Funnily enough there was some amount, less than a dollar IIRC, left in Voyager when they folded. I received an email telling me it was being taken over by...Binance. Never bothered to login and even check it.
Guess it really is scams all the way down.
Except you aren't really. You will always be beholden to one entity or another, in bitcoin the 51% who need to clear your transactions. You just decide to not trust in the current financial apparatus and instead bet on the new.
the entire concept of money is a social construct. It's a culture wide bluff that we all agree to never call. "self-sovereignty" is antithetical to the idea of money.
Specialized ASIC were developed after crypto became popular.
Sure there is. The capped supply is intended to cause deflation and enrich early adopters if/when Bitcoin goes mainstream. To argue otherwise is to claim that the author of the whitepaper was ignorant of how a currency with limited supply would behave. And if that's true, it's more damning of Bitcoin than the "get rich quick" stuff.
At the end of the day, you need to keep your keys on an a dedicated air-gapped system where you have epoxied the USB ports and have ideally written the OS and all of the firmware (and the compiler) yourself. But then what's the point of a supposed currency of the future that is barely usable without paranoid security measures?
(These are the hard truths they won't tell you in the super bowl commercials)
so eschewing exchanges, you conduct all your commercial transactions directly in crypto straight from your crypto wallets? it's cool you can avoid all fiat like that, but doesn't it limit your purchasing options? Or have I missed another one of the points of crypto?
I use an exchange occasionally, but I don't keep money parked there long-term like a bank. Deposit fiat, trade for crypto, withdraw crypto. I'm never exposed for more than an hour.
Which isn’t to say the existing financial system works well for everybody all the time, but in practice crypto just isn’t showing real benefits to offset its many downsides.
It does not appear to be justified to make claims about what's true of "the majority of sex workers online". This is not an area where reliable numbers exist.
Many payment processors do restrict the business they want to deal with beyond what the letter of the law requires. (And that is their prerogative as a private business!)
> How is refusing to serve legal sex workers different?
As far as I can tell, in the US discrimination is forbidden against certain protected groups / along certain protected differences only. But you are free to discriminate on all other grounds. Eg a restaurant can legally discriminate against people who don't wear a tie.
The UK rules are similar, see eg https://www.gov.uk/discrimination-your-rights
In the British rules, sexual orientation is explicitly mentioned, but your trade ain't. So as far as I can tell, it's illegal in the UK to discriminate against gays but legal to discriminate against sex workers.
(However, a government might come after you, if you do something they don't like, even if it's perfectly legal. Eg the government could just 'randomly' decide to audit your taxes all the time, or 'randomly' apply other regulations and rules more strictly.)
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group for a list of the protected groups in the US. Wikipedia lists sexual orientation, but not vocation.
I think the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Iran since the Islamic Revolution etc went for a less legalistic and more moralistic approach.
(Of course, you should still evaluate these policies on their own merit, instead of tarring them guilty by association. To give a counter-example: Nazi Germany was one of the first places to put anti-animal cruelty laws on the books and officials were very concerned about the dangers of smoking. Two stances that are widely popular today, and rightly so.)
(And if the general public doesn't care, why should laws in a democratic country care?)
You might declare marijuana vaguely shady, but as far as I can tell, it's a legitimate product that consenting adults might want to trade in.
Yes, if you buy in person, then cash works. I was more thinking of buying online. And also where a marijuana business would keep their money.
(For the latter, bitcoin isn't very useful, because suppliers won't accept it. But neither is the legacy banking system always willing to serve businesses in weird niches.)
This goes beyond the question of legal risks and statutory limits, CC’s are debt which means someones money isn’t tied up during a dispute.
On the other hand, you can only lose the bitcoins you actually have.
With a credit card you can go into debt.
If Bitcoin transactions involved giving your private key to every entity you wanted to transact with (like how credit card numbers work), then this would be a problem.
You can also choose not to trust any 3rd party. If I'm buying an on-chain digital item, I probably don't need to support disputes, but if I'm buying something off-chain and don't trust the merchant, I might want that protection.
