Crypto companies think they don't trade securities which is clearly wrong and contradicted by their own advertising. People buy crypto without a real use for crypto because they think they can sell it for more later. Everyone under the sun knows this. It's obviously a security and failing to register should be met by SEC cases like this one.
> Crypto companies think they don't trade securities
To quote the Binance Chief "Compliance" Officer: "we are operating as a fking unlicensed securities exchange in the USA bro"
Source: Quoted in the filing yesterday where SEC sued Binance
> 111. As Binance’s CCO bluntly admitted to another Binance compliance officer in December 2018, “we are operating as a fking unlicensed securities exchange in the USA bro.”
A bunch of people have speculated that this was a CYA move. I mean, if you get hired as the Compliance Officer for a company which clearly has no interest in compliance and only hired you to give a facade of respectability, you probably want to have a paper trail indicating "I clearly communicated that this was against the law, and they ignored me" for when the cops inevitably come.
There are two modalities to crypto and the law needs to treat them differently. Running a node on a crypto currency network does not generate securities. It generates commodities. We don't tax people on the FMV of gold when they dig it out of the ground. But, speculating on the price of gold by creating a virtual token/contract/etc. and selling that, well that’s obviously a security. Just because people buy gold speculatively does make it a security. So buying bitcoin or chia (no longer eth) is still buying a commodity. Anything else, yeah, seems like it passes the sniff test for a security.
The sale is taxable obviously and of course. The same is true for gold and crypto.
But your relatives didn't get a tax bill for 25% of the value of the oil the moment it was prospected, did they? Their land value went up but they weren’t taxed on the value increase either (that happens when the land is sold).
Maybe I'm mistaken, but my property taxes increase as the value of the property increases. The sales tax is a tax on the sale itself when sold at price $X.
Sorry I meant you're not taxed on the value of the oil at the moment it increases the property value. You are correct that eventually the property value might increase in the eyes of the county assessor or via sale of the property and there would be a measurable effect in that regard.
Generally though, you also don't pay property taxes on securities (property tax is a pretty specific tax and a unit of crypto currency doesn't directly translate). I don't have any apropos objection to a property tax on crypto at the moment mostly because that's not the point being discussed. We just don't do it currently. The more appropriate analogy would be like you have barrels out and oil rained from the sky. Now you have some barrels of oil. Your land value doesn't increase, but also you don't get taxed because you collected oil from the sky. You get taxed when you sell the oil. Maybe we do need a tax on the latent potential of your property to generate crypto, or that information should be factored into property value, but again that's not quite what we're discussing.
"An excise, or excise tax, is any duty on manufactured goods that is normally levied at the moment of manufacture for internal consumption rather than at sale."
I'm very familiar with how the excise tax on alcohol works, it's definitely a tax on creation not consumption.
Article discusses Coinbase Earn, which was a staking service providing APY yields.
Is that not an unregistered financial product? That's also the kind of financial product directly behind FTX, Voyager, Gemini, and Lunacoin / Celsius collapses.
So we have direct evidence of a particular produce (staking) that is both unregistered and dangerous. That many Americans lost money over.
Minor clarification. Coinbase Earn is a lending product, you lend to Coinbase and you receive interest. The same applies to Celsius, it provided interest on money they borrowed. Coinbase also offers staking as a service, the SEC is also going after this.
But both of the above are different from actual Proof of Stake, as conceived by Ethereum. The SEC has made no mention of this in neither of the 2 current lawsuits. Unfortunately many of these products misused the term to whitewash or as a marketing gimmick.
Gemini didn't collapse, and an evidence takes a bit more clarity to be treated as such. Luna is.. a coin
Can't you get APY returns as a retail customer with pretty much any high street banks? In what ways is that less dangerous than going through a crypto exchange: by the fact the SEC is actively criminalising the activity rather than issuing licenses so that some customer protection via the justice system remains out there for this sort of market.
You mentioned FTX, that's a good example, an exchange run by a con goofy looking artist, that achieved such massive penetration even on the US market was made possible exactly because it is so cumbersome or impossible for a legit business to get a license, the crypto affiliated threats making it also difficult for normal banks to do any sort of business with crypto entities.
All that being said, sure, if they don't have a license they can be sued for their earn products.
