I read this and assumed crypto meant cryptography. I guess at this stage we should come up with a new short term for cryptography, since crypto has been subsumed.
Could this maybe be editorialised to cryptocurrency for clarity?
Eh I wouldn’t be so quick to blame finance for this one. How quickly did we lose the “hackers vs crackers” debate in security? Even this forum, plenty of people think the “hacker” in the name refers to cybercriminals because the name was so throughly co-opted.
Magic beans that live in your computer, or, uh, digital Chuck E. Cheese tokens. On a side note did you know the E. stands for Entertainment? Entertainment is literally that mouse’s middle name.
Nope. Fiat money is created as debt repayable only in that currency, and backed by a government which levies taxes only in that currency, so future demand to obtain the currency doesn't depend entirely on the assumption its purchasing power will go up. Even then, it needs a lot of intervention to keep it stable on a day to day basis.
Yes but it is a very broad subset to the point that it isn't useful. It's like saying that a law makes Germany a "money heaven" after introducing mobile payments.
>> we should come up with a new short term for cryptography
Or neither of them should be shortened because these are compound words and the meaning of the first "hidden, secret" is too broad to represent any of its compound derivatives.
Seems they're making all crypto exchanges not registered in Germany illegal for their citizens. I wonder what the punishment will be for a German who buys crypto from an unregistered exchange?
I'm not so sure about that. I haven't looked up the legal text, but to me it only sounds like operating some services like crypto exchanges requires a licence.
As a citizen I can interact with a Canadian bank that has no German licence, as long as I don't launder money. The Canadian bank just can't do business activities in Germany (advertisement, opening an office, etc).
Overall this seems like a bigpositive since it gives crypto currencies a more solid place in the German legal framework, taking it out of the niche
I can see the sarcasm in your post, but as someone who's just moved to Germany from a more ... bureaucratically modern ... country, it is enough to make one cry. The only digital part of my tasks so far has been that I had to send a document by email after travelling 800 km to perform a needlessly face-to-face task which required a followup.
Welcome to Germany (in all seriousness, if nobody rold you yet, welcome!)! I still remember when the local admin office was so proud to to go digital by offering online reservations for appointments. After at least two years of discussions. Portal looked already old in the early 2000s.
When I first heard a politician announce that at a start-up conference, I had to double check that really talked about the implementation and not the law to be in force. And the guy was the (deputy-) head of parliament's digitalization council. Not sure just how the German government, and society, think a digital world is going to look like.
What I don't understand is your banking. As a Czech person, I strongly felt like German banking is 20 years in the past. Why the heck would you have ATMs with opening hours, and not accepting all cards? Why does it cost so much (or anything?) to withdraw? Why are your businesses not accepting cards, or only accepting some cards with weird details like "CCs only German, other cards only EU"?
Here they do, as they are inside the bank’s self-service area. Once had to skip on a cab fee (I offered to wire the money, driver wasn’t interested) because there was literally no place I could get money from.
>As a Czech person, I strongly felt like German banking is 20 years in the past. Why the heck would you have ATMs with opening hours, and not accepting all cards?
Never seen an ATM with opening hours, other than ones located inside shopping malls where the entire mall completely closes during the nights.
I never had an ATM refuse my card, tho. The worst was some steep fees (see below).
>Why does it cost so much (or anything?) to withdraw?
Because banks are in the business of making money ;) Seriously tho, most Germans do not pay for withdrawals, you "just" have to remember to go to an ATM of your bank or one of their partners, which admittedly you have to know about and then it's a bit of a hassle.
>Why are your businesses not accepting cards, or only accepting some cards with weird details like "CCs only German, other cards only EU"?
Now that's actually more of an issue, indeed. I think it's a combination of
- Germans still really loving their cash, so everybody usually has at least a few bucks in cash with them,
- Germans always being a bit conservative about new tech (that can lose them money or get their persoanl and/or banking data into the wrong hands),
- Germans really despising when somebody in front of them wants to pay for small purchases slowly with a card (insert into reader, type PIN and/or sign) instead of quickly with some cash
- and small shops not wanting to go through the hassle of setting up this stuff. Both legal and also the tech aspects are a burden; there is a lot of red tape to get accepted by upstream processors and CC companies; and the system isn't exactly unified either. Especially small independent shops that usually sell stuff at a few bucks per customer do not really seem to see the point in offering card payments. And from what I heard, purely anecdotal and second hand, it's far more of a hassle to get set up to accept credit cards, especially issued by foreign banks, than German bank cards, so that may explain why some shops will accept some card but not others.
