Perhaps they could ask for support from the international monetary fund, an organization established in the wake of the great depression in order to try to preserve financial stability worldwide?
I would actually be surprised if the whole crypto ecosystem isn’t going to implode soon.
The thing is that it doesn’t create any value, it’s all a game of musical chairs.
I don’t care VCs holding the bags, but I do care about the retail “investors” that were naive. (I don’t care about the hfsp bros).
In a few years we will look back at the crypto space and we wonder why nobody intervened like nobody intervened with Madoff, despite multiple people warning about him.
The damage the crypto space has caused is just beyond redemption. To both people and the environment.
It’s time that this stuff is regulated to death. It will also kill the crypto ransom ware pipeline because of a lack of on/off ramps.
The only real value it has beyond speculation is bypassing sanctions, buying drugs and sending money abroad. The speculation has really gone majorly overboard lately. Honestly the Chinese government are looking quite wise in retrospect for banning crypto.
Don't forget about giving tax authorities and relevant three letter organizations easy insight into said activities. Crypto is making public sector more efficient! :)
The question is whether paying contractors in Russia is ethically any better than paying illegal drugs.
Not that the contractors would all be bad people. But sanctions are there to force change. The easier it is to make sanctions ineffective the longer change will take.
So you close Putin's and a couple of other credit cards and let everyone else continue a normal life? Maybe fairer to some individuals (like those already acting in opposition), but certainly a completely ineffective sanction.
This is the first time in the history of humanity that the country leaders can be bypassed and money could be sent peer-to-peer between geographies. There is just no precedent to this (you can't send gold / USD bills on the borders, and when there are banks involved, the leaders could always stop it).
> This is the first time in the history of humanity that the country leaders can be bypassed and money could be sent peer-to-peer between geographies. There is just no precedent to this [...]
"Hawala as a legal concept came to be described as early as 1327, according to Schramm and Taube,[5][6] though the actual practice has existed since the 8th century [...]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala
Except the government fighting a war is getting taxes from those people that just want to engage in the economy to fund its war effort. Sanctions are not perfect but they're a better tool than a shooting war.
Not only directly supporting the government by paying taxes, but also implicitly keeping the current dictator in power. I don't say everyone should be active opposition, it's dangerous in that morally rotten state with its criminal government.
But there is a tipping poing when a dictator and his elite falls. Nobody thought the Soviet Union or the GDR would fall in 1989/90. But they did, at some point the lying just did not work anymore. As long as average peaceful people can make a good living this is much less likely to happen.
While your comment style is a bit aggressive you have a point: Bush and Blair would belong into an international court for starting an attack war, just like Putin.
My personal "sanctions" to the US are that I don't travel there anymore. I visited the country around 2 dozens times and I mostly liked it. But after 9/11 only twice and now not for nearly 12 years. 2 Bushs, homeland security, Manning/Assange/Snowden, and Trump gave me enough. Obama and Biden were too small sparks of hope in the 49% misery.
Biden is not a spark of hope. There is a reason Obama didn't endorse him quickly. Note that he wanted to start the Russian war when Russia invaded Crimea in 2014 as a VP but Obama had to personally intervene and veto the war because he knew instability in that region would blow up.
Biden is nothing like Obama. He is an old timer who has zero mental cognitive ability beyond trying to save his son's investments in Ukraine.
China is planning to drop USD with Gulf countries today. and the US power rests on USD.
Future us will look upon Biden's era & foolishness as the death of American hegemony.
> beyond trying to save his son's investments in Ukraine
The only thing I’m aware of is that Hunter was a non-executive director of Burisma, a private oil company, but that he resigned in 2019 during Biden’s election campaign and 3 years before the war.
Does it matter why the US is supporting Ukraine? its still the right thing to do, even if you do it for the wrong reason (which I don't think they are).
Those wars were wrong, but the question is will you ever say that the Russians are wrong to be committing genocide in Ukraine, and torturing its civilians?.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political battle, and for posting flamewar comments and ignoring our request to stop.
