> ... it seems one by one the promises of crypto of the last several years are evaporating ...
Hardly. What's happening is that a financial institution is being regulated and pro-actively adopting steps to please regulators. And those regulators will never be satisfied.
As regulators squeeze harder and harder, it will drive Coinbase under. That is not the disaster that some might think. It's a necessary next step for Bitcoin to prove that it can actually deliver on the promise of censorship-resistant money.
At the very least what's happening with exchanges, regulation, and the over-eager suits at Coinbase demonstrates the need for censorship-resistance in the first place. None of the new steps add anything whatsoever to the experience of the user. It's all about other people exercising control over that user's money.
You call this "censorship-resistance" but it seems to be "law-resistance." This is a point that critics of crypto have been making for awhile: crypto's only use-case seems to be to avoid the law. At least in the USA, the courts have typically granted wide latitude to technologies that have a mix of both legal and illegal uses, but crypto seems to only have illegal uses, so it looks more and more like one of those technologies where the courts often allow strict regulation or outright bans. Especially in the democratic nations, where the laws have the legitimacy granted by popular representation in the political process, there is no reason to tolerate a technology if that technology exists solely to evade the law -- there must be some clear legal purpose for the technology.
8. There was once a way to pay for burritos from a specific restaurant using Bitcoin.
9. Everything else
It really shouldn't be a surprise that lawmakers have taken a dim view of the subject. That said, there are a handful of legitimate uses for cryptocurrency, but it's hard not to think that we could find better alternatives for those use cases, especially given the disastrous environmental impact of many of these crypto schemes.
Personally I have been using Bitcoin for legal & legit use cases for years. It is primarily a hobby, but personally I believe in the long run it will also benefit me financially. As a personal savings and checking account it works, though the volatility for many is understandably hard to bear.
For online purchases in my country Bitcoin works very nicely. Also for travel related purchases. I would estimate that maybe 60-70% of my purchases are in Bitcoin these days.
Groceries I don't buy with BTC, because it is not possible. But basically all household items, thanks to several big online retailers accepting BTC in my country. Also all travel related stuff, hotels, flights, etc.
I very rarely use BTC in brick-n-mortar setups, in the last year once in a restaurant where I had a bigger bill and they had recently started accepting it - went actually very fluently.
It is not really that much different lifestyle to any normal life, I just pay with BTC where it works. And these days it works very fluently in online setups in my experience.
The lifestyles not that different, except the relative value of the currency you use on apparently a daily basis has dropped 52% this year? Do you hold bitcoin, or just convert whatever your employer pays you in fiat into btc every two weeks? With a limited number of potential retailers, how do you comparison shop? How do retailers handle pricing and the volatility of bitcoin?
I just don't see how this is at all possible. Like, who are you paying bitcoin to for flights?
But what are the advantages of BTC in these cases? Transaction fees + Processing Times are so high that make it uninteresting for many people.
It feels like translating the real value of something (say $5) to something else (e.g., 0.01 BTC) with every purchase. It's just overhead at this point.
It's life as usual - the biggest mainstream webshops here accept Bitcoin. I can buy anything I want that way - groceries, tech gadgets, kitchen machinery, garden equipment, whatever - with same-day or next-day delivery. The mainstream concert ticket sellers also accept BTC here. Not sure about plane travel, but I can use BTC to buy train tickets.
If I can't use Bitcoin at a store directly, I can simply take out some cash at a nearby Bitcoin ATM - nowadays there's more BTC ATMs than my bank's ATMs.
With Bitcoin directly? You'll be quite limited (though not impossible). If you are looking for non-KYC off-ramps, there are many; especially if you are living in a country where cash is widely accepted. P2P Bitcoin trading is quite widespread, though it requires some due diligence to find reasonable and trustworthy people to exchange with.
For most of your online purchases, you can go with a gift-card; though it's an annoyance compared to just having one single card with rewards and cashback.
I read this and think ".. and a16z is doubling, even tripling down on cryptocurrency?" Do they not have the self/brand awareness that they are over-indexing on this area? It doesn't deserve zero funding, but maybe not launching fund over fund dedicated to it? Did a16z jump the shark?