The only clear distinctions, the one thing the name mentioned and many others still running
Ehhh, I got confused over the myriad of collapsed companies. Perhaps I shouldn't try to get better memory, but instead cryptocoin companies need to stop collapsing. Its getting difficult to remember each company's situation on an individual basis.
Gemini was sued by SEC for running unregulated securities and was forced to shut down Gemini Earn months ago. Whatever, but its just another example of the kind of products the SEC is clearly looking at.
> Luna is.. a coin
Lunacoin supported Terra, and Celsius was backing its staking product with Terra coins. Are... you unaware of the connection between Luna and Celsius?
I wrote "Lunacoin / Celsius" for a reason. This didn't even happen that long ago, so I guess I assumed people would know where I was going.
I'm trying to describe the scope of unregistered, unregulated, super-dangerous "staking" schemes that collapsed over the last year. The names I discussed are all related to staking.
I'm aware, I'm just pointing out luna is a coin. It's a bit hard to assimilate it to business entities running unregistered financial products on the US soil.
My understanding is that Celsius or any lender that gets exposed to a token value collapsing can quickly get itself in serious muds since loans have a collateral, and in crypto those are often crypto tokens. Anyhow that's my recollection of what happened to Celsius, i could be wrong.
I don't think the problem the SEC is invoking is "dangerous" investments. I'm not sure who would be entitled to make the difference.
You could stake eth and that would be one of the safest positions to take in the crypto space. Actually anybody can, whether the SEC sees it as OK, via centralised exchanges for those who can access them or decentralized exchanges for those who can't. But then of course eth could drop 95% in value by next year and the yield would mean nothing to compensate. It could go the other way and go the other way.
Does it make it a dangerous product? A security illegal to trade without a license which the SEC wouldn't grant a license to offer as a product to anyone? Because it's dangerous or because it's a security having drastic volatility? More volatile than Gamespot shares not so long ago? Does it make gamespot so dangerous it should be banned from trading as a security? And one last one, what is more dangerous, owning eth tokens staked for long term returns, or some treasury bonds issued by a country that is systematically on the verge of defaulting on its unbearable debt?
And who's to say? I don't think the SEC has any legitimacy left to be taken seriously, it let SBF runs business inside and outside the US soil for years, embezzling well over 10B dollars, whether he is innocent or an idiot crook the ridicule crown goes to the SEC for not having seen anything suspect until after the empire entirely collapsed.
About having flimsy memories, it's OK but it discounts serious weight throwing incorrect facts when attacking a type of trading activity as a whole. Your argument did read like because so many collapsed, the whole thing must be flagged as a failure. Anyhow, coinbase, kraken, binance, gemini, kucoin and many others have been operating for years just fine, and are successful, profitable businesses to this day despite all the obstacles regulators and the press threw at them.
Anyhow back to the main point, I'm with you earn products if unregistered are non compliant with regulations, so the SEC can have its case and continue to pretend it's doing its job.
>Can't you get APY returns as a retail customer with pretty much any high street banks? In what ways is that less dangerous than going through a crypto exchange:
Well, given that there are clear ways of issuing securities that have worked for hundreds of years that aren't being followed and that people generally don't get the rug pulled in normal securities, I'd say that it's less dangerous in many obvious ways.
Yes? Do you think underground activities would care about what the law says about them being illegal?
Coinbase at least is a registred corporate playing by the rules, aside the SEC viewing their yield based or futures product non compliant, but the SEC also makes it impossible to achieve compliance, so we may might left off with no code base and totally underground offerings, instead of "some" businesses in the clear that operates within the confined of a justice system. If you feign to see the point that's fine, i just hope you are not so blinded by anti crypto arguments that you can't SEC actions using force and paid by millions of tax payers counter productive for both consumers and the opportunity for the US to remain relevant in the growing crypto economy.
This requires a citation with data points, eg how many Americans lost money, how much money did they lose, etc. Because, what if there are more Americans who've made money than those who have lost?
> SEC said Coinbase has since at least 2019 made billions of dollars by handling cryptocurrency transactions, while evading the disclosure requirements meant to protect investors
This is a pure framing - it doesn't matter how much money Coinbase made. Otherwise, it means that if you don't make _billions_, you can conveniently avoid the disclosure requirements intended to protect investors. So really, they should've written something like: "Coinbase has been facilitating cryptocurrency transactions since at least 2019, while evading the disclosure requirements intended to protect investors".