Regardless of how right you are or feel you are, or how bad others are or you feel they are, it's not ok to abuse HN like this. It does no good for anyone.
Even if George Bush went around US punching everyone in their face and telling them that all the wars were war crimes, Americans would accuse him of being a Kremlin apologist.
We've banned this account for using HN primarily for political battle. That's not allowed, because it destroys the curious conversation this site is supposed to be for.
I realize it can be frustrating to hold minority/contrarian views, but it's not ok to vent that frustration in flamewars on Hacker News. We can't allow that, or this place will soon burn itself to a crisp.
The more corrupt a government is, the less people are likely to justify paying taxes to them.
Many Russians that get cryptocurrencies from other countries used it to buy plane tickets to fly away (or other means to get out of the country), and they are definately not want to pay taxes, but are contributing the brain drain that is likely happening right now.
I claim even driving a car is unethical. Russia earns more money from energy imports now than before the war. Price is a function of supply and demand. Supply is difficult to change and certainly not in an ethical way. So everone maintaining demand supports the war, whether they want or not.
An action does not get ethical because others are worse. It's good for your conscience noting others are worse, I don't deny that.
(And I did not say that I don't do the same. I recently had to take a plane. It was unethical to make Russia's war budget grow a tiny bit by doing so, but I thought staying at home would have had other morally unpleasant consequences.)
I don't think op is taking about CO2 emissions, rather that Russia exports a lot of fuel. But even if op is taking about CO2, diving a car and breathing aren't that comparable. Exhaling CO2 is part of the active CO2 cycle and doesn't really contribute to climate change. Digging up locked carbon from the ground and burning it does.
No, I was not talking about CO2 now. I was talking about the global energy market. Most of Europe decided that buying energy from Russia needs to be phased out to give them less money to finance their attack war. I think that's a good plan. Unfortunately with acceptable supplies shrinking prices went up. So now Russia has more income to finance the war. I know it's not a very popular opinion, but for me drastically shrinking demand is the measure that helps.
That this would help the CO2 issue is only a nice side effect.
That’s why we’ve parked the car for all trips that are even theoretically possible with transit and keep the house at 17-18 C (about 64 Freedom Degrees), aside from the toddler’s room.
Chase lets you send wires online for 40 bucks still to all but half a dozen banks there. There might be cheaper ways to wire, too. Not sure what's so unreliable about that, worked all of this year so far.
If the unreliability of the traditional banking system is due to sanctions, then that would suggest that what you are doing is circumventing sanctions and thus quite likely illegal.
Lots of caveats as I don't have enough information, happy to be corrected though.
Unless they are dead set on specifically sending money to the 7 sanctioned institutions, there is absolutely nothing illegal or unstable about this. Source: me wiring modest amounts regularly to my own accounts there to pay local taxes and other things from my regular US bank accounts.
Not sure whether it is illegal. I certainly don't like the imperialistic US view that their sanctions are globally binding. Citizens and businesses from other countries should not be bound by US laws while not being on US ground.
But I think that these sanctions against Russia are ethically justified. So circumventing them is unethical for me, whether illegal or not.
Edit: Saying that these sanctions are ethically justified does not imply that they would be the most efficient or effective way to stop the war.
Most people in the world don’t have access to the reserve currency of the world (especially the countries don’t have the right to print it), they are born in disadvantage.
I'm not sure why you're being down-voted, but that's exactly the biggest real-world use-case for stable-coins. They're a way for people to buy USD and sell their own deflating currency
Except you aren't buying a USD when you buy a stablecoin. You are buying a fraud that pretends to be a dollar.
A true dollar, offered by a bank or money market fund, has assurances from the US that it really exists in our federal reserve system.
A stablecoin is a chuck e cheese token pretending to be a dollar. I can make an excel spreadsheet pretending I have a billion dollars, but I'd be a liar if I did that.
I think the idea was (or still is) to have dollars or some other equivalent that is more tangible and easier to transfer in the world of cryptocurrencies.
