Governments tend to do things at their own pace.
If any blockchain was forbidden, there would be a huge PR stress and infinite arguments about their viabilities.
Just let morons fail.
Look.
Imagine an otherwise empty room with a table and a few chairs. A couple people come in with some money in their pockets and cards. They play a few round of a card game, some lose, some win. When they leave, the room as it was before so it is crystal clear the sum of their money couldn't change. Some won, some lost but overall the change is zero. This still doesn't change if, for convenience, during the game, they use plastic chips to count wins and losses and at the end they exchange it for money.
But if someone takes a small cut every time the plastic chips move then that person is guaranteed to win and everyone else together is guaranteed to lose. Now, a game where, without knowing anything about the game you can tell ahead of the time which group wins and which one loses is not a game, it's a scam.
Indeed, one of the best moves for players is not to play the game but to sell their chips -- and praise the game to increase the chance of a greater fool buying in. Those will sit on a greater loss than you did which might not materialize yet but it's certainly in the system.
So, any crypto"currency" with transaction fees is a scam. Those who collect transaction fees are guaranteed to win and the rest are guaranteed to lose.
And no, stocks aren't like this because they produce dividend. And no, gold is not like this either because there are uses of gold which transform your gold into higher value products than raw gold (integrated circuits, jewelry) which sell for real money. Neither can happen with crypto"currencies", there the only interfacing with real money is exchange.
Does this not describe CC fees/taxes/online marketplaces/etc? Or is your argument all those are scams as well?
I agree crypto projects are generally a scam but I fully disagree the reason for that is transaction fees (which I assume is what you're alluding to here as the "small cut").
Is it often used for scam? Yes. But so is email.
Just like stocks can fall 99% in a day. It stock s cam? No.
The problem is that users dive into it without understanding the risks. Also, there should be (and will be) more regulations around it.
But it is as far from the scam as it gets.
Tether may also have been allowed to proceed as a sort of test bed for the CBDCs which seem to be on the agenda. Now the narrative can be "the public has already demonstrated strong demand for USD-type cryptocurrencies, we just need to supply an official version."
It just takes a shit-tonne of capital, and it helps to have a functioning internal economy and flexibility to be able to defend against malicious agents.
I suspect there are other legal issues with creating an alternative currency in the us though, which is why these aren't currencies but securities. Which is still fine! A tethered coin is conceptually _similar_ to a 0-yield bond.
Presenting it as being "safe" without it actually being so is the problem here.
As a result of the ICO scams in 2017 for example the infamous Ethereum DAO hack, perhaps that is why at least in the US, the SEC banned unregistered ICOs [0]; more countries to follow.
They have done 'something' about it, but it is not going to 'completely' stop otherwise they would have 'totally' banned all of them, including even registering an ICO with the SEC.
I won't be surprised to see stable-coin regulations this year with only a few of them still surviving.
[0] https://www.whitecase.com/publications/alert/regulation-init...
find a VC who’d buy coins at low prices and then dump into public by placing on Coinbase/Binance
spend that VC cash on marketing
No, it is not.
Please try to set aside your hatred for all things crypto and understand that there is actual legitimate value in many of the crypto projects, and that the core proposition, that of decentralized peer to peer value transfer, is a legitimate and useful use case.
Stablegains, by their own admission, only invested in stablecoins: https://stablegains.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4402687671...
> We do not engage in speculation on the prices of volatile cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ether. We only offer deposits in stablecoins whose value is pegged to one dollar.
> Regardless if crypto markets are soaring or crashing, the value of assets under our management remains stable.
This is hypocritical on its face. You can't have any returns if the assets are stable!
Sure, YC can do whatever they want with its money, but we can all be very disappointed and sad that VC funds are engaging with any of this. YC has been slowly been losing their image for years now, along with the other VC firms, and this just cements it for me.
No, because CCs exchange dollars and the dollars themselves are not worthless (or, rather are given worth via a nuclear arsenal).
The coins themselves are worthless, but accrue "fees" in fiat (ex. when you exchange USD for UST).
I would contest even this. People don't want to transfer "value" they want to transfer money, now to use, say, Bitcoin to transfer money you need to do the following steps:
1. Buy Bitcoin. Let's presume you are already set up with an exchange for this so all you need to do is transfer your money some way to the exchange.
2. Transfer Bitcoin and pay the transaction fee.
3. The receiver wants money. So let's again presume -- despite this is a much shakier presumption -- they are already set up with an exchange then they need to exchange Bitcoin to real money and transfer their money from the exchange to their bank account. I am not mentioning here if they tarry then the exchange rate in #1 and #3 differs -- that could be automated although as far as I am aware there's no service which currently does it.