Hacker news is a bubble of crypto haters, everything positive gets downvoted here.
There are hundreds of apps in DeFi, was 250B invested, over 10MM paid per day just in transaction fees, and 20k developers. The amount of users is growing as fast as the internet was during the 90s (we're equivalent to 1998 now) and almost every usage graph is up and to the right exponentially. Can see many of the metrics at https://defillama.com and https://link.medium.com/readqva7brb
Ethereum by the metrics looks like the greatest startup investment of all time. It was also the quickest to reach $500B market cap. But alas many are going to miss out because they miss the forest for the trees.
A16Z is definitely making the right moves based on the metrics. HN folk are blinded by emotions, and not bothering to do the research. The person you're responding to doesn't even know DeFi.
If you want to understand what DeFi is check my post history. I often talk about it yet every crypto thread is always the same dumb "only criminals use it" comments voted to the top.
I'm not a big crypto person. But I do think that it does one thing well, it enables the transmission of value digitally. The same way I can transmit a file to you over the internet, I can now transmit a crypto coin of value.
Now, personally I don't have a lot of issues with the prevailing system, venmo and similar apps. I don't have any issues buying what I need online since credit cards work and are widely available.
I suppose crypto could be useful for industries that are legal, but banks do not like engaging with. Like adult entertainment.
The thing is, crypto coins tend to be terrible ways to transmit value. They usually have massive overhead compared to pretty much every other system and are often quite slow.
Anybody who has tried to pay for something directly with Bitcoin will see the problem instantly. The mining fee is a significant percentage of your transfer unless you're sending literally thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoin and it typically takes 4-24 hours for the transaction to clear unless you're willing to increase the transaction fee significantly.
Crypto currencies are so bad at this that PayPal is a better way to transfer money. Let that sink in.
Comparing a Bitcoin transaction to a PayPal transactions is comparing Apples to Elephants. They have different value proposition. A more fair comparison is comparing a PayPal transaction to a Coinbase one. In which case they are the same (haven't used PayPal for a while, so not sure if they are charging fees for P2P transfers).
I have been using Bitcoin for various online purchases for many years. For me it always works fluently. In fact I have had more cumbersome experiences with fiat payments.
Not that I have much problems with any payment methods. I just prefer to hold Bitcoin and use it as my primary currency. I'm willing to willing to spend some extra effort to pay with it, but if it gets too difficult I'll resort to fiat.
Not sure about "likely much cheaper". Those methods are either funded by VC money (for the case of early startups) or in the case of bigger companies, their other products that monetize you in other ways.
BTC is expensive to transfer, but other options like LTC are not. It takes a small fraction of a penny (in USD value).
But originally, crypto was built with the expectation of being illegal and yes, to facilitate only illegal transactions, that live and die illegal with no communication with "white" money. It's only in the recent few years - to attract normies' money - it started to make weird detours into the legal space.
I think there is no need mixing the two. Use normal banking, companies and taxable jurisdictions for white money - everyone needs some white income to explain what they are doing - and crypto for the rest.
Crypto people i know (the real ones), want it illegal, because then their work has fewest impediments - it becomes nothing but coding in R, Solidity, some Python, and occasional visits to a guy next block for a pack of cash. No paperwork.
Sounds like bullshit. Yes there have been criminals using Bitcoin since the early days. But there have been always a lot of people promoting it for normal merchants. There are lots of shops accepting Bitcoin these days, depending where you live though.
The only 'legal' purpose is speculation around 'decentralized innovation'. It is legal to speculate that Bitcoin or NFTs may be more useful someday, therefore more in demand. Obviously that makes it no different than beanie babies, but buying beanie babies is legal and a lot of people did it.
I think a very legitimate, legal purpose of the technology is for the implementation of financial systems. How many billions of dollars of computers, networks, mainframes, and engineers are dedicate to running the financial system? Distributed ledgers are basically an abstraction for implementing financial systems. Think about them as C for the financial system, where the current financial system is assembly. The doesn't mean public, decentralized blockchains are the answer the any particular problem, but blockchain technology can be useful even if they exist mostly as private chains run by financial institutions.