1) Actual regulated banking is ... well regulated. Buying and possibly selling monopoly money passes this regulation.
2) Making a token out of everything allows you to play on the chain.
3) There is profit in trading customers real money to your own monopoly tokens... Which of value is determined on market while you keep the real dollars.
4) It could allow some people to argue that they never realised any profits from their trading. Thus tax avoidance...
The US dollar is regulated and it’s use and transfer creates all kind of legal issues and as a result institutions that handle its storage and transfer run heavy KYC and reject unconventional use cases. When you turn it into a stablecoin you no longer have to deal with all that, you can easily trade unregistered securities and engage in ponzis without an oversight.
Okay this sounds a bit too cynical but each crypto bull market resulted in exactly that, unfortunately.
The problem isn't the concept, it's the backing. If the Fed were to announce an official USD stablecoin on Ethereum the chain could be used for international settlement.
Of course, that will never happen as having the ability to restrict capital flows is a key power government wants to retain.
The economic effects are the same as in the real world...i.e. stablecoin is leverage in that one has to have more assets set aside to peg the stable coin during bear markets. In short words more assets during bear market to help maintain the one dollar peg.
Or opposite of the word stable coins during bear markets behind the scenes with the firms that have to dramatically increase the assets used to peg the one dollar value.
That means we have two leverage levers at work the crypto coin used in trades and the stable coin itself.
This is the oracle problem. The guarantees of blockchain and smart contracts only work with things on the blockchain. You can’t put US dollars on the blockchain obviously so you create a cryptocurrency that is on the blockchain and peg it to the US dollar.
In reality you haven’t solved anything because there’s a trust element. It’s just moved. Also you need deep reserves to maintain a peg. There have been several attempts at an algorithmic stablecoin but they’ve had a tendency to collapse spectacularly.
Maintaining a peg in the real world is tricky too. Real world pegs can and do fail.
Tax, if your country has capital gain tax you need to declare every single trade to real USD. When you are trading between crypto pairs you are not realizing any gain, thus you don't need to declare it. Until you eventually sell of course.
99.999% sure the IRS is not going to accept "but it was technically USDC not USD".
The main reason was that historically, crypto institutions tended to be no-questions-asked blacklisted from any real bank, so those who could get banking made stablecoins. Circle, who runs USDC, got banking access from some favorable VC connections iirc, and Tether .... who knows.
If you're trading crypto pairs then that is considered a taxable event.[0]
Many people owed taxes in 2017 because of that rule. It's not considered a like-to-like exchange.
It's wrong as other comments said, but there are related use cases. If you have much XMR, want to evade tax, and want your assets to be stable: you can't exchange it to real USD because it will be followed by tax office. However just exchange it to USDT (between your crypto wallet, not wallet on exchange) won't be followed by your local tax office. Finally you still need to wash the money or need to use them for virtual things like NFT, but it works as temporary solution.
Crypto is programmable money. However, if you use non-stable coins then you open yourself up to exchange rate risk, especially given how volatile the price can be. Stable coins are an attempt to create programmable dollars, essentially.
Sad nobody talks about Monero when cryptocurrency is mentioned. It is pretty much the only viable cryptocurrency. There are no wild promises of getting rich quick, just technology. There are hundreds of cryptocurrencies and Monero stands out like a sore thumb, trying to deliver nothing else other than privacy, security, and stability. It's what Bitcoin should have been. I am seriously not all that interested in cryptocurrency. For the most part, it's all just nonsense and a waste of electricity, but Monero actually delivers.
Yeah. The saddest thing about the cryptocurrency space is how actual good projects remain marginalized despite their value. Monero is what cryptocurrency was supposed to have been like since the start.
Holding XMR means losing money because it doesn't increase in value proportionally to BTC and gets absolutely destroyed even in minor market crashes. It would be so nice if Monero turned into the de facto stable coin of the cryptocurrency world but it's still way too volatile with all the drawbacks and none of the benefits.
This won't change until speculation stops being the most common use case for crypto.
