficult to replicate with "self-custody".
Crypto crises like these are in general due to regulation not having caught up yet, not because companies that involve crypto are inherently un-regulatable. Crypto is speed-running banking regulation over again. It's an ugly process, but the end result will be crypto institutions that are strictly regulated like banks (and/or existing banks will start to handle crypto just like they do any other foreign currency balance).
As for the current state of things, FTX is (was) a Bahamas company not subject to the financial oversight of the general western world. The public would generally hesitate to wire large amounts of money off to some company in the Bahamas, but when it's crypto, people don't think twice about it for some reason. After the FTX blow-up, perhaps more people will. It's hard to prevent people from wiring money off to a company in some other country that has much looser financial regulations, but that's not a crypto problem, it's a financial education problem.
Literally, the first sentence in the Bitcoin whitepaper (which arguably kicked off 'crypto' as a thing) is "A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution".
[https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf]
I mean, seriously?
The US has shown they can effectively enforce AML/KYC requirements across the vast majority of exchanges and businesses. Any exchange the average person tries to use to buy crypto will request your ID to do any meaningful transaction.
Granted, there are exchanges you can use a VPN and access without KYC, and while it is difficult to manage billions of dollars in the dark, it's certainly possible. But they can regulate the vast majority that any regular user will find, and have shown they're willing to OFAC others.
No one needs a pile of paperwork to prove to the gov’t who they are to spend or get paid cash.
No one needs to be on a list, and have their every transaction double checked to make sure it’s with a validated counterparty to pay in or get paid cash.
Etc.
At that point, it’s literally cheaper, easier, and safer to just use a normal bank.
Which is I guess the point.
It's not about pleading to these entities that they are "doing it wrong". They know this, because this is their way to control it / oppose "doing it right".
To be clear there's different types of regulations, some we/I personally agree with more than others.
Personally, I agree with you that kyc/aml laws are over the top. I think privacy and money laundering are two things people often conflate, and that privacy is something we should want. (Side tangent - the majority of crypto was not really designed for anonymity or privacy, although that's a whole different topic). People claiming "crypto is just for money laundering" as a reason it's bad should be applying the same logic to physical cash.
What I'm particularly interested in is regulations around the big exchanges to prevent them from putting all of their clients money somewhere stupid, losing it all, and go illiquid.
> At that point, it’s literally cheaper, easier, and safer to just use a normal bank.
I mean yes, an FDIC insured bank is absolutely safer than an unregulated crypto exchange. This is the exact reason why the phrase "not your keys, not your coins" exists, and why everyone says you shouldn't keep your keys on an exchange. Done properly, a crypto wallet should be safer than a bank provided you can assure physical safety and redundancy of your keys.
Part of the problem IMO is that crypto became this "get rich quick" thing - with "exchanges" advertising double digit returns, people using NFTs for art for some reason, etc. I think the technology has uses, but this "get rich quick" bs has been a massive hinderance. I really think this "the point of crypto is to make money" mentality is missing the actual use of it.
tl;dr - a properly used crypto wallet should be safer then a FDIC bank, an FDIC bank is faaar safer then a crypto exchange, there could be more regulation on just the exchanges, and aml/kyc laws are a seperate type of regulation - I was just using these as an example of the US government successfully regulating exchanges.
It’s a lot easier to make a lot of money if you steal it, or play games. Most of those are already illegal, no regulators required.
Regulation can help of course, if someone actually comes by and checks that nothing illegal going on. but the type of regulation that comes along with ‘have a reliable audit of what you’ve got every night, or else’ also tends to include ‘and make sure you don’t do business with drug lords and human traffickers’, at least in the West.
God help you if you try to fight that last one too.
Gold depositories have the same issues as crypto exchanges have typically had - it’s almost inevitable that someone absconds with the actual gold without telling anyone, or ‘prints’ extra without backing assets, etc. and until someone does an audit or everyone tries to withdraw their gold/tokens/whatever, no one knows.
It also enables a lot of other scams.
[https://www.cftc.gov/LearnAndProtect/AdvisoriesAndArticles/f...]
For anyone reading, educate yourself so you don’t get defrauded.
Not all depositories are a bad idea in all situations - but be cautious.
(Also, historical footnote - the last credible audit of the gold at Fort Knox was in 1974, hah - https://www.usmint.gov/learn/history/historical-documents/in...)
So there is always a middleman, unless you’re on your own chain. But it’s distributed, no one can reliably pick who is going to be the miner (or always be the miner) because of the POW algorithm, and everyone can trust the outcome because of the way everything is structured. There are very strong incentives for everyone to try to mine, for instance, and the more mining power there is, the more difficult it is for anyone to have a controlling interest or monopoly on mining, barring special economies of scale in mining hardware, anyway. (Which do exist, but not enough to make it doable to get a monopoly right now)
Worst case, the miners can ignore your particular transaction indefinitely, but the counterparty can see that too, and it would require active collusion from a very large percentage of miners to even attempt that.
