So I'm working on a crypto derivatives trading bot... have been for a few years now... it's going alright.
I am personally situated in Ontario, Canada, and getting more and more anxious by the day as seemingly every major legitimate derivatives trading platform with any volume is banning Ontarians from trading.
Kraken, Bitmex, Okex, and Huobi all won't even look at me simply because I have a personal address inside Ontario.
I can trade on their spot markets with them, sure... but the fees are MUCH higher than that of derivatives markets and my bot isn't THAT good to swallow a 0.3% trade cost when it's essentially performing high frequency trading. A fee of 0.075% however is manageable.
Binance still allows me to trade derivatives, and I can't figure out how or why. They don't have any legal authority to allow Ontarians to trade afaik, and they're the absolute largest derivatives trading platform on the planet right now.
I tried setting up a corporation in the UK back when Bitmex originally banned Ontarians, but when I went to register that corporation as a trader with Bitmex, they demanded to know the identity of all of the owners of the corporation, and if any of them resided inside Ontario then they wouldn't work with that corporation as well.
(the bot was originally setup to trade on Bitmex as they had the most liquidity at the time, but that has dwindled significantly ever since they banned Ontarians and all of the USA from trading in October 2020)
I don't have millions of dollars in my pocket, so I don't have the money to jump through legal loopholes by registering shell corporations and paying representatives to act as proxy owners in non-banned jurisdictions.
I'm not doing anything wrong imho. I'm not risking my life savings or going to crash the cryptocurrency market with my derivatives trading ways or whatever the Ontario government is trying to protect me from?
I am just another guy trying to make a buck like everyone else on this planet. Why is my government trying to prevent me from doing so at every turn? I just don't get it?
What are my options if/when Binance decides to ban Ontarians as well?
> I am just another guy trying to make a buck like everyone else on this planet.
What? Most people aren't trying to make a quick buck by rent-seeking in a system based on massive electrical waste.
Myself? I cut my work hours recently so that I can live now instead of dreaming of someday. I spend my free time enjoying my life, not trying to figure out who to exploit.
You're being too charitable. By their definition of "exploit", anyone holding crypto and benefiting from capital gains is "exploiting", since these people are also benefiting off a system based on "massive electrical waste".
Is there a term for someone who stretches language in such a way for rhetorical purposes?
I can see why it's an effective rhetorical trick, since it forces people to debate whether the behavior is bad enough to fit the definition of exploitation, or whether it's not sufficiently bad. By having this debate we've already implicitly accepted their premise that something bad is going on.
> By their definition of "exploit", anyone holding crypto and benefiting from capital gains is "exploiting", since these people are also benefiting off a system based on "massive electrical waste".
This is begging the question. They've presupposed that it's bad by using the word "waste", without actually having made the case.
I happen to think that flying overseas for a holiday wastes a lot of energy. I could label this a "massive energy waste". Then as a corollary I could label people taking those trips and people facilitating those trips as "exploitative" actors. But these are mere debating tricks even though it's all vaguely accurate given the words I've chosen and the framing I've picked.
The root problem to all of this is an untaxed externality.
A lot of crypto currencies use a lot of electricity that wouldn't have been used otherwise. A portion of that electricity that was used will be non-renewable energy.
> I happen to think that flying overseas for a holiday wastes a lot of energy. I could label this a "massive energy waste".
Yes, people taking over seas vacations instead of staying home also wastes energy.
People taking an overseas vacation use energy. Whether it's an energy waste is your subjective judgement that that activity lacks sufficient utility to justify that energy usage. The people taking those trips probably beg to differ on that point.
Exactly. While this guy sits in his high tower and consumes energy using his air conditioning (WASTE), owns a refrigerator to keep food (WASTE), and looks down on those working more hours. He sits and shitposts on HN using, gasp... electrical WASTE from his useless WASTE device. Breathing up oxygen(WASTE). You can see that anyone opposing virtuous view is a total exploitative threat actor. /s
Oh, you've taken on less work hours to enjoy your life? Maybe others are able to view that as a waste. Quit stretching things so much that you paint __everyone else__ as a threat or enemy.
So much hostility... my simple comment is shit posting but yours isn't?
I didn't say I didn't waste energy, I didn't say I was an angel, I was merely pointing out the fact that two wrongs don't make a right. "It's ok for bitcoin to waste electricity because people flying internationally waste electricity too" is a pretty weak argument.
Call it waste or whatever else you want to, the fact is, crypto currency uses a ton of electricity that wouldn't be used otherwise. Sure you can go on weird tangents if you want but it is a simple fact that seems silly to ignore.