In fact, I would dare say that crashes are good for the ecosystem for this exact reason. At the end of the day, the only people left will be those who really care about privacy and security - and that's when we'll see more substantial advancement in those areas.
Only 0. The "1" state is apparently stable when there's permanent excitation of the underlying cryptomatter (otherwise known outside of cryptophysics as "pumping"), but that always comes to pass, as the pumping molecules are finite.
You know that fiat currencies are also pumped by all the institutions managing them, right? If you are one of the lucky minorities who are privileged enough to have trusted institutions doing a good enough job, then just look at who is desperately trying to get in your country. Their home countries would probably have shitty institutions with horrible currency management.
Baloney. Many stablecoins are not pegged 1:1 to USD, for a strict example see Rai. If a stablecoin has enough collateral, then the managers (human or algorithmic) can let the peg loosen in order to purchase and burn the coin at a discount or mint and sell the coin at a premium.
That said I’m being a bit pedantic as the specific design of USDD (as well as UST) has that property since the collateral is correlated to the stablecoins peg. So you’re correct in this specific case though not in general.
The point is that the ability to maintain the peg is the only important value of a stablecoin, if this is brought into question it will be tested. Once it is tested it will either hold, thus 1 or fail and reside permanently at 0. The exact implementation of the peg management - human, algorithm or otherwise doesn't change this fact.
Every stablecoin has a set of use cases, and in some a strict peg isn’t even one of them - instead it’s low volatility. Yes you’re correct that in the case of USDD maintaining a 1:1 peg matters but the use case of USDD is so that Justin and friends mint USDD for themselves then stake for farming tokens and dump those (such as crv and epx). Basically a way to exploit the tokenomics of stableswap amm, so in this case a 1:1 peg is needed.
In other cases the primary use case can be to provide liquidity for a product or service. In these cases, a strict 1:1 peg isn’t needed as the product essentially goes on sale if the stablecoin’s value falls. Of course the merchant needs to be locked in to the stablecoin as the sale mechanism for this to work.
USD transfers are cumbersome. Bitcoin can be sent to someone with an internet connection. My colleague sends bitcoins to his family living in an OPPRESSED_REGIME with currency controls and high inflation, where the government artifically lowers the official exchange rate of USD.
> It is astounding that some people still take this obvious joke serious.
This was more or less my impression on reading the article. Events have revealed that most of crypto is made up of playthings and pseudo-scams, but this article takes it really seriously.
Don't count on it. If I recall correctly USDD still doesn't have a redemption mechanism. USDD is just Justin Sun messing around with folks to get a rise out of them. He can restore the peg at his discretion for a few bucks.
Sun was on twitter a few months ago shitposting about "steady lads deploying capital" (referring to Do Kwon's infamous Terra posts) as it lost the peg before, and nothing came of it then either.
USDD isn't a 1:1 asset backed coin, and it's not a properly algorithmic coin. Also Justin Sun is a piece of work. It's all just a weird mess. Moreso than usual for crypto.
Cryptocurrency, as a thing, just needs to go away. How many people have to lose their life savings before we admit a bad idea? All so that NK can pay for nukes, people can buy drugs and extort people on the internet.
We’re not making the world a better place here, folks. Good effort, but no. Let’s stop now.
I think that there are valid reasons for crypto to exist (just not for the 10K scam projects), but since when do things need a legal or any other reason to exist?
Kitchen knives are not required for life, but they enable murder.
I find cheerleading really unnecessary, but it leads to 20K injuries amongst adolescents every year. Why is nobody stopping this?
Attempting to invoke the thankfully largely-discarded concept of "whataboutism" is actually just a kind of backhanded ad hominem used to avoid making a real argument and instead try to make people "look the other way".
Criticism of the existing financial system in the context of discussing a proposed replacement for it is about as related a discussion as possible.
Simply stating that all crypto is bad/criminal adds nothing of value to the discussion.
The truth is that there are (as there generally is with new technologies), useful and practical purposes to which they are applied. Indeed, the majority instances so far of "crypto" having caused harm has actually been the result of an ordinary centralised trust-based fraud donning the label "crypto" to draw in victims to loot.
