I highly doubt that “ending crypto crackdown” would mean guaranteeing safety for projects like Samourai or Localmonero. Or ending the relationship with Chainalysis.
Can you elaborate on these topics for someone not in the know?
Samourai was a Bitcoin wallet attempting to improve the currency’s privacy. Its devs were arrested this year.
Localmonero was a platform where people could post listings for buying or selling Monero without KYC. There was also an identical sister site Agoradesk for Bitcoin. They abruptly shut down this year, probably afraid of similar prosecution (it happened pretty soon after the Samourai case).
Chainalysis is a company that US government works with, attempting to track and deanonymize crypto transactions. Recently a presentation of theirs leaked, disclosing some of their methods (which were very interesting for the Monero community in particular).
Thanks!
Chainalysis is a cryptocurrency/blockchain investigation software, I at least know that much.
What crackdown? The SEC has only charged actual scammers and they’ve “requested information” from the legitimate players to figure out how to proceed. Other than some bad calls by sanctioning software, there’s hardly been anything considered a “crackdown.”
That means, in Republican speak, that they will allow anyone to scam anyone without repercussion.
Republicans love a good scam
Next up is the dismantling of the ACA. They will roll out these amazingly cheap alternatives. Health insurance for $10 a month!
So the poor and the stupid will sign up. They’ll go to the bar and saunter up to a “libtard” and tell them that trump fixed everything.
Then when they get sick and try to use MAGA super plan plus premium they won’t be able to find a doctor. The $10/month plan only covers an annual trip to a CVS minute clinic. They’ll go on Facebook and write up how the goddamn liberals tricked him. Other faithful republicans will pray for them and tell them that it must be a glitch because trump made things better.
The con will win because it’ll only hurt those without power.
But that’s not as exciting as promising to end something that’s barely happening in the first place.
People elected Trump to be entertaining, not for sensible governance.
Exactly. He intends to let scammers scam.
Scam and speculation are the only use cases after all.
I don’t know why this is being taken at face value with so many upvotes. The Gensler SEC was right to go after actual scammers and ponzis, but they went much further and clearly had an agenda.
Gensler targeted the most reputable exchange in the US alleging that their core business is illegal, because the Gensler SEC decided to classify crypto assets as securities rather than define a new regulatory framework that actually fits.
https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023-102
Coinbase wanted to follow the rules and spent years asking for clarity. Rather than provide clear rules, the SEC provided a lawsuit.
There wasn’t a need to “define a new regulatory framework that actually fits” because, funnily enough, the existing regulatory framework already fits. It turns out, inventing new words doesn’t actually change the fundamental nature of the thing you’re describing. Refusing to call something an “investment” doesn’t change the fact that you’re selling an investment, refusing to call something a “security” doesn’t prevent it from being a security if it meets the definition.
Edit: Sorry, let me address that ridiculous point about Coinbase “asking for clarity” directly. Yes, Coinbase repeatedly “asked for clarity” in the same manner as a dude in a girl’s DMs repeatedly asking for nudes while being told in the bluntest of terms to fuck off. They were given perfectly clear answers, they just didn’t like them, so they kept claiming, with zero fucking basis, that these will laid out rules that every financial institution has been following for decades were somehow “unclear” to them. It was a conversation not unlike a Sovereign Citizen trying to get out of a speeding ticket by claiming that they don’t understand where the officer’s authority comes from. The law is prefectly clear. If you don’t understand the law, you hire a lawyer who does. That’s a cost of doing business. Sticking “smart” in front the of the word “contract” doesn’t suddenly invent a whole new field of law. I can’t suddenly get away with murder because I call it “crypto murder”. The law is based on what you do, not what you call it.
wouldn’t a security/investment require a fundamental book value?
An investment contract exists if there is an “investment of money in a common enterprise with a reasonable expectation of profits to be derived from the efforts of others.”
And just to be absolutely clear, many cryptocurrencies do not qualify as investments, and the government agrees. However there are numerous other regulations that the crypto industry apparently cannot handle, such as “Know Your Client” laws, which all financial institutions have to abide by, and which exist to prevent money laundering (Binance’s internal emails revealed that they knew perfectly well that their clients were using their service to facilitate crime, and they were perfectly happy with that).
