Crypto Currency Thread

[Condi]

dimots said:

Condi said:

One owns OVERVALUED SHARES IN companies which have invested money in physical assets, which if required can be sold AT A LOSS to release cash, and which have a value to someone for the purpose they were originally constructed.

FTFY.

Edited by dimots on Tuesday 26th November 16:53

True, although that depends on when they were bought, and at least they will always have a value to someone until the company goes bust. Even then the assets can be liquidated.

The only reason people buy bitcoin is because they hope someone else will pay more for it later. There is no value being created, no work being done, and it has failed as a currency in that people are not using it to buy goods and services. The perfect example of the greater fool theory in action.

But each to their own, some people have done well out of it, and good luck to them. To me its like riding a rollercoaster blind, knowing that at some point the track runs out but not knowing when.

[anonymous-user]

All the onecoin stuff, yes BTC is different, but in reality the system is very similar.

Bitcoin is purely a get rich quick scheme, no one actually uses it en masse, there is little transparency by exchanges,mass manpluilation, people will always have the mindset it will be big tommorow.

It is too volatile and only really solves problems in the illegal world.

[anonymous-user]

What problems does it solve in the illegal world?

[dimots]

JPJPJP said:

What problems does it solve in the illegal world?

It can be used to get around ISP restrictions on payment processors - for e.g. grey/black market gambling. Whether these actions are illegal is debatable in many cases - depends on the country they are operating in.

In addition it all has to be accounted for if it’s converted to Fiat and it’s actually very traceable in most situations.

To say ‘it’s no good except being good for X’ just indicates the stage of adoption it’s at. Bitcoin works and has been working for a long time without any failures.

[anonymous-user]

JPJPJP said:

What problems does it solve in the illegal world?

money laundering for a start.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/11/17/br...

Global Witness, an anti-corruption NGO, has uncovered fresh evidence of connections between Mayzus Financial Services (MFS), a Russian-owned company incorporated in the UK, andcryptocurrency exchange BTC-e.

Edited by Thesprucegoose on Tuesday 26th November 19:13

[anonymous-user]

Money laundering a plenty without crypto

Eg https://www.nationalcrimeagency.gov.uk/news/10-arr...

And institutions that are supposedly regulated, licensed and to be trusted aren’t all shy of getting Involved

Eg https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/sep/21/i...

That a public and published matter of record of every verified transaction on the bitcoin blockchain exists makes using bitcoin for laundering (into and out of fiat) a crazy undertaking - it is orders of magnitude easier to detect and police in real time and historically than almost any other means of transfer

It can be compared to Betfair making the use of ‘gambling’ to wash money harder than cash in bookies / casinos ever has been

Bitcoin decentralises control (good imo), but in doing so it enhances, rather than reduces, transparency and traceability

Edited by anonymous-user on Tuesday 26th November 19:56

[anonymous-user]

JPJPJP said:

Money laundering a plenty without crypto
]

Yes but that has zero to do with the story I linked.

British regulated exchange laundered money for Russian Mafia.

The same with onecoin and probably a thousand other coins, all leading into BTC. Its the same staid reponse, mention an illegal activity and it will be in FIAT, but the point is in BTC they can make billions, maybe 100 of billions, turn 1 million usd into a billion with whatver scam you want, all using BTC as the medium.

1 billion expected to be spent on kiddie porn and drugs on the dark web.

Merchant transactions account for 1.3% of economic activity, Speculation remains the primary use, Chainalysis data show.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-31...

[anonymous-user]

Thesprucegoose said:

Yes but that has zero to do with the story I linked.

British regulated exchange laundered money for Russian Mafia.

The same with onecoin and probably a thousand other coins, all leading into BTC. Its the same staid reponse, mention an illegal activity and it will be in FIAT, but the point is in BTC they can make billions, maybe 100 of billions, turn 1 million usd into a billion with whatver scam you want, all using BTC as the medium.