The #1 mantra of crypto has always been "not your keys, not your coins". Had it been followed, instead of perverted into its opposite and mislabelled "crypto", the most heinous of these scams would not have been enabled.
The thing most actively facilitating crime and fraud in "crypto" lately is the profoundly misguided belief that giving your money to someone you've never met you saw on TV is safer than keeping it in your own wallet.
Crypto is not to blame for that belief, it was invented to provide an alternative.
>Attempting to invoke the thankfully largely-discarded concept of "whataboutism" is actually just a kind of backhanded ad hominem used to avoid making a real argument and instead try to make people "look the other way".
Moments of clarity like this are one of the main reasons I keep coming back to this place. :D
What about the fact that I have no idea what credentials he has with regard to analyzing the banking system vs crypto? Please don't disregard my perfectly valid question as an ad hominem attack
Accusing someone of deliberately derailing a conversation when they're doing no such thing is obviously going to be taken as an insult.
You can question the relevance of a comparison without questioning the integrity of the person bringing it up: say it's off-topic and explain why.
More often than not, accusations of "whataboutery" are used to avoid having to explain why something isn't relevant
and thus avoid addressing whatever point is being made. I'd go as far as to say it's why the word even exists.
If NK paid for nukes in USD, would you ban USD? How does that make any sense?
Bitcoin was created partly as a reaction to public funding of private cronies (see the genesis block coinbase). If the national currency is debased like this, at the expense of the general public, clearly the government is not doing its job.
Bitcoin makes it so that the supply is well-known in advance, and only the owners can spend the currency.
Give me a digital payment option without kyc or a risk of "assets are frozen because ____ gov said so" then we'll talk.
As an adult, take responsibility for the consequences of the risks you take. If it isn't crypto the it is the race tracks or lottery. High risk, high reward and you knew that getting into it! No one forces you or tricks you into using crypto.
Right, but they can understand their inability to regulate themselves and be responsible. Some of us can drink all we want and we won't commit crimes or hurt people yet others can't help it so they should not get drunk. Plenty of people gamble at vegas without losing all their savings and plenty if people trade options without committing suicide. So because a bunch of people can't help themselves that doesn't mean you take away the libery of everyone, it means those people need to know themelves and stay away from it.
KYC doesn't say you can't walk around with $10K in your pocket paying cash everywhere. It says the $10K should come from an understood source when you take it in or out of the bank.
I don't understand the illegal immigrant comment. Please do explain that if you like.
And I have paid for cars and expensive things in cash myself because I value my privacy.
If crypto is banned and kyc and cash restrictions take place I will be forced to work with shady people and only hope they cause more harm to this messed up society that wants to take my liberty away. I would gladly fight in or support civil wars for this cause.
Since the dawn of civilization, it has been a right of a free person to own what they want and barter it or exchange currency for some item.
The governmemt does not get to understand or track what sources I get money from. Before the internet, no government cared so long as we paid taxes on all our income.
Find another way to prevent "shady" stuff which fyi will not be deterred one bit, criminals would trade rocks as currency backed by a bigger criminal before letting this bullshit stop them. It's my unaluenable right to not be forced to do business or hand my earnings by default to a third party company be it banking or insurance. May society burn before that happens.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 192 ms ] threadThe thing is that it doesn’t create any value, it’s all a game of musical chairs. I don’t care VCs holding the bags, but I do care about the retail “investors” that were naive. (I don’t care about the hfsp bros).
In a few years we will look back at the crypto space and we wonder why nobody intervened like nobody intervened with Madoff, despite multiple people warning about him.
The damage the crypto space has caused is just beyond redemption. To both people and the environment.
It’s time that this stuff is regulated to death. It will also kill the crypto ransom ware pipeline because of a lack of on/off ramps.
Not that the contractors would all be bad people. But sanctions are there to force change. The easier it is to make sanctions ineffective the longer change will take.