These are not bad faith regulations. They exist for good reasons, and there is absolute no good reason why the crypto industry shouldn’t also be subject to them. If these are currencies they should be regulated like currencies. If they are investments they should be regulated like investments.
lack of technical (not legal) requirements to follow know your client laws is by far one of if not the biggest advantage crypto currencies have over traditional currencies.
That’s fair, but hardly so aggressive that I’d call it a “crypto crackdown.”
But it’s hardly unexpected to see lawsuits around unsettled law. Everyone should expect more as we start settling case law and bringing crypto inline with existing law.
Also, wasn’t it mostly centered around their non-exchange activities? Press release specifically mentions their “Staking-as-a-Service” offering. Not that I see anything wrong with it, but I could see how that could be considered a security. Doesn’t really pass the Howey test.
Obligatory Line Goes Up video, although not exclusively about Bitcoin.
I do admit that early in Bitcoin’s life, around 2013, i was a interested in Bitcoin as an alternative to banking, but the volatility and speculation alienated me from the community. Anyone buying BTC now for $90k, you need to realize this turned into a pyramid scheme and you’re not at the top of it. You may be able to find someone who’s more of a sucker to take the Bitcoin off your hand and make a profit, but it’s not sustainable, someone has to loose. Any gains you make are probably less than 10% what the person made by selling it to you.
If you do end up speculating on crypto, don’t invest more than you can afford to loose, and assume you’ll loose it all. It’s very likely you’ll either get hacked/scammed, loose your wallet, leave your wallet in an online exchange who runs off with your keys, etc. You’re on your own if that happens. If you do end up making any profit, it’ll be a blessing and you’ll be way happier than if you thought this would be your key to get rich, and you end up loosing it all.
Lose
The system where everybody loses is fiat money, because the money always loses value. Bitcoin is the opposite.
To be fair, the idea of “alternative to banking” is still very much alive. BTC and LTC are very much used as currencies, even though BTC has fees too high for small transactions. Monero was developed specifically with utility rather than investment in mind - now reading about how exactly anonymity is enforced there (especially after the Chainalysis leaks), it’s pretty interesting. I kinda hope we invent something better than blockchain-based currencies that is equivalent in uncensorability, but right now it’s the closest we got.
Yes, the line keeps going up. I don’t understand why people think this is some kind of own. That longass video just gets funnier and more irrelevant as it gets older.
And the picture is about NFTs… At worst they’re like collector plates. Just another grift. Who cares? People buying jpegs of monkeys is not a real problem for me.
Coiners: “We want to be taken seriously and treated as legitimate businesses!”
Biden Government: “OK. We’ll treat you as legitimate businesses in your respective fields and expect you to comply with the same regulations everyone else has to.”
Coiners: “Oh shit wait no this sucks, our whole business model only works because of crime, quick everyone vote for a fascist conman!”
deleted by creator
It is literally going to be a feeding frenzy on idiots.
Honestly, waking up and seeing my balance was the only thing that kept me from ending myself the day after the election.
So glad I invested when the price was at $20k and everyone was calling it a “scam”. Good thing I didn’t listen. Bitcoin literally saved my life.
You should probably seek professional help if market changes have this kind of effect
Dude seek help, it’s a Ponzi scheme. Sell and get out now.
Every time the price spikes I get the feeling its large holders cashing out while they can and the liquid from newcomers is available. Which would make it mostly a scam, kinda like the stock market but even more shallow somehow, as if the stock market wasn’t unrelated enough to actual production and very esoteric.
kinda like the stock market
It’s basically the same thing. People cry about crypto being a pyramid scheme without talking about how pyramid schemes are a major foundation of the whole economy. People cry about how crypto isn’t a worthwhile currency while the dollar (ie. paper covered with pictures of slave masters) is constantly losing value.
It really depends on the community you’re talking with. In the Bitcoin community that would not surprise me in the least if it’s just big holders dumping on little holders to cash out for fiat. In the Monero community however that’s totally different because they want to use it as actual money. They, and I include myself in this category, believe that the government should absolutely not have control of our money supply that they can manipulate at any time for any reason or no reason at all and make everyone less wealthy, with the exception of those who they choose to give “government contracts”, “incentives” or “subsidies”. This is why the libertarians say that taxation is theft because they tax you on your productive hours of your life and call it an income tax and then they give it to the people who they choose to flatter and leave you homeless and shit.
