>> You're still missing the forest for the trees. All of this was created in the last 2-3 years and already it's replicated most of what's in traditional finance.
Making a copy of an existing technology while repeating every historical mistake on the way is not innovation but rather poor learning ability. It's been 13 years since the advent of blockchain and we are yet to see anything actually useful. Yet all we see is smuggling, money laundering and fraud. With stories like FTX we also see incredible ineptitude, incompetence and ignorance. I am so tired of seeing these same groundless arguments over and over again, especially now, once money got dear and all of the crypto started crashing down.
It's almost as if the "anyone can do it without permission" argument is one of the reasons traditional finance evolved into the regulated system it is today.
TradFi - Anyone can do it without permissions and lie, except regulations force accounting practices, revealing malfeasance.
DeFi - Anyone can do it without permissions, and everyone can see they didn't lie.
Crap-coin FTX Crypto Bros - Let's lie, do "TradFi" and call it "DeFi", comply with no regulations or accounting practices, and steal the Crypto. What could go wrong?
HN low-research "Eternal September" Bros: Told ya Crypto was all a scam, yer dumb!
You're No-true-Scottsman'ing DeFi by excluding FTX after the fact.
I posit there is no way to tell apart the "real" DeFi from the Crap-coins. If you can tell them apart, which tokens and/or exchanges will fail next, and when?
There's a pervasive aura of "secret knowledge" in crypto, where the in-group think of themselves as superior operators who scoff as the noobs get fleeced[1]; yet these suave traders continually fail to recognize peaks and troughs and trade accordingly.
1. Sometimes while trying to scam the noobs themselves. The whole "to the moon"/HODL/meme-stock episode was naked preying on unsophisticated traders/bag-holders
Pretty much everyone credible has been warning people to get off all exchanges, since well, forever. Because you can't (and shouldn't) "trust" someone. If you want to trust someone, go to a bank. This isn't really too much a matter of "secret knowledge", but historical fact. But, hope springs eternal.
And, self-referential Crap Coins (like Luna) are just, well, insane at first glance. Trust-based "Staking" for returns w/ no revenue model? Nuts! But, I've been modelling the behavior of wealth-backed currency systems for 15 years, so maybe it seemed obvious to me. I've been boring people to death with warnings about these for as long as they've existed. Again, this time it's different!
And, the risks to all but the absolutely largest PoW and PoS networks are well known (relatively trivial 51% attack, see OFAC "compliance" disaster). And to "permissioned" networks (XRP, etc.); perfect for CBDCs, for liberty not so much. And the list goes on...
So, spare me the "No True Scottsman" whitewash.
The signs were all there, and the warnings were blaring. Dedicated, competent and highly-funded attackers are at work. Central/commercial banks, Treasuries, etc. cannot abide any fire-exit that is not chained shut, for what's coming.
So, the stakes for attackers are high. The stakes for liberty-valuing citizens: even higher.
I think most reasonable people would agree that desiring the freedom to invest your personal wealth in non-government approved investments isn't "tax evasion, fraud and laundering money".
Investing in small businesses isn't legal because you need to be an accredited investor which only the top 1% of the wealth pyramid qualify for.
It's these kinds of rules to "save people from themselves" that have the bonus effect of the rich gatekeeping the best investments that make a lot of people mad and see the current system as corrupt.
Being able to spend and invest my money how I want should not be a crime.
Maybe unregistered securities is what I want to buy. What gives the government the right to say I'm not allowed to enter into a consensual agreement with someone selling them? Why do I have no way of opting out of these protections unless I'm rich already? Sometimes it feels like I'm explaining water to a fish on here.
> Investing in small businesses isn't legal because you need to be an accredited investor which only the top 1% of the wealth pyramid qualify for.
Whaaaaat? Sorry, but that comment makes no sense. You can buy a share in any small business you want.
You're mistaking this for some types of stock market investments[1], which are made to "save people from themselves", from back in the day before 1929 when access was free for all and hawkers peddling crappy stock brought the entire world economy to a halt by getting the general population to join the stock market casino (slight exaggeration, but not by much).
[1] And guess what, your sister's lemonade stand isn't listed on the NYSE or even on the Romanian BVB :-p
Sounds like you live in the USA right? And probably have a good income?
I tried for years but angel list never accepted me being an investor because of income or nationality restrictions. And other methods of gaining access to silicon valley startups didn't work out.
Now imagine how hard it is for someone in India or Thailand to invest in USA startups.