The claim of pure rent-seeking is easily disproven by comparing bid-offer spreads before and after the advent of computerized market making and seeing how much bid-offer transaction costs have shrunk for the average investor.
So what I am doing is wrong, but trading derivatives with less leverage in sanctioned markets is allowed/legal?
I get it, I could be doing something much more productive with my life.
The money this bot makes isn't for myself if that's any consolation. Not most of it anyways.
I have big plans to use the money generated to help the poor.
I live very frugally, exclusively shop at thrift stores, drive a 20 year old car that I fix myself, and am frustrated with all of the homelessness I see in my city.
In my eyes, this bot is the only way I can stand to make a real dent in that pressing issue. All I know how to do is code.
My cryptocurrency of choice is Stellar actually, it doesn't use any electricity hardly whatsoever to keep it's blockchain safe.
Not all cryptocurrencies are hell-bent on destroying the globe. Some of them actually try to solve real problems.
> I have big plans to use the money generated to help the poor.
Everyone who wants to be rich says this exact line even though you don't need a lot of money to help the poor. Do you currently volunteer for shelters, charities or soup kitchens? If not, why do you think that will change when you get more money?
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Robbing from others to give to the poor, or leeching off people's hard work - both seem very noble... Funny how each side (Robinhood or FIRE) try to justify their choices.
Presumably because you're sitting back and retiring while everyone around you still work. The logic is flawed though, because it doesn't account for the fact that you had to forgo consumption in order to build up a reserve to retire early.
I'm very curious about the ethics of early retirement. Forgone consumption seems like a reasonable justification. But surely there is a limit? If I retire by early and through compounding interest amass a fortune that would allow my children to retire before they even enter the work force, is that ethical?
Similar scenario: I take up arms to aid the king and in turn ensure stability and peace for society. The land I'm given as compensation allow my lineage to live as nobility for centuries. Is that ethical?
I'm making hyperboles not to discount your logic but to show an extreme and try to pinpoint where the limit is. For what its worth, I'm saving quite aggressively and live very modestly for the sole purpose of increasing my leisure, perhaps to retire early. So I am obviously not making this argument as a way to bash FIRE practitioners. I am genuinely curious about the ethical implications of compounding rewards for legitimate sacrifice. Of course someone who works hard in their youth without consuming should be able to retire earlier without guilt. Though I think Warren Buffett is on to something in his disdain for dynastic wealth.
>If I retire by early and through compounding interest amass a fortune that would allow my children to retire before they even enter the work force, is that ethical?
It's easy to argue it's unethical by invoking utilitarianism. Unfortunately that also means basically anyone with a white collar job in the first world are unethical, which I'm not sure most people would agree. Other than that I can't think of any convincing for why that's unethical.
My take would be that actively working against both equal opportunity and equality is unethical. By giving your children a giant leg up, you're taking from all of the others.
Imho society should be liberal in letting people acquire and enjoy their wealth, and strictly limit the passing down of wealth to prevent dynasties and having someone's opportunities decided by their parents' means. This would solve a lot of compounding problems. However, people are generally pretty terrified of not being able to let one's own kids inherit the entire fortune and sharing it with other random kids too. We'll likely continue along those lines for a long time coming, whatever your stance on ethics doesn't stand a chance against family bonds and their voting power.
It's not flawed though, because total economic value goes to zero when all the workers kick up their feet and decide they want to post on Instagram for likes from Aruba once they hit 35.
I don't think that's true. Sure, at some point you stop producing economic value, but we don't mind people retiring at 65. What's so magical about that age?
If you contribute enough productive value (as determined by the free market, paid in some asset), why does it matter when you retire? I'm sure there is some endgame where we stop funding our consumption economy to the same degree we are now, but is that a reason to work until you can't anymore?
You can only kick up your feet if you've done enough "economic output" in the previous years, it's not a free lunch. This is coupled with the fact that most retired persons do invest and contribute capital. It's not at the same level as Mark Cuban, but does it really matter if you only invest a million vs 700 million+?
Nothing magical, because when people age they become less healthy and able to work/contribute - it is only ethical to offer them the last ~10-20 years of their lives as reward for their hard work. The average age of death in the US is 78
And who pays for the benefits the elderly (or as a matter of fact, the whole society) enjoys? Amenities, welfare, health insurance, etc. - taxpayers, exactly the demographic (before 65 - healthy & able-bodied) FIRE is encouraging to stop working, thus avoid paying income taxes.
>because economic value goes to zero when all the workers kick up their feet
That will never happen, as I explained in a sibling post:
>there would be an imbalance of labor demand compared to supply. This will cause prices to go up, which will make it less attractive to stay "retired" and more attractive to start working again.
