When they looked into high-end real-estate in 2016, up to 30% of all deals were suspicious of being money laundering. [1] They looked just primarily at New York, Miami, Los Angeles and other big markets.
> The rules cover properties purchased for more than $3 million in Manhattan, properties over $1 million in the southern Florida locations, over $2 million in the California locations and more than $3 million in the Hawaii locations.
> Treasury said that among the transactions covered by the rules over the past year "about 30 percent... involve a beneficial owner or purchaser representative that was also the subject of a previous suspicious activity report."
It makes you wonder how much the real estate market is inflated due to money laundering and foreign funds flowing in for washing or investments, keeping real customers out of the market.
Fact is money laundering is a problem in real-estate, art, crypto, political campaigns [2] (with Citizens United) and more.
Bank tellers file suspicious activity reports for any arbitrary reason. The only people these SARs ensnare are poor-ish people that accidentally structured a cash transaction and it looked like they were trying to avoid the $10,000 reporting threshold. I've read enough appeals court cases to see that it doesn't catch actual money laundering from illicit sources.
And with the real estate industry successfully lobbying Congress from an exemption to anti-money laundering laws, I don't think these wealthy people will ever be investigated from a "Suspicious Activity Report" since there isn't a legal framework to further investigate.
Agreed on messing with small players and real estate getting favorable treatment, but did you miss the part where they were in million+ properties with shell corporations?
> Treasury this week expanded and extended a program targeting luxury real estate deals in New York, Miami, Los Angeles and other big markets to prevent the use of real estate for money-laundering by overseas buyers. The program was designed to prevent buyers from using shell company's or LLC's to hide the identities of the real buyers.
Yeah I remember when that article came out. Did it work?
The federal government doesn't regulate what kind of business entities their states offer. And you can always use a lawyer on the incorporation forms if that state asks for more info and have your whole entity protected by client attorney privilege.
There's no probable cause to raid the lawyer, and the money is magically clean in the property now.
>"about 30 percent... involve a beneficial owner or purchaser representative that was also the subject of a previous suspicious activity report."
There are so many issues with conclusions like this but the simplest question to ask first is, "What's the SAR rate for the equivalent tronche of people who aren't involved in money laundering?". This analysis probably suffers from Berkson's Paradox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daiEkxSaRlU
Cracking down on real estate (or metals, per another comment) has to be done carefully because there are legitimate reasons to want to own metals or real estate. There's no analogous legitimate reason you'd want to own a particular string of random numbers; evading the rule of law is the entire market in those.
Precious metals have a very long history of protecting against inflation risk, which is why many investors own them. Crypto currency is not anywhere near that category because they haven't been around even 20 years and the prices suffer from severe instability.
Please... the metals markets, where holdings can be reconstituted, aggregated, faked and leveraged is the undisputed champion for big time laundering. Two favorite examples:
Not to discount the metal markets or just corrupt banking, but crypto currency clearly has the advantage of being transmissible weightlessly anywhere in the world.
Imaginary metal is akin to a bank token, indeed easy to transport but connected to people & institutions (kind of like, money). And it eventually has to be traded for real metal.
Just about everything of value has it's pluses and minuses for avoiding state scrutiny (land, cash, enterprises dealing in a lot of cash, start-ups needings lots of cash, halal banking, underground economy equivalents, etc, etc). With the interlocked problems of capital controls, drug cartels, failing states and resource economies (China, Brazil, Mexico, Afghanistan, Congo, etc), the river of dirty money is huge and goes everywhere. And efforts at control are naturally quite large too ("how much control over how dirty a flow" is what the lobbyists now place bids for, right, with the money itself coming partly from these flows. But those who've escape enough of their capital want to plug up the capital of their competitors, naturally).
Still, the advantage of turning a raw resource (energy) into money is a tremendous boon to those who control resources but don't technically own them (from bureaucrats to warlords).
And, of course, the blockchain shows the flow of tokens from account to account but it neither shows who owns the account nor the reason for the flow. Someone might guess but guesses aren't evidence in a conveniently large number of places.
Actually, I still didn't distinguish bitcoin-for-money-laundering from credit-accounts-for-money-laundering.
The thing is that a credit-account may indeed have the advantage that the trail of money might be lost.
However a bitcoin has the advantage that a bitcoin trader doesn't have to depend on any one single institution or entity to secure the claim for their wealth. A state can look at a bank or a gold-account company or whatever and say "you must invalidate this account in particular, I'm watching" and the account-holder loses their money, no matter where they are in the world, even in their island hideout, etc. The state may look at a given bitcoin, see it's been by the Lord's Resistance Army to sell human heads or whatever but the state can't do anything if that state can't find where in the world the holder of the account is.
To catch the actual illegal money, States would have to require all exchanges and buyers have filters to stop bitcoins they declared illegal (not that states necessarily shy away stuff like that as we've seen but it's clearly harder).
Which isn't saying bitcoin's absolutely better but it presents some uniquely better aspects "for the discerning money launderer" (don't let this bit of sarcasm lead you think I'd approve of such scum btw).
> crypto currency clearly has the advantage of being transmissible weightlessly anywhere in the world.
It also provides a convenient way to pay off transactions in an obscured way, which was the main reason cryptocurrencies gained so much traction in illicit trade.
Meanwhile, a fully-regulated and ostensibly compliant EU bank in Denmark laundered $233 billion through a single bank branch [0].
I would argue that crypto is actually an investigator's dream, as you can trace transactions instantly through the blockchain without needing to follow the money in multiple jurisdictions, faxes, waiting periods, cooperating with other law enforcement, etc. etc.
I think this is under appreciated by the press as well. Money is going to get washed, there is just too much of it not too and everyone has a price. Efforts to suggest that "this" is the best reason to abolish crypto currencies have struggled (in my opinion) to make this case.
To me the argument is the opposite: what is the reason for cryptocurrencies to exist if not for money laundering and generally avoiding regulations/fees you'd otherwise be subject to?
Gold is not controlled by a government, but it's a poor currency given its physical characteristics, although it has been used as a common currency in the past.
Cryptocurrencies are similarly not government controlled, but have better characteristics to make them usable as common currencies.
The desire to use cryptocurrencies as currency is not by nature linked to crime, or tax avoidance, etc. just as owning gold does not make you a tax cheat.
I own cryptocurrencies and I paid taxes on my trades, just as I paid taxes on my other capital gains.
>Gold is not controlled by a government, but it's a poor currency given its physical characteristics, although it has been used as a common currency in the past.
When people say that an advantage of Bitcoin is that it is a currency not controlled by a government, they do not mean that governments prevent them from spending their dollars, or that governments are aware of what their dollars are spent on. If that was what they meant, you would be right to say, "Those two are the exact same goal." But that isn't what they mean, and so you are mistaken.
What people actually mean when they say "not controlled by a government" is that the dollar has lost 98.3% of its value since its peak in 1792–1833. It fell 6.3% in 1834, but stayed at that value (with occasional deviations downwards) until 1932. From 1932 to 1970, it lost 47% of its value, mostly in 1933. In 1971, it became a fiat currency, and fiat currencies are famously prone to inflation; since 1970, the dollar has lost 96.6% of its remaining value.
I'm measuring the dollar against gold here, not just because gold was what defined its value from 1792 to 1970 (and part of 1971), but because gold was the standard of value for international commerce from sometime around 100 BCE until 1971. You could reasonably use a different good as the standard of value, and you'll probably get marginally different results, although a few goods (passenger pigeons, 32-bit multiplications, warships) will give you significantly different results. Gold is relatively convenient for this because of the wide availability and verifiability of its price. Gold's short-term volatility makes it useless for very short-term comparisons, though, by which I mean anything less than 10 years.