While I do understand that these are the legal requirements, the protect investors "narrative" (khm-khm, requirement) is a joke. People lose money trading stocks / options / etc every day. To me, as a consumer, there is zero difference between trading AAPL on TD Ameritrade App vs trading crypto through Coinbase App. How's TD Ameritrade protecting me from losing money?
> Because, what if there are more Americans who've made money than those who have lost?
Why does this matter? Even if Americans are scamming foreigners (0 Americans losing money), that doesn’t make this legal.
The difference between aapl and coinbase is there is regulatory audits of the books and required publications about the health of the security. There are rules about insider trading and insurance protections if a brokerage mishandles your money (see Blockfi).
Because the parent said "that many Americans lost money over". Plus the SEC is "protecting investors". So I'm asking, what if there are more people who've made money over those who lost? Does that mean life's good? Coinbase has been pretty transparent about their operations. Not only transparent, they've publicly mentioned several times how frustrated they are dealing with SEC, the organization that is slow to come up with various legal requirements for the cryptocurrency industry. In a way, Coinbase helps the SEC to raise their own bar.
Would the SEC be protecting investors if they allow 1 investor to get scammed to the benefit of 2+ investors?
We need systems in place where everyone can make trustworthy investments. If people can't feel safe (even if it's one person or many people), then our economy will slow down (see current crypto prices post-terra, ftx, and more).
> This requires a citation with data points, eg how many Americans lost money, how much money did they lose, etc.
My coworker lost $X0,000 over Celsius.
So yes, maybe this is a personal bias. But its based in reality. His entire account at Celsius is written off. He managed to save his money from Voyager. I got cousins who lost money in FTX. Different people, but same overall problem.
If my personal social circle is showing huge losses in these companies, I have to imagine that other people out there have similar experiences. I don't need a study to prove the facts, I just talk to my cousins / coworkers / other people who are directly affected.
There, that's Celsius alone. Is that enough proof for ya?
> Because, what if there are more Americans who've made money than those who have lost?
Its not about making or losing money. Its about accounts disappearing because they've been lied to.
We're all adults here. We know that investments can lose money. But lying about those investments is where the law needs to step in. Liars need to be punished. And I get that people have been skirting the truth recently. But when we get to Celsius, Voyager, and FTX, the money was just straight up being stolen. Its the worst case offenders.
So now we need to think about what kind of culture caused these crimes. And its increasingly looking like "staking", and the culture surrounding it, is to blame.
> If my personal social circle is showing huge losses in these companies, I have to imagine that other people out there have similar experiences.
This is a personal bias. I've made $86,000 trading Ethereum. My brother-in-law made $24,000 trading Bitcoin. My reality is different from your reality ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I can't speak for Celsius, Voyager, and FTX. If there was a scam, it has to be punished. No questions asked. But Coinbase has been closely working with SEC for years.
The problem is that companies like Celsius, FTX, and Voyager are disappearing and collapsing.
Binance and Coinbase are two other companies that could just randomly disappear because of how incredibly sketchy their products are (especially "Earn" or "Staking" products).
I'm pointing out companies that collapse (taking literally Billions of American money away). And you're just coming in here saying "But I made money on something totally unrelated", as if its a good argument?
> This is a personal bias.
I'll proudly be biased in favor of reality. There's nothing wrong with taking a stance when my real world friends get affected.
> I can't speak for Celsius, Voyager, and FTX. If there was a scam, it has to be punished. No questions asked. But Coinbase has been closely working with SEC for years.
Coinbase is doing the same thing as Celsius, Voyager, and FTX with their Earn / Staking products. And now the SEC is suing them over it.
There's a pattern here. And I for one, am glad that the SEC is no longer fickle and is trying to be proactive about it. Trying to get American money out of these dangerous instruments before they collapse, rather than after (when its too late).
Dude, I made that comment in response to your "My coworker lost $X0,000 over Celsius" to highlight the fact that not everyone's circle is losing money.
> Coinbase is doing the same thing as Celsius, Voyager, and FTX with their Earn / Staking products. And now the SEC is suing them over it.
Why can't SEC work with Coinbase before suing them? Again, Coinbase has been seeking help from SEC for years. Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, talked about this so many times. They are trying to work with the regulators, but the problem is that the regulators lack expertise dealing with these new asset types.