In crypto I can buy their token in seconds from anywhere in the world, no kyc required, and no middle men taking their cut to custody it for me.
So go invest in something else and make your money there. The income limit is only $200K. I don't understand why you're so fixated on this one thing.
This limitation was put in place for an extremely good reason: to protect people from getting scammed and also to prevent bailouts. A lot of people think they're savvy investors when they're not.
> and forgetting that's not a good thing to most people.
you are living in a bubble to assume that governments are always good and anyone bucking their government is a bad actor. Try to learn more about Venezuela, Iran, Russia, North Korea or Syria. Or even truckers in Canada whose accounts were frozen because of peaceful protests.
At this point, the best thing for crypto would be for someone like Trump to freeze all the finances for some people like BLM protestors. Then perhaps people will get out of "ye subvert yer gubmint? ye traitor..." mindset.
> The rest of this is pure irrational FUD. Democracies are not dictatorships.
Please get your facts straight. This happened in Canada, one of the supposedly best democracies out there
"The Attorney General of Ontario sought and was granted an Ontario Superior Court of Justice court order under Section 490.8 of the Criminal Code of Canada against GiveSendGo,[69] to freeze the funds collected from two campaigns, "Freedom Convoy 2022"—US$8.4 million and "Adopt-a-Trucker"—over $686,000,[73][74] and prohibit their distribution.[72][69] The court order binds "any and all parties with possession or control over these donations".[73] The Mareva injunction was issued on February 17 by Justice Calum MacLeod.[75] GiveSendGo funds go directly to campaign recipients such as The Freedom Convoy campaign, so Canadian banks cannot interfere. The largest donation, which was anonymous, as were six of the other top ten, was US$215,000.[74] The Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance (FINA) members, who are investigating Freedom Convoy's fundraising, voted on February 10 to include a study of the "rise of ideologically motivated extremism".[74] The FINA Committee invited GiveSendGo to testify.[74]
By February 19, at least 76 bank accounts linked to the protests totalling CA$3.2 million were frozen under the Emergencies Act.[76] Most accounts had been unfrozen by February 23.[77]"
And you're letting your simplistic take on democratic government being "nice" color your own thinking.
Canadian banks and regulators looking into money laundering might be reasonable when carefully permitted by tried legal procedure. A bunch of freely donated money for a peaceful protest of a type with lots of basic precedent being suddenly frozen for blatantly political reasons by pressure from the country's leader is not the same thing. Quite the opposite, it's a small bit of third world tinpot, would-be authoritarianism that has no place in the legal proceedings of a highly developed country like Canada.
We are giving you facts which are pertinent to this thread. Please provide a factual rebuttal of your own rather than claiming "conspiracy", which this is not.
Looking into? Totally fine. Blocking accounts? That crosses the line, which happened in Feb for 4 days. So yeah, if you don't have any reasonable arguments, don't just yell "conspiracy". I am giving you facts with evidence. Please respond with facts.
> Dedicated, competent and highly-funded attackers are at work. Central/commercial banks, Treasuries, etc. cannot abide any fire-exit
First-world tech bros drinking cool-aid and shoveling money by the truckload with zero understanding of finance, and in it just for scams, get rich schemes and money: check.
"It's a coordinated attack by the Big Money and State Actors" whine: also check.
> So, the stakes for attackers are high. The stakes for liberty-valuing citizens: even higher.
Spare us the bullshit.
"DeFi" is literally just currency speculation and flash loans, all of them happening with fantasy tokens. But it's a big circle jerk because blockchain and programs in esoteric programming languages on inefficient esoteric VMs (yes, that's what "smart" "contracts" are).
All of the crypto scams and failures are entirely on those in crypto space. No highly-funded attackers needed. You're busy doing it to yourselves.
> You're No-true-Scottsman'ing DeFi by excluding FTX after the fact.
You are trying to fit the square peg of scam otherwise known as FTX into the round hole of DeFi. It was apparent since the day of its founding that FTX is not DeFi nor trustless.
I've been making more than a few jokes lately that Games Done Quick should have pre-banned categories like "Great Depression-era Wall Street Finance Speed Run ANY%".
Making a copy of an existing technology while repeating every historical mistake on the way is not innovation but rather poor learning ability. It's been 13 years since the advent of blockchain and we are yet to see anything actually useful. Yet all we see is smuggling, money laundering and fraud. With stories like FTX we also see incredible ineptitude, incompetence and ignorance. I am so tired of seeing these same groundless arguments over and over again, especially now, once money got dear and all of the crypto started crashing down.