Then again, everything that's part of a chain or franchise usually accepts cards, and most actual restaurants do too (but some still don't, which can lead to a lot of awkwardness once you try to pay), as do virtually all gas stations, and so on.
As a German, that's just something you're used to and expect: The people in the doner shop or asian food truck or Kiosk (newsagent/corner shop) will stare blankly at you if you want to pay your less than 10 bucks with a card, even when they accept cards.
Anyway, banks been rolling out contactless payment systems recently, which might change things for small item purchases finally (or rather eventually). Which, of course, is an area where Germany lacked behind.
> Never seen an ATM with opening hours, other than ones located inside shopping malls where the entire mall completely closes during the nights.
True for pure ATMs, but here (Lübeck, SH) all the ATMs (besides those fee scalping machines) are inside the bank areas, and they all close between 22 and 23 until the next morning. And when you find one that is open, good luck at getting smaller bills.
huh? Every branch of my banks have card readers at the entrance that allow me to enter the area in the front with the ATMs and self-service machines 24/7. Every other bank I know has the same thing. Has been that way since at least 2 decades.
I've seen that during my roadtrip circle around Germany in Frankfurt, Koln, Hamburg and cities like that, but not in other parts of the country, especially not rural.
> Never seen an ATM with opening hours, other than ones located inside shopping malls where the entire mall completely closes during the nights.
Yeah. In Czechia we can use the card to open the enclosed area and use the ATM.
> I never had an ATM refuse my card, tho. The worst was some steep fees (see below).
I have never seen a Czech ATM that can't handle literally any card from planet Earth, meanwhile the first German ATM I saw has been MasterCard only. And then the second and the third one as well, I was not amused.
The initial purpose of Bitcoin according to its creator was to abolish central banks. The fact that the state uses force to collect taxes in fiat currency means that you have no chance to escape fiat, this new regulation makes sure of that. It means nothing more than Bitcoin has utterly failed in its mission.
I'm just wondering if people who claimed to believe Bitcoin would end the banking system came up with that amongst themselves or were basing it on something "Satoshi" had said.
I had the impression Satoshi was relatively matter of fact about Bitcoin, but I haven't read much of his/her/their own words.
You are confusing the right to legally sell and trade cryptocurrency in Germany and the control of it.
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies will not be regulated by the Deutsche Bundesbank (Germany Central Bank).
Yes, but a person who exchanges using cryptocurrency has to pay taxes in euros to the German government, so you cannot escape. Every transaction in Germany binds you to the central bank.
This is also true of exchanging five eggs for some butter, so anyone who thought a new currency would somehow exempt them from tax laws (and the currency in which the tax is denominated) was always foolish.
First of all, the purpose of Bitcoin had more to do with creating a censorship resistant method of transferring money, and much less to do with central banks.
And for the purpose of sending censorship resistant transactions, it works pretty well. Bitcoin transactions are basically never censored, where as other types of transactions (such as bank, credit card, and PayPal, ect) often are censored.
It is imposible to anonymously buy or sell bitcoin now. If you buy Bitcoins and send them to "censored" people you will be caught immediately and possibly punished.
"Tainted" bitcoins will be traced and will be unusable in Germany.
This new law will also make sure that "censored" persons can not convert bitcoin to fiat. For them bitcoin will be worthless because they have to pay their taxes in fiat.
If this is a blueprint for what is coming in the rest of the world, bitcoin is over. It is now worth less than Gold, because Gold can not be traced.
> and send them to "censored" people you will be caught immediately and possibly punished.
Nope! There are many people that are censored which have broken no laws, have not been charged with any crimes, and yet the banking system tries to block their payments anyway.
By making the transaction on the blockchain, PayPal, who whoever, can't just decide, on a whim to block your transactions arbitrarily, even though no law has been broken.
An example that comes to mind is WikiLeaks. There was a time when donations to WikiLeaks were blocked, through the credit card system, even though they were not charged with any crimes.
Yet the Bitcoin transactions succeeded, and nobody was sent to jail for donating to WikiLeaks.