When Bitcoin people say they want a "currency not controlled by a government", they mean that they don't want 97% of their savings to evaporate in a mere 50 years because the government decided that printing money was a good way to meet its payroll and pay its bonds.
As fiat currencies go, dollars are actually doing pretty well. Here in Argentina, our peso has lost about 25% of its value each year for the last several years, but this year, it's accelerated; it's lost 50% of its value since April. (It's worth 5¢ today, down from 10¢ in April.) And of course everyone remembers Zimbabwe's hundred-trillion-dollar bills.
Now, you could argue that 5% inflation per year doesn't really impair a currency's use as a measure of value or a medium of exchange, only as a store of value. And you might be right. But there are a bunch of people out there who would love to have a secure store of value that they can also spend, which is why the dollar price of gold more than tripled in 2005–2012. (It's recovered a bit since then.)
I am not going to take a position here on whether providing a potentially safer store of value than dollars is a good thing or a bad thing. It's a thing some people want, and you might not want them to have it. That's okay. I'm just pointing out that they want it, and it's not the same thing as money laundering.
Presumably you are hoping someone else will respond to your question, because, as I said in the comment above, I am not taking any position on such questions.
Bitcoin's inflation rate is higher than the USD though?
Bitcoin inflation rate per annum: 3.87%
USD Current inflation rate for the United States is
2.7%.
Early in Bitcoin history, by design Bitcoin went though a period of hyperinflation where Satoshi and a few users acquired most of the coins in circulation.
Aprox 4.11% of Bitcoin users (addresses) control 96.53% of all bitcoins in circulation.
Also there's a chance that something will make Bitcoin obsolete in the near future - immediately destroying the trade value of Bitcoin, either a new cryptocurrency, a quantum computer or cryptographic breakthrough that would allow theft of BTC private keys or more predictably a bug like what recently happened in the main Bitcoin core wallet client software which allowed a user to inflate the supply of Bitcoins past 21 million and mint more BTC for free.
So if you were truly concerned about long term stability - gold or tangible functional assets would be much safer than software based pet rocks.
The obvious worst part of this bug was the inflation
exploit. An attack could create new bitcoins at will,
exceeding the 21 million hard cap limit that is
currently in place. This would absolutely destroy
confidence in not only Bitcoin, but every
cryptocurrency.
In addition, a miner could crash every single node they
are connected to by producing a block with an invalid
transaction in it. Miners are will go out of their way
to connect to as many other mining nodes as possible, so
they receive notifications of blocks faster.
Imagine you’re a miner, hashing away at block #1000.
Another miner, Jim, finds block #1001 and starts
propagating it around the network. However, you’re not
connected to Jim, so it takes an extra few seconds for
you to receive the block. During those few seconds, the
network has moved on and you’re wasting hashpower and in
turn money. You need to receive the new block before you
get started on the next one.
All the miners are highly connected, so if one is
producing client-crashing blocks, many of the larger
miners would be hit.
Quite a concerning catastrophe that has no guarantee of being avoided in the future, as any programer knows how many bugs can hide or be exploited in any code base.
Yes, if you measure inflation by the increase in the amount of money in existence, the first block mined represented an infinite amount of inflation, the second block mined created 100% inflation over 10 minutes, the third block created 50% inflation, and so on. But, if the system functions as designed, this rate asymptotes to zero fairly quickly. You are of course correct that the system may not function as designed.
However, it is more common to measure inflation by the increase in nominal prices of goods, as I did above with gold. And, by this measure, Bitcoin is deflating. It's hard to measure the deflation rate with precision because it's so volatile, but at the beginning of 2011, it was worth 10¢, and now it's US$6600. It's oscillated wildly around the exponential trend line by about a factor of 3 on each side, but the trend line itself is a deflation by about 75% per year (or of 300% per year, if you look at deflation that way.)
Presumably this won't continue forever, as it's more appropriate to tulip bulbs than to a usable currency, but it is certainly quite far from inflation in the usual sense.
The vast majority of the supply is owned by a very small oligarch.
The chances of Bitcoin becoming obsolete or failing catastrphically due to a glitch or bug in the protocol software - like what just happened a few days ago (luckily by someone who desired to fix it, if the bug was found by a malicious actor they would have destroyed the entire Bitcoin ecosystem), the cryptocoin software can not be guaranteed as a safe store of value.
Anyone who "invested" in Bitcoin at the start of this year has lost upwards of 50%, so that would qualify as inflation in your terms. Other cryptocoins have seen losses exceeding 80%-90%.
The way cryptocoins work is by early users dumping their supply onto new users to exit and extract real value from the suckers who then become bag holders, the new users hope to do the same but are at a severe disadvantage to early users who own the vast majority of the supply.
Porn has never had a problem with charging people's credit cards...
And in states where marijuana is legal, cash is the easiest solution for everyone. In states where it is not legal, cash and Venmo seem to be the preferred methods of payment.
As a CO native, cash is only the easiest option because they literally can't accept credit cards. I'm sure most stores would rather not tell customers they need to go find an ATM and come back when they do.
It still can. I have yet to see a state level or higher official openly claim marijuana use. Not saying they don't exist I have just not seen any. No politician is going to win after openly admitting to consuming pornography.
Porn has always had a problem with credit card payments. They are forced to use special credit card processors that take a much larger percentage as fees.
> * Payments to gray area businesses like porn and marijuana businesses who can't get credit cards
I was aware that US cannabis businesses have a lot of trouble getting banks to work with them, due to federal level issues, but I never even considered that angle.
But looking at it now, it makes perfect sense, both crypto and cannabis legalization became very mainstream around the same time.
Tho, have any legal businesses actually adopted this. How common is it to have a cryptocurrency payment option at retail dispensaries?
> * Cheaper than credit cards (who take 1-3% fees).
Not always. It would be more expensive than a 3% credit card charge on anything < $20 at current levels (0.62 USD). And if if the network actually gets busy, like it would if bitcoin actually went mainstream, then your max fees per transaction top out around $55.
> * Safer for merchants as it avoids credit charge back fraud.
Less safe for consumers as this simply transfers risk to the buyer, who incidentally is the ones choosing how to transact. Why would they prefer Bitcoin over protected credit card transactions that, depending on terms, give a 1-2% cash kickback to the consumer.
You're only looking at Bitcoin where the devs celebrated when the fees got up to $50. [0]
It could have easily been prevented by focusing on on-chain scaling instead of waiting for off-chain solutions which aren't ready yet and possibly never will. This is what Bitcoin Cash does and the goal is to never have high fees again. During the latest stress test they processed multiple more transactions than Bitcoin could ever do and fees were still $0.0017. [1]
Credit cards also has a small fixed fee which can hurt merchants you need to take into account when comparing. It's not easy to compare though since there are many different possible contracts.
> Less safe for consumers as this simply transfers risk to the buyer
You're right, that's a negative.
> Why would they prefer Bitcoin over protected credit card transactions that, depending on terms, give a 1-2% cash kickback to the consumer.
Because it might be the only payment method possible. Because the merchants now avoid the credit card fees and can instead pass on the savings to the customer. They are incentivized to do this to avoid credit charge back fraud (which they otherwise eat).
A whole world currency that is potentially immune to inflation and government manipulation.
No currency conversion fees.
The ability to send funds to anyone with no middle man and no fee (besides the miners).
Also the removal of business and corporate surveillance. Right now Banks, Mastercard, stripe, venmo etc. know everything about you. They can then leverage that information in any way that they want. I don't like that. You run for office on an anti banking or big business platform and amazingly its leaked that you have an ongoing monthly subscription to X.
> A whole world currency that is potentially immune to inflation and government manipulation.
You said potentially, so I’ll give you this one.
> No currency conversion fees.