> Why can't SEC work with Coinbase before suing them? Again, Coinbase has been seeking help from SEC for years.
How has Coinbase been "seeking help"? They are a company, they should be going to the SEC with all of the particulars of each of their investment items and saying to the SEC "We believe we have met your standards of fiduciary duty on these items that appear to be securities, have we?" They shouldn't be saying, "Hey, SEC, are these things we're selling securities, and thus need a higher standard of duty of care? Tee hee, we can't figure it out on our own, as we're just a little company with thousands of employees trading billions of dollars a year. Until you get back to us we'll just assume that they aren't securities and won't bother meeting the higher standard of care."
They filed a petition which SEC failed to address. The result is Coinbase suing SEC. Now, SEC sues Coinbase back. Seriously, wtf? SEC needs a massive slap on their hands. If they lack expertise and don't have enough knowledge (literally), then whoever works there should go "back to school" (figuratively speaking), learn all the ins and outs of crypto, and only after consider joining the SEC as an employee.
Coinbase brings this mandamus action to seek modest, but meaningful and time-sensitive, relief: a writ requiring the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC or Commission) to act on Coinbase’s pending rulemaking petition to provide clarity for the crypto industry. Coinbase does not ask the Court to instruct the agency how to respond. It simply requests that the Court order the SEC to respond at all. The Commission has repeatedly demonstrated that its mind is made up to deny the petition. But the Commission’s delay in formally announcing that decision has enabled it to improperly delay judicial review at a critical moment for the industry.
> “We allege that Coinbase, despite being subject to the securities laws, commingled and unlawfully offered exchange, broker-dealer, and clearinghouse functions,” said SEC Chair Gary Gensler. “In other parts of our securities markets, these functions are separate. Coinbase’s alleged failures deprive investors of critical protections, including rulebooks that prevent fraud and manipulation, proper disclosure, safeguards against conflicts of interest, and routine inspection by the SEC. Further, as we allege, Coinbase never registered its staking-as-a-service program as required by the securities laws, again depriving investors of critical disclosure and other protections.”
Seems rather straightforward to me given this press release.
Quit comingling functions. Bring your exchange to proper legal structure in the USA. Split the broker-dealer and clearinghouse functions off.
And quit operating Coinbase Earn, which is an obvious security by any other name. Either that, or properly register Coinbase Earn as a security before offering it as a product to the public. If you are to keep operating Coinbase Earn, then bring it under security regulations, which means reporting upon your assets and such under whatever filing system you want (probably bonds?)
Its... not even that hard to read the SEC complaint. Just read it, the complaint is right there for all of us to see.
This is indeed straightforward, but I'm not complaining about it. If all of these requirements had been outlined by the SEC prior to the release of the products, Coinbase would've followed the rules. Now when all of these products are in production, the SEC woke up and like: "heeey, this is a security, you must follow the rules". But there were no rules before. So, shall Coinbase just sit there and wait while the SEC learns more about blockchains? I don't know if there was any "warning" from the SEC, but if not, they should've published a public one first: "Due to X, Y and Z, the SEC gives Coinbase 6 months to split the broker-dealer and clearinghouse functions off".
The rules always were there. Just that the SEC was willing to turn a blind eye for years on this issue.
The reason why SEC couldn't ignore this anymore is FTX and SBF. It became clear that cryptocoins are full of fraudsters, and the cryptocoin community has absolutely no way to differentiate from the fraudsters and the legitimate groups.
SEC is simply not in a position to keep turning a blind eye to the cryptocoin world after $10,000,000,000+ was stolen by FTX and SBF.
> Dude, I made that comment in response to your "My coworker lost $X0,000 over Celsius" to highlight the fact that not everyone's circle is losing money.
But you making money doesn't allow my friend, or anyone from FTX, or Voyager to get their money back.
And you fail to see that it is HOW he lost money that I take issue with. Celsius lied about unregulated staking/interest yielding instruments to him and the natur of how it worked.
And Coinbase is making the same lie right now with Coinbase Earn. And you are sitting here defending it, and ignoring three major collapses last year while doing so.
By definition, Ponzi schemes involve some investors making a lot of money and others losing. That doesn't make them any less illegal.
