So USDT is not truly decentralized and your money can be frozen for any reason or no reason at all.
- much more awkward to use
- more liable to hacks
- deposits are not insured
- fewer legal protections
- doesn’t pay interest (or not easily anyway)
- and as I find out, bannable by a central institution with lower legal oversight than the Fed
I’ll keep a mental note of this.
What will they do when the alternative is broken bones?
> almost-unregulated except when the authority say no.
No, their entire business model relies on bank/CC providers don't ban them. Somehow, they treat all crypto related transactions as iffy but USDT, bought to buy crypto, got under much less scrutiny. The entire problem their solver was that new users couldn't move cash to exchanges fast enough to join bull runs.
Turns out, Coinbase "Wallet" is a completely separate thing from Coinbase, and long story short, ultimately ended up accidentally converting some spare ETH I transfered into some kind of garbage Binance "wrapped" Litecoin. Which had zero indication/warnings in the app other than a like 4 pixel Binance logo superimposed on the 16 pixel Litecoin logo that it wasn't the real thing.
Once I gave up on this Wallet experiment I ended up needing Gemini to walk me through all the Binance "gas" nonsense to finally manage to swap into a real coin I could transfer out (like 80% of what I started with after subtracting gas fees and miscellaneous leftover change I was stuck with). And while transferring I had to avoid like a dozen alternative networks consisting of seemingly random strings and a scary red banner saying "yo don't fuck this up".
My first red flag should have been that Coinbase Wallet's Play Store name literally advertised betting on prediction apps. Second red flag was while looking for "Litecoin" in the list of coins, there were literally about 5000 different spam/meme coins with dozens of near identical clones that were all name squatting on top of each other.
As someone who came of age in the Crypto 1.0 "Bitcoin is for buying drugs" era the entire exercise was utterly baffling and somehow significantly less usable than crypto was a decade ago for actual payments. I guess for a young person looking to illegally gamble their paychecks at some unlicensed offshore prediction market it provides some utility I'm missing but man, the experience just made the post-Web 3.0 crypto scene look .... grim.
I've heard good things about monero from a friend. This is not an attack on monero, rather a reflection on the general tone of the message.
Monero is so obscure the IRS has put out a million dollar bounty to trace it, unlike any other crypto even btc lol
Monero is, time of writing, #12 on the coinmarketcap leaderboard [0] and less than 1% of the crypto space by market cap. It's hard to complain about that being called obscure; anyone who gets a feel for crypto by looking at a top 10 coins list isn't going to see it.
Although it is a technological miracle. That coin specifically might do poorly in the long term so I'm not about to call it an investment, but I think it's quite possible that Monero holds a probable entry in the history books in 150 years time.
As opposed to junk like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Gold/comments/1xab90c/first_gold_ba...
When the canada mint does a movie tie-in, they do it better: https://cdncoin.com/collections/rcm-new-arrivals/products/20...
It's much less easy to convert it to something you can actually spend. Even if you can get it to a buyer, they'll always offer you less than you expect/want.
Reputable dealers have KYC reporting duties of their own. Disreputable dealers... may have other ideas.
Gold sells at about 1% less than the current market price of the gold content of your item which I find fair. It might be easier here in Antwerp than in other places to deal with gold because it's kind of a gold trading hub. You can basically show unannounced (I suggest going by bike rather than by car because there is little street parking) and trade your gold for cash at the -1% rate, obviously if you get to the million euros range it's going to be a bit different, but for a few tens of thousands it's business as usual. And it's not like it's a difficult place to reach from anywhere else in the EU.
One of the only surviving darknet markets only takes Monero as currency.
Make of that information what you will
You'll still get a 1099 with zero capital gains for it.
Sorry, but I'm not much informed about cryptocurrencies. How does one get USDC from Monero? Through some other exchange acceping both?
It's not and never supposed to be and everybody who uses it in any significant amount knows that. Don't mistake a cryptotoken with a cryptocurrency.
Then people get into shitty casino tokens that are widely available because the state doesn't care about a little gambling and got surprised that they are in the casino in the first place.
This is but one model developed within academia for an entirely anarchist organisation, there are dozens of others and they have been both studied for efficacy (they tend to work better than a more hierarchical structure), as well as put into practice in real life within certain organisations. To this date there are a number of non-profit organisations and coöperatives that use this governance system to improve the situation where they are locally and achieve their goals — whether that's "everyone working to improve the local community" or "make good products for a client".