This is a function of the market, not the underlying instruments. It’s also not true of most crypto markets, and I’m not confusing the spread with fees at exchanges.
> The ability to send funds to anyone with no middle man and no fee (besides the miners).
No fee (besides the miners) isn’t much different to no fee (except this fee). It’s still a fee, and in the case of Bitcoin, the fee has potential to be prohibitive (and already is for some use cases that it was designed for, e.g. buying a cup of coffee).
> Also the removal of business and corporate surveillance. Right now Banks, Mastercard, stripe, venmo etc. know everything about you. They can then leverage that information in any way that they want. I don't like that. You run for office on an anti banking or big business platform and amazingly its leaked that you have an ongoing monthly subscription to X.
Bitcoin is not anonymous, Monero could be unmasked[1], if you’re leaving a digital footprint, someone will eventually be able to follow it.
Look, if you are going to be a critic then you can't stand behind ignorance.
The "fees are just too high to buy a cup of coffee" is an old trope that is no longer relevant. One can go download LND 0.5 and use the lightning network to make instant practically free payments for a "cup of coffee" today.
The only thing I'll concede is that it is still in beta, but the question of whether it's going to exist or not is no longer a question.
The way Lightening Network is designed kills the p2p aspect of the Bitcoin protocol.. LN is predictably to benefit capital holders with enough excess capital to act as the backbone hubs. Normal users will be unable to bypass the Bitcoin banking/payment processor LN hubs and unable to reliably route though peer to peer paths on the LN.
This presumably is intended to enrich the Bitcoin oligarchs as a passive way to extract rent and wealth on the network simply for controlling existing capital.
This design choice indicates either a comic level of negligence, or intent to shift away from p2p to centralized information control.
only a 1% chance of successfully routing a $67 payment on the lightning network:
Sending payments using the Lightning Network is cheaper
than the regular Bitcoin network, but suffers from
routing errors and wallet bugs that make it impractical
even for highly technical users. [1]
If you don't want to use an LN hub, then create your own. If you don't have enough money, then raise some capital and start a LN hub business. Hell, create a non-profit LN hub! If you don't want to pay for the service of using other LN hubs, then send a direct payment. Of course, this will cost real money, but you always have that option. If I'm sending money to purchase a house, you can bet I'm going to send an actual transaction and not use the lightning network. For cups of coffee, I just don't need the full decentralization.
Claiming that we will not be able to solve the routing problem on the lightning network is exactly the same as claiming that we won't be able to solve the routing problem on the Internet. Routing is a solved problem, but is a difficult problem to implement, which is why the clients are in BETA.
Your link is bullshit, as I mentioned the network is in BETA. Of course people don't have a bunch of money on the lightning network and can't route large payments like $67. That's because the network is in BETA, and all of the platforms are expressly telling people not to use it for large payments.
Claiming that we will not be able to solve the routing
problem on the lightning network is exactly the same as
claiming that we won't be able to solve the routing
problem on the Internet. Routing is a solved problem,
but is a difficult problem to implement, which is why
the clients are in BETA.
You clearly don't understand the architectural differences between how the internet routes packets, and what how the Lightening Network claims to be a decentralized routing protocol. Nodes in a decentralized network have no visibility to peers unless there's a map, the map needs to be updated, and in a payment network the complexity increases as nodes and activity increases. LN will not function for p2p decentralization, it is a design choice that creates Bitcoin banks and Bitcoin payment processors.
For digital payments I could skip the scam and use Venmo or cash.
I don't get why anyone would bother wasting their money on LN? You have to first buy the Bitcoins which is highly volatile so the risk of losing your money is always possible.
What's the use case? Why bother going though all the trouble and why is there a need to buy someone elses tokens which they basically made for free?
It sounds like you need to convince people to use Bitcoin because you own some and need more people to buy it so you can sell for fiat and make real money. Why else would you try to dismiss the inherent issue with race conditions in decentralized routing networks? Handwaving the flaw by saying "it'll be fixed in the future" is either your ignorance or a lie and an attempt to deceive.
You can't even claim it's the fault of beta software, because it's not even theoretically possible to solve the decentralized routing problem. LN is just another form of paypal/banking.
First of all, I know a little something about how routing works. I've written a simplified implementation of OSPF and also BGP. I've been an engineer at a backbone hardware provider before.
That said, I have never seen any convincing argument that LN routing can't work in theory... Especially because the lightning network is not completely decentralized on purpose. It works off the idea of "hubs", in which you will connect to a hub, likely one hop, and then the hub will most of the time get to your destination in one or two hops. I'd really like to see someone who claims that we don't have the ability to connect two points in a graph separated by three, or even four, hops. This is just made up nonsense.
The middle part of your comment is just "kids, get off my lawn". Why would anyone need anything besides venmo or cash? Do you mail cash to purchase things online? How many large Internet retailers accept venmo? How many people are implementing micro payments using venmo?
The rest of your comment is just an ad-hominem. And not only is it that, but it's also nonsensical because maybe I have some bitcoins because i'm putting my money where my mouth is.
Also, the travelling salesman problem is bullshit and irrelevant, because LN doesn't need to have the shortest possible route to work, it just needs a workable route.
> A whole world currency that is potentially immune to inflation and government manipulation.
There are lots of ways that powerful governments can still put their thumb on the scale. US taxes still need to be paid with US dollars, and they can squeeze / regulate the exchanges, or influence, for example, the devs working on bitcoin.
Also, the design of bitcoin is inherently deflationary, which isn't inflation, but has its own set of problems. Saying that nobody is going to have the power to fix those problems isn't a huge selling point.
> No current conversion fees.
Well, I guess if everyone in the world settled on a single cryptocurrency. But that's also true of any other currency in the same situation.
> The ability to send funds to anyone with no middle man and no fee (besides the miners).
What is the importance of not having a middleman? Is it so that you can avoid regulations/fees that you'd otherwise be subject to? To me, this seems like the entire value proposition of cryptocurrency.
> Also the removal of business and corporate surveillance.
That's a quite simplistic Keynesian view of economics. Economy != money changing hands. Savings are necessary for economic growth as they represent unspent resources in the economy that can be put into long-term projects and investments.
Do the money holders keep their money in their house? Or do they keep it in banks? What the banks do with the money? Nothing? Or lend it to new businesses/invest it?
The biggest problem I see with deflation is that it becomes rational to avoid actually using the currency. This massively decreases demand.
Not many people are using bitcoin to buy pizza any more, because there's a hope that if they just HODL a bit longer they'll be able to buy lambos with the same amount of bitcoin.
That makes bitcoin less useful as a day-to-day currency. If the entire world economy was based on bitcoin, there would be a deflationary spiral and no clear way to fix it. This would be the mother of all depressions.
Yeah, Bitcoin's falling to Gresham's Law like gold did before it.
If you have two forms of money, one of which is inflationary and one of which is deflationary, it becomes rational to hold the deflationary one and spend the inflationary one. Eventually all transactions happen in the inflationary currency, and people forget that the deflationary one is money at all - it just becomes a collectible.
One of the intriguing possibilities of cryptocurrency to me, though, is the idea that a currency could have its inflation rate algorithmically determined so that all market participants know exactly what it'll be worth in the future, irrespective of the actions of any central bank. Extra points if any new money injected goes to people actually transacting with it rather than people holding it as a store of value.
I've long thought the problem with the Fed isn't that it exists or that it increases the money supply, it's that it injects new money at the top of the economy (banks etc.) and measures its effect at the bottom of the economy (consumer prices). That a.) gives a long time lag between the Fed's actions and their effects, which tends to make them overcorrect and b.) means that all sorts of shenanigans can go on in the meantime.