Free speech, no matter how disgusting, is constitutional in the US. This is a legal use case of crypto.
Another is micropayments for content or for upvotes with Lightning Network, for example https://stacker.news
Actually, even in the US communication providers are required to stop people sending certain images to each other.
These people also need to pay their bills and not have their money stolen or otherwise disappear in the “fraud all the way down” world of crypto. Cash solves most of these problems, as well as basic intermediate layers like LLCs.
In an industry where getting fucked by payment processors regularly is part of the business, I think there is obvious appeal to pseudonymous transactions for both buyer and seller. Again, off-ramps are far better in 2023. I can deposit crypto and get cash in my bank account in a working day or two.
This is a common problem in these discussions. The HN crowd tends to have better access to payment infrastructure and reliable income from their industry. Not everyone has those benefits and many people are punished by our existing system for doing completely legal work that some see as immoral.
It’s the people saying “Sex workers should just use crypto, it will solve all their problems!” who are lacking empathy, and not the people listing very plausible reasons why “Magic solution X” doesn’t make any problems go away.
Modern internet finance on hacker news. I pulled a muscle cringing.
In sane countries that is, yes. And that's where most of the global wealth is, too.
However, there are places where you need to worry a lot more about the government arbitrarily seizing your funds, or the banks just 'misplacing' them.
(I specifically write 'arbitrarily' above, because sane countries also typically want a cut of your income and/or wealth, but they write laws and regulations _beforehand_ that you can read to figure out how much you'll owe in taxes. Of course, some people also use crypto and other tricks to avoid paying taxes.)
These companies will be free to operate everywhere else.
I'm not really in favour of bans here, because just as no one forces you to enter a casino, no one forces you to trade on a cryptocurrency exchange (or hold any cryptocurrencies at all). Matt Levine's Money Stuff reported a lot on people losing money in crypto over the last two years, and was always amazed that the media couldn't really find those sob stories where orphans and widows lost their life savings. It was always some guys who admitted that they gambled and lost.
However, if eg American elected officials, or their appointed proxies at the SEC, want to ban certain things, who am I to judge?
Here in Singapore the authorities are a lot more crypto friendly, which works for me.
(I don't hold any cryptocurrencies. My investments are all in the most boring index fund available.
My position on weird financial assets is the same as for drugs: I don't think cryptocurrencies are a good investment for most people (on the grounds of insufficient diversification, if nothing else), but I don't see any reason to ban consenting adults from them. By default, let people make their own choices.)
We have casinos here. Our government is an interesting mix between laissez-faire and paternalistic with a strong Puritan streak. (I don't think it's actually of Puritan origin, but a parallel evolution from Chinese culture? Would be interesting to look into the origins.)
The result is that foreigners can enter the casinos willy-nilly, and lose all their money as they please. But as a local you have to pay an entry levy of 150 Singapore dollars, just to remove any illusion that you might be come out ahead when you visit.
You can also tell that government that they should ban you from entry completely (if you know you have a gambling problem). Curiously enough, your relatively can also do that for (or rather, to) you.
See https://www.mha.gov.sg/docs/default-source/media-room-doc/an... for sources.
The fact that crypto can be used in the free world makes it valuable and useful for people in less free parts of the world.
In the same class of assets as beanie babies and tulips, perhaps
Why would you see it as an investment signal, rather than a massive red flag and an indication of a Ponzi scheme?
"I generally distrust door-to-door salesmen, but the Brooklyn Bridge deal was just too good to pass up!"
In March they asked us to sign up with Binance who would take over the accounts.
In April they said the Binance thing was off.
Since April, they just keep sending chapter 11 restructuring projections.
I imagine the folks who had money in Voyager when it melted down felt pretty scammed.
And now for folks in Binance...
Similarly whatever you do or showcase or discuss, "Oh that is not REAL Crypto. Our Crypto is different!"
It's a massive whack a mole. Meanwhile there are what, ten thousand plus different tokens tracked on coin market cap?
Edit : 25k, apparently lol. It's been a few days since I last checked :-)