lkn

You mean payment for ransomware and such? The problem today though is that so many on/off ramps have introduced AML/KYC procedures, and with the blockchain being public, it is very hard to disguise (launder) ill-gotten gains. But I definitely agree, the advantage of setting up a parallel payment system (like crypto) is regulatory arbitrage, and that in itself have enough value, that the network could be subsidized by those who really need this aspect (because really, legit agents would not be willing to pay the actual cost of a decentralized payment). Last year, the Conti Ransomware Group alone received $180 million worth of crypto, that is dirty money where they would probably be happy to accept 10 cent on the dollar to launder them, as that would still leave them with 18M of clean U.S. dollars. Many of these ransomware groups (and North Korea) are simply keeping majority of their crypto, probably because it’s hard to cash out $180M worth of tainted bitcoins…

And he got scammed in the process. Buyer paid with stolen credit card, but Wozniak had already sent the coins, and as we know, once you have sent your bitcoins to someone else, there is no authority to contact to get them back incase of fraud, but hey, that’s a feature! Except of course, when it affects major stakeholders, then we do a hard fork…

What is the argument for the inverse correlation between sovereign debt and bitcoin prices? How couldn’t such argument not also be applied to cans of beans? Why not open actual short positions in T-bills or similar, if you think the government is about to default on their debt? Honestly, I wouldn’t put much faith in anyone who makes such stupid statements, because alone the fact that bitcoin has gone up over the last 5 years, without the government defaulting, should tell you that it is not a short position on their debt. It is just a speculative asset, and it has started to show a correlation with stock market, even though it was supposed to do the opposite.

I repeat, no mainstream merchant is accepting bitcoin. PayPal is not accepting your bitcoins. If I sell via PayPal, I will not be accepting your bitcoins. Right, it is not better. And that is why VISA and Mastercard are still the mainstream payment methods, even after 13 years. On the surface, yes, I follow your argument. But which consumer will send money to an unknown internet merchant if there is no recourse incase of fraud? We already know from some of the market places that does use crypto currencies that this does not work, and the market place will introduce an escrow service (that cost extra) to protect consumers (and merchants). And now we are back to your PayPal, Stripe, etc. scenario: If the consumer complains, will the market place side with the consumer or the merchant? Will the merchant be kicked off the market place if there are too many complaints? Also, while you may work with ethical merchants (engaged in drop shipping ????) and only see the fraudulent buyers, there are probably even more fraudulent sellers. I don’t know if you saw the thread on this forum where a poster asked about his Thai friend who received money and just had to pass them on, taking a small cut: That seemed to be fake sales boosting merchant reputation on Shopee. If payment processors wanted to get rid of chargebacks, they could. You don’t need crypto for that. But as said, chargebacks are meant for consumer protection. Unfortunately I am not privy to the actual numbers, but I am almost certain that regular consumers do not engage in mass chargebacks, banks don’t allow that. More likely, the chargebacks your merchants are seeing is because stolen credit cards were used. Here you can definitely fault the credit card industry for not having solved this problem yet. I actually find it a bit strange that it is still a problem, because my cards have been using 3DSecure (or another form of 2FA) for many years. No, I am thinking of the actual cost to PayPal. It does not cost PayPal 3-4% to facilitate a payment, in fact, in Europe we have (by law) capped interchange fees at something like 0.11%, so that is much closer to PayPal’s actual expenses dealing with VISA and Mastercard (for European payments). Domestically I have been told (by someone who works in the payment card industry) that retail stores on average pay around 0.12% for card payments (all fees included). Bitcoin fees are hard to reason about, because the faster you want your payment to go through, the more you have to pay, and the more people who use the network, the higher the price gets. So shopping in rush hour in a post-adoption world would probably see double or even tripple digit fees. Plus people forget that the mining reward really should be included in the cost of doing transactions, currently shared among all bitcoin holders as a hidden tax. Sounds good, but the fact is, bitcoin / blockchain is just an extremely inefficient (and expensive to run) database. This really cripples it, i.e. expensive and slow transactions, and require constant internet connectivity, plus phones do not have enough storage to validate the chain themselves, so they will need to go via custodial wallets. All this is done so that we do not need a central authority. So it will never be a better payment system for people who trust a central authority. This is just a fact! It could be a better payment system for people who cannot trust a central authority, i.e. a good censor resilient payment network, but majority of people do not need this, and, as we have seen countless times, bitcoin (and other aspects of the crypto currency ecosystem) is controlled by a few big players, take e.g. Binance who said they wouldn’t take cards from Russian banks (so that’s 70% of trading activity which is now unavailable to Russians), and we have seen hard forks in the past because all miners agreed about it, and we have seen BlockFi, Coinbase and others reject “tainted” coins, i.e. coins obtained via illicit activity, and also introduced AML/KYC procedures, so all the “advantages” of wild west banking are slowly eroding, and we are left with the question, why on Earth are we still using a blockchain? Of course we already see several less distributed chains appear, because they are faster and cheaper to run. For example, is the Binance Smart Chain or Solana really decentralized censor resilient chains?