I would argue the more the economic exchange to violence ratio is between two groups, the better it is for both groups (maybe not the leaders)
However, the massive speculation and pollution caused by crypto make the overall balance look strongly negative to me.
"Hawala as a legal concept came to be described as early as 1327, according to Schramm and Taube,[5][6] though the actual practice has existed since the 8th century [...]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawala
But there is a tipping poing when a dictator and his elite falls. Nobody thought the Soviet Union or the GDR would fall in 1989/90. But they did, at some point the lying just did not work anymore. As long as average peaceful people can make a good living this is much less likely to happen.
My personal "sanctions" to the US are that I don't travel there anymore. I visited the country around 2 dozens times and I mostly liked it. But after 9/11 only twice and now not for nearly 12 years. 2 Bushs, homeland security, Manning/Assange/Snowden, and Trump gave me enough. Obama and Biden were too small sparks of hope in the 49% misery.
Biden is nothing like Obama. He is an old timer who has zero mental cognitive ability beyond trying to save his son's investments in Ukraine.
China is planning to drop USD with Gulf countries today. and the US power rests on USD.
Future us will look upon Biden's era & foolishness as the death of American hegemony.
The only thing I’m aware of is that Hunter was a non-executive director of Burisma, a private oil company, but that he resigned in 2019 during Biden’s election campaign and 3 years before the war.
Anything more?
They are literally state-sponsors of terrorism and they're funding privately operated terrorist groups.
Rapes, murders, destruction of civilian infrastructure, it's all well documented.
Those wars were wrong, but the question is will you ever say that the Russians are wrong to be committing genocide in Ukraine, and torturing its civilians?.
I suspect you won't.
That's why Russia is being sanctioned, there is no greater evil.
Regardless of how right you are or feel you are, or how bad others are or you feel they are, it's not ok to abuse HN like this. It does no good for anyone.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No, they didn't.
(predictably, Kremlin apologists/supporters of genocide/whataboutists quickly resort to lies, every single time)
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/sep/16/iraq.iraq "Iraq war was illegal and breached UN charter, says Annan"
Even if George Bush went around US punching everyone in their face and telling them that all the wars were war crimes, Americans would accuse him of being a Kremlin apologist.
And, I'm capable of seeing more than one evil in this world.
Before anyone jumps to the wrong conclusion: yes, this rule holds (and we enforce it) regardless of what your politics actually are. For more explanation see https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
I realize it can be frustrating to hold minority/contrarian views, but it's not ok to vent that frustration in flamewars on Hacker News. We can't allow that, or this place will soon burn itself to a crisp.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=whataboutism%20by:dang&dateRan...
Many Russians that get cryptocurrencies from other countries used it to buy plane tickets to fly away (or other means to get out of the country), and they are definately not want to pay taxes, but are contributing the brain drain that is likely happening right now.
I am paying for programming services. Traditional banking system is unreliable, so I use crypto. Nothing illegal or unethical!
An action does not get ethical because others are worse. It's good for your conscience noting others are worse, I don't deny that.
(And I did not say that I don't do the same. I recently had to take a plane. It was unethical to make Russia's war budget grow a tiny bit by doing so, but I thought staying at home would have had other morally unpleasant consequences.)
That this would help the CO2 issue is only a nice side effect.
Chase lets you send wires online for 40 bucks still to all but half a dozen banks there. There might be cheaper ways to wire, too. Not sure what's so unreliable about that, worked all of this year so far.
Lots of caveats as I don't have enough information, happy to be corrected though.
But I think that these sanctions against Russia are ethically justified. So circumventing them is unethical for me, whether illegal or not.
Edit: Saying that these sanctions are ethically justified does not imply that they would be the most efficient or effective way to stop the war.
https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/crypto-exchange-bit...
Such a cruel joke from mother Nature putting all those natural resources in the hands of a nation and people so unworthy.
Read some history. "unworthy", yeah, sure.
Or use Belize dollars. They’re worth $0.50 by law and have no instability issues.
A true dollar, offered by a bank or money market fund, has assurances from the US that it really exists in our federal reserve system.