So it’s not a middleman like a bank or a payment processor. Rather a bulk processor who moves a bunch of opaque chunks somewhere for money without any particular regard for who or what as long as they get paid for it.
And since it’s global, that third party could even be some foreign gov’t or entrepreneurial individual.
And which cops have a nasty tendency to seize on sight in the US if seen in any significant quantity (outside of an armored car) because ‘proceeds of crime’?
And pretty much every drug transaction, illegal sexual transaction, whatever is done in cash? To the point most major crime shows and drama shows have scenes involving some massive pile or duffel bags or whatever of cash as a plot point?
Cash on the barrel head is the textbook definition of ‘difficult to regulate’.
Also, most people buying person to person used cars and doing yard sale transactions use it too, of course.
It’s not a requirement that Cash transactions involve a crime at all. Same with crypto.
If your transaction is illegal though, using Venmo seems pretty dumb.
But then there’s China, right?[0] And arguably India?[1]
I agree with your larger point, but I don’t think it’s “western” per se to dream of the surveillance state knowing our every spend.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/27/technology/alipay-china.h...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Indian_banknote_demonetis...
Thanks for the links!
So, no, cash isn't entirely separated from financial institutions.
Cash transactions do not, so spending, receiving, and if one is crazy storage can be done without institutions.
That hypothetical $10k transaction for instance only sets alarm bells off if it’s an abnormal transaction for an individual account.
Someone doing a cash business is going to do stuff like that so much, it’s a drop in the bucket and no one cares. Coin shops, check cashing places, certain types of convenience stores and restaurants, etc.
If they manage the cash themselves instead of a cash drop, such as if they are a dispensary and are unbanked, a given dollar bill can circulate a very long time before touching a bank, depending on which parts of the economy it touches.
The reality is it isn’t super hard to launder funds apparently, so it ends up back in a bank somewhere soon, but with the intermediary transactions hidden.
Do you mean bank transfer?
Let’s say I buy a legal widget for $10K and I pay cash and I don’t plan to treat it as a business expense. On my side, I’m done, and any alarm that might be invoked is the problem of the seller, and probably dependent on their compliance with weakly enforced regulations.
For some classes of widget I might want a receipt, but definitely not for all. You can easily spend that much on a birthday dinner with your friends, if that’s your thing.
I don’t think anybody is arguing that cash is “entirely separated from financial institutions” but — even above $10K — it allows for the possibility (not the guarantee) of transaction privacy.
Devon Zuegel talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the crazy world of money and finance in Argentina. When inflation is often high and unpredictable, people look for unusual ways to hold their savings. And when banks are unreliable because of public policy, people look for unusual ways to keep their savings safe and to make financial transactions. Welcome to Argentina, where Zuegel finds surprising applications of cryptocurrency for solving problems.
https://www.econtalk.org/devon-zuegel-on-inflation-argentina...
Practical value add? Less clear. On-chain comes with "contract risk", off-chain is more or less unregulated and comes with these FTX-like collapse risks.
However, whether this freedom to tinker and invent new primitives is worth all the extra risk from people trying to "invest" in this stuff, way less clear. Especially when the freedom is most often used to recreate traditional flavors of financial fraud dressed up as new technology.
There needs to be some conceptual separation between the actual on-chain technology (used by a very smaller minority of people with some kind of financial stake in crypto) vs. buying tokens/coins off-chain. At the very least marketing and promotion of buying made-up crypto tokens should be illegal and probably every off-chain entity related to crypto should be heavily regulated to avoid using the cover of "new technology" to perpetuate scams.
Or do you have to fill out a slip and get audited for every transaction?
Bitcoin was about digital money, out of the reach of central banks as a response to the 2008's financial crisis.
Modern crypto is about trying to convince others your altcoin has some intrinsic value by selling rumours, partnerships, governance or some other vaporous dream, so it can be used for gambling.
The problem are central exchanges creating monstrous speculation instruments and of course gambling with user funds on top of it by lack of regulation.
But yeah, it’s mostly semi-transparent grifts, and has been for awhile.
Standardizing behavior across regulatory boundaries means that crypto "just works" to send value from one country to another, without needing cross-border intermediary companies that support your specific country pair to convert things between currencies/systems.
The stateless unit of account part is perhaps more interesting to me, though. Before crypto, there were no digital representations of value independent from state. No country has the power to hyperinflate crypto, and there doesn't seem to be a clear path to be able to accomplish a unit of account like that through traditional political means. The closest thing we have to that is the Euro, but it doesn't tick all the boxes.
