Hacker News Reader

Comment by c3534l | Hacker News Reader

Cryptocurrency enables people to make anonymous monetary transactions. Also, so does cash. Drug dealers and criminals still very much prefer cash. Is it wrong to work with certain traditional finance companies because of their association with cash? Should we be worried about users associating your favorite language with the seedy world of cash transactions which subvert the traditional role and spying capacity of large financial institutions? This is the first I've ever heard anyone suggest that Haskell is associated with criminality in any way. Its associated with academics, and nerds, and maybe even hobby programmers. But if I bring up Haskell among a group of people, criminal enterprises is not going to be in the 100 top-associated things with that language. There is no elephant, the connection is strenuous, and if such an elephant existed, it would not be worthy of serious consideration.

View on HN

Hold on. The idea that a means of exchange can be used to purchase seedy or illegal goods is not the problem the author has with cryptocurrencies. The issue is VERY clearly stated - there's a loosely-regulated industry riddled with companies that are pushing essentially scam investments. The author is concerned that these companies are beginning to fund enough Haskell development that it's worth questioning whether they want to be associated with such an industry.

I think this is totally valid to question. To brush it off entirely as a non-issue, unworthy of even a moment's thought, is extremely peculiar.

Exactly. Nobody is saying "get your cash here!" while profiting off of speculators. Ok, maybe countries do but they also back the currency and foster growth. You get no such protection from crypto communities.

Everything in the OP article is spot on and the gp argument is a strawman.

It's worth noting that the author's company is in the private blockchain field, complete with a smart contract language under their belt, in Haskell.

Indeed, it's not the first time that a private blockchain partisan has attempted to tar all of "public" blockchain/crypto as a lawless amoral cesspool. R3 made similar claims in years past. In truth, there's been equal or more FUD thrown at private by public zealots too. But it's not confidence-inspiring to see this kind of tribalism, and it speaks to a conflict of interest (at least in R3's case, who were signalling to governments that "private is safer").

The broad brush is FUD. There are any number of crypto efforts that are not fraudulent. Grin and zcash come to mind. Ethereum itself is hardly a criminal effort. The claim that this technology has not advanced the field is simply laughable. Sure, there's a lot of technobabble and money being raised around nothing, what else is new.

Anybody in the fintech industry pointing fingers at crypto need to take a look in the mirror. Crypto is a tiny speck compared to the modern financial system. That's not to excuse fraud and shady stuff, but companies servicing hedge funds, private equity and megabanks have zero moral ground from which to point fingers.

What private block chain?

Looks like a database backed web app for connecting financial data feeds.

https://www.adjoint.io/connect/

It's a recent pivot/rebrand. As of May 2019 their hero copy was "Adjoint empowers enterprises to achieve new levels of efficiency and control by delivering blockchain technology built specifically for the needs of the financial industry."[1]

Also, Stephen Diehl was actively promoting smart contracts and blockchain technology in Haskell until recently. [2]

1- https://web.archive.org/web/20190513032812/https://www.adjoi...

2 - http://internetofagreements.com/2017/12/18/stephen-diehl-adj...

Cryptocurrencies and blockchains still don't seem to solve a real problem.

It seems like a solution for nothing.

I think cryptocurrencies are detrimental to society and I don't care if you program them in Haskel or brainfuck.

> Cryptocurrencies and blockchains still don't seem to solve a real problem.

Have you ever wanted to send money to someone who wasn't in the same location as you? Alternatively, have you ever wanted to send a large amount of money without dealing with a large volume of cash, gold, or some other physical store of value (making the down payment on a house or car for instance)? Blockchains make it possible for you to do that electronically, and without the enormous and centralized infrastructure of banks, vaults, guards, armored cars, etc.

I'll believe this when somebody buys a house with Bitcoin.

> I'll believe this when somebody buys a house with Bitcoin.

Regardless of whether centuries-old cultural and social infrastructure evolves to take advantage of this, the fact of the matter is that blockchains do actually enable this kind of electronic value transfer. And they do it in a way that results in a number of properties that are significantly different from our existing value transfer systems.

It remains to be seen how important these differences are and how much of an impact they will have on our society. Will it be huge like the crypto-maximalists preach? Or will it be a passing fad that is not much more than a blip? I don't know. But that doesn't change the fact that blockchains were a genuine technological advance that enabled something that we weren't previously able to do.

> I'll believe this when somebody buys a house with Bitcoin.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/16/bitcoin-is-finally-buying-in...

"Our buyer has evolved, they've moved from mom and pops to young people who want to pay with various forms of payment," said Ben Shaoul, president of Magnum Real Estate Group. "Cryptocurrency is something that has been asked of us — 'Can you take cryptocurrency? Can we pay that way?' — and of course when somebody wants to pay you with a different form of payment, you're going to try to work with them and give them what they want, especially in a very busy real estate market."

Spoiler alert: no one bought a house with Bitcoin. A real estate agent advertised a willingness to buy Bitcoin from his customer to facilitate a transaction.

From the same article I linked:

Others, however, are not as comfortable with the relatively new currency. The first ever single-family home sale in Texas involving bitcoin was announced last month. The buyer, who works in the tech industry, purchased the newly built home in Austin using bitcoin, but the seller, a custom homebuilder, wanted the currency converted to dollars during the transaction.

This article is from 2017 I'm sure if I searched for more I'd find more examples but regardless is buying a house really the final test of something's potential as a currency?