Or avoid being scammed, becoming scams or being wholly manipulated. I don't know how people think cryptocurrency will just 'work itself out' as some decentralised system with no oversight somehow free of corruption and illegality... that holds a steady, useful value within regulated and legal markets.
The liberal exchange of currency (arguably money in this case) is not a "black market." It's only a black market in the context that a government thinks it has the right to regulate private transactions to the extent that the physical address of a recipient needs to be on record. Is it a black market when I pay the neighbor kid to mow my lawn and don't report their address? Nonsense.
> Is it black market when I pay the neighbor kid to mow my lawn and don't report their address? Nonsense.
No, but it is illegal for financial institutions (and many industries) to provide services without knowing who they are serving. Not sure how anyone is surprised that KYC requirements are coming for crypto..
Probably because banking stuff is cryptic and KYC sounds like something that is dredged in flour and 21 seasonings before being fried crisp instead of a very real obligation.
And they are right to assert that, because the alternative is all sorts of bad actors using this alternative currency to do all sorts of things we don't want as a society (money laundering, drug trade, human trafficking).
No they don't, at least not in the United States. The Government has no rights. It has privileges given to it by the people. Only individuals and corporations have rights. Corruption may have been subverting that principle since time immemorial, but that does not change the fact.
The federal government, if it was motivated enough, has the capability to bust your door down and hold you in a cell indefinitely with no trial if it wanted to. That doesn't mean they have a right to do so. It only means the people have allowed them to do it.
> all sorts of things we don't want as a society (money laundering, drug trade, human trafficking).
Oh, you mean the eternal bogeyman that can be used to justify any conceivable invasion of your privacy by government? Right.
What do you say to The Government requiring that your home and all new homes contain cameras and microphones to detect bad actors doing all sorts of things we don't want as a society, like money laundering, drug trade, and human trafficking?
Somehow I doubt you'd be on board with that, which is the entire point. You would draw a line in the sand because The Government does not have a right to do that, and those unsavory things that could possibly happen in your home are not a good enough excuse for them to subvert your rights.
Detailing discussions by questioning definitions doesn’t help advance your point. A black market is a market that is illegal, not just a market that you personally don’t approve of. Governments are doing what their laws say they can, trying to disambiguate between “right” and “privilege” doesn’t change this.
Your point seems to be “they can’t do that because I don’t like it”, which is the basis of a political movement, not a discussion of what can actually legally be done right now.
KYC laws are pretty universal, they’re not going away because you say they shouldn’t be real.
You are not obligated to follow a law purely because it exists. I realise you will immediately jump to the alternative here but you should take a step back and consider the implications of being obligated to follow any harebrained, harmful and sometimes downright evil law that has ever existed.
Legal and ethical are not the same thing. If a law is any of the above things plus unenforceable I would argue it makes zero sense to obey it.
You're obligated to follow a law because if you don't someone will hit you with you a stick, kidnap you, and lock you in a tiny room. You're right that governments don't have "rights." They have abilities.
Exactly. Which is why I also added unenforceable. The government can make idiotic evil and harmful laws till the cows come home, and history shows that indeed they do.
The value in innovations like cryptocurrency are about making a particular class of the above idiotic laws unenforceable, to the extent they are successful. Other similar products exist which make other forms of law similarly unenforceable, for example Tor for dissidents in totalitarian regimes looking to smuggle information into or out of their open air prison camps, etc.
The harder agencies try that produce and attempt to enforce these fundamentally unenforceable laws, over time, the less able they will be to do so, because the nature of cryptography is that the mathematics massively favours the defender to such an extent that even the lumbering behemoths we have in nation states are inadequate to breach it if done correctly. The best they can do is breach supporting infrastructure around it, which just ends up as an evolutionary fitness function for the removal of such vulnerable supporting infrastructure, until they end up creating the monster they simply can't kill.
Which is fortunate, because I dread to imagine a world they actually had the absolute power they so desperately covet.
You mean if you remove Bitcoin/Cryptocurrency, the drug trade and human trafficking will stop? The only thing that I can, kind off, agree on is Cyber Crime (Cryptolocker and friends).