Three problems with buildings in Thailand that at least I do not have in the same scale “back home”: Besides poor construction, Thai buildings have a lot of things that can break and require maintenance, e.g. we have diesel fueled generator, battery powered UPS, emergency light system, fire alarm, sprinkler system, lightning rods, septic tanks, water storage tanks, aeration system, intranet with routers and server, CCTV system with NVR, some high-voltage control system, swimming pool with pumps, chlorinator system, fitness room equipment, public bathrooms, showers, steam rooms, vegetation/garden, a.s.o. Lots of things in Thailand are done by paying in cash. This means your employees need to handle quite large amounts of cash each month when paying contractors, and there is effectively no paper trail. Furthermore, often condos will have co-owners pay them for water supply, bottled water, management fee, a.s.o., so more cash handled by staff. More communication with local authorities: For example, we’ve had dealings with the municipal about garbage collection, electricity company about power, land office about AGMs, yearly building inspection, bank about all sorts of things, etc. So to run a building in Thailand, you need someone who has at least some knowledge about all these things, and can communicate with authorities and the local craftsmen that you need to service all of this, and you need someone who understands finance, who can ensure that money is not misappropriated and communicate with an accountant that you will need to create the monthly (mandatory) profit and loss statement. In my building, we do not use a management company. I am in Chiang Mai, and after a bad experience with one company, I asked a few real estate agents for recommendations, but was basically told that they all suck, so we decided to try hire our own manager and have the committee oversee things. It can definitely work, but you need people in the committee who know what they are doing, and you need to find a really good manager to hire, because servicing a building in Thailand can be a full time job…

I once closed an SCB savings account with a 2M baht balance. Since the daily transfer limit was 50,000 baht or so, I opted to just get the two million baht in cash, then went to Krungthai and made a 2M cash deposit. Nobody asked any questions! Seems they are quite lax about this stuff in Thailand! Only money in and out of the country trigger their system, but even there, 500K is below their threshold (for incoming).

If we rewind a little, I said, it had been 13 years, and still no mainstream merchants were accepting bitcoin. You (or maybe someone else) brought up PayPal, and I am pointing out, that this is not actually “mainstream merchants accepting bitcoin”. That said, please do enligthen me, since someone else said that bitcoin is better than the old system; what new possibilities will bitcoin bring to PayPal? Bitcoin payments are slower and (for your typical payment) more expensive than what PayPal already offer.

You don’t seem to get it: You cannot transfer crypto to PayPal. You cannot transfer crypto from PayPal. The merchant cannot receive your crypto via PayPal. This is not payment with crypto. This is just PayPal offering access to a speculative money market for your coins, while they are in your wallet. This is not adoption of crypto currencies as a payment method.

PayPal allows you to buy and sell a few crypto currencies on their platform. But they do not allow you to transfer coins to/from your PayPal wallet. They do allow you to “checkout with crypto” where they will convert (sell) coins you previously bought on their platform, and pass the proceeds (i.e. USD) to the merchant. I fail to see how this is better than the current system or how this is “mainstream adoption”. It is just PayPal making some extra money from the fees/spread on having you buy crypto (because of FOMO) and sell again when you need to actually use the money.

Here’s a lecture about just how great this technology is:

So it is better than the current system, but no-one uses it, because it’s only as old as the iPhone? Yet, proponents has been telling us just how great it is almost daily for the last five or so years, but still, we can’t actually use it for anything besides speculation…

We are on year 13 and nobody in mainstream society accepts payment with bitcoins. How come, if it is better than the existing system? It is a speculative asset that people buy on a few centralized exchanges, only to keep it on those same exchanges, and hope it appreciates in value. So from my point of view it has totally failed becoming a currency. And don’t give me that “store of value” story, because it has failed here as well. Store of value means the value should be constant, not go up or down 10-15% in a single day.

I am under 50, but I have @Neeranam added to my ignore list, because even linking to official consumer price index data is not enough to prove to him that we did not have 15% inflation over the last decade, so rather pointless trying to prove my age to him, nor do I care, he lives in his own reality. And I think he has already implied that I am actually quite knowledgable about crypto, since he accused me of spending all my time researching it, but to him, I am just bitter because I missed the boat, which is just so funny, because “missing the boat” means that this is an investment scheme which rewards the early investors, and what other schemes do we know that does that, think ▲? ????