Other than a non functioning economy where wealthy oligarchs control everything simply for showing up a few years early and taking control of the money supply because they already had surplus capital to either mine or purchase the easily produced Bitcoins in 2009-2016..
Bitcoin has a higher inflation rate than USD.
Bitcoin inflation rate per annum: 3.87%
USD Current inflation rate for the United States is 2.7%.
Early in Bitcoin history, by design Bitcoin went though a period of hyperinflation where Satoshi and a few users acquired most of the coins in circulation.
Aprox 4.11% of Bitcoin users (addresses) control 96.53% of all bitcoins in circulation.
Maybe I'm just naive, but I suspect that the US government will long outlast SHA-256. Beyond that, I'd much rather put my trust in a democratic process than a plutocratic one.
>A whole world currency that is potentially immune to
inflation and government manipulation.
But completely exposed to private manipulation - malicious coders inserting backdoors into wallets which allow theft of users funds, weak private keys that are later regenerated by the dev, and so on.
Or manipulation from exchanges which generate counterfeit accounts and fake volume in order to steal BTC from the market before they exit scam like most of the exchanges in the past have.
What do you think about Tether and "stable coins" being generated by the billions for free (and then those operators using the counterfit stablecoins to steal BTC/XMR/ETH)?
The common theory is that Bitfinex, Tether, and most of the Cryptocurrency exchanges are operating as fractional reserve banks - and creating more cryptocoins for free, meanwhile "buying" Bitcoin, Monereo, Ethereum, and so on for free because they operate in the dark.
If this is true, it's worse than real central banking, and it's quiet possible Bitfinex and other exchanges have stolen the vast majority of BTC in circulation.
Protections for Customer Funds Are Often Limited or
Illusory. Generally accepted methods for auditing
virtual assets do not exist, and trading platforms lack
a consistent and transparent approach to independently
auditing the virtual currency purportedly in their
possession; several do not claim to do any independent
auditing of their virtual currency holdings at all. That
makes it difficult or impossible to confirm whether
platforms are responsibly holding their customers’
virtual assets as claimed.
I don't mind blockchain as a mechanism to keep track of transactions, I don't like it being designed with Ponzi and Pyramid scheme structures embedded.
If some are, then all of them that have the same structure at (even if they add layers of "purpose" and effort towards some promised value of technology) - unless perhaps they have a fixed price, preferably with no mechanism or way to game the system to profit on micro-adjustments to maintain price stability.
>I don't like it being designed with Ponzi and Pyramid scheme structures embedded.
devil's advocate: what's wrong with Ponzi and Pyramid schemes that are clearly advertised? it's pretty much guaranteed that people will lose money on them (negative EV), but how are they any worse than say, slot machines that are also negative EV?
the same sadly could be said for much more mundane and socially acceptable things, like paying the tithe at a money-hungry religion that's trying to sell uneducated/oblivious people some instant peace of mind.
So we should just throw out all of the protections implemented by stock market from lessons learned there - as a means to protect society? I really don't understand why financial regulators have turned a blind eye to the obvious nature for the structures of Bitcoin etc. They're decentralized Ponzi-Pyramid schemes, with a promise and tie-in into technology - which doesn't nullify the negative scheme structure.
To reply to your edit-addon re: slot machine - You walk into a casino to hopefully know you're getting played (a specific context), however Ponzi and Pyramid schemes are subtle - and people you trust or don't trust will influence or manipulate you into "playing" the game [100% of the time so far people promoting it that I've talked to outright deny any function as Pyramid-Ponzi scheme], and you run into them the more the hype-shallow marketing-level "positive" information hits mainstream media, and you get more people (army of HODLers; Pyramid scheme) trying to sell you with shallow and/or purposeful misinformation/information. That's very different than going to a physical place, to a casino, and playing a slot machine. I'm surprised you don't see that difference yourself?
>however Ponzi and Pyramid schemes are subtle - and people you trust or don't trust will influence or manipulate you into "playing" the game [100% of the time so far people promoting it that I've talked to outright deny any function as Pyramid-Ponzi scheme]
but OP's comment is about schemes that are embeded into the currency itself
>I don't like it being designed with Ponzi and Pyramid scheme structures embedded.
presumably as some sort of smart contract. in which case every participant should know (or can find out) that it's a ponzi/pyramind scheme.
>and you run into them the more the hype-shallow marketing-level "positive" information hits mainstream media, and you get more people (army of HODLers; Pyramid scheme) trying to sell you with shallow and/or purposeful misinformation/information. That's very different than going to a physical place, to a casino, and playing a slot machine. I'm surprised you don't see that difference yourself?
that's a fair point. "traditional" gambling don't incentivize people to market for them.
If they don't have a fixed value (and perhaps requirement that they aren't private) then they're decentralized Ponzi-Pyramid schemes with a promise and tie-in into technology - which doesn't nullify the negative scheme structures.
> I would argue that crypto is actually an investigator's dream, as you can trace transactions instantly through the blockchain without needing to follow the money in multiple jurisdictions, faxes, waiting periods, cooperating with other law enforcement, etc. etc.
Is this a reference to crypto's distributed ledgers being open to the public?
Except that one can’t necessarily track who owns an address and one cannot trace coins through a laundrette. Sure if someone’s coins are traced back to a money washing service then they could be assumed dirty but there can be other services that look like “lots of people send money to addresses. Those addresses send money to a few central addresses. Those addresses send money out to many addresses.” For example a crypto exchange. This is even harder to track if the dirty money is transferred to some other currency, sent to another exchange and then transferred again. Sure you could trace it with the cooperation of the exchange but that might not be so easy to get because exchangers don’t always live in very legally reachable countries.
I would argue that it depends on the Cryptocurrency you are looking at. While yes, Bitcoin has almost no privacy when it comes to watching a transaction take place from Address A to Address B, if you look into the white paper of Monero [0] or ZCash [1], you will find that they are almost impossible to trace from a technical perspective. They have essentially solved this problem and you can achieve full privacy and anonymity.
If Cryptocurrency takes off and society accepts it enough to take it as a ordinary medium of exchange, I would imagine it would almost be impossible to prevent people from routing a subset of their transactions through privacy coins.
I wouldn't say so necessarily, since there have been attacks that reveal who's who. It can lull you into a false sense of security and you could be caught in the future. They are relatively immature tech and I would wait a while until trusting them for privacy critical actions.
This is a Monero puffpiece masquerading as a vilification of Shapeshift.
Erik Voorhees' "cavalier" approach to the man's collection efforts are honest in that even the best Anti-Money Laundering/Know Your Customer implementation would not reveal the origin and destination of the funds when using Monero.
The quaint mention of Monero in this article is foreshadowing of more amazing informative pieces about this form of money. In this piece, they intentionally conflate what Shapeshift does with how other exchanges operate. They intentionally conflate Monero with all cryptocurrencies.
It is an interesting way of writing
But I think this will be followed up with more productive articles
The Wanna-cry ransomware did not collect millions of dollars. It barely collected $100,000 before the patch rolled out. The very public nature of the Wanna-cry attack and patch revealed that the same NSA tool was being used on a Monero mining botnet for weeks before hand already. and THAT was making millions of dollars, but the ransomware people ruined it!
Alright I'm going to call it, this is shoddy journalism. Glad to see the Monero mention
I'm not sure whether or not you misread GP, but just to clarify in case, GP means that the malware used code that was leaked from the NSA, not that the NSA was directly involved in making the botnet. This popped up in google: https://threatpost.com/pyromine-uses-nsa-exploit-for-monero-...