Society is like a cargo net. Every knot that bails out makes it collectively less capable of bearing a total burden. I'm fine if these FIRE dreamers want to use their free time to invest into social and charitable causes, but the ones that just want to perma-vacation on society's economic margin are what annoy me. But I don't personally believe in retirement either.
>Society is like a cargo net. Every knot that bails out makes it collectively less capable of bearing a total burden.
I'm not sure what you're alluding to with this, but if it's "well if everybody goes FIRE society will collapse", then you're wrong because it will never occur (due to the economic mechanisms discussed earlier).
>but the ones that just want to perma-vacation on society's economic margin are what annoy me
Sounds like you're annoyed if people aren't being productive when they can be. After all, what's the difference between being 100% productive for only 50% of your working years (ie. FIRE), and being 50% productive for 100% of your working years? What's your opinion on people engaging in non-productive activities (eg. watching TV, playing sports, reading books), taking time off, or taking a "easy" profession? Are you against them as well? Or are they fine because they put in a token amount of work?
Maybe I am misinformed, the investing part makes sense, but not paying taxes on capital gains while willingly "unemployed" in your productive years to "enjoy life" and "freedom" sounds the same as the crypto miners trying to avoid taxes.
Contrary to popular belief, taxes are supposed to benefit society (at least that is the intent & purpose). I agree this is not the case for corrupt countries, but if everyone just retired early or sat at home mining coins, where will society end up?
...that haven't been realized yet. As you draw on your reserves, you'll be forced to realize those gains and pay taxes on them, making this a non-issue.
>willingly "unemployed" in your productive years to "enjoy life" and "freedom"
Ah yes, because the goal of life isn't to enjoy it, it's to be as productive as possible! Freedom is overrated anyways!
>as the crypto miners trying to avoid taxes.
Are miners known to be tax dodgers or something?
>but if everyone just retired early or sat at home mining coins, where will society end up?
"retired early": there would be an imbalance of labor demand compared to supply. This will cause prices to go up, which will make it less attractive to stay "retired" and more attractive to start working again.
"sat at home mining": same thing that would happen if everyone decided to gold mine. eventually there would be a saturation of miners and it won't be profitable anymore, causing people to exit.
That sounds like an epic tax dodge if true: take a sabbatical, realize your gains with zero tax. The only thing I can think of that could go wrong is dividends taking you over the 40k limit. Assuming your portfolio has 2% dividend yield you would start running into trouble once your portfolio approaches $2M in value. Anyways, will be calling my accountant tomorrow to discuss this ;)
Capital gains are part of your income, so realizing the gains themselves will take you over the limit unless total profit including gains and dividends is < $40k-ish.
You might be able to take out small amounts strategically to avoid the 40k threshold.
I may be mistaken, but isn't FIRE telling people to live off 4% of their investments forever? If the goal is 1 million, that is exactly 40k.
The math works out perfectly to leech on society - and
(this is just a hypothesis) possibly causing S&P 500 ETFs to inflate as these FIRE "retirees" promote their methods online, creating a feedback loop and illusion of ever-increasing stock market boom for the last 10 years
Dydx. It's a zkrollup (non-custodial) based perpetuals exchange, no kyc. Only an ip check for Americans on the interface.
Liquidity for eth and btc perps is good now, volume picked up.
well you're not the subject of the regulation either, it's the platforms which offer financial products to customers. And even if you might not incur any significant financial risk, derivatives trading, just like any other complex financial instrument is regulated because we have more than enough experience with (systemic) distortions on financial markets and huge losses being incurred by consumers of such services.
I really have to question how Binance is pulling off basically no fee trading. There's something not right as if they may be hit with pretty hard regulation. Add in the Brian Brooks lasting two months as CEO of .US and Catherine Coley's short stint (and disappearance). I would transfer some of my funds over since they seemed to cleanup the customer service nightmare but it seems like too much unknown risk.
You can buy daily BTC/ETH which is delivered at 4pm, and the fee is a flat $5 per coin (so ~0.01% at the current BTC price). BTC is traded in 0.01 increments and ETH in 0.1 increments.
Caveat is that only wire deposits are accepted, so the wire fees plus network fees (if you withdraw your coins) can raise this cost substantially if you only trade small amounts.
> What are my options if/when Binance decides to ban Ontarians as well?
You're an in an extremely risky market, from both a regulation perspective (they might shut you down/you might lose a lot), and from a perspective of all the scams and lack of transparency exists in crypto.
You can either try to become political, or move on to less risky markets. If you're just here to make money, move on and try something that doesn't carry this insane regulatory risk.
