Good
The more countries hit the brakes on this despicable market, the better.
Another week, another big economy restricting cryptocurrency. This time Indonesia has barred financial services firms from offering bit-buck-related services to their customers. In the tweet below, Wimboh Santoso, commissioner of Indonesia's financial services authority the Otoritas Jasa Keuangan (OJK), states that the agency …
I find the crypto-hate groupthink on this site rather sad.
Twelve years ago, a lone programmer uploaded the original bitcoin code to the internet. And here, a little over a decade later, without the backing of any government or financial institutions, bitcoin has grown into an asset worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and spawned an asset class worth trillions. That's amazing to me. If I had read it in a science fiction novel back in the day, I would have found it totally unrealistic. Yet here we are. Even if you dislike crypto-currencies, for whatever reason, where is your sense of wonder at that?
Personally I'm pro-crypto. Banks and governments are screwing us. Your bank makes a ton of money lending out your savings, and returns what, a fraction of a percent to you? And your government is merrily printing money and driving up inflation to erode the value of your savings. Banks are running scared about DeFi platforms that return a much higher percentage of profits to customers, and so they should be. The sector needs shaking up.
And on the technological side, if there are problems with crypto, I like to think of ways to solve those problems, rather than using them as a stick to bash crypto with. Solving problems is why I got into technology in the first place. Fortunately there are plenty of people who do think that way, even if they apparently don't visit The Register; the biggest problem in the thriving crypto space right now is the cutthroat competition for developers. I suspect anyone still hoping crypto will just go away is going to be waiting for a while.
Ok, downvote away.
yeah , but , ya see .
Whilst it was a nice idea re the "currency" no ones using it as a currency.
Its just a pretend intangible invented commodity
and people gamble on wether its totally invented percieved value will go up or down.
Whilst its not being used as a currency its doing no real work and is no real benefit apart from swirling money around in the global casino.
And using a hell of a lot of kWh to do it .
The science fiction novel you are referring to as fictional already exists, it's called "Idiocracy". And no, it hasn't grown an asset worth billions of dollars. It's al smoke and mirrors. You have an intangible token, backed by no money at all, worth what a group of big speculators say it's worth.
Then, you have a bunch of converts trying to force blockchain into everything, and praising decentralization just for the sake of it.
One wonders whether Russia's proposed clampdown of cryptocurrency may be put on hold. It might prove rather useful if there is an invasion of the Ukraine and Russia gets ejected from SWIFT and The Vlad & Co need to silently shift their ill-gotten gains somewhere more discrete.
Would the US then clampdown on it making cryptocurrency literally wire fraud?
If enough investors pull out, could we have the equivalent of a Bitcoin Bank Run? If you consider Bitcoin a currency, then its value is upheld by trust. No reason why that trust should survive forever, even though it seems like there are lots of fools and their money to keep the thing running for quite a while. If it's an investment (and let's face it, people 'invest' into crypto), the same issues apply.
As opposed to government-backed currencies (or established companies / commodities), crypto schemes are only backed by private entities without any meaningful history that would foster long-term trustworthiness. And don't tell me that you don't need trust crypto, because crypto ... If people stop accepting your currency, the value goes to zero. The value is tied to others accepting your currency and not tied to a nice picture on a dollar bill or a nice crypto scheme on somebodies computer.
It may take a while, or maybe the crypto schemes will just fade away -- but I predict that a nice cataclysmic run will wipe out most crypto schemes at some point within this generation (or the next). There is, of course, only one way to accelerate the run: talk about it wherever you can. Erosion of trust can be a self-fulfilling prophecy :).
The only problem with that is the exchanges. Every time a remotely large sell-off has started in the past, all the exchanges have historically had "unexpected outages" and "scheduled maintenance", conveniently stopping anyone else selling off their kleptocurrency.
Then Tether warms up the printer and creates several million USDT out of thin air to bump the price back up.
"Then Tether warms up the printer and creates several million USDT out of thin air to bump the price back up."
That only works if people are willing to by those Tether millions. If no one is wanting to buy the crypto, and everyone wants to sell than the value goes to 0... And there is bugger all that the Scammers - Sorry Crypto experts - can do about it except try to drum up some more spin...
It's not just Tether in on the stablecoin fraud. USDC prints have gone parabolic in recent months, but neither they or Tether are audited so no one knows where this money is coming from. The only possible conclusion is that it's all imaginary funny money.
The whole cryptocurrency space is rotten to the core. Scams, rug pulls, market manipulation, wash trading and exchanges that collude and actively conspire against their own customers. On the bright side, there are headwinds looming for crypto. Increasing scrutiny from authorities, rising interest rates and feds turning off the cheap money taps are going to come to bear on the biggest pyramid scheme in history.
I do wish that people would stop using the word "crypto" as shorthand for cryptocurrency.
When I read the headline I thought "Wait a minute, a bank is stopping people encrypting their dealings with the bank?"
It turns out on reading the piece that it was on the dubious practices of the cryptocurrency world and not what I had originally thought.
Now I know that in writing a headline you need to be concise and attention grabbing but I think that this example was downright confusing.
All they do is ban safe abortions. The back streets are going to remain full of people who can "help". (Young) women will die but frankly, they DGAFF.
If people cannot get good advice about crypto-currencies, they will have a go by themselves. They may need to work their way through government firewalls and VPNs but some will. They will be in greater danger of having it stolen. Those who come out the other end, will loose even more faith in their banking system and how it owns their government.