1 billion expected to be spent on kiddie porn and drugs on the dark web.

Merchant transactions account for 1.3% of economic activity, Speculation remains the primary use, Chainalysis data show.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-31...

And I linked to "Danish regulated bank laundered money for Russian Mafia"

Money laundering is not an illegal problem that is solved for the perpetrators by crypto. Some money laundering involves crypto. Some doesn't.

Using bitcoin to buy illegal products / services is crazy and could only be done by someone with very little understanding of how BTC works. There is a detailed and immutable and public record of every transaction made in bitcoin on the bitcoin blockchain. Anyone putting their dodgy transactions on such a record is begging for bother and they will, rightly, get it.

You are right that it is currently a primarily speculative asset. It may well remain a speculative asset for a long time to come. Maybe for as long as it survives - which may be days, weeks, months, years, decades or centuries. I'm OK with that.

The number of merchant transactions isn't particularly relevant (imo). Gold, for instance, isn't used much in merchant transactions either. Merchant transactions are just one use case of an asset / money.

Most of the stcoins that were created in the last couple of years were, in one way or another, a scam. No doubt about that. A lot of punters were duped and parted from their wealth by the scammers that operated those schemes and their useless / worthless tokens

I say that bitcoin isn't a stcoin and isn't comparable in any way to, say (my favourite in a very crowded field of scam tokens), 4New https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/death-threat...

I won't argue with anyone that says that BTC could go pop and be worth nothing at all. As of today, that would disappoint me, but it wouldn't shock me.

Nor will I go further the other way than I already have: to say that I agree with Mark Yusko when he makes the case that all investors should 'get off zero' in a well managed and properly planned portfolio. I am certain that I did enough research before deciding to do just that with my small bet on BTC.

I did, as I posted previously on this very thread on 10th July, speculate entirely on the back of DrSteveBrule's contributions to this thread on LINK: 105 and a bit LINK (~$325) that were bought with the leftovers of transactions I was doing to rid myself of BCH. He might be wrong about LINK and I might be proven to be stupid to do that without any of my own research. I did none and that is not a path that anyone can recommend to anyone.

Don't do things like that with money you can't afford to smile about losing immediately and forever.

Edited by anonymous-user on Tuesday 26th November 21:50

[Condi]

JPJPJP said:

Using bitcoin to buy illegal products / services is crazy and could only be done by someone with very little understanding of how BTC works. There is a detailed and immutable and public record of every transaction made in bitcoin on the bitcoin blockchain. Anyone putting their dodgy transactions on such a record is begging for bother and they will, rightly, get it.

Why then do so many hackers and cyber criminals want payment in bitcoin? When they encrypt a companies computer systems, of which there are many many examples, they never post a message with account number and sort code do they? They provide a bitcoin address.

Nearly all the transactions on Silkroad were paid for in bitcoin too. Very little, if any, of that was ever sized by police as would have happened with cash in a bank account.

The fact it is traceable it totally pointless if you cannot see who owns the account it is connected to, and to fool yourself that it is not on the whole used by people who for whatever reason cannot use the legitimate and regulated banking system is just naivety. For most law abiding citizens if offers no advantage over current payment methods.

[anonymous-user]

The problem crooks have with an open and complete ledger (like bitcoin's) is that the record of their transactions is immutable and persistent.

As Mr Hugh Brian Haney recently discovered when the $19m he cashed out of BTC that he had accrued from drug deals on the Silk Road marketplace led to his arrest in July 2019 (almost 6 years after the silk road site was closed down)

He is currently in custody awaiting sentencing (up to 30 years) following a guilty plea in court just a couple of weeks ago

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/dark-web-narc...

[DonkeyApple]

Condi said:

Why then do so many hackers and cyber criminals want payment in bitcoin? When they encrypt a companies computer systems, of which there are many many examples, they never post a message with account number and sort code do they? They provide a bitcoin address.