Also, you can't launder money with Bitcoin. Bitcoin financial network is strictly separated from the main stream "legitimate" network where you need to launder your money. Hide your money? maybe, if you can bear the volatility; but not launder money.
The US federal government does not have this right. Policing powers belong to the states. Federal government economic concerns are limited to international borders and keeping interstate commerce moving.
If you want to make an argument that the federal government can stop states from adopting cryptocurrency as money you would be right. The Constitution explicitly says they can't.
> If you made a payment during the calendar year as a small business or self-employed (individual), you are most likely required to file an information return to the IRS.
I don’t think that covers a homeowner paying for services. I’ve paid an appliance repair person more than that this year. I’m thinking about updating my home’s HVAC and that’s going to be way more than that. I hired a plumber earlier this year and spent about that. None of these things require a 1099 to be filed and I don’t wee why landscaping would be different.
Regulated, perhaps. But regulation shouldn't entail handing vast amounts of personal details, and the ability of intermediates to be able to track you fully afterwards. I want to be able to buy stuff without centralized entities following me everywhere.
> I want to be able to buy stuff without centralized entities following me everywhere.
Isn't the blockchain a record of everything you do from here until eternity? I understand your wallet might not be connected to you but that's only going to last for so long. I'm not completely up to speed on this so I could be wrong.
I haven't studied it, but I believe ZCash https://z.cash/ is not designed to eliminate that record (that's what a blockchain is right?), but to encrypt it and then use zero-knowledge proofs to show the validity of the transactions.
That seems like it might be the best of both worlds in some ways: laws can be enforced when it's genuinely important to do so (the record is there so presumably if you seize people's keys you can verify transactions), but not so cheaply as to entail practical mass surveillance and tyranny. In principle presumably a possible weakness is later large-scale decryption if the encryption gets broken -- but that's arguably much less useful to the would-be tyrants and surveillers.
Cash is close to being outlawed. Once CBDCs are a thing cash will be phased out. They'll claim paper is too expensive or helps criminals or terrorists or whatever.
In many countries (EU for example) is illegal for a seller to accept over a certain amount of cash for a purchase. The maximum allowed amount can be as low as a few thousand USD.
In order to implement mass surveillance with dollar serial numbers, you would have to identify people during transactions and record them. Nobody taking cash does this outside of ATMs possibly. When I go to the store they don't ask for my ID to pay with cash, they don't record serial numbers, it would be a lot of technology and effort and there's no justification for why. When doing transactions with computers, there's usually a reason for attaching an identity to a transaction, a reason for keeping track of things, addresses, account information, login details, etc above and beyond just banks being required to keep this information.
The post I replied to said "could never be tracked". People using cash can be tracked if it's important to do so. Mass surveillance on cash transactions is trickier (though maybe with machine learning we'll decide that it's a great idea to track physical transactions of any kind using video etc.).
Monero is touted as digital cash fro this reason. Even if you buy it from an exchange, it's the equivalent of taking cash out from an ATM. There is no way to track where/what you spent that money on.
This kind of thing always depends entirely on what ideas people end up believing, and the details of the problem-situation when that comes about. I know: "obviously" people will never take the threat of tyranny and mass surveillance seriously. Just like obviously women couldn't possibly get the vote from a position of not having the vote in the first place with which to wield power. It was obvious! But it wasn't true.
I think you forgot there’s whole planet with billions of people beyond the USA borders. Something what doesn’t follow every single us regulation != black market.
For better or worse, US law extends to anything that touches our financial network. Even a whiff of a connection to a US financial institution can get you prosecuted by the US. The Bank of Somewhereelse really wants to be able to continue doing business with the Bank of America, so they accept regulation.
please go to Dubai and learn Arabic edit or Farsi or Mandarin, if they confide in you, report back on the universality of the US banks.. secondly, I send you a beaming picture of BRICS leaders this week to reinforce the "fish sees no water" nature of your statement. American here
"A Dubai resident who flaunted his extravagant lifestyle on social media has arrived in the United States to face criminal charges alleging he conspired to launder hundreds of millions of dollars from business email compromise (BEC) frauds and other scams, including schemes targeting a U.S. law firm, a foreign bank and an English Premier League soccer club."