The entire point of anarchism is that there isn't One Big Guy, it's that it's people, deciding on a system and working together on a small scale — this then translates to the big scale through cross-group meetings, information sharing, and resource sharing. There is a lot of evidence within the social sciences to back these methodologies up as being very efficacious compared to traditional methods of group organisation, as well as being more democratic than traditional alternatives.
This additionally tends to be how some kinds of open mic nights work, as well as some kinds of modern speakeasys.
It’s a bit antithetical to anarchy to start defining true and untrue configurations. It’s more accurate to say that while anarchy permits chaos, it also permits self-organization, one mode of which is hierarchy-free community governance. Most of us have experienced this among friends when e.g. deciding where to go to dinner.
Peaceful anarchy evaporates when bad actors arrive. I wish it wasn't so. A structured civil society is the nearest we've managed to get to being able to live in relative freedom almost all of the time. It's the least violent, least coerced option we've been able to find.
The other way would be to go live in a group by yourselves off the grid, and as long as every one of you is good and decent that will be fine, but the moment one of you goes bad, you either have to choose violence or they will do whatever they want to you.
Not going to school GP (presumably not one of the hill peoples[1] for which self-defense is mother nature)... ?
Actshually, Jura Federation dissolved
(Not too sure about bad actors in or around it)
[1]https://www.elliptic.co/insights/myanmar-earthquake-how-a-re...
Can you source these claims?
Civil society only seems to be getting LESS free and MORE violent all of the time. And in America, I constantly have to protect myself against enemies be it scammers or the thug who tried to mug me for my wallet.
This is much less frequent than the violent-death rates of pre-civilization groups of humans.
It is politically impossible to go back on KYC/AML measures in the traditional financial system, even if some of them were perhaps a bit too ill-advised. It's much easier to say "this is shiny new tech, very different from that old tech over there; we support innovation so we won't impose KYC requirements on it", even if there's no logical reason to do that.
As it stands, stablecoins let you make a keypair in the privacy of your own home (or your own agent sandbox, as it were) and immediately start transacting. They're allowed-by-default instead of blocked-by-default, with the US government still able to block you if they have a specific reason. No traditional bank I know of, in any country, works like this. This is a valuable capability to have, technologically, even if there's no technical reason why a Postgres database and a REST API couldn't provide the same service, but faster and more easily.
It’s politically irrelevant more than impossible. Most Americans simple aren’t visibly encumbered by KYC/AML enough to make it a priority.
> They're allowed-by-default instead of blocked-by-default
So were banks in the wildcat era.
But I also appreciate that bankers should be liable for supporting terrorists and criminals so I live with it
It’s way easier to take a company to court than any government entity.
If a bank collapses, you get your money back from the Fed, no questions asked.
Sure, you _can_ still sue them anyway and maybe get around the T&C, but you can sue the government to, the important question is if you can actually win.
https://dailycoin.com/sbf-tether-deltec-secretly-colluding/
Also, it's not decentralised, they just unilaterally froze 2 billion in funds.
Over time I believe it's founders did start backing it with Treasuries so now it must turn a nice profit for them.
Decentralized cryptocurrency is an ideal from early 2008's from the Bitcoin supporters. It's not the reality of cryptocurrency in general.
Cryptocurrencies are full of contraditory ideas between the founding ideology and the actual usage.
I can run an exact copy of the bitcoin code in a fork with a new genesis block, and no one would give me even an apple for all my eru-coins.
One that you freshly mined seems fairly pristine.
On a tangent:
Funnily the Algerian law they quote would not actually apply to bitcoin (but I doubt Algerian judges would see it that way):
> Art. 117. — The purchase, sale, use, and holding of so-called virtual currency is prohibited. Virtual currency is that used by internet users via the web.
Bitcoins have their own protocol independent of the world wide web.
> It is characterized by the absence of physical support such as coins, notes, payments by cheque or credit card.
People have made physical bitcoin coins, and there's plenty of payment cards etc floating around that you can use with bitcoins.
Compare with eg the Brazilian Plano Real which was sort of a virtual currency for quite a while, but I doubt the Algerian law was meant to outlaw that one.
Perhaps I am missing your argument.
not your keys not your bitcoin
As soon as I start to look for information, I will be drowned in automated criminal attacks trying to trick me into create a vulnerability in my setup process.