Income taxes go back into services that help society. How do you expect a government to fund any of the infrastructure and services that you take for granted around you without it?
some areas do fine without income taxes. plenty of other types of taxes.
Name one
Cayman Islands, UAE, Bahamas, Monaco, Bermuda, Qatar, Bahrain, Brunei, Oman, Kuwait, British Virgin Islands, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Anguilla, Somalia… There’s more, but you only asked for one. I will admit that doing fine is a relative term and probably doesn’t apply to all these places. 😂
Not exactly the places you would go for living a free life…
First off, we have to agree that we need the government in order to fund infrastructure. If we make that assumption, then sales tax on anything other than food and base essentials.
Lower income people spend - as a proportion of their income - far more of their income than higher income people. This makes the “nothing but sales taxes” approach much more regressive than it initially seems, despite often being touted by economists as a progressive approach to taxation.
Right, but a lot of lower-income people also spend a lot more of their income that they do get on base essentials, such as food, clothing, and housing, which would be considered base essentials and therefore not have sales tax. So your box of pasta would not have sales tax, but your new flat screen TV would. Reason being, the box of pasta will let you survive. But you cannot eat your flat screen TV.
You’re missing the fact that a flatscreen TV will still often represent - as a portion of someone’s wealth - a far greater cost than a private jet would to a billionaire. Consider that most low income people are getting their cell phones on payment plans, whereas a multimillionaire can afford to buy a Lamborghini Gellardo out of pocket. On top of that, high end purchases like cars, yachts, houses, fine art, etc, often retain a lot of their resale value, turning them into investments in many cases, often reselling for more than their purchase price. So yes, I absolutely did account for the tax exemptions on “essentials”, and even when you factor those your sales tax only model still ends up being less onerous the more wealthy someone is.
I also want to call out the unspoken implication that is often present with these theories - not accusing you of doing this, but it needs to be said - that items like phones, computers and TVs are extraneous luxuries that no poor person should ever own, as if enjoying a fulfilling life or engaging in relaxation are things that only the wealthy should be allowed to have access to.
Thanks for pointing that out. I am definitely not saying that poor people should not have access to flat screen TVs and phones, etc. Because, especially with computing hardware, those kinds of things can very easily lift somebody out of poverty due to greater access to information and opportunities. However, I often see people struggling to afford basic necessities, and yet they have the newest iPhone every year or every other year, which is incredibly financially irresponsible.
ok but why not gold or silver then? also obviously without currency controls all modern countries would have drastically smaller economies.
The settlement time. Gold and silver don’t work well as currency if you need to settle over long distances quickly. So like I cannot send Amazon and ounce of silver to buy a product easily. But I can send them Monero with a few clicks of my keyboard. Almost instantaneously. Lynn Alden, who is an economist, basically says that the invention of the telegraph broke gold and silver as money, because transactions could happen at the speed of light, but settlement could still take weeks, especially if, say, the United States was paying, I don’t know, the UK or something.
I’m sorry, no. The point when you find yourself relating to libertarians is the time you should really ask yourself two simple questions
1 - Am I a dumbass?
2 - Why am I trying to herd myself in with a group of dumbasses?
And that’s why we are different people. I have my opinion and you have yours. You’re not going to change my mind and I’m not going to change yours and we both already know that.
Why is this so heavily downvoted? Holy shit people, talk about a hivemind/‘group of dumbasses’…
- Yes
- Cause it’s warm and comfortable in this mass hive of stupidity. Who wouldn’t want to be one of us?
Went ahead and filled in that questionnaire for you.
You can believe that all you want, but this is an even nutter dream than achieving effective gun control in the US (one of my nutty dreams). Why in the world would the government ever give up control of the “money supply”? That’s not going to happen.
Oh, they’re absolutely not going to give it up. That’s for sure. But as a citizen, you can just stop using it as much as you can in your day-to-day life. You can’t avoid using it entirely in most cases, but you can tone down how much you use it pretty significantly. And that they cannot control.