Basically Shadowbrokers claimed to hack the NSA with a datadump of the NSA's hacking tools. They offered a bounty for it and nobody took it
Eventually they released a sample which contained real exploits with unheard of vulnerabilities
A few weeks later the Wanna-Cry ransomware had weaponized those vulnerabilities and spread world wide really quickly, attracting way too much attention and a fix rolled out
The attention revealed that the exploit had been weaponized almost immediately a few weeks earlier for a very smart and stealthy Monero mining botnet, which made way more than Wannacry did
People still use the leaked NSA exploits to hack computers and run Monero botnets.
yes, we've all heard misinformation about bitcoin being untrackable, but Monero is the real deal for now, with the pros and cons and possible attack vectors researched and published about
The quest to stop "money laundering" is totalitarian in nature. It is not reasonable to stop crime by way of having total awareness of the source of every individual's financial holdings.
Such a quest rationalizes warrantless mass-surveillance of the economy, which gives AML agencies and their deputies in the banking sector an unreasonably broad view of the private financial interactions taking place in the economy, and by negating the fungibility of money, undermines its usefulness.
Money is only useful to the extent that every unit is interchangable, accepted at face value without prejudice, and can be used without compromising its user's privacy. That means all money must be assumed 'clean' unless proven dirty. Treating everyone as suspect and forcing them prove their money was legitimately acquired in order to utilize it is taking exactly the opposite track.
Loss of fungibility has implications for liquidity, and through its centralization of power / creation of information asymmetries, rent-seeking and public choice theory. Maybe these effects could be modelled.
I imagine monitoring it could be difficult because the presence of fungibility implies non-traceablility/privacy, meaning observation changes the phenomenon, sort of like the measurement problem of quantum mechanics.
> The quest to stop "money laundering" is totalitarian in nature.
The point is to raise the risk/cost of money laundering and to minimize its occurrence, otherwise financial fraud becomes culturally normalized, and not something people avoid. For that, anti-money laundering agencies must pay attention to large transfers between anonymized business entities. That's very different than total-awareness of every individual's financial holdings and small transactions.
> by negating the fungibility of money, undermines its usefulness
Reducing the fungibility (i.e. by increasing the reporting and oversight requirements) of large transfers of money doesn't undermine its usefulness for anything other than money laundering. Most transactions of life fall well below the 10k reporting limit, and those that are above (i.e. purchasing a car) tend to be on-the-record.
There are other ways to investigate and prosecute crime besides doing away with due process and protections against warrantless searches.
Fraud leaves a massive evidence trail. In many jurisdictions the problem is law enforcement simply not starting a criminal case against those involved in blatant fraud, or taking years to file charges, giving the fraudster time to victimize countless parties before they finally face consequences.
So there's no lack of information to use to prosecute those committing fraud without the total surveillance approach.
>>For that, anti-money laundering agencies must pay attention to large transfers between anonymized business entities.
Anything of significance about the operations of individuals and companies can be known by tracking transactions above $10,000.
Requiring that these transactions be reported totally circumvents the traditional limits on government searches, which required a warrant issued by a judge.
This is dragnet warrantless surveillance of trillions of dollars of transactions that creates information asymmetries the likes of which have never existed before.
>>That's very different than total-awareness of every individual's financial holdings and small transactions.
Most small transactions aggregate to larger ones. Having to explain the source of a large deposit to a bank requires providing evidence of the smaller transactions that formed the holding.
It amounts to AML agencies and the banks they've deputized having near total knowledge of the financial history of every individual.
An enormous amount of proprietary information can be gleened from this, which inevitably contributes to centralization of power, and I imagine, income inequality.
>>Reducing the fungibility (i.e. by increasing the reporting and oversight requirements) of large transfers of money doesn't undermine its usefulness for anything other than money laundering.
People have their money frozen for months at a time by banks, and have to comply with incredibly intrusive requests for private and hard to acquire information to get it unfrozen.
People have their bank accounts closed without explanation because the bank identifies some aspect of their financial profile, like affiliation with a legal marijuana dispensary, as too risky for their AML program. Or because the source of their money, while legal, is perceived as high-risk by the bank. So money is not fungible. Revenue from one legal source is treated differently than revenue from another.
And people can't just use cash. The AML drive has resulted in a situation where moving large amounts of cash is not safe, as billions of dollars in cash have been confiscated from individuals without even any charges being laid against them, through civil forfeiture and the principle that cash is "suspicious":
> "The exchange’s system lets people see which anonymous wallets received cryptocurrency, but in the case of Monero, recipient addresses and transaction amounts remain secret and the trail is severed."
> The way this reads makes it seem like the Shapeshift exchange is intentionally hiding something in order to facilitate criminals. This is negligent journalism deliberately written for you to form a particular opinion about cryptocurrencies in general. The Monero payment network doesn't publicly reveal recipient addresses and transaction amounts? This is a feature.
100 comments
[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] thread> The rules cover properties purchased for more than $3 million in Manhattan, properties over $1 million in the southern Florida locations, over $2 million in the California locations and more than $3 million in the Hawaii locations.
> Treasury said that among the transactions covered by the rules over the past year "about 30 percent... involve a beneficial owner or purchaser representative that was also the subject of a previous suspicious activity report."
It makes you wonder how much the real estate market is inflated due to money laundering and foreign funds flowing in for washing or investments, keeping real customers out of the market.
Fact is money laundering is a problem in real-estate, art, crypto, political campaigns [2] (with Citizens United) and more.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/a-third-of-luxe-real-estate-...
[2] https://theintercept.com/2016/08/03/citizens-united-foreign-...
OH come on.
Bank tellers file suspicious activity reports for any arbitrary reason. The only people these SARs ensnare are poor-ish people that accidentally structured a cash transaction and it looked like they were trying to avoid the $10,000 reporting threshold. I've read enough appeals court cases to see that it doesn't catch actual money laundering from illicit sources.
And with the real estate industry successfully lobbying Congress from an exemption to anti-money laundering laws, I don't think these wealthy people will ever be investigated from a "Suspicious Activity Report" since there isn't a legal framework to further investigate.
> Treasury this week expanded and extended a program targeting luxury real estate deals in New York, Miami, Los Angeles and other big markets to prevent the use of real estate for money-laundering by overseas buyers. The program was designed to prevent buyers from using shell company's or LLC's to hide the identities of the real buyers.
The federal government doesn't regulate what kind of business entities their states offer. And you can always use a lawyer on the incorporation forms if that state asks for more info and have your whole entity protected by client attorney privilege.
There's no probable cause to raid the lawyer, and the money is magically clean in the property now.
There are so many issues with conclusions like this but the simplest question to ask first is, "What's the SAR rate for the equivalent tronche of people who aren't involved in money laundering?". This analysis probably suffers from Berkson's Paradox: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daiEkxSaRlU
https://qz.com/216059/chinas-investigation-into-missing-meta...
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article195552089.html
Just about everything of value has it's pluses and minuses for avoiding state scrutiny (land, cash, enterprises dealing in a lot of cash, start-ups needings lots of cash, halal banking, underground economy equivalents, etc, etc). With the interlocked problems of capital controls, drug cartels, failing states and resource economies (China, Brazil, Mexico, Afghanistan, Congo, etc), the river of dirty money is huge and goes everywhere. And efforts at control are naturally quite large too ("how much control over how dirty a flow" is what the lobbyists now place bids for, right, with the money itself coming partly from these flows. But those who've escape enough of their capital want to plug up the capital of their competitors, naturally).
Still, the advantage of turning a raw resource (energy) into money is a tremendous boon to those who control resources but don't technically own them (from bureaucrats to warlords).
And, of course, the blockchain shows the flow of tokens from account to account but it neither shows who owns the account nor the reason for the flow. Someone might guess but guesses aren't evidence in a conveniently large number of places.
The thing is that a credit-account may indeed have the advantage that the trail of money might be lost.