There are still quite a few exchanges with only fake KYC (accept any burner email/any country) as long as you fund and withdraw only crypto. Sometimes with withdrawal limits, which you simply program into the bot (create new accounts every time you hit the limit).
Have look at the XRPL DEX. You can trade there with IOUs (for example BTC IOUs or USD IOUs). Works from anywhere in the world since its a DEX and its extremely cheap (no fees) and it can not exclude people.
You still need a way to exchange from and to traditional fiat but that should not be too hard to do. For the most part you can use IOU fiat so they can stay on the ledger ("blockchain").
Yes, you could move somewhere else, and maybe it isn't even fair or necessary or proportional to make life difficult for you specifically. But it could turn out to be quite lucky.
Big career changes get more difficult with every year you get older. Plus: if it involves moving into any adjacent subject area, doing it now and not in three to thirty months when it all blows up, you won't be competing with thousands of guys wearing the same exact Jack Wolfskin jacket and trying to move from fantasy finance to the real thing.
And if you don't share my pessimism: if I'm wrong and cryptocurrencies go mainstream, you also be out of luck because it'll become interesting to those teams of hundreds of Harvard & MIT quants.
And, of course, you might get to do something useful. At least in comparison to ending up being blamed for bonfires of both money and forests.
>you also be out of luck because it'll become interesting to those teams of hundreds of Harvard & MIT quants
I read somewhere the comment that people like that are already there, and they have been reveling in the fact that simple arbitrage strategies that are otherwise obsolete in the rest of the financial world, are still quite lucrative with crypto.
I think many of us have done similar things but after researching the legal and tax aspects of it decided it was a terrible idea. your local regulations and tax rules may vary just promise to research it 100% before continuing :)
I can feel your pain. My bot is running on BitMex and Binance. I live in a corrupt Shithole Country™, so as of right now I enjoy pretty lax KYC from both exchanges.
I'm truly bothered by the fact that all of them are seemingly happy to comply with the laws of governments in regard to it citizens. So as soon as my country bans crypto (which is close to inevitable) - Binance will happily strip me of my income. For no reason, really.
Pushing me, a non-criminal and mostly() law-abiding citizen to turn to money laundering schemes.
technically every working citizen here is a criminal
Unfortunately the problem seems to be with the Ontario Securities Commission, so the exchanges don't have much choice. No idea how Binance gets around it.
I just went over the CRA's rules for how it treats cryto and all I can say is oof.
Worse part to me seemed to be that you can't deduct expenses (hardware, fees, power, etc) from your capital gains lest it then be considered income and therefore have the full tax rate.
You're never going to get away from regulation on centralized exchanges. Have a look at injective , its a decentralized derivatives exchange, afterall crypto is meant to be decentralized.
Estonia is not going to cut it. I assume they work like your government would for tax purposes and your government can just say it's a Canadian company because you own it and supposedly there is not much more substance in the Estonian company. If you had a director, an office, a few employees, regular board meetings in Estonia that could work.
Unfortunately you need trust in this situation. A trusted friend with a company you don't own paying taxes in another country, taking a cut and sending you the profits very frequently would be my choice.
I did just that for friends a few times (for tax reasons though), sometimes holding out the money for a long period of time while they moved to more favourable tax jurisdictions.
You can setup a contract between his foreign company and your canadian company and send invoices - albeit that won't afford you that much protection if he decides to run away with the money (hence why you want to transfer the money frequently).
I wouldn't trust a stranger with this, to avoid getting scammed but there is an entire industry around frontmens and some players should be reputable enough to be trusted.
E-stonia Eresidency is not enough. That just makes it easier to get EU banking.
Someone else’s id and rental agreement is though, for this purpose. These are either directly purchasable on a DNM (darknet market), or something you can ask for
Woooorst case you need to deep fake live on webcam, this is consumer grade tech even open source now
Acquiring and using the ID This might violate laws
Anyway.
VPN from the expected country all the time, or Tor+RDP (remote desktop) from a compromised computer close to the postal code of the ID which can also be found on an RDP DNM
Just incorporate a shell company in the Seychelles - it's basically the only way to go about this. Ironically, it's also one of the only ways to circumvent insane legacy payment provider requirements for industries that require high-risk payments.
So when Bitmex asks for the information of the owners of the corporation, what do I tell them? How do I prove that I am a real person who resides outside of Ontario without committing fraud? ... or actually residing outside of Ontario which would prevent the need for the shell corp in the first place?
Unfortunately I don't know anybody well enough who lives outside of any of the banned jurisdictions to trust them with hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of crypto currency.