Financial censorship is something that is often done even though people have broken no laws, and the act of the financial censorship itself is actually the illegal action.
This has nothing to do with people breaking laws. The most common financial censorship is done, arbitrarily, to people who have not broken any laws, have not been charged with any crime, and who will never been able to defend themselves in a court.
Stopping this kind of financial censorship, is extremely valuable.
It'll compete with the failed central banks first, and considering the technology is young and shit right now, it's doing pretty good in places like Venezuela.
This article is attempting to put an extremely positive spin ("new law makes Germany 'crypto[currency] heaven'", "leads to institutional investors", "major breakthrough", "massive for adoption") on a government crackdown. To be expected given that decrypt.co is funded by ConsenSys, which was in turn founded by someone who had (in Feb 2018) an estimated "net worth in cryptocurrency to be between one and five billion [US] dollars"[0], so they have a vested interest in promoting cryptocurrencies. But why does this sort of advertising keep on cropping up on HN?
Indeed I don’t see how this exempts the custodians from any of the AML and KYC rules that represents the only real value proposition of crypto: crime.
> But why does this sort of advertising keep on cropping up on HN?
Enough people within the HN community also suddenly found themselves with a large amount of wealth in these digital beanie babies of late, and so have similar vested interests.
Bloomberg is founded by a billionaire with a vested interest in... whatever he has an interest in? Washington Post by Bezos as well. Should we ban all of this so-called “independent” media from HN?
Well, Bloomberg probably has some actual cash. The crypto guy has a bunch of tokens he needs to turn into usable money. So he has a interest in keeping the price up while he slowly exits without crashing the price.
Bloomberg also has a lot of pricing and other financial market data that he needs to turn into usable money. Most (but not all) of Bloomberg’s editorial content furthers that interest in one way or another.
If the Washington Post featured nothing other than articles about Amazon, and those articles only ever painted Amazon in an unreasonably positive light, then I would question the value of having those featured repeatedly on HN too.
Guess it depends what you want out of HN. Those publications all have issues with objectivity. For me it's enough to know the source, and see comments spelling out the source when it's non-obvious.
Please note that Lubin is a Jew and this is another way Germany is paying reparations. I can't bother to spend the time to connect the dots for any reader - you can do that yourself if you're honest. Besides, anything I say will get censored anyway.
>why does this sort of advertising keep on cropping up on HN
Hacking, startups, and cryptocurrencies are all a rebellion against the stifling rigidity of the established order. Some more constructive than others.
It appears to be a two-pronged law that permits banks to act as custodians, while at the same time requiring other custodians currently operating in Germany to obtain a special license and comply with other regulations.
74 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadCould this maybe be editorialised to cryptocurrency for clarity?
"they" should come up with a new short term for cryptocurrency
We are all, unfortunately, under control of an entity that values financial growth at all costs over any sort of scientific merit.
Something like this:
The five eyes are trying to ban crypto! The government wants to be able to access your life savings when it inevitably all goes digital!
Or neither of them should be shortened because these are compound words and the meaning of the first "hidden, secret" is too broad to represent any of its compound derivatives.
Thanks to whomever changed it.
As a citizen I can interact with a Canadian bank that has no German licence, as long as I don't launder money. The Canadian bank just can't do business activities in Germany (advertisement, opening an office, etc).
Overall this seems like a bigpositive since it gives crypto currencies a more solid place in the German legal framework, taking it out of the niche
When I first heard a politician announce that at a start-up conference, I had to double check that really talked about the implementation and not the law to be in force. And the guy was the (deputy-) head of parliament's digitalization council. Not sure just how the German government, and society, think a digital world is going to look like.
Never seen an ATM with opening hours, other than ones located inside shopping malls where the entire mall completely closes during the nights.
I never had an ATM refuse my card, tho. The worst was some steep fees (see below).
>Why does it cost so much (or anything?) to withdraw?
Because banks are in the business of making money ;) Seriously tho, most Germans do not pay for withdrawals, you "just" have to remember to go to an ATM of your bank or one of their partners, which admittedly you have to know about and then it's a bit of a hassle.
>Why are your businesses not accepting cards, or only accepting some cards with weird details like "CCs only German, other cards only EU"?