Is a stateless unit of account good, or better than traditional government currencies? I'm honestly not sure. It does have some drawbacks in terms of the ability to use monetary policy to loosen and tighten markets. But it's an interesting enough concept that I would say it's worth it to "bother" with blockchain consensus technology.
The most influential statement of your proposal is Hayek's article "Choice in Currency: A Way To Stop Inflation"[1] which he later expanded on in "Denationalisation of Money".
Hayek's views have an admirable internal consistency, but his political premises are contrary to the core values of almost every pre-industrial society, and of the social democratic tradition in Europe which has been internationally influential.
Very few people understand the full scope of Hayek's political vision, which is premised on a thoroughgoing skepticism toward the very possibility of rational democratic deliberation. If they fully understood his proposal's implications, I doubt they'd support them; but certainly there are some who are willing to fully own their anti-democratic implications.
1: https://iea.org.uk/publications/research/choice-in-currency-...
But that’s not crypto, that’s just a crypto-related service.
Fundamentally, it's not. But crypto's advantages are largely--possibly exclusively--in evading regulation.
When a packet hops from one country to another, it's bound by a different set of laws. Same thing with an international financial transaction, crypto or otherwise.
Sounds like a solid plan.
To buy and sell cars in a personal capacity, you don't need a license. But if you run a business with the intent of making a profit by buying and selling cars to other individuals, that's illegal to do without a licensed corporation.
To buy and sell gold in a personal capacity, you don't need a license. But if you run a business with the intent of making a profit by buying and selling gold to other individuals, that's illegal to do without a licensed corporation.
It all comes down to whether the government deems something to be a personal activity or a business activity. Handling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of trades may well be considered a personal activity, if you're rich and making a series of OTC trades with a friend. But if you're attracting a diverse customer base and making a business out of it, that's when regulations apply.
A great example of the murkiness of this distinction was the crackdown on localbitcoins. It wasn't the people doing one-off personal trades who got in trouble, it was the people profiting off of volume, doing many trades and capturing the spread. The people who traded with several counterparties, but maybe not enough to be considered a business - well, that's where the gray area lies and personally, I am not a big fan of that gray area.
Do you have a USA reference for this belief? From my experience and knowledge that claim is not true.
The critical distinction is between someone who is buying and selling precious metals, compared to someone who is "in the business of" buying and selling precious metals.
"crafted precious metal dealer". And that sounds like a professional license, not a requirement to start a corporation.
The headline says filing for US bankruptcy so I’m assuming they have some US based entity — which as of yesterday was perfectly solvent because the accounts weren’t commingled.
So one would presume (without actually reading TFA) that they are indeed subject to US financial oversight and have some explaining to do to the people in charge of those sorts of things.
I for one am not very excited to continue using the legacy systems with countless of middle men and entrenched rent seekers to extract the maximum they can out of the completely legal trades I do with other consenting individuals.
While not completely wrong, we have only to look at the various markets at play around the world to see how not very different they are to the crypto market.
Housing crisis of 2007/08. Even with regulation and a plenty capital market institutions, nearly all of the major banks collapsed and failed had it not been for government intervention.
Previous to that we had Enron and the Dot-Com bust. Previous yet, was the Savings and Loan crisis.
Even our current economic environment shares similarities in terms of middle-class wealth being destroyed - albeit less dramatically and at a slower rate.
There is one common theme among all economic events - certain groups/classes always fare better than others, either by design or just happenstance.
Ultimately regulation is without any real effect if it's not enforced or applied somewhat equally across the spectrum of investors - retail and capital markets. Greed and corruption are equally present in all areas of investing and governance.
Can you please make your substantive points without personal attacks or name-calling? Your comment would be fine without this bit.
The guy who is supposed to have "won" this , is running an exchange apparently banned by china, largely disliked by regulators and disinvited by governments, and not funded by any government or large investors, right?
All the proposed usecases except speculation and censorship resistant wealth transfers (eg. getting money out of Russia) have been abandoned.
Just because you haven’t found crypto helpful doesn’t mean it doesn’t have use cases.
Maybe the payment is related to, say, Cannabis, so companies like Wise would refuse to facilitate it [1], legal or not.
Or perhaps they've heard the stories of PayPal seizing funds with no explanation or recourse (e.g. [2]), and don't want to roll the dice on that.
Maybe they want to exchange currency at the actual market rate, rather than PayPal's 3-4% spread.
Or they might not want to wait forever for a two-sided ACH transfer (usually the cheapest option with e.g. Wise), or pay wire fees and still have to wait until Monday morning before a US bank will consider processing the transfer.
[1] https://wise.com/acceptable-use-policy
[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/01/paypal-stole-use...
At some point the first world will pull their collective head out of their ass
It’s crazy how stupid HN becomes at the word crypto.
“A non binary view about crypto omgzzz can’t compute!!!”