If some people are harmed by unlawful behavior, that is a reason to prosecute, just the same as if you mugged Alice and bought Bob an icecream with the proceeds.
If you opened an exchange and did nothing but trade bitcoin, and only bitcoin, you would be free and clear, but there is no real money in that. Coinbase argued a few years ago they were losing to competition because their competitors could do a lot of gray area stuff they couldn't to do being a US-based traded company. Getting listed on Coinbase used to be the gold standard of a trusted, respectable crypto, but they at some point decided screw it and just embraced the coming legal challenges.
Bitcoin itself might not be. Even many other currencies might not. But what other "products" they are running? Those could and probably would fall under various classifications.
Honestly bitcoin not being a security has been one of the biggest mistakes the SEC has made over the past decade. They gave that guidance and are stuck with it now. But the argument for it being a commodity is pretty weak and being a security would be useful from a regulatory framework. I think it's pretty clear bitcoin needs as much or more regulation than a typical stock or bond and is a more likely source of fraud or problems than typical stocks or bonds are.
If that's true, then why did the SEC approve Coinbase's IPO and not doing anything about it until years later? Even in spite of Coinbase meeting with the SEC hundreds of times and testifying before congress. This is a complete change in their stance by the SEC.
You're saying that the SEC knowingly allowed Coinbase to become a public company, have insiders dump billions in stock on the public, and then continue to operate a completely illegal business for another 2 years without taking any action at all? Not even issuing any guidance which Coinbase requested from them dozens of times?
If so, that would be a huge scandal and the SEC should be investigated immediately.
A much simpler explanation is that crypto was largely ignored by regulators, including the very shady parts like FTX, for most of Coinbase's life. When FTX imploded, lawmakers turned on crypto and put pressure on the SEC to attack the industry. This is why there's been a whole series of actions by them in the last 6 months.
It's absolutely unclear what the SEC is doing here at all. Why is ALGO a security and ETH is not? They do the same thing. What are the implications of this lawsuit? Completely unclear. This is vague and unhelpful.
edit: Keep downvoting - the fact, with a clear example, remains.
The fact that they have been asked, point blank, by congress, "is ETH a security?" and the SEC wouldn't answer is pretty fair for claiming "not perfectly clear."
Even here, it wasn't all of ETH that is under question. So, if you have bought some ETH from coinbase, it isn't under fire here. If you paid them to stake your ETH, it is. It is unclear, to me, what it would mean for any ETH you staked personally.
That's the root of the problem - it's absolutely unclear what the global implications are and if this will be used to go after individuals staking on their own, etc.
I've watched that interview, congress would ask a loaded question, framed in a fallacy[1], the chair would start answering it, and the congresscritter would interrupt him and throw a tantrum. Repeat 5x.
It wasn't a good look. For the congresscritter.
(I wonder how much money he's gotten from Sam, CZ, and Coinbase...)
[1] The fallacy in question is the congresscritter's claim[2] that a security can't also be a commodity. This is trivially disprovable by a simple example - an isolated company town using scrip, where the scrip also happens to be company stock.
[2] Whenever the chair would start responding to the fallacy, the congresscritter shouts over him, because if he doesn't, his argument-in-the-form-of-a-question falls to pieces.
A question where answering easily implies past behavior is very different from one that does not. "Do you think it is ok to beat your spouse?" better not get any slow rolled answer, and is more comparable here.
Hell, I'd be fine with a hedged answer of "it can be." That would make a ton of sense and would make sense. Akin to asking "is it speeding to drive your car at 40?" The answer would be "in certain situations, certainly. Can be too fast and it can be too slow." So an answer of "I can't answer without more context" would be fine.
Past behaviour isn't the issue. An incorrect assertion is the issue.
Let me give you another chance to answer a simple yes or no question.
----
Since it's obvious that democrats are all criminals and baby-eaters, is Elizabeth Warren a democrat?
Yes or no. No hemming or hawing. I'll interrupt you as soon as I hear any words besides those two. Your answer or failure to answer will appear as a headline in the New York Times.
----
The chair was responding to the statement made in the question, the congressman just didn't like what that response was, which is why he kept interrupting.
The question was literally "is ETH a security?" To compare that to the questions you are stating is laughably bad faith argument.