Turns out the challenge is not #2 but the bank transfers in #1 and #3: integrating with every national banking system in the world. Wise (nee Transferwise) shows this can be done without Bitcoin, creating transparency and predictable fees.
This does not mention the criminal aspects of Bitcoin, I am focusing just on the transfer aspect.
Correct. Only a few cryptocurrency projects will survive and the several meme cryptocurrencies or non-compliant coins will wither away.
This is why some companies waited for regulatory clarity to enter back into the cryptocurrency markets. This is what the absolutist crypto-skeptics or absolutist crypto-maximalists won't tell you.
Disaster strikes when someone sees the mountain of money and thinks ”If we invest this money, we get to keep the gains”
Can you hire someone working in Venezuela and pay them with Wise?
"Oh, they are underdeveloped countries", you will say. Okay, question: If you were in Greece 5 years ago and you wanted to get your money out, could Wise help you in any way?
> The coins themselves are worthless, but accrue "fees" in fiat (ex. when you exchange USD for UST).
But why are the coins worthless? I'm sure your answer would be "because they're a scam" (probably more indirectly, but it would boil down to that point). But your reasoning for why the coins are a scam involves them being worthless.
Also, this isn't even true but the standard definition of worth of something like "what the market is willing to pay for something".
Notice how what I just described does not match the vast majority of these “crypto” projects. That is because they are not crypto. They do not adhere to the ethos of crypto. They are scams. It’s very simple really. If there’s a company behind it, if there’s an ICO, if there’s a single identifiable leader which can be attacked by governments to bring the project down, then it is a scam.
Unfortunately some time in the mid-2010’s the scammers and grifters of traditional finance moved in and started playing all the same games that got regulated out of existence in the legacy markets. They will likely get regulated out of existence again in the crypto world and people like you will gloat about how it’s the end for crypto. But the real crypto projects, Bitcoin, Monero, etc. will keep chugging along and there is absolutely nothing that can stop them.
The coins are worthless because they have no function outside of speculation.
>But your reasoning for why the coins are a scam involves them being worthless.
The coins are a scam because they are worthless but the conmen in the room are telling you that if you just hodl they will be worth a billion dollars. Just like buying seeds for a money tree is a scam. In other words, the coins themselves have as much utility as seeds for a money tree. Sure the market might be willing to pay for seeds for a money tree; but you and I both know that money trees don't exist and the market participants are paying for something that will be worthless in 10 years.
You are now one of those market participants twisting language because you are 100% convinced that you will begin harvesting benjamins in 10 years once you plant your money tree seeds. Once the tree matures and bears no fruit, will money seeds be a scam, or will it just be that your tree was a "Failed project", but the ecosystem of money tree seeds is 100% legitimate?
So you agree with me the reason they are a scam has nothing to do with transaction fees??? Maybe you should re-read my initial comment.
> You are now one of those market participants twisting language because you are 100% convinced that you will begin harvesting benjamins in 10 years once you plant your money tree seeds.
I have never, am not currently, and do not plan to hold any cryptocurrency or invest in crypto-related projects. Thanks for projecting this onto me though!
> Once the tree matures and bears no fruit, will money seeds be a scam, or will it just be that your tree was a "Failed project", but the ecosystem of money tree seeds is 100% legitimate?
You really should go re-read my first comment - I never said anything close to this.
“Gold has two major shortcomings in that it is neither of much use nor productive. While gold does have some industrial and decorative purpose, the demand for these purposes is limited and unable to absorb the amount of new gold being mined. And if you own an ounce of gold for eternity, you still end up owning an ounce.” - Buffet
https://www.statista.com/statistics/299609/gold-demand-by-in...
Yes, the general public retail stockholder doesn’t have a whole lot of power. I was just making a point about ownership and securities. If you own enough stock in a company, your vote Carrie’s weight.
Downvoted I’m sure by the hodl gang.
Unless someone with vast capital assets is willing to accept units of fantasy money in trade for those assets, it has no real value besides hucksters finding Greater Fools.
Worse than cryptocurrency being fantasy money, it literally wastes an Argentina worth of power (and growing) every year. I doubt the entire global financial industry, including all mainframes, office buildings, corporate jets, and commuting workers uses even one Argentina with of power in a year. And the global financial industry is doing billions upon billions of transactions for trillions upon trillions of dollars.
This can be mitigated by using many banks, but it's hard to find banks willing to deal with cryptocurrency. So in practice all the deposits are at 1-2 banks.
A stack of paper USD in a safe would work, but there's risk of theft/fire/etc.