A stablecoin is a chuck e cheese token pretending to be a dollar. I can make an excel spreadsheet pretending I have a billion dollars, but I'd be a liar if I did that.
1) Actual regulated banking is ... well regulated. Buying and possibly selling monopoly money passes this regulation.
2) Making a token out of everything allows you to play on the chain.
3) There is profit in trading customers real money to your own monopoly tokens... Which of value is determined on market while you keep the real dollars.
4) It could allow some people to argue that they never realised any profits from their trading. Thus tax avoidance...
Okay this sounds a bit too cynical but each crypto bull market resulted in exactly that, unfortunately.
Of course, that will never happen as having the ability to restrict capital flows is a key power government wants to retain.
This sits right next to the sibling poster's comment:
> The US dollar is regulated and it’s use and transfer crates all kind of legal issues [...]
It looks like people who want stablecoins can't even agree on why they want them.
Or opposite of the word stable coins during bear markets behind the scenes with the firms that have to dramatically increase the assets used to peg the one dollar value.
That means we have two leverage levers at work the crypto coin used in trades and the stable coin itself.
In reality you haven’t solved anything because there’s a trust element. It’s just moved. Also you need deep reserves to maintain a peg. There have been several attempts at an algorithmic stablecoin but they’ve had a tendency to collapse spectacularly.
Maintaining a peg in the real world is tricky too. Real world pegs can and do fail.
The main reason was that historically, crypto institutions tended to be no-questions-asked blacklisted from any real bank, so those who could get banking made stablecoins. Circle, who runs USDC, got banking access from some favorable VC connections iirc, and Tether .... who knows.
[0] https://www.coindesk.com/learn/crypto-capital-gains-and-tax-...
Random exchanges can‘t print dollars, but they can print stablecoins to prop up other crypto prices.
https://basicswapdex.com/
https://particl.news/basicswap-open-beta-is-now-live/
Holding XMR means losing money because it doesn't increase in value proportionally to BTC and gets absolutely destroyed even in minor market crashes. It would be so nice if Monero turned into the de facto stable coin of the cryptocurrency world but it's still way too volatile with all the drawbacks and none of the benefits.
In fact, I would dare say that crashes are good for the ecosystem for this exact reason. At the end of the day, the only people left will be those who really care about privacy and security - and that's when we'll see more substantial advancement in those areas.
(lol)
That said I’m being a bit pedantic as the specific design of USDD (as well as UST) has that property since the collateral is correlated to the stablecoins peg. So you’re correct in this specific case though not in general.
The point is that the ability to maintain the peg is the only important value of a stablecoin, if this is brought into question it will be tested. Once it is tested it will either hold, thus 1 or fail and reside permanently at 0. The exact implementation of the peg management - human, algorithm or otherwise doesn't change this fact.
In other cases the primary use case can be to provide liquidity for a product or service. In these cases, a strict 1:1 peg isn’t needed as the product essentially goes on sale if the stablecoin’s value falls. Of course the merchant needs to be locked in to the stablecoin as the sale mechanism for this to work.
Pro-tip: they won't
And even worse: you won't "notice" its actual value is falling until it's too late
Justin Sun announcing announcements was a common meme back then.
John McAfee was promoting it.
It is astounding that some people still take this obvious joke serious.
Cryptocurrency was and still is being shilled everywhere and FOMO is real.
Venezuela's inflation rate was 1,700,000% in 2018.
This was more or less my impression on reading the article. Events have revealed that most of crypto is made up of playthings and pseudo-scams, but this article takes it really seriously.
Sun was on twitter a few months ago shitposting about "steady lads deploying capital" (referring to Do Kwon's infamous Terra posts) as it lost the peg before, and nothing came of it then either.
USDD isn't a 1:1 asset backed coin, and it's not a properly algorithmic coin. Also Justin Sun is a piece of work. It's all just a weird mess. Moreso than usual for crypto.
We’re not making the world a better place here, folks. Good effort, but no. Let’s stop now.