Though, I'll bite. What statement is made by the question "Is ETH a security?" Why is that a question that can't be answered with "Yes", "No", or "it depends how it is packaged"?
The question was literally "Because something cannot be both a security and a commodity, is Eth a security?"
The chair's answer was, as we can glean from the interruptions (but who the hell really knows, the man's not allowed to finish a sentence) 'It depends'.
If he was saying "it depends" he had a lot of words to say that. His sentences were like my talking to the kids when I ask "did you do your homework?" It was painful.
And note that some things can be both a security while wrapped around a commodity. Just look at brokered CDs. Such that, even if you agreed that ETH is a commodity, you can still have financial instruments on ETH that are securities.
For any who might be interested, a link to the exchange that this user is comparing to asking if "democrats are all criminals and baby-eaters" [0]. Remember, the law is "extremely clear" on whether these tokens are securities or commodities, according to the GGP commentator.
> People keep saying that regulation is unclear, when let's be honest, it's perfectly clear. Just not what a lot of people wanted to hear.
I honestly don't know how you can say that with a straight face if you have ever looked into this for more than 5 minutes.
The regulation is not clear and they refuse to clarify when asked on many important topics. Compare that to other security related issues, where regulators are very proactive about clearly defining what is what, publishing explainers, etc. etc.
The primary use cases of ETH are changing state of the network and collateral for state change validation. Requester pays to effect change and some ETH is burnt and some goes to validators to incentivize operation. What other security does that? I don’t expect profit when using it to change state of the network.
SEC is supposed to tell them what is a security and what isn’t so they can refrain from selling them. Exchanges have been asking for clarification over and over. So far the only thing the SEC said on the subject is that BTC in not a security but nothing about the other cryptos.
In the absence of regulatory clarity Coinbase have devised their own framework to classify what tokens aren’t securities and proceeded to list them. I don’t know how you can blame them. It’s the SEC’s job to tell them what they can trade and what they can’t but they refuse to do it.
When tokenbro industry invented a very convoluted asset class they expected government to say "Oh, it's really hard to understand and classify it, that's why we won't do it at all. You guys can do whatever you want now.". But actually they said "Oh, it's really hard to understand and classify it, that's why we will have to do it the long and painful way, and you guys can wait for us or not. But if you want to operate before the decision is reached - it's on you if you break the law.".
Apparently a really convoluted business plan is not an inherent human right, if it is masking law infringement in he mean time. Who knew, right?:)
That's not how it works. They say what a security is. It's not their job to be babysit. Corps wishing to play in this field are expected to understand the basic foundations.
What about tokens that are used to pay the network, like Ethereum? If you want to use any chain that uses Ethereum, either as a L1 or L2, you need ETH.
It's almost as if people don't actually want a multiple dollar transaction fee that can take an hour (or more) to process.
That may be acceptable when you use bitcoin (or more likely Monero) to buy whatever your heart desires, but is absolutely not usable for regular purchases.
I could ask the same for a lot of things, though? Time shares, collectible card games, collectibles at large, fashion at large, etc.
Not that I can or will wholly defend crypto. That just doesn't seem like a relevant complaint.
I do question the desire for everlasting permanence of the blockchain. I know we like to keep real estate deed records and such going back as far as we can, but even there we have limited utility of that. Encasing it in a technical solution that expands to cover more transactions does feel limited in usefulness. Largely ironic/funny that it makes it incredibly unsuited to criminal use.
They bring the probability that you will be harassed by police/landowners/elements/civilians when residing in an area way down. Personally, I take the harassment and sleep on the street. But it's not easy and many would pay not to.
> collectible card games
You have fun when you play them. People pay to have fun.
> collectibles at large
Idk some people just get weird addictions. I put collectables at large in the same bucket as crypto, no defense there.
> fashion at large
Looking good is more likely to get you laid. People like getting laid, and will pay for it.
Do note that the SEC's argument is usually along the lines of "if anybody is buying this to make money, then it is potentially a security." The "common enterprise" part makes it a bit different, but only a bit.
Also note that time shares typically are securities, in my understanding. In contrast to a house, which is not. My argument there wasn't to identify some other things that are or are not securities, but "things that are kinda useless." In the case of timeshares, I'd say they are actively more harm than good.