If I get caught lying, Bitmex can literally liquidate all of my positions and essentially steal my money. Not sure about the others but I imagine it's the same. They're all trying to save their own skin, they don't care about me at all.
Not saying it's a bad idea, I just don't see how it would be any different than the UK corporation I already setup.
The comments on this thread remind me of `The Big Short` when Jared Vennett's team goes to Florida to conduct diligence on the raging real estate market of the late aughts ... and Jared realizes absolutely no one is participating in the market in a prudent and reasonable way.
So when the exchange or a bank asks for the UBO for your offshore company, it wouldn't be weird to provide the information of the registered agent instead of yourself?
> So when Bitmex asks for the information of the owners of the corporation, what do I tell them?
The key here is the definition of "legal ownership of an entity", which - while most people tend to believe they're identical - is not the same as "actual control of an entity".
I'm saying that being the legal owner of a company and having actual control of said company are really not the same thing.
There are a number of ways to achieve this, all of which are very dependent on your personal context.
But to be practical, I'll give you an example: a member of my extended family runs a construction company.
For all intents and purposes, he completely controls the company: what it does, what the money generated is used for, etc...
However, he does not own it: as seen from the govmt's perspective, his ex-spouse does.
For reasons I am not going to get into, he could not own both this construction company and other businesses he controls without running into some issues.
What he did: he divorced his wife and through the divorce, he gave her full ownership of the company.
The facts that:
- they still live as a couple
- they love each other
- they trust each other with their lives
- the wife has zero interest in sticking her nose in the company's business
None of the above appear on any book or has any legal standing.
There is a reason why so many business names in the Anglo-Saxon world have the word "trust" in them.
This is just an example, there are many other avenues.
- raise capital thru the UK company
- use said capital to fund the bot to operate on a larger scale
- remain one among many shareholders (preferably a minority one), most of which aren't based in the jurisdiction that's giving you a headache.
- just be the salaried COO and single employee of said company, where all other shareholders know fully well that the day they try to wrestle actual control from you, the tech to run the bot only lives in your head ...
- when BitMex asks for company owners, just provide them with the truth.
This is all of course predicated on your bot actually being able to earn :D
There's lots of other finance stuff you could be writing bots for... automated technical analysis on stocks, for example, and you can very neatly skirt all the crypto bullshit.
If you're looking for options, a better one would be to find the nearest casino and bet it all on black. You're more likely to win there than with some trading bot. And if you do win the casino will actually pay out instead of stealing your money. They might even give you free drinks.
Seriously those exchanges and trading platforms are set up to take advantage of n00bs like you. Don't be a sucker.
You're the definition of a parasite scalping cents on the market providing no utility. That s fine and legal, but why would we, the people represented by the elected government, care for your edge case when tons of people are being exploited by these ?
You don't understand market structure. Market making provides liquidity which is literally required to have efficient markets. I don't know enough about how his bot operates but if he is a maker of liquidity then he is providing a useful function. Please don't spread FUD and fake news if you don't understand market microstructure.
I am personally situated in Ontario, Canada, and getting more and more anxious by the day as seemingly every major legitimate derivatives trading platform with any volume is banning Ontarians from trading.
Kraken, Bitmex, Okex, and Huobi all won't even look at me simply because I have a personal address inside Ontario.
I can trade on their spot markets with them, sure... but the fees are MUCH higher than that of derivatives markets and my bot isn't THAT good to swallow a 0.3% trade cost when it's essentially performing high frequency trading. A fee of 0.075% however is manageable.
Binance still allows me to trade derivatives, and I can't figure out how or why. They don't have any legal authority to allow Ontarians to trade afaik, and they're the absolute largest derivatives trading platform on the planet right now.
I tried setting up a corporation in the UK back when Bitmex originally banned Ontarians, but when I went to register that corporation as a trader with Bitmex, they demanded to know the identity of all of the owners of the corporation, and if any of them resided inside Ontario then they wouldn't work with that corporation as well.
(the bot was originally setup to trade on Bitmex as they had the most liquidity at the time, but that has dwindled significantly ever since they banned Ontarians and all of the USA from trading in October 2020)
I don't have millions of dollars in my pocket, so I don't have the money to jump through legal loopholes by registering shell corporations and paying representatives to act as proxy owners in non-banned jurisdictions.
I'm not doing anything wrong imho. I'm not risking my life savings or going to crash the cryptocurrency market with my derivatives trading ways or whatever the Ontario government is trying to protect me from?
I am just another guy trying to make a buck like everyone else on this planet. Why is my government trying to prevent me from doing so at every turn? I just don't get it?
What are my options if/when Binance decides to ban Ontarians as well?