You know electronic banktransfers are a thing right? Maybe you pay a transfer fee but that's ok.

> Is it wrong to work with certain traditional finance companies because of their association with cash?

On the contrary, drug dealers and criminals stay away from traditional banks precisely because of this. Are you asking is it wrong to work in the foreign banknote management business, or the Western Union style irreversible wire transfer business, or the gift card trading business, or a business that wants to pay you cash in hand? I would say yes. At some point the criminal uses of a given tool are so overwhelmingly more popular than legitimate uses that the tool itself becomes tarred with criminality.

www.marketwatch.com/story/netflix-documentary-re-examines-hsbcs-881-million-money-laundering-scandal-2018-02-21

The way that whole affair is reported infuriates me. HSBC followed unclear government guidance and advised their clients to do the things that the government said were low risk. That article talks about "money laundering crimes" but nothing HSBC did was ever shown to be criminal, nor should it have been. They moved money in a legal way for their clients, but people would rather blame bankers than drug dealers.

> nothing HSBC did was ever shown to be criminal

HSBC has a sordid history of associating with criminal or unethical behavior, including active participation in money-laundering - far from "moved money in a legal way".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HSBC#Controversies

When I drilled down into the details it looked like the accusations were all just smoke. It's things like "the law said that transactions from this region should be classified as medium risk or low risk depending on the bank's own judgement, and the bank decided to classify them as low risk", or "the bank provided services to company x, which was found out to be part of a criminal enterprise 10 years later". The only "active participation in money laundering" was that a client company asked them how to send wire transfers from Mexico to the US without violating the regulations, and they told them, which far from being a crime is surely what any responsible company would do.

If you've got concrete facts to the contrary then I'd be happy to be corrected, but I'm convinced it's all just political posturing.

You're right to apply critical thinking and not trust the general sentiment against HSBC. That brings a healthy perspective.

I searched for "HSBC prosecution" and found the following article from December 2019.

https://www.crainsnewyork.com/markets/third-times-charm-hsbc...

The words of Brandon Garrett, a professor at the Duke University of Law, concludes:

> They are recidivists, but they do not receive harsher penalties despite their growing criminal records. Individual criminal defendants are not so lucky.

The article seems to provide factual support to the sentiment, that HSBC has a record of criminal behavior, in legal terms.

> The article seems to provide factual support to the sentiment, that HSBC has a record of criminal behavior, in legal terms.

It doesn't. A deferred-prosecution agreement means that the case never went to court and they didn't admit guilt.

Obviously in theory a company that was confident of their innocence would refuse such an agreement. But the laws are ambiguous, public sentiment is against them, and in practice the industry regulators have a lot of discretion and will make life very hard for you if they decide you're fighting them.

HSBC does seem to have more than their fair share of allegations against them - but in my book circumstantial, ambiguous allegations never amount to a smoking gun even if there's a huge number of them.

> worried about users associating your favorite language with the seedy world of cash transactions

when did we start calling cash transactions seedy? you own a pub, somebody pays in cash is automatically seedy? let's maybe look into offshore banking and US offshore jurisdictions such as New Mexico, Delaware and Nevada first (tax havens in our midst) before bringing out the guns on the little people who have a bad line of credit or are unable to pay by card?

GP was obviously joking, trying to show that crypto-currencies are no different than cash, so anyone who calls crypto-currencies 'seedy' would also have to consider cash 'seedy'.

However, crypto-currencies are in reality not like cash, because fat more than being an anonymous medium of exchange, they are in fact mostly an unregulated speculative investment, and unregulated speculative investments are, in fact, quite seedy.

Because there are a lot of speculators, that makes it seedy? What does the amount of speculators have to do with the seediness of the underlying technology? I thought it was "seedy" because it can be used for fraud?

To be fair, if someone hands off a briefcase full of cash, that's generally considered shady.

If you dive into the crypto world. There's a ton of cons that promise the world just to bump up the cost.

A quick way to make a buck was to look at the dates for crypto roadmap announcement, launch or white paper. Buy crypto a week before, then sell a day before the announcement before everyone else buys in.

This become so popular many coins where created just for this purpose. They would claim the world as the next bitcoin. Then after the announcement, seized to exist.

That brings us to this post. They're using Haskell as the 'new tech' to pump and dump coins.

There's so many scam coins out there. It really shows you how stupid the whole thing is.

I don’t agree with your characterization- anyone who thinks iohk is a pump and dump is woefully misinformed.

Cardano may or may not be the way of the future for who knows what, but the amount of academic work put into it really doesn’t support calling it a pump and dump.

> Is it wrong to work with certain traditional finance companies because of their association with cash?

Cash is much more difficult to move across international borders. It opens up exciting new opportunities for international crime and scammers. Further, cash is not a fungible as you suggest, criminal have to incur vast expense in order launder their money. Cash is also difficult to store in large quantities, which imposes a physical constraint on the amount that can be securely stashed by less sophisticated criminals.

Cryptocurrencies have lead to an explosion of pump and dump schemes, ponzi schemes, outright fraud (see: the recent twitter hack), and other financial schemes design to separate the gullible from their money.

Did these things exist prior to Cryptocurrencies? Yes, but cryptocurrencies democratised the ability to conduct them and made it more difficult for authorities to catch criminals.

Cryptocurrencies are an absolutely terrible idea: born from the minds of techno-utopians, fueled by anarcho capitalists, and weaponised by criminals.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com