They have been accepting donations in various foreign currencies since 24th of February. In addition to IBAN there is also the option for paying via payment card. If you use Revolut, they have waived all fees when sending money to Banks in Ukraine, and they say donations to Red Cross (via their app) are instant, free, and 100% of proceeds going to Red Cross (and their efforts in Ukraine).

FBI have seized bitcoins in relation to Silk Road, the Colonial Pipeline ransom payment, the Bitfinex hack, and many more cases. Furthermore, Tether have frozen stable coins related to hacks, e.g. they immediately froze the coins from the Poly Network hack. You are correct that it is technically easier for the FBI to freeze USD deposited with the U.S. banking system, than confiscate bitcoin, but bitcoin only makes it harder, not impossible, and bitcoin does make laundering a lot harder. Especially today where most exchanges and other actors (like BlockFi) will not touch “tainted” coins, that is not just coins which are the direct result of illegal activity, but also coins from mixing services. In 2016 the Cryptsy exchange reported they were insolvent and claimed they were hacked in 2014. It turned out it was the founder who had stolen the money, and he had “laundered” them through Coinbase. This was an interesting situation, because was Coinbase then complicit? It seems they felt this way, as they agreed to a settlement where they paid around one million dollars to Cryptsy users. But this also means Coinbase will now be extra careful about accepting coins without thorough AML/KYC procedures (and of course also because of regulatory pressure). In other words: The more mainstream crypto becomes, the more it will be subjected to exactly the same regulation as normal finance, and the harder it will be to move illicit funds around the system. I think EU is now even seriously considering requiring miners to do KYC for each transaction (originally it was transactions below €1,000, but now they want it for them all, but this would be from 2025 or so, if I remember correctly). Bitcoin was never designed for censorship resistance. It was intended for micropayments.

Amazing… @Sparktrader makes it clear that they don’t understand block rewards, and I am the troll for spelling it out… just like the other thread, where a crypto-proponent thinks the blockchain holds private keys to hardware wallets and I am called clueless for recommending you have more than one copy of your private key. Just confirms that these crypto proponents are brainwashed zealots, as they don’t even understand basic stuff like how the blockchain works, how ECDSA is used, nor miner incentives, but yet they think it is the Second Coming… Pure madness!

Is this satire?

Do you not know that 6.25 new coins are issued every 10th minute? That’s 27,000+ new coins each month. With a value of $39k per coin, that is above one billion USD worth of coins.

BTC isn’t that rare, around one billion worth of coins are printed each month, and multiple billions of stable coins are additionally printed to prop up the price… but yeah, the USD is the ponzi scheme in all of this…

Please elaborate. I think it is you who do not understand that a hardware wallet does not actually hold any coins, it holds a private key, and this private key can be stored in multiple locations, even multiple hardware wallets (most have the option to transfer an existing private key to the wallet). And having your private key in a single hardware wallet is an extreme risk, it can break or be stolen. Just last week, a friend of mine got his hardware wallet stolen (break-in where all his electronics was stolen), fortunately he did have a backup stored in another location.

You seem to say that the only thing that determines the price of bitcoin is “past chart performance”, so you agree there are no fundamentals to look at? Price is solely based on speculation about future price based on past performance, nothing else?!?

No certified financial advisor would recommend that you put your savings in foreign currencies to “make money”, that is just stupid. At best, it is a hedge against fluctuations if you have expenses in foreign currency.

You should have at least 3 backups of your private keys, not just a single hardware wallet!

So what you are saying is that those who bought early will be rewarded, but not us late-comers because we hesitated for too long? Right, that does not at all sound like a pyramid scheme… ????

This is a pretty good video from an open minded computer scientist. He did interviews with crypto proponents and crypto skeptics, and here he talks about his view on the blockchain (after these interviews, and having read a lot of the white papers, or yellow, in the case of Ethereum). It’s a little bit technical, but I highly recommend watching it because I think he really nails that blockchain doesn’t solve any problems whatsoever related to finance. There is also one of the interviews where he raises some other points, namely that if he were to design a crypto currency, he would not build it up around a central data structure (blockchain), it basically must be distributed, take e.g. Tonga which lost internet connectivity for a few weeks because of the earthquake that broke one of the undersea cables: How would they have managed their economy if they cannot interact with the canonical blockchain? Stuff like that happens, and that is why our current money system is actually more decentralized than blockchain.