However a bitcoin has the advantage that a bitcoin trader doesn't have to depend on any one single institution or entity to secure the claim for their wealth. A state can look at a bank or a gold-account company or whatever and say "you must invalidate this account in particular, I'm watching" and the account-holder loses their money, no matter where they are in the world, even in their island hideout, etc. The state may look at a given bitcoin, see it's been by the Lord's Resistance Army to sell human heads or whatever but the state can't do anything if that state can't find where in the world the holder of the account is.
To catch the actual illegal money, States would have to require all exchanges and buyers have filters to stop bitcoins they declared illegal (not that states necessarily shy away stuff like that as we've seen but it's clearly harder).
Which isn't saying bitcoin's absolutely better but it presents some uniquely better aspects "for the discerning money launderer" (don't let this bit of sarcasm lead you think I'd approve of such scum btw).
It also provides a convenient way to pay off transactions in an obscured way, which was the main reason cryptocurrencies gained so much traction in illicit trade.
https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/facebook-flaw-allowed-hacke...
I would argue that crypto is actually an investigator's dream, as you can trace transactions instantly through the blockchain without needing to follow the money in multiple jurisdictions, faxes, waiting periods, cooperating with other law enforcement, etc. etc.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/09/19/ceo-denma...
But they're saying the same thing. The only thing that makes money laundering what it is is governments deciding what are good ways to make money.
Cryptocurrencies are similarly not government controlled, but have better characteristics to make them usable as common currencies.
The desire to use cryptocurrencies as currency is not by nature linked to crime, or tax avoidance, etc. just as owning gold does not make you a tax cheat.
I own cryptocurrencies and I paid taxes on my trades, just as I paid taxes on my other capital gains.
It still is used as a currency, particularly in Islamic parts of the world. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_gold_dinar
What people actually mean when they say "not controlled by a government" is that the dollar has lost 98.3% of its value since its peak in 1792–1833. It fell 6.3% in 1834, but stayed at that value (with occasional deviations downwards) until 1932. From 1932 to 1970, it lost 47% of its value, mostly in 1933. In 1971, it became a fiat currency, and fiat currencies are famously prone to inflation; since 1970, the dollar has lost 96.6% of its remaining value.
I'm measuring the dollar against gold here, not just because gold was what defined its value from 1792 to 1970 (and part of 1971), but because gold was the standard of value for international commerce from sometime around 100 BCE until 1971. You could reasonably use a different good as the standard of value, and you'll probably get marginally different results, although a few goods (passenger pigeons, 32-bit multiplications, warships) will give you significantly different results. Gold is relatively convenient for this because of the wide availability and verifiability of its price. Gold's short-term volatility makes it useless for very short-term comparisons, though, by which I mean anything less than 10 years.
When Bitcoin people say they want a "currency not controlled by a government", they mean that they don't want 97% of their savings to evaporate in a mere 50 years because the government decided that printing money was a good way to meet its payroll and pay its bonds.
As fiat currencies go, dollars are actually doing pretty well. Here in Argentina, our peso has lost about 25% of its value each year for the last several years, but this year, it's accelerated; it's lost 50% of its value since April. (It's worth 5¢ today, down from 10¢ in April.) And of course everyone remembers Zimbabwe's hundred-trillion-dollar bills.
Now, you could argue that 5% inflation per year doesn't really impair a currency's use as a measure of value or a medium of exchange, only as a store of value. And you might be right. But there are a bunch of people out there who would love to have a secure store of value that they can also spend, which is why the dollar price of gold more than tripled in 2005–2012. (It's recovered a bit since then.)
I am not going to take a position here on whether providing a potentially safer store of value than dollars is a good thing or a bad thing. It's a thing some people want, and you might not want them to have it. That's okay. I'm just pointing out that they want it, and it's not the same thing as money laundering.
(Historical gold price data from http://onlygold.com/m/Prices/Prices200Years.asp.)
Early in Bitcoin history, by design Bitcoin went though a period of hyperinflation where Satoshi and a few users acquired most of the coins in circulation.
Aprox 4.11% of Bitcoin users (addresses) control 96.53% of all bitcoins in circulation.
Also there's a chance that something will make Bitcoin obsolete in the near future - immediately destroying the trade value of Bitcoin, either a new cryptocurrency, a quantum computer or cryptographic breakthrough that would allow theft of BTC private keys or more predictably a bug like what recently happened in the main Bitcoin core wallet client software which allowed a user to inflate the supply of Bitcoins past 21 million and mint more BTC for free.
So if you were truly concerned about long term stability - gold or tangible functional assets would be much safer than software based pet rocks.
https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/cve-2018-17144-the-aftermath...
Quite a concerning catastrophe that has no guarantee of being avoided in the future, as any programer knows how many bugs can hide or be exploited in any code base.However, it is more common to measure inflation by the increase in nominal prices of goods, as I did above with gold. And, by this measure, Bitcoin is deflating. It's hard to measure the deflation rate with precision because it's so volatile, but at the beginning of 2011, it was worth 10¢, and now it's US$6600. It's oscillated wildly around the exponential trend line by about a factor of 3 on each side, but the trend line itself is a deflation by about 75% per year (or of 300% per year, if you look at deflation that way.)
Presumably this won't continue forever, as it's more appropriate to tulip bulbs than to a usable currency, but it is certainly quite far from inflation in the usual sense.
The vast majority of the supply is owned by a very small oligarch.
The chances of Bitcoin becoming obsolete or failing catastrphically due to a glitch or bug in the protocol software - like what just happened a few days ago (luckily by someone who desired to fix it, if the bug was found by a malicious actor they would have destroyed the entire Bitcoin ecosystem), the cryptocoin software can not be guaranteed as a safe store of value.
Anyone who "invested" in Bitcoin at the start of this year has lost upwards of 50%, so that would qualify as inflation in your terms. Other cryptocoins have seen losses exceeding 80%-90%.
The way cryptocoins work is by early users dumping their supply onto new users to exit and extract real value from the suckers who then become bag holders, the new users hope to do the same but are at a severe disadvantage to early users who own the vast majority of the supply.
* Donations to wikileaks
* Payments to gray area businesses like porn and marijuana businesses who can't get credit cards
* Digital payments for unbanked. Yes many don't have bank accounts or credit cards but they have smart phones.
* Payments to/from unstable countries. For example escape Venezuela with your wealth intact or receive aid from outside.
* Cheaper than credit cards (who take 1-3% fees).
* Safer for merchants as it avoids credit charge back fraud.
And in states where marijuana is legal, cash is the easiest solution for everyone. In states where it is not legal, cash and Venmo seem to be the preferred methods of payment.
In short they're losing a lot of money since they need to go roundabout ways as credit card companies wants to avoid them.
Cash is however not digital, cryptocurrencies are. The term "digital cash" gets thrown around sometimes.
I was aware that US cannabis businesses have a lot of trouble getting banks to work with them, due to federal level issues, but I never even considered that angle.
But looking at it now, it makes perfect sense, both crypto and cannabis legalization became very mainstream around the same time.
Tho, have any legal businesses actually adopted this. How common is it to have a cryptocurrency payment option at retail dispensaries?
Not always. It would be more expensive than a 3% credit card charge on anything < $20 at current levels (0.62 USD). And if if the network actually gets busy, like it would if bitcoin actually went mainstream, then your max fees per transaction top out around $55.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...
> * Safer for merchants as it avoids credit charge back fraud.
Less safe for consumers as this simply transfers risk to the buyer, who incidentally is the ones choosing how to transact. Why would they prefer Bitcoin over protected credit card transactions that, depending on terms, give a 1-2% cash kickback to the consumer.