Umm, OK. Funny that's not how it's been marketed. But I'm baffled as to how cryptocurrency is better for doing that than all of the other ways of doing that.
The drugs I've bought with cryptocurrency have been cheaper and of better quality than the drugs I've bought with dollars, by a wide margin. So there's that.
The marketing you're talking about is for the investors. By the nature of the product, the users have powerful adversaries and are probably operating in secret. You can't expect their use cases to show up in the marketing, that would defeat the purpose.
Sure, you get the bad with the good. There are definitely unsavory things going on under the covers. But you have to weigh that against the misbehavior of the powerful in a world where they're more difficult to coordinate against due to a underdeveloped crypto.
It's a trade off, but I think it's a worthwhile one.
> in a world where they're more difficult to coordinate against due to a underdeveloped crypto.
This is the part I don't understand. How does cryptocurrency make it easier to coordinate people than all the other tools we have to coordinate people?
If you rely on systems that involve implicit custodial trust (i.e. not crypto) to coordinate with your homies, and you have powerful adversaries, your adversaries will compel those custodians to prevent you from communicating with your homies. They also might find you and hurt you.
This happened with thepiratebay and DNS. It happened with wikileaks and paypal. It happened at the ISP level with Signal during recent unrest in Iran. It happens with the US banking system anytime somebody manages to get somebody else on one of the OFAC lists. It happens to would-be radicals on twitter all the time.
On the other hand, systems that don't involve implicit custodial trust don't have these problems, which is why journalists in China occasionally publish on Ethereum, because the Chinese censors don't have a single-point-of-failure to attack.
I don't think that currencies are an especially interesting application (although the wikileaks case is an example where they are relevant to group coordination). It's just that the currencies are what gets hyped because they're relevant to the investment side--without them, there's less money to build the other stuff.
Another example which I expect to emerge, but which I don't think has been developed yet, would be the use of NFT's in a successor system. If the leader of a movement gets apprehended or incapacitated and they don't check in after a certain number of blocks, then a contract moves the leadership token to their successor. This denotes the successor's signing keys as authoritative, and the leader's (presumably compromised) keys as deprecated. If you keep signatures on-chain you can also tell which ones were registered at a time when they were valid.
You couldn't do this on AWS, somebody would just compel AWS to remove the data they don't like, you need something like a blockchain. But it only works if enough people are running nodes to make attacking all of the node operators infeasible. For that you need to provide incentives, and now we're back to cryptocurrency.
For me it comes down to whether you think dissent is more important than preventing all of the shady business that goes on in secret online. I do, so I'm pro-crypto. The currency bit is an ugly necessity which I hope we can find a way to get rid of.
> If you rely on systems that involve implicit custodial trust (i.e. not crypto) to coordinate with your homies
But there are myriad ways of coordinating without relying on a systems that involve implicit custodial trust. More so now than ever.
But I get the sense we're talking about different things here. I was talking about coordinating activities with groups of people. You seems to be talking about payment systems.
> If the leader of a movement gets apprehended or incapacitated and they don't check in after a certain number of blocks, then a contract moves the leadership token to their successor.
You could use blockchain for this, but equally you can use any of several other methods to achieve the same effect.
> For me it comes down to whether you think dissent is more important than preventing all of the shady business that goes on in secret online.
For me, this doesn't enter into is. I do think dissent is critically important. I don't see how blockchain is essential to doing that. Why bring in something as tainted as cryptocurrency when there are other options?
You keep saying that there are many alternatives, but I don't know what you mean. I'd like to outline a scenario and you can tell me which technology you think would scratch the itch:
Suppose you're a journalist in a place with an oppressive government. You have information about government behavior that you expect will cause protests. You're not an activist though, so you don't want to actually plan those protests.
Suppose I'm an activist in the same country--I'll plan the protest--but we don't know each other. We've got a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-friend... kind of relationship.
Ideally you could post the information somewhere, and then our mutual friends could post annotations which validate it. They'd be attaching "I was there and I saw this happen" kind of information. I would then see this information because I explicitly/transitively trust people who have validated it. The government can inject disinformation about it, but it just gets ignored unless they manage to get us to explicitly trust their agents about this kind of thing (presumably this will be prohibitively expensive).