Imho Bitcoins being stolen is not at all Bitcoin being "bent, broken, or subverted", it's just a natural consequence of the design goals. If an unrelated third party could block my bitcoins by accusing me of terrorism that would be subverting the system, and such things have not happened to bitcoin-core (but have happened in other parts of the bitcoin ecosystem)
The issue that is often raised with Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies is that not even the law can help you in case of theft. Now, it's true that the police wouldn't bother helping me recover a wallet with 100€ into it, but things change if someone steals millions or even billions like in this case.
I find something odd about this, because it seems to contradict some of what I understand of the arguments for bitcoin.
However, there is merit to your point, and if something is working as intended, then nothing was attacked in the first place.
There is a reason the IRS has not put up a million dollar bounty about BTC tracing but XMR and all darknets use it.
For the less economical-savvy ones it was like Beanie Babies or Tulips (with predictable consequences)
The predictable outcome is that the deers get to them, but I got to see a few go into full bloom last year and it was wonderful.
If the police retrieves your money from the thief?
If it's stolen from a bank, it's their obligation to recuperate you.
FWIW, most countries have a type of insurance if a legally operating bank goes under, at least some of your savings are protected (eg. in Serbia that's up to 50kEUR).
It applies equally well to a fiduciary coin with a promise that 1 gcoin = 1g of gold or whatever.
However, it does not necessarily apply to algorithmic stable coins (Terra) or crypto-backed overcollateralised coins (DAI). That's why I said "fiat-backed".
Deposits at a regular bank aren't backed by fiat. The bank promises to pay you back in fiat, but they don't keep dollar bills in a vault. The promise is backed with all the bank's assets. Ideally, they have a think equity cushion, so that even if the assets take a hit, the promises don't.
You don't need to see where the coins are and move to promise $1 of going for every coin.
How are you bootstrapping a network to validate private transactions without the promise of potential gains in coin value as its popularity takes off?
Why? BTC is pretty stable longterm and nobody is going to touch your cold wallet. Anything that has an owner or legal entity is not decentralized, subject to either rug pull or censorship and shouldn't be touched, sounds very easy.
Everything that promises you any return is a scam in crypto, simple as that.
Managing a wallet where there is no recourse if your wallet is compromised is simply too difficult when even crypto exchanges get hacked and otherwise sophisticated people get compromised when taking cautious measures (eg [1]).
Crypto really is and always was a race to the rug pull.
[1]: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/about-3-5-million-los...
This by itself is a reason to push for more crypto acceptance, in my eyes.
It's invisible, insidious censorship. They don't hit your hands with a ruler and say "stop, no buying that, bad". They make it so that what they don't like doesn't get to be on the store shelves in the first place. Hard to buy what isn't being sold, isn't it?
As for why they do it - it's unclear, but there's speculation that payment processor leadership might be in part ideologically captured by the usual "think of the children" moralizers and puritans. The same types that used to spurn moral panics, rally against D&D and later GTA, and are the first in line to propose sacrificing freedoms for imaginary safety - now allowed to wield covert influence over most of the payments that happen online.
Even if the absolute number of chargebacks is small, in relative terms it’s still several times larger than it is for non-“adult” charges, and that kinda destroys profit margins — more support calls, more work, etc.
Or so they say.
I’m not in the industry, so I don’t know. I can certainly believe that many of the oligarchs in charge are weird shitheads with bizarro conservative views, but payment processor leadership doesn’t seem to give a fuck about morals in any other manner, so it’s also kind of weird to me that they’d pick porn and porn only (a seemingly passé target for most conservatives these days) as the one and only target of a uh, decades-long distributed lowkey conspiracy that spans multiple generations of payment processor leadership. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> It’s invisible, insidious censorship
Plus, freezing funds and waiting for US law enforcement to weigh in rather than being the proverbial judge, jury and executioner is now likely to keep you on the right side of said law enforcement.
I assume they call a method on the contract to freeze the coins (with some superuser kind of signature), so they could easily write a method that moves the coins back, too. This should be similar in terms of gas costs.
The law enforcement theory seems more likely, yeah.
No matter what the reason or the situation, shutting off your access to the technology is their option and it will likely happen at the moment it is a greatest problem to you.
This goes so far beyond "Not your keys, not your coin", it is "Not your stack, not your sovereignty".
Obviously in this case, there is are truly solid rational and moral reasons to shut down those USDT transfers: to cut off the theft which is funding NK's aggressive nuclear weapons program. But that changes nothing about the structure of everyone's vulnerability in using technologies controlled by others such as USDT.
[0] https://newrepublic.com/post/217349/elon-musk-cut-off-ukrain...