Kitchen knives are not required for life, but they enable murder.
I find cheerleading really unnecessary, but it leads to 20K injuries amongst adolescents every year. Why is nobody stopping this?
Criticism of our existing financial systems is valid but it’s a different topic, it does make society happen and has tremendous value.
Crypto has negative value. It undermines society, and it actively facilitates crime.
Attempting to invoke the thankfully largely-discarded concept of "whataboutism" is actually just a kind of backhanded ad hominem used to avoid making a real argument and instead try to make people "look the other way".
Criticism of the existing financial system in the context of discussing a proposed replacement for it is about as related a discussion as possible.
Simply stating that all crypto is bad/criminal adds nothing of value to the discussion.
The truth is that there are (as there generally is with new technologies), useful and practical purposes to which they are applied. Indeed, the majority instances so far of "crypto" having caused harm has actually been the result of an ordinary centralised trust-based fraud donning the label "crypto" to draw in victims to loot.
The #1 mantra of crypto has always been "not your keys, not your coins". Had it been followed, instead of perverted into its opposite and mislabelled "crypto", the most heinous of these scams would not have been enabled.
The thing most actively facilitating crime and fraud in "crypto" lately is the profoundly misguided belief that giving your money to someone you've never met you saw on TV is safer than keeping it in your own wallet.
Crypto is not to blame for that belief, it was invented to provide an alternative.
>Attempting to invoke the thankfully largely-discarded concept of "whataboutism" is actually just a kind of backhanded ad hominem used to avoid making a real argument and instead try to make people "look the other way".
Moments of clarity like this are one of the main reasons I keep coming back to this place. :D
You can question the relevance of a comparison without questioning the integrity of the person bringing it up: say it's off-topic and explain why.
More often than not, accusations of "whataboutery" are used to avoid having to explain why something isn't relevant and thus avoid addressing whatever point is being made. I'd go as far as to say it's why the word even exists.
No, the financial system is the reason Bitcoin was created: state and banks are cooperating to debase the national currency.
Crypto undermines tyranny, not society.
In all my tears of living I’ve never had a conversation where someone used the word tyranny and banking in the same sentence.
Average joe just wants their assets insured and kept in a safe place.
"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws." - Mayer Amschel Rothschild
"EThe Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks"
The financial system is explicitly on topic when discussing Crypto Currency.
[1]: https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/blocks/btc/0
Bitcoin was created partly as a reaction to public funding of private cronies (see the genesis block coinbase). If the national currency is debased like this, at the expense of the general public, clearly the government is not doing its job.
Bitcoin makes it so that the supply is well-known in advance, and only the owners can spend the currency.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Genesis_block
Give me a digital payment option without kyc or a risk of "assets are frozen because ____ gov said so" then we'll talk.
As an adult, take responsibility for the consequences of the risks you take. If it isn't crypto the it is the race tracks or lottery. High risk, high reward and you knew that getting into it! No one forces you or tricks you into using crypto.
Haha, you’re a funny guy. This thinking is fantasy. People can’t regulate themselves.
Keep thinking this though if you are that delusional.
Dude, most anything in violation of KYC is sketch.
I don't understand the illegal immigrant comment. Please do explain that if you like.
And I have paid for cars and expensive things in cash myself because I value my privacy.
If crypto is banned and kyc and cash restrictions take place I will be forced to work with shady people and only hope they cause more harm to this messed up society that wants to take my liberty away. I would gladly fight in or support civil wars for this cause.
Since the dawn of civilization, it has been a right of a free person to own what they want and barter it or exchange currency for some item.
The governmemt does not get to understand or track what sources I get money from. Before the internet, no government cared so long as we paid taxes on all our income.
Find another way to prevent "shady" stuff which fyi will not be deterred one bit, criminals would trade rocks as currency backed by a bigger criminal before letting this bullshit stop them. It's my unaluenable right to not be forced to do business or hand my earnings by default to a third party company be it banking or insurance. May society burn before that happens.
And another one gone and another one gone
Another one bites the dust