That is not money laundering.
1,511 karma · joined February 25, 2014
Half? This is such a gross overestimation. The people that hold those views are a tiny fringe minority. It's rhetoric like this, where you accuse the half of the country that didn't vote for your team of holding extreme views, that drives division in the United States.
the world continues to do things.
The unit of account has nothing to do with actual production.
“Every Finance student I’ve ever met is completely retarded.”
and
“Who else but a woman could come up with the idea of a ‘journalism license’?”
Notice how what I just described does not match the vast majority of these “crypto” projects. That is because they are not crypto. They do not adhere to the ethos of crypto. They are scams. It’s very simple really. If there’s a company behind it, if there’s an ICO, if there’s a single identifiable leader which can be attacked by governments to bring the project down, then it is a scam.
Unfortunately some time in the mid-2010’s the scammers and grifters of traditional finance moved in and started playing all the same games that got regulated out of existence in the legacy markets. They will likely get regulated out of existence again in the crypto world and people like you will gloat about how it’s the end for crypto. But the real crypto projects, Bitcoin, Monero, etc. will keep chugging along and there is absolutely nothing that can stop them.
1. I see current fees are around $1.90/txn these days. My bad, it’s been quite some time since I’ve made a Bitcoin transaction. If on-chain transactions are cheap, what motivation does a user have to use lightning?
2. I actually didn’t know it was onion routed, that’s good! There is still the possibility of censorship at the edges though, which could propagate throughout the network via “I won’t open a channel with anyone who opens a channel with X”. Although this issue exists in most federated systems like Mastodon and Matrix. I don’t know a way to solve it other than full anonymity. I’m assuming it’s public knowledge who has an open channel with who.
3. My understanding is that opening a channel locks the funds into that channel. As you said you can still use those funds for lightning transactions, assuming that the other party is well connected and you can route to your destination via them.
4. I do agree that it can be useful for most things while at the same time failing its design goals. The thing I’m extremely wary of is creating a system which handles 99% of use cases perfectly but accidentally degrades the service for the rest. If lightning gets enough adoption that it handles 99% of Bitcoin traffic then I’d expect 2 things to happen. First, a small set of hub lightning nodes would emerge which everyone would route through. These nodes would be subject to KYC/AML laws by governments and would be required to begin censoring transactions in the manner described in #2 by refusing to open a channel with anyone who either is a node that does not comply with KYC/AML, or an individual who has not jumped through enough hoops. Second, anyone who makes an on-chain transaction that is not lightning related is instantly suspicious, like handing someone a brown paper bag full of cash. I think this would be an unfortunate state for Bitcoin to end up in as it would have become the very thing it sought to destroy.
On atomic swaps. I think they’re really great. The only issue is I can’t imagine myself ever converting Monero to Bitcoin for fear of ending up with coins tainted in some way that I’m not sophisticated enough to discover until it’s too late. I don’t have a solution for this.
Finally I want to say that I appreciate your response, as there is more nuance to the lightning network than I initially presented. Admittedly I was a little overzealous with my comment above, but I’m glad we can have a honest discussion about things. Rare on the internet these days!
Payment processors would also have the ability to censor transactions which is antithetical to the core ideals of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as a whole. This kind of processor structure would be fine in a cryptocurrency like Monero where the processor would not be able to see the sender address, recipient address, or transction amount. But in Bitcion where all that information is visible it is infeasible to use lightning network and maintain censorship resistance.
Lightning also completely fails in its original design goal which is to allow scaling while preventing node centralization due to expensive hardware requirements. Since a lightning node must maintain open channels with other nodes to operate, and since open channels require commitment of capital, and since the number of open channels required scales directly with number of users and merchants, only the wealthy with the deepest pockets can afford to operate a useful lightning node.
But I do agree that we should avoid CBDCs like the plague.
You have good points about the physicality of cash and the guarantee that merchants will accept it. Crypto can be carried around physically with a hardware wallet, though it’s still not quite as good as cash in this regard. And that guarantee that cash is accepted comes with legal tender status. You can’t be guaranteed to be able to spend CAD in US for example, but plenty of the world has multiple legal tenders, see Europe.
I like cryptocurrencies, but admittedly they are still pretty clunky to use. Bitcoin has a lot of development momentum behind it, but I don’t see it as the feasible option going forwards due to the scaling shitshow and lack of privacy (no, taproot won’t solve this because you need privacy by default otherwise private transaction default to “suspicious”). Ethereum is great, I really like Vitalik’s leadership and it arguably has even more development momentum than Bitcoin. Unfortunately it also has the scaling and privacy issues like Bitcoin and additionally it seems to be primarily used to create pump and dump scam coins and shit like NFTs which are always going to clog up the base layer. Monero seems to have the most potential to me. It is like Bitcoin but has default privacy and on-chain scaling (we will have to see how that holds up under more adoption) without the dogma.
How would you know? Maybe others just haven't been caught yet. It would be naive to think that China is the only country doing, or attempting to do, this.
I used my Fi SIM and international roaming continuously outside the US for 13 months over 2020/21 and never received a message like this or had my service cut. Makes me wonder if I just slipped through the cracks in their detection or something.
The 51% “attack” he is referring to is that a mining pool briefly had over 50% of the total hash rate. No attack took place, and within hours miners had moved to other pools bringing the hash rate of the 51% pool down to the mid-30s%. I’ll also mention that the power of 51% attacks is largely overstated too, especially in a privacy coin like Monero.