It could have easily been prevented by focusing on on-chain scaling instead of waiting for off-chain solutions which aren't ready yet and possibly never will. This is what Bitcoin Cash does and the goal is to never have high fees again. During the latest stress test they processed multiple more transactions than Bitcoin could ever do and fees were still $0.0017. [1]
Credit cards also has a small fixed fee which can hurt merchants you need to take into account when comparing. It's not easy to compare though since there are many different possible contracts.
> Less safe for consumers as this simply transfers risk to the buyer
You're right, that's a negative.
> Why would they prefer Bitcoin over protected credit card transactions that, depending on terms, give a 1-2% cash kickback to the consumer.
Because it might be the only payment method possible. Because the merchants now avoid the credit card fees and can instead pass on the savings to the customer. They are incentivized to do this to avoid credit charge back fraud (which they otherwise eat).
[0]: https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2017... [1]: https://cointelegraph.com/news/bitcoin-cash-stress-test-resu...
No currency conversion fees.
The ability to send funds to anyone with no middle man and no fee (besides the miners).
Also the removal of business and corporate surveillance. Right now Banks, Mastercard, stripe, venmo etc. know everything about you. They can then leverage that information in any way that they want. I don't like that. You run for office on an anti banking or big business platform and amazingly its leaked that you have an ongoing monthly subscription to X.
You said potentially, so I’ll give you this one.
> No currency conversion fees.
This is a function of the market, not the underlying instruments. It’s also not true of most crypto markets, and I’m not confusing the spread with fees at exchanges.
> The ability to send funds to anyone with no middle man and no fee (besides the miners).
No fee (besides the miners) isn’t much different to no fee (except this fee). It’s still a fee, and in the case of Bitcoin, the fee has potential to be prohibitive (and already is for some use cases that it was designed for, e.g. buying a cup of coffee).
> Also the removal of business and corporate surveillance. Right now Banks, Mastercard, stripe, venmo etc. know everything about you. They can then leverage that information in any way that they want. I don't like that. You run for office on an anti banking or big business platform and amazingly its leaked that you have an ongoing monthly subscription to X.
Bitcoin is not anonymous, Monero could be unmasked[1], if you’re leaving a digital footprint, someone will eventually be able to follow it.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/1704.04299.pdf
The "fees are just too high to buy a cup of coffee" is an old trope that is no longer relevant. One can go download LND 0.5 and use the lightning network to make instant practically free payments for a "cup of coffee" today.
The only thing I'll concede is that it is still in beta, but the question of whether it's going to exist or not is no longer a question.
This presumably is intended to enrich the Bitcoin oligarchs as a passive way to extract rent and wealth on the network simply for controlling existing capital.
This design choice indicates either a comic level of negligence, or intent to shift away from p2p to centralized information control.
only a 1% chance of successfully routing a $67 payment on the lightning network:
https://i.redd.it/twku0lwslz411.jpg
[1] https://medium.com/andreas-tries-blockchain/bitcoin-lightnin...If you don't want to use an LN hub, then create your own. If you don't have enough money, then raise some capital and start a LN hub business. Hell, create a non-profit LN hub! If you don't want to pay for the service of using other LN hubs, then send a direct payment. Of course, this will cost real money, but you always have that option. If I'm sending money to purchase a house, you can bet I'm going to send an actual transaction and not use the lightning network. For cups of coffee, I just don't need the full decentralization.
Claiming that we will not be able to solve the routing problem on the lightning network is exactly the same as claiming that we won't be able to solve the routing problem on the Internet. Routing is a solved problem, but is a difficult problem to implement, which is why the clients are in BETA.
Your link is bullshit, as I mentioned the network is in BETA. Of course people don't have a bunch of money on the lightning network and can't route large payments like $67. That's because the network is in BETA, and all of the platforms are expressly telling people not to use it for large payments.
For digital payments I could skip the scam and use Venmo or cash.
I don't get why anyone would bother wasting their money on LN? You have to first buy the Bitcoins which is highly volatile so the risk of losing your money is always possible.
What's the use case? Why bother going though all the trouble and why is there a need to buy someone elses tokens which they basically made for free?
It sounds like you need to convince people to use Bitcoin because you own some and need more people to buy it so you can sell for fiat and make real money. Why else would you try to dismiss the inherent issue with race conditions in decentralized routing networks? Handwaving the flaw by saying "it'll be fixed in the future" is either your ignorance or a lie and an attempt to deceive.
You can't even claim it's the fault of beta software, because it's not even theoretically possible to solve the decentralized routing problem. LN is just another form of paypal/banking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem
Quiet obvious how your scam works.
That said, I have never seen any convincing argument that LN routing can't work in theory... Especially because the lightning network is not completely decentralized on purpose. It works off the idea of "hubs", in which you will connect to a hub, likely one hop, and then the hub will most of the time get to your destination in one or two hops. I'd really like to see someone who claims that we don't have the ability to connect two points in a graph separated by three, or even four, hops. This is just made up nonsense.
The middle part of your comment is just "kids, get off my lawn". Why would anyone need anything besides venmo or cash? Do you mail cash to purchase things online? How many large Internet retailers accept venmo? How many people are implementing micro payments using venmo?
The rest of your comment is just an ad-hominem. And not only is it that, but it's also nonsensical because maybe I have some bitcoins because i'm putting my money where my mouth is.
Also, the travelling salesman problem is bullshit and irrelevant, because LN doesn't need to have the shortest possible route to work, it just needs a workable route.
https://study.com/academy/lesson/attacking-the-motive-fallac...
There are lots of ways that powerful governments can still put their thumb on the scale. US taxes still need to be paid with US dollars, and they can squeeze / regulate the exchanges, or influence, for example, the devs working on bitcoin.
Also, the design of bitcoin is inherently deflationary, which isn't inflation, but has its own set of problems. Saying that nobody is going to have the power to fix those problems isn't a huge selling point.
> No current conversion fees.
Well, I guess if everyone in the world settled on a single cryptocurrency. But that's also true of any other currency in the same situation.
> The ability to send funds to anyone with no middle man and no fee (besides the miners).
What is the importance of not having a middleman? Is it so that you can avoid regulations/fees that you'd otherwise be subject to? To me, this seems like the entire value proposition of cryptocurrency.
> Also the removal of business and corporate surveillance.
This is a good point.
Not many people are using bitcoin to buy pizza any more, because there's a hope that if they just HODL a bit longer they'll be able to buy lambos with the same amount of bitcoin.
That makes bitcoin less useful as a day-to-day currency. If the entire world economy was based on bitcoin, there would be a deflationary spiral and no clear way to fix it. This would be the mother of all depressions.
If you have two forms of money, one of which is inflationary and one of which is deflationary, it becomes rational to hold the deflationary one and spend the inflationary one. Eventually all transactions happen in the inflationary currency, and people forget that the deflationary one is money at all - it just becomes a collectible.
One of the intriguing possibilities of cryptocurrency to me, though, is the idea that a currency could have its inflation rate algorithmically determined so that all market participants know exactly what it'll be worth in the future, irrespective of the actions of any central bank. Extra points if any new money injected goes to people actually transacting with it rather than people holding it as a store of value.
I've long thought the problem with the Fed isn't that it exists or that it increases the money supply, it's that it injects new money at the top of the economy (banks etc.) and measures its effect at the bottom of the economy (consumer prices). That a.) gives a long time lag between the Fed's actions and their effects, which tends to make them overcorrect and b.) means that all sorts of shenanigans can go on in the meantime.
Bitcoin has a higher inflation rate than USD.
Early in Bitcoin history, by design Bitcoin went though a period of hyperinflation where Satoshi and a few users acquired most of the coins in circulation. Aprox 4.11% of Bitcoin users (addresses) control 96.53% of all bitcoins in circulation.Or manipulation from exchanges which generate counterfeit accounts and fake volume in order to steal BTC from the market before they exit scam like most of the exchanges in the past have.
