Two sides of the digital coin: Ill-gotten gains in cryptocurrencies double, outpaced by legit use – report The year 2021 proved to be a tough one for anyone affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, though it was awesome for crime involving cryptocurrencies. Last year, illicit blockchain addresses received a whopping $14bn in ill-gotten gains, almost twice the $7.8bn unlawfully obtained in 2020. That's according to Chainalysis, a …
Apparently you can now use BTC to buy an american politician.
Judge for yourself if that is either a legitimate or a legal use.
Leaders in many foreign countries don't see American politicians as worthless, this means they can fund them with a little bit of bitcoin ... if donated by REvil, (only $70 million from one hack last year) this might be seen as completely legitimate because the source of the bitcoin was an American company.
With the pandemic restrictions, it's hard to deliver a briefcase full of cash or physical photos of the politician in a compromising position. They need some way of semi-anonymously moving credits around. Since the Swiss are more than willing to rat anybody out, the whole numbered account thing is long gone.
Yes, it was first seen in insider trading profiteers but these days it's just the standard commercial operation methods supported by virtually all politicians and governments.
When cryptocurrency first appeared it looked like a possible alternative to credit cards and bank transfers, you might think that the criminals pretty much took it over, but look at the current bitcoin price which shot sky-high after Bitcoin became a legal investment in the USA because it offers investors the ability to move vast amounts of money around while keeping everything secret.
mmm... no, the scammed won't pay or lose in the future crypto currency collapse. They have already paid for their crypto currencies. Their losses will be limited to that. Which in a sense, as pointed out in other comments, it is much less than if they were operating futures or options.
Nonetheless, a lot of family savings will be wiped out when the crypto currency bubble crashes. Except of course the "too big to fail" entities, but for the small investors, which are 90% of crypto currency holders (owning less than 10% of the asset's value) will be a financial disaster.
Somehow we, as a collective, never seem to learn: after dot com, real estate, etc, one would have expected people to become more financially savvy.
Most people have trouble finding their own arses with both hands and a map.
That's because they're doing it wrong. You only use one hand to find your arse. And use the other to hold the map. Makes it much easier.
Probably needs both hands to fold the map first though. In fact, I'm not sure it doesn't take more skill to fold maps than it does to read them...
[note to young people: Paper maps were what we used before the invention of smartphones. Folding the map was what your Grandad used to do in preparation for getting into the car to have an hour long argument with your Grandma.]
"Our methodology is that we combine proprietary heuristics and human experts to ..." = "We pulled the numbers from the nether regions..."
There's that saying that 78.2% of statistics are made up on the spot and the other 32.6% are outright lies, though don't quote me on that one.
I do work in apllied statistics and most of us usually do much better than the garble above (only to be later misrepresented by manglement, or sales, or the newspapers).
I don’t care about imaginary crypto munny and imaginary nft asetts, people can play whatever fool games they want.
What I do care about is the wastage of Earth’s actual resources in pursuit of pointless crypto calculations needed to create this made-up nonsense.
If there was ever anything desperately in need of CO2 taxation, crypto is it.
"The Chinese government already banned mining over the load it places on electricity generation."
Just look at the mid-day photos of major cities in China and you can see that C02 is the least of their problems. Mining crypto creates no wealth so it adding to the air pollution does nothing for the country.
The bitcoin enthusiasts would reply that the energy use is not wasted as it serves a useful function: to secure the network. They would further argue that this is at least as legitimate as many uses of energy that we accept but could considered to be a waste. The entire advertising industry, most travel, most television shows, etc. could easily be considered to be a frivolous waste of Earth's resources. Many would say the same of the entire military-industrial complex. I don't know if bitcoin will ever become a globally useful asset that justifies the required energy consumption, but if one is prepared to shut down bitcoin on this basis, then one must also be prepared to shut down many industries that we currently take for granted.
Bitcoin advocates would further argue that it actually creates an incentive for development of clean, cheap energy generation, and for using generated energy that would otherwise be unused, and therefore definitely wasted. I haven't explored these topics in depth, but there's at least prima facie evidence that there's some merit to these arguments (see for example: https://assets.ctfassets.net/2d5q1td6cyxq/5mRjc9X5LTXFFihIlTt7QK/e7bcba47217b60423a01a357e036105e/BCEI_White_Paper.pdf).
That said, the crypto industry broadly speaking is unquestionably rife with fraudsters and phony get-rich quick schemes.
...but not all crime is trafficking drugs and kids. Sometimes you want to buy something the government refuses to allow for sale, and crypto is a way to do that. If the government hates that so much, let me buy the things I want. It's not as though most of hte things I legally buy don't have associated costs in human life and suffering. Maybe governments should gtf over themsleves a little and realize that the differences between buying 2g of cocaine and 2 bluetooth headphones online affect them the exact same amount, and the only people who care are them and other busybodies who seem dead set on telling people how to live their lives.
Nope. This scenario doesn't make sense - governments don't monitor your transactions in real time so even if someone is not legal to buy in your country, just buy it from a neighbouring country and have it shipped in. Customs are just as likely to check your shipment regardless of the payment method. And if it's a seller in *your* country selling this illegal product, so no customs, then selling the product via cryptocurrency is just as as illegal as using credit card/cash. And once you've got the product, it's very, very unlikely the government is going to raid your home for slightly off-spec blutooth headphones.
So nope. If you're using cryptocurrency to buy something you're either a cryptobro who gets off on it (and/or wants to prop up the value by demonstrating how useful it is) or doing something illegal enough that the government would want to track down offences that have already occurred. The former would be amusingly tragicomic if it wasn't for the planet destroying amounts of energy used; the latter *should* be stopped.
I just don't have a need to conduct large transactions anonymously. I am a firm believer in paying cash for most things to keep my transaction off of the great ledger in the Cloud. All of my major purchases are tracked by other means. The house (paid off, yea), the car (also paid off), utilities, taxes and on and on are all accounted to me already. I can pay them with traceable money from a bank and it makes no difference. If I want a nice bottle of single malt, I'll not use the debit card so the health insurance company has no way to see what I spend on adult bevies. Same goes for groceries. While not in business as a caterer, I sometimes am the person that whips up all of the snacks and drinks for a small event. I'd look like a huge junk food junky if that were all reported. It wouldn't be accurate either since I prefer the fresh fruit and veg more than the calorific snacks.
Unless I suddenly dive into a serious drugs habit, unlikely at my age, crypto doesn't seem worth the effort. I have some precious metals and investment grade art/coins as well as cash, if I had more money, I'd buy the vacant lot next to me and perhaps a couple before gambling money on crypto. In fact, I do plan on buying at least the lot next to my house and having a workshop built on it sometime at the end of this year or next. The wonderful thing about land is they aren't making more if it.
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