What are you talking about, the US successfully imposed FATCA on nearly every bank institution on the planet, and none of them or their government even tried to push back.
That why a lot of people bankside outside the US will refuse to accept US customers. The reporting obligation is only applicable if they have US customers.
This is called the "Travel Rule", and it's part of an international effort to regulate crypto transfers analogously to bank transfers. When you send a wire transfer, you include the address of the recipient and your bank includes your address in the transfer.
It's technically a FINCEN/FINTRAC requirement in the US and Canada, but they imposed the rule before any of the tooling existed... so there's a bit of a scramble happening right now to figure out how to comply with the rule. Coinbase put together a consortium with other centralized exchanges in an attempt to create a common standard that should hopefully reduce the manual work required by customers, but this is absolutely not isolated to them.
As regulators squeeze harder and harder, it will drive Coinbase under.
This seems more like wishful thinking than objective analysis.
It's a necessary next step for Bitcoin to prove that it can actually deliver on the promise of censorship-resistant money.
I've observed three pro-cryptocurrency arguments:
1. It is a store of value (ex: inflation hedge)
2. It is a replacement for x% of monetary transaction (ex: Web 3.0)
3. It is a way to exchange value outside of government intervention
You seem to be in Camp #3. With government controlling money for all of recorded history, why do you think cryptocurrency will be different? There's some compelling evidence that government will continue to exercise control over all currency including cryptocurrency. Just one example:
The government has had practically zero control over cash transactions, historically speaking. The only real power governments have over their money supplies are the power to create and destroy money with impunity, that is all.
The government has had practically zero control over cash transactions, historically speaking.
Government has had extremely tight control over cash transactions.
1. Try to give someone $100,000,000 in cash. It literally weighs over a ton. The government stopped printing bills > $100 in 1946 explicitly to control cash transactions. With inflation, the largest bills we have to work with are worth about $30 in 1946 dollars.
2. Look up AML and BSA legislation, "Know Your Customer" regulations, Form 8300, Structuring Deposits. Did you know that a bank has to report you to the government if you deposit more than $10,000 in cash? And that if you deposit $6,000 on a Wednesday and $4,000 on a Thursday with perfectly legal money in an attempt to avoid the reporting that you have broken the law? (https://www.irs.gov/irm/part4/irm_04-026-013#:~:text=Structu....)
3. Try to open up a bank account and tell them you'll be depositing lots of cash. They'll refuse to open an account for you.
And admittedly this is today's U.S. government. But governments haven't just taken a "oh well" approach to cash ever in all of history.
And while not disputing any of that, as far as I know, every single transaction I've ever made with cash has not been logged in my name and is not cheaply trackable. That's a good thing because it avoids heavy concentration of power.
> 1. Try to give someone $100,000,000 in cash. It literally weighs over a ton.
Is this a common problem? I don't normally transact $100M on a normal basis, and the few times I've transacted anything more than even $5k or so usually involved some form with the government involving a title transfer or something along those lines. So then the argument of needing to do it privately is a bit of a moot point anyways.
I used to work for government regulators and this is a such a bizarre view of regulation.
Trust me, people on my team weren't up at night scheming how we might put the squeeze on a companies, and what nice new regulations we might implement to make things harder on businesses.
We barely had the resources to enforce important regulations that everyone would agree should exist.
Please read up on the history of any regulatory body in the US. Nearly every governing body we have and every regulation on the books was create after there was abuse. Regulations in the Federal government are almost never proactive, and as a general rule the regulators I knew had no interest in expanding their purview.
In fact, it's quite uncommon for regulations of any kind to be enforced until you basically force yourself to get caught. Most regulatory agencies are underfunded and understaffed by design. It's a reason so many startups perform regulatory arbitrage for years without consequences, even when their actions are quite harmful to the society overall.
Lots of people are negatively impacted by these regulations, even if you personally didn't feel as if you were making much headway in enforcing them. The difference is that you only see meaningful results if you can enforce the regulations nearly all of the time, whereas the individual victims of these regulations are significantly harmed when they're enforced even once.