Nearly all the transactions on Silkroad were paid for in bitcoin too. Very little, if any, of that was ever sized by police as would have happened with cash in a bank account.

The fact it is traceable it totally pointless if you cannot see who owns the account it is connected to, and to fool yourself that it is not on the whole used by people who for whatever reason cannot use the legitimate and regulated banking system is just naivety. For most law abiding citizens if offers no advantage over current payment methods.

That’s really the big benefit. The entire path may be traceable but it’s an excellent means to route illicit funds from masked account A to masked account B where physical cash transactions instead have to pass through intermediaries that have a regulatory duty to report as well as establish beneficial owner status of at least one of the two parties. It’s the unmonitored, unregulated, unsanctioned transfer of wealth that is the valuable tool. The fact that it could be traced actually isn’t particularly important.

And at the lower, retail end of the market it is much more slick means to get retail mugs to settle their accounts as you don’t need the expensive levelsnof layering to migrate cash into electronic form. Again the fact the micro muppet transaction can theoretically be traced isn’t relevant as the muppet makes a digital transfer to a masked entity that hops multiple jurisdictions and destinations for much less cost that bouncing the funds through the required series of physical bank accounts. For example, to get an Estonian bank to wash your money by say, issuing a bond to you it is likely to cost around 20% and that’s after you’ve paid to bounce the cash around enough places so that the Estonian bank can say they had carried out DD on the source and it looked fine to them. Crypto allows you to do that bouncing for next to nothing, an enormous saving to the point that by the time you are buying your physical property in NY and London you’ve paid a fraction of what you used to have to pay to get the street cash from all over the world into the banking system and washed so that you have all the appearance of a perfectly legitimate F1 team owner, football club owner, international financier or commercial property magnate and can walk into any of Caring’s clubs with the stench of death and theft not quite strong enough to make others wretch.

[dimots]

Or to put it more succinctly it is a decentralized digital currency without a central bank or single administrator that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin blockchain network without the need for intermediaries.

[DonkeyApple]

dimots said:

Or to put it more succinctly it is a decentralized digital currency without a central bank or single administrator that can be sent from user to user on the peer-to-peer bitcoin blockchain network without the need for intermediaries.

The trade off being security. So absolutely fine for people who have nothing and for those who have lots but can’t risk putting it through a secure system due to issues with the source of funds.

[Behemoth]

DonkeyApple said:

The trade off being security. So absolutely fine for people who have nothing and for those who have lots but can’t risk putting it through a secure system due to issues with the source of funds.

Used peer to peer, as intended, there is no security trade off. It's extraordinarily secure, with no intermediary and zero chance of any payment reversal. The transaction appears on the blockchain and that's that. It's immutable and doesn't require a trusted third party.

[Condi]

Behemoth said:

Used peer to peer, as intended, there is no security trade off. It's extraordinarily secure, with no intermediary and zero chance of any payment reversal. The transaction appears on the blockchain and that's that. It's immutable and doesn't require a trusted third party.

Indeed, very helpful if you need to pay for a load of drugs from an unnamed person.

Transfer from me to you, why not just use BACS?

[Behemoth]

Condi said:

Indeed, very helpful if you need to pay for a load of drugs from an unnamed person.

Transfer from me to you, why not just use BACS?

Very helpful in any situation where third parties cannot be trusted and are thus a security risk.

Not useful for you today, no. We already know you're limited in your ability to think beyond your own horizons and the current decade.

A form of money that is native to the internet and is not controlled by anybody is clearly useful and has enormous future potential.

[Condi]

Behemoth said:

Very helpful in any situation where third parties cannot be trusted and are thus a security risk.

Not useful for you today, no. We already know you're limited in your ability to think beyond your own horizons and the current decade.

A form of money that is native to the internet and is not controlled by anybody is clearly useful and has enormous future potential.