The government will find us and hurt us if they catch three or four of us coordinating in this way. But if there are thousands of us, it will be a different story. So we need to collect a critical mass of validations, and we need to plan the protest, and we need to do it in a way that the government can't prevent and which doesn't betray our actual identities to the government--at least not until we all show up at the protest site.
I'm working on this app, by the way. I intend to have pluggable backends so it won't be coupled to a specific blockchain--you could use it over ssh for instance, or a thumb drive, or via a shared S3 bucket--but it's the blockchain backends that I expect to be most useful in situations with many stakeholders and truly aggresive adversaries because it's not realistic to expect users to maintain the system of file transfers necessary to ensure that the annotations dataset converges in a way that gets the message and its validations from journalist to activist, or from activist to other activist.
Sneakernet / file transfer will be the first backend that I support. What should I support second?
What is tamper-resistant enough that the government can't remove the data, lacks dependency on a naming system which can be tampered with to hide the data, and is also public enough that all parties can access the data and know that the version they're accessing is the real one, if not a public blockchain?
Granted, there may be solutions that are not technically a blockchain. I'm curious about Kademlia DHT's, for instance. I wonder if SSB can be used here. But so far as I can tell, all serious contenders are, if not blockchains, blockchain-like.
Simple example is that if governments control finance you can't coordinate if the government is your opposition. If you start sharing resources as a means of coordinating, governments can always just compel the banks to shut down your account.
Governments can't shut down crypto nearly as easily due to its decentralized nature.
I don't find this argument compelling at all, because I can't think of a historical example where fiat currency prevented coordination of antigovernment people.
I also find it interesting that the pro-cryptocurrency argument centers around being antigovernment. So it's a political thing, not a practical thing. That automatically means cryptocurrency has no chance of mainstream adoption. People who don't agree with the politics of it will avoid it because they don't want to be associated with those politics.
Many clear examples of it being used to coordinate in opposition to fiat because the governments can't be trusted. And it's working far as I can tell. We just don't hear about it in the first world because our culture is so apathetic about anything happening in poverty oppressed nations.
Worth adding I'm not pro-crypto or anti-government. For transparency I have less than $10 grand in crypto which is no big deal for me to lose overnight. I think there is a good enough case to invest but not enough to make it large part of my portfolio. I don't believe the hype but also think throwing it out with the bathwater is likewise unnecessarily absolutist.
"People who don't agree with the politics of it will avoid it because they don't want to be associated with those politics"
Tell that from the majority of crypto users who reside in the third world and derive actual value from it. They are not politically homogenous (leftists and rightists use crypto on the third world) and most probably don't care much for decentralization as a means of political action. They just want something that works and is less corrupt than the incumbent system.
This might be a political stance, but it's not exactly a radical one:
> Tech that mediates a relationship between two users should not give special powers to a third party.
It's not anti-government, it's anti-tampering. I'm most concerned with government tampering, but that's just me. I can exchange tokens with somebody who is concerned with alien tampering (something I don't worry about in the slightest) and we can all disagree about the "why" while still agreeing on the "what".
Maybe there's a subset of users that would prefer to have some authority they can appeal to when something goes wrong. That's fine, crypto isn't for them right now. But I suspect that those authorities will eventually abuse their position of trust. When it happens, I hope crypto is a nice enough place for them to turn to. As it stands there's a lot of work to do for that to be the case.
imagine when the bank was invented and somebody said, "imagine if somebody's bank account is frozen for political reasons." and somebody said, "this hasn't happened to banks yet, but somebody's satchel got robbed for political reasons"
Mastercard and paypal have both shut down legal activity in the last 4 years on the backs of government decisions or targeting legal, but politically inconvenient activity and there seems to be no slowing down on that avenue. Pornhub is one recent major example of that.
The idea that it's just criminal enterprises that benefit from being able to participate in markets without interference is laughable at best given the increased interconnectedness between banks and the regulators themselves, especially not even 6 months after a rash of major banking failures within the traditional financial markets.
There is very little reason to have a favorable opinion of the SEC following the 08 collapse given their own hand in it or the banking failures existing now, especially when they refuse to clarify their position on what is or is not a security so people CAN legally operate in the space. It appears to many both inside and outside of the space that the SEC is wielding its regulatory arm to create winners and losers, and with their own track record it's a failing proposition.
It may be hyperbolic, but the holocaust was a legal activity in Nazi occupied territory.