It is no different from saying "In some places I can buy houses with cocaine". Sure, if the buyer thinks they can immediately offload cocaine for cash, the buyer might take it. That does not mean that the house is sold for cocaine.
The actual tech is sort of irrelevant, it’s the hubris and exceptionalism
2. All the "not your keys, not your coins" mindless chanting misses the point. While true, a modern financial system depends on being able to have trust in financial institutions if you actually need to move money quickly. Years ago I went the "move everything to cold storage" route, and it was a major pain in the ass, not to mention slow and expensive every time you needed to move to an exchange to trade or convert to fiat. It's the equivalent of stuffing your money under your mattress - valid for emergency situations, but not for a currency you actually want to transact in.
Oh, and the reason hardly anyone actually stuffs money under their mattress any more is that we've built up institutions (e.g. FDIC insurance, SIPC insurance, and the associated regulations to provide this insurance) to reliably protect depositors.
Currencies tanking is not uncommon either. I'm not sure what you think this proves exactly.
A reasonably likely possibility is that the SEC starts sending letters to every issuer and exchange that sells to US persons. If you're an issuer, you have to register as a security or get a no-action letter that says yours is a utility token. If you're an exchange or a broker, you have to register as an exchange or a broker. Sign up for FINRA regulation and pay SIPC premiums. They did that to ICO issuers back in 2017, which is why you don't see many ICOs any more. NFTs were a workaround for that, but the SEC has been saying that bulk NFT issues and fractional NFTs are probably securities.
The SEC has been reluctant to do this, partly because they were still litigating over whether crypto issues are securities, and partly due to political pressure. Last week, the SEC won SEC vs. LBRY with a decision that crypto is almost always a security. Much of the political pressure came from FTX, which is now a political liability. FTX donated to both Republicans and Democrats. Now, on Capitol Hill, key committee leaders from both parties are against them.[1] The SEC is now ready to act.[2]
The crypto industry sees regulation coming and is freaking out. It's not that filing an S-1 is that hard. It's that you have to give all the info crypto issuers like to hide, such as where the money is going, the business plan, and who's running the thing. Under penalty of perjury.
(I want to see an S-1 for Yuga Labs (Bored Ape Yacht Club / Otherside). They raised $400 million, printed some pictures, and threw some raves. That could be the most fun S-1 to read since BOYSTOYS.COM did an IPO for a strip club.)
There are fewer offshore havens available. China pulled the plug on crypto mining. (Literally. Power was cut to crypto mines.) Cyprus cracked down. Japan, post Mt. Gox, licenses and regulates crypto exchanges. Bahaman regulators were about to take FTX into liquidation. Cyprus cracked down after the binary option debacle. There's still Bulgaria.
What will be left after all the sketchy operators are shut down?
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/11/crypto-meltdown-washington-t...
[2] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/sec-chair-gensler-slams-non-1...
Of course that would kill crypto.
In general I’m glad the government let the experiment be run. I was not one of the people saying crypto should be banned, and I’m still not. But at this point I think it should be regulated, for the same reason most other investments are.
Doesn't it cost 200K$+ in attorney fees?
How much it costs to draft depends on how convoluted your financial structure is.
try not to conflate the two.
It is interesting that the waves that we are experiencing are nothing new, everything has been repeating every 20-40 years for the past three centuries or more.
Yeah, bitcoin is nothing new. It is the roughly similar thing happening all over again -- people buying something they absolutely do not understand just because they see the value is going up. Investing is hard and here is this golden opportunity -- just put your money in and see it multiply. And for a long time this works because more people are putting their money in and expecting returns. Then suddenly for whatever reason the positive returns dry up (at the very least you have to run out of new capital at some point) and those same people who were only in to speculate now want to get their money back. But as the first are able to do it, the price starts to fall.
Then you get companies or individuals swarming nearby the stream of money because, hey, for every greedy person with capital you will find a greedy person without it. And lots of these people also want to get rich quick.
It really is just another pyramid scheme that lures in people who do not understand finances but want to get rich quick (and some who do understand but are just too greedy to pass on the opportunity or play with somebody elses capital), the difference being it looks way more legit and legal because of the number of investors and amount of capital.
The cycle length has something to do with how long people remember the previous painful lesson before they forget and do it all over again. Remarkably stable over centuries...
One could also argue that the presence of regulators and regulation creates the very problem it tries to solve through moral hazard.
As long as there are schmucks with dollar signs in their eyes and little patience to read history, these disasters will continue - with or without regulation.
Maybe something could have been different this time? In the end it wasn’t, and it proves the necessity of regulation and institutions.
There aren’t very many other aspects of our society where we get to have that kind of experiment and find out whether our approaches to past problems were really correct. Letting us do that may turn out to be the true value of crypto, after the coins go to zero and we start mentioning it in our history books alongside tulip mania and the South Sea bubble.