What do you think about Tether and "stable coins" being generated by the billions for free (and then those operators using the counterfit stablecoins to steal BTC/XMR/ETH)?
https://medium.com/@bitfinexed
The common theory is that Bitfinex, Tether, and most of the Cryptocurrency exchanges are operating as fractional reserve banks - and creating more cryptocoins for free, meanwhile "buying" Bitcoin, Monereo, Ethereum, and so on for free because they operate in the dark.
If this is true, it's worse than real central banking, and it's quiet possible Bitfinex and other exchanges have stolen the vast majority of BTC in circulation.
https://virtualmarkets.ag.ny.gov/https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2018-09-27/crypt...
devil's advocate: what's wrong with Ponzi and Pyramid schemes that are clearly advertised? it's pretty much guaranteed that people will lose money on them (negative EV), but how are they any worse than say, slot machines that are also negative EV?
but OP's comment is about schemes that are embeded into the currency itself
>I don't like it being designed with Ponzi and Pyramid scheme structures embedded.
presumably as some sort of smart contract. in which case every participant should know (or can find out) that it's a ponzi/pyramind scheme.
>and you run into them the more the hype-shallow marketing-level "positive" information hits mainstream media, and you get more people (army of HODLers; Pyramid scheme) trying to sell you with shallow and/or purposeful misinformation/information. That's very different than going to a physical place, to a casino, and playing a slot machine. I'm surprised you don't see that difference yourself?
that's a fair point. "traditional" gambling don't incentivize people to market for them.
Is this a reference to crypto's distributed ledgers being open to the public?
If Cryptocurrency takes off and society accepts it enough to take it as a ordinary medium of exchange, I would imagine it would almost be impossible to prevent people from routing a subset of their transactions through privacy coins.
[0] https://lab.getmonero.org/pubs/MRL-0001.pdf
[1] http://zerocash-project.org/media/pdf/zerocash-extended-2014...
Erik Voorhees' "cavalier" approach to the man's collection efforts are honest in that even the best Anti-Money Laundering/Know Your Customer implementation would not reveal the origin and destination of the funds when using Monero.
The quaint mention of Monero in this article is foreshadowing of more amazing informative pieces about this form of money. In this piece, they intentionally conflate what Shapeshift does with how other exchanges operate. They intentionally conflate Monero with all cryptocurrencies.
It is an interesting way of writing
But I think this will be followed up with more productive articles
The Wanna-cry ransomware did not collect millions of dollars. It barely collected $100,000 before the patch rolled out. The very public nature of the Wanna-cry attack and patch revealed that the same NSA tool was being used on a Monero mining botnet for weeks before hand already. and THAT was making millions of dollars, but the ransomware people ruined it!
Alright I'm going to call it, this is shoddy journalism. Glad to see the Monero mention
Eventually they released a sample which contained real exploits with unheard of vulnerabilities
A few weeks later the Wanna-Cry ransomware had weaponized those vulnerabilities and spread world wide really quickly, attracting way too much attention and a fix rolled out
The attention revealed that the exploit had been weaponized almost immediately a few weeks earlier for a very smart and stealthy Monero mining botnet, which made way more than Wannacry did
People still use the leaked NSA exploits to hack computers and run Monero botnets.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/newly-detected-malware-uses-n...
yes, we've all heard misinformation about bitcoin being untrackable, but Monero is the real deal for now, with the pros and cons and possible attack vectors researched and published about
Such a quest rationalizes warrantless mass-surveillance of the economy, which gives AML agencies and their deputies in the banking sector an unreasonably broad view of the private financial interactions taking place in the economy, and by negating the fungibility of money, undermines its usefulness.
Money is only useful to the extent that every unit is interchangable, accepted at face value without prejudice, and can be used without compromising its user's privacy. That means all money must be assumed 'clean' unless proven dirty. Treating everyone as suspect and forcing them prove their money was legitimately acquired in order to utilize it is taking exactly the opposite track.
I wonder how you could model that. And as a corollary, how to monitor the effect in the real world?
I imagine monitoring it could be difficult because the presence of fungibility implies non-traceablility/privacy, meaning observation changes the phenomenon, sort of like the measurement problem of quantum mechanics.
The point is to raise the risk/cost of money laundering and to minimize its occurrence, otherwise financial fraud becomes culturally normalized, and not something people avoid. For that, anti-money laundering agencies must pay attention to large transfers between anonymized business entities. That's very different than total-awareness of every individual's financial holdings and small transactions.
> by negating the fungibility of money, undermines its usefulness
Reducing the fungibility (i.e. by increasing the reporting and oversight requirements) of large transfers of money doesn't undermine its usefulness for anything other than money laundering. Most transactions of life fall well below the 10k reporting limit, and those that are above (i.e. purchasing a car) tend to be on-the-record.
Of course, that's the point. But the means is totalitarian.
>>otherwise financial fraud becomes culturally normalized
There are other ways to investigate and prosecute crime besides doing away with due process and protections against warrantless searches.
Fraud leaves a massive evidence trail. In many jurisdictions the problem is law enforcement simply not starting a criminal case against those involved in blatant fraud, or taking years to file charges, giving the fraudster time to victimize countless parties before they finally face consequences.
So there's no lack of information to use to prosecute those committing fraud without the total surveillance approach.
>>For that, anti-money laundering agencies must pay attention to large transfers between anonymized business entities.
Anything of significance about the operations of individuals and companies can be known by tracking transactions above $10,000.
Requiring that these transactions be reported totally circumvents the traditional limits on government searches, which required a warrant issued by a judge.
This is dragnet warrantless surveillance of trillions of dollars of transactions that creates information asymmetries the likes of which have never existed before.
>>That's very different than total-awareness of every individual's financial holdings and small transactions.
Most small transactions aggregate to larger ones. Having to explain the source of a large deposit to a bank requires providing evidence of the smaller transactions that formed the holding.
It amounts to AML agencies and the banks they've deputized having near total knowledge of the financial history of every individual.
An enormous amount of proprietary information can be gleened from this, which inevitably contributes to centralization of power, and I imagine, income inequality.
>>Reducing the fungibility (i.e. by increasing the reporting and oversight requirements) of large transfers of money doesn't undermine its usefulness for anything other than money laundering.
People have their money frozen for months at a time by banks, and have to comply with incredibly intrusive requests for private and hard to acquire information to get it unfrozen.
People have their bank accounts closed without explanation because the bank identifies some aspect of their financial profile, like affiliation with a legal marijuana dispensary, as too risky for their AML program. Or because the source of their money, while legal, is perceived as high-risk by the bank. So money is not fungible. Revenue from one legal source is treated differently than revenue from another.
And people can't just use cash. The AML drive has resulted in a situation where moving large amounts of cash is not safe, as billions of dollars in cash have been confiscated from individuals without even any charges being laid against them, through civil forfeiture and the principle that cash is "suspicious":
http://time.com/4878195/civil-asset-forfeiture-jeff-sessions...
What makes you say that?
If I paid you in gift cards redeemable with specific places you spend money would that not be useful to you?
What if I bought coffee from you and paid you in tokens that your employees could invalidate if they proved you engaged in illegal labor practices?
What makes these forms of money useless?
I would propose a diffuse cloud of uses, with different assets filling them out. More like a long tail than a gradient from “useful” to “not useful”.
> The way this reads makes it seem like the Shapeshift exchange is intentionally hiding something in order to facilitate criminals. This is negligent journalism deliberately written for you to form a particular opinion about cryptocurrencies in general. The Monero payment network doesn't publicly reveal recipient addresses and transaction amounts? This is a feature.
the real story is in the comments.