Governments have shown in the past they will indeed never give up their money printer. That’s a key reason crypto was created. You seem to think governments are willingly allowing crypto to exist and have the ability to shut it down. Centralised e-cash has been tried (and quickly squashed). P2P crypto is immutable and exists to preserve the freedom of users.
They have the ability to shut it down for all practical purposes by simply banning its use for transaction by legitimate companies in their country.
That would just suppress the price in the short term and leave that country behind in the digital currency revolution. Everyone has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. Politicians can legislate all they want, but crypto will keep humming along.
. That approval made it easier to fund bitcoin investment projects, but despite the seeming endorsement, Gensler warned at the time that the SEC still viewed bitcoin as a “volatile asset” linked to “illicit activity” like ransomware, money laundering, sanction evasion, and terrorist financing.
Anybody who is not using Monero for these kinds of activities is doing it wrong. Just remember folks, every transaction on Bitcoin and similar chains is an upskirt transaction.
Isn’t USD also linked to many of those? Gangs launder physical cash through businesses, ransomware can ask for credit cards or bank accounts, terrorists may take USD as it can be spent nearly anywhere.
The difference is that 100% of crypto-currency transactions are stuff like that and only a small percentage of USD transactions.
Do you have a source for that? I’ve seen local businesses like pizza shops and such accept btc.
Edit: the majority of crypto transactions are likely between exchanges, miners, and exchange customers. An example is the Blackrock BTC ETF buys and sells btc off an exchange in realtime in relation to the ETF purchases. I’m not saying no crime happens on the btc network but to claim 100% of transactions are crime based is just false.
And by “pizza shops” you mean that one pizza shop that tried it back before BTC got really expensive?
I’m pretty sure they just charge the local currency equivalent in BTC at the time of purchase.
Oh yes, these kinds of organizations love cash because it’s a bearer asset.
not surprised since crooks love corrupt officials
Shitcoin and the Orange turd both need to be flushed but they keep sticking to the rim.
Idiots. Short it and make money.
Go ahead and short bitcoin right now. lmao.
(Seriously though wait until it peaks ffs.)
the market can remain irrational far longer than you can remain solvent.
the world is full of bubbles right now but the wisest move is to hoard cash while the trumpets are playing and buy everything after the dust settles. like warren buffet isnt trying to time the crash, its long overdue.
Bitcoin has been going up since 2009, lol. Bubbles pop and die. Internet stock had the dot com bubble and kept going up later.
the wisest move is to hoard cash
I disagree, market timing fails more than it succeeds. The better bet IMO is to diversify your investments. When one bubble pops, you’ll have assets in other sectors/regions/etc that aren’t in a bubble and get the investment dollars from people fleeing the bubble.
Warren Buffett hoarding cash doesn’t mean you should hoard cash. He’s hoarding cash because he’s a sophisticated investor with a long track record of being able to find good deals, and he sometimes buys entire companies outright, and having a large cash balance makes that a lot easier. He also frequently funnels that money into stock buybacks instead of leaving it in cash. He doesn’t know if the market will crash next year on in a decade, because as you said, the market can remain irrational.
Do what Warren Buffett says, not what he does: buy and hold a broad market index fund (he recommends the S&P 500).
That’s what I’m doing. I’m rebalancing my investments more regularly because I do expect this temporary run-up to drop, but I’m unwilling to try to time the market. I have a target US/international ratio, and I’m making sure that’s correct (my US portion has grown faster than international). I have also decided to pull the trigger on a small-cap value tilt after watching some good videos by Ben Felix, so I’ve been completing that transition as well. I intend to keep this portfolio for >10 years (probably through retirement, but we’ll see what happens when there’s new research).
Hoarding fiat currency will always end worse than slowly trading it for assets that hold or increase in value. All the while: government money loses value by design. Attempting to time a crash and call the bottom is more akin to gambling than investing.
Yep, I suspect at least some people to get hurt in the very near future, because a decently reliable gauge of FOMO is where is the Coinbase app in the App Store rankings, and it is increasing quite quickly. Back in 2022, before everything imploded, it hit number one on the App Store for a while. And it’s headed right back that direction from what was like 400th place. I use Monero because it’s actually being used as money and so has a bit more inelastic demand.