Nerds like us make the same mistake over and over again. "If an HTTP request receives a 200 OK response, then that is by definition proof that a request for access was made and granted." No, no, no, a million times no. The government can make a law that regulates which requests are legitimate and which aren't. And they can compel you to follow those rules. And they can come to your house with guns if you don't. And they can put your physical body in a holding cell if you resist. It literally doesn't matter what the protocol says. Code is not in fact law.
To be fair, everytime there's a thread on HN about a crypto scam/fraud/run etc, there are a ton of comments that read that there isn't enough regulation and the crypto world is learning the lessons learned in the past 100 years or so in the finance/banking world. Now there's news of some regulation in the crypto world and people don't like it either.
Those arguments are from different groups of people. I'm in the camp of wanting crypto to have way more regulation. I would also like us to not hasten a climate crisis by turning on coal power plants to mine crypto that is useless.
Both are incredibly naive. They think there's this magic that will allow them to do whatever they want while being protected from others taking advantage of them.
"You can't tell me I can't run a farm to table restaurant in my own home."
AND
"You have to make Bob refund me for giving me food poisoning at his farm to table restaurant run out of his home."
It is nativity. I know someone who constantly talks about the environment and also is a big crypto supporter and even runs a mini g setup! What hypocrisy!
Do you really think the person you responded to made the claim that it was the same person flip-flopping their opinion? Obviously it's no surprise.
Nonetheless, what OP was getting at is that there is a clear trend on HN to semi-blindly hate everything crypto related, no matter the narrative (regulation good vs regulation bad). At least that's how I took it.
Crypto (for lack of a better word to lump everything together) is probably not the answer to the world's problems, but it's not as incredibly dumb of an idea as your average HN thread makes it out to be.
He explicitly said "people don't like it either", meaning the same people flip-flopping, not "other people don't like it".
You're making unwarranted and derogatory assumptions and mistakes about people's reasons for opposing cryptography.
Do you claim that Bruce Schneier semi-blindly hates everything crypto related? He certainly believes and says cryptocurrencies are an incredibly dumb and useless idea, and he's extremely well qualified and respected in the field, and a lot of people on HN read what he writes, agree with him, and base their opinions on the facts and experience and wisdom he and other trustworthy experts write about, instead of getting their information from crypto shills with fraudulent financial agendas. Is that what you mean by "semi-blindly"?
Your assumption that everyone on HN who opposes crypto is doing it semi-blindly is quite rude and insulting, and you simply don't know where they got their beliefs, in spite of your completely blind and false claims to somehow know other people's motivations and sources of information.
What are your qualifications that make you know so much more about crypto than Bruce Schneier, and give you such deep insight into why everyone on HN holds their beliefs and where they get their information about crypto?
Schneier on Security: On the Dangers of Cryptocurrencies and the Uselessness of Blockchain
Exactly. Coinbase is not part of the "crypto promises". It's like any other centralized financial institution that happens to deal with crypto currencies.
Just send the crypto from Coinbase to a wallet you control (outside Coinbase) and send to anyone from there through the blockchain. No questions asked.
Is that double trouble? Yes, but if you choose to leave the blockchain for a centralized institution, you can't complain about having to go back in order to enjoy blockchain benefits...
That will work some smallish number of times; the worrying (from a btc / freedom perspective) is that Coinbase and other exchanges start to have opinions abt what you do even after you move your btc off the exchange, e.g., with mixing. That, I think, is what's going to force this showdown and lead to the end game, whatever it turns out to be.
Hardly. What's happening is that a financial institution is being regulated and pro-actively adopting steps to please regulators. And those regulators will never be satisfied.
As regulators squeeze harder and harder, it will drive Coinbase under. That is not the disaster that some might think. It's a necessary next step for Bitcoin to prove that it can actually deliver on the promise of censorship-resistant money.
At the very least what's happening with exchanges, regulation, and the over-eager suits at Coinbase demonstrates the need for censorship-resistance in the first place. None of the new steps add anything whatsoever to the experience of the user. It's all about other people exercising control over that user's money.