Now that's actually more of an issue, indeed. I think it's a combination of
- Germans still really loving their cash, so everybody usually has at least a few bucks in cash with them,
- Germans always being a bit conservative about new tech (that can lose them money or get their persoanl and/or banking data into the wrong hands),
- Germans really despising when somebody in front of them wants to pay for small purchases slowly with a card (insert into reader, type PIN and/or sign) instead of quickly with some cash
- and small shops not wanting to go through the hassle of setting up this stuff. Both legal and also the tech aspects are a burden; there is a lot of red tape to get accepted by upstream processors and CC companies; and the system isn't exactly unified either. Especially small independent shops that usually sell stuff at a few bucks per customer do not really seem to see the point in offering card payments. And from what I heard, purely anecdotal and second hand, it's far more of a hassle to get set up to accept credit cards, especially issued by foreign banks, than German bank cards, so that may explain why some shops will accept some card but not others.
Then again, everything that's part of a chain or franchise usually accepts cards, and most actual restaurants do too (but some still don't, which can lead to a lot of awkwardness once you try to pay), as do virtually all gas stations, and so on.
As a German, that's just something you're used to and expect: The people in the doner shop or asian food truck or Kiosk (newsagent/corner shop) will stare blankly at you if you want to pay your less than 10 bucks with a card, even when they accept cards.
Anyway, banks been rolling out contactless payment systems recently, which might change things for small item purchases finally (or rather eventually). Which, of course, is an area where Germany lacked behind.
True for pure ATMs, but here (Lübeck, SH) all the ATMs (besides those fee scalping machines) are inside the bank areas, and they all close between 22 and 23 until the next morning. And when you find one that is open, good luck at getting smaller bills.
Yeah. In Czechia we can use the card to open the enclosed area and use the ATM.
> I never had an ATM refuse my card, tho. The worst was some steep fees (see below).
I have never seen a Czech ATM that can't handle literally any card from planet Earth, meanwhile the first German ATM I saw has been MasterCard only. And then the second and the third one as well, I was not amused.
I had the impression Satoshi was relatively matter of fact about Bitcoin, but I haven't read much of his/her/their own words.
This is also true of exchanging five eggs for some butter, so anyone who thought a new currency would somehow exempt them from tax laws (and the currency in which the tax is denominated) was always foolish.
Maybe in a decade or three, it will be possible to pay taxes in a cryptocurrenty too.
For now, we should be careful and observe as the technology evolves and the impact of cryptocurrencies on markets and society increases.
And for the purpose of sending censorship resistant transactions, it works pretty well. Bitcoin transactions are basically never censored, where as other types of transactions (such as bank, credit card, and PayPal, ect) often are censored.
Seems like it has worked out quite well.
This new law will also make sure that "censored" persons can not convert bitcoin to fiat. For them bitcoin will be worthless because they have to pay their taxes in fiat.
If this is a blueprint for what is coming in the rest of the world, bitcoin is over. It is now worth less than Gold, because Gold can not be traced.
Nope! There are many people that are censored which have broken no laws, have not been charged with any crimes, and yet the banking system tries to block their payments anyway.
By making the transaction on the blockchain, PayPal, who whoever, can't just decide, on a whim to block your transactions arbitrarily, even though no law has been broken.
An example that comes to mind is WikiLeaks. There was a time when donations to WikiLeaks were blocked, through the credit card system, even though they were not charged with any crimes.
Yet the Bitcoin transactions succeeded, and nobody was sent to jail for donating to WikiLeaks.
Financial censorship is something that is often done even though people have broken no laws, and the act of the financial censorship itself is actually the illegal action.
This has nothing to do with people breaking laws. The most common financial censorship is done, arbitrarily, to people who have not broken any laws, have not been charged with any crime, and who will never been able to defend themselves in a court.
Stopping this kind of financial censorship, is extremely valuable.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Lubin_(entrepreneur)
> But why does this sort of advertising keep on cropping up on HN?
Enough people within the HN community also suddenly found themselves with a large amount of wealth in these digital beanie babies of late, and so have similar vested interests.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
That's implied by the other guidelines already, and is certainly the spirit of the site, but some redundancy seems needed for clarity.
Hacking, startups, and cryptocurrencies are all a rebellion against the stifling rigidity of the established order. Some more constructive than others.