Yes, but your 'ideal world' where you can see all the benefits and non of the downsides unfortunately at some point has to coincide with reality and you don't seem to accept that the widespread adoption of any crypto coin beyond the aforementioned drug dealers, international criminals and hackers relies upon it being accepted and regulated in a similar way to bank accounts are at the moment. Once you put similar regulation to banking into the bitcoin world, you may as well just use banks...

[anonymous-user]

Condi said:

Once you put similar regulation to banking into the bitcoin world, you may as well just use banks...

Bingo.

The LDN was the future, loads of posts on here, i raised concerns, but the btc fanboys always say tommorow. That seems to have frizzled out, no one really uses it. Bitcoin is purely speculation, real world use is limited, the medium used to buy it is manipulating the price via various methods.

Edited by Thesprucegoose on Wednesday 27th November 20:50

[anonymous-user]

Condi said:

Yes, but your 'ideal world' where you can see all the benefits and non of the downsides unfortunately at some point has to coincide with reality and you don't seem to accept that the widespread adoption of any crypto coin beyond the aforementioned drug dealers, international criminals and hackers relies upon it being accepted and regulated in a similar way to bank accounts are at the moment. Once you put similar regulation to banking into the bitcoin world, you may as well just use banks...

Banks have had their chance and there is no need for them or fiat currencies to disappear because of crypto. However, there are around 1.7 billion adults that are still unbanked (according to worldbank). If crypto offers an alternative (like mobile did against fixed line) and gives those people access to a secure financial system, all well and good.

Does bitcoin need to become a means of payment that is used for everyday transactions? No, it absolutely doesn't. It can act in a similar way to gold - no one really buys a coffee with a shaving off a bar of bullion do they?

In part, bitcoin doesn't need the same regulation as banks. Part of the regulation of banks is about reserves, money creation and similar. In a system where the supply of currency is finite - e.g. bitcoin - and where it can't be created by a banking licence holder merely to lend out at interest, that side of the regulatory regime can be much lighter.

Once you get your mind past the idea of a bitcoin being worth £x - i.e. thinking about it from scratch in the broader world, you can imagine some strange scenarios. You have to go there in your mind to really understand the beauty of the bitcoin white paper.

At risk of repeating myself, BTC could indeed vanish and be worthless and proven to have been a waste of whole lot of time and money.

But, as well as thinking about things like QE, inflation, deflation, bank bail outs and the world that the average developed world person lives in, looking outside that and thinking about citizens of countries in revolutions, wars, unbanked people, currency crises etc. was an interesting part of my early research into BTC.

[Behemoth]

Condi said:

Yes, but your 'ideal world' where you can see all the benefits and non of the downsides unfortunately at some point has to coincide with reality and you don't seem to accept that the widespread adoption of any crypto coin beyond the aforementioned drug dealers, international criminals and hackers relies upon it being accepted and regulated in a similar way to bank accounts are at the moment. Once you put similar regulation to banking into the bitcoin world, you may as well just use banks...

That's not my opinion at all. I'm not anti regulation, I just think the path I describe is inevitable. I fully expect widespread adoption to carry concomitant regulation. But this'll be in tandem with increasing unfettered use that nation states won't be able to control. They will try, but it'll forever be cat & mouse.

The internet is once again a good analogy. Since adoption by the public, it has had good legal bits and bad illegal bits. All parts of it fall under law somewhere, but that law is circumvented more easily than it ever was in the pre internet era. Whether that circumvention of regs is good or bad is rather irrelevant. It's just a matter of fact. What is perfectly legal for you to read in Tunbridge Wells may be something for which in China you'd be sent to a re-education camp.

Will the internet be banned because of its bad bits? Of course not (though this was certainly mooted by the ignorant in the early years).

The same goes for the censorship of financial transactions. A form of digital money not controlled by anybody clearly has an excellent prospect of surviving and prospering, especially if it has provable scarcity.

Whether you or I think it's a good or bad thing is moot. It's simply inevitable. Thinking otherwise is like waving a red flag in front of a horseless carriage.