>At the risk of murdering this dead horse there's a reason nobody positions duffle bags of cash as the future of finance no matter where located
I think you're conflating "someone who is defending crypto in this particular instance" with "someone who thinks bitcoin will take over the world".
>I mean this guy is already demanding the FBI get involved when the FBI's position is you should just put it in a bank account and not need to call us in the first place.
Yeah, I think we're in agreement here that he was acting like an idiot.
> This is just saying “that’s what you get for playing with crypto you degenerate”.
No, it isn't. It's a reminder that we have all of this financial structure for a reason. The person you're responding to didn't make any light of the potential victim or call them a degenerate.
In traditional finance, you (Joe Shmoe) can't just wire someone ~100M USD, regardless of jurisdiction. There are controls, most of which have been written in blood or tears. Cryptocurrencies will also grow those controls, and we will all rightly question its value when it inevitably does.
> This is one of those scary things with a cryptocurrency based society that I worry about.
No, not really. It is the same kind of story as people putting all their money in a bag in a chimney to find out their family decided to finally lighten the mood by making a fire in long unused fireplace. It is an actual story about my neighbour when I was a kid.
People have been doing stupid things with money for thousands of years.
You can store crypto safely. It is essentially the same problem as storing encrypted backups. It has been solved.
As much as I hate cryptocurrency, I would actually be more at peace having lots of crypto than lots of stock on my account (if not for the fact that crypto is just a scam).
> but to outright dismiss it as a scam/only for criminals/the worst thing on Earth is blindly emotive
I mean but you came up with one maybe kinda plausible use case just to better than I could dismiss why it would be a piece of shit anyway - and that most importantly it doesn’t solve the hard problems.
It’s not emotive - I just want an existence proof of something useful that isn’t purchases or transactions I want off the grid.
I don’t think money laundering or concealing transactions is necessarily criminal - but the only real use of crypto assets for transactions is to do stuff someone powerful doesn’t think you should be doing.
> This wasn’t some hacker poking around because he could. He was stealing assets and then trying to ransom them back.
If he managed to do that using nothing more than a TV and an Android device, I have absolutely zero sympathy with his victims. In the end, I'd even classify that as a public service, getting these companies to up their security game at least to some standard.
> He also just straight up stole crypto.
And here I have even less sympathy. I have grown to hate anything crypto-currency with a passion, simply because it's even more enticing to criminals than a locked safe room full of diamonds.
Don't get me wrong: It's still not correct what he did. Lock him up in prison like every other random criminal. But it's not "lock him up for life"-worthy, not by any means.
> Spoken like someone talking about immigration who knows only what they've seen on Fox News.
What sort of character attack is this? Answer the main point.
> You're so unbelievably short sighted about a tech innovation.
Am I? Or is the current stage of Bitcoin and Ethereum not fit for mass adoption, Exchanges crashing all the time when the prices rise.
Ridiculous fees for swapping these tokens. Chia, a supposedly energy efficient alternative to bitcoin, destroying SSD's with their very own way (Proof of Time and Space) NFTs, which are burning the environment and definitely not energy efficient.
And why are we celebrating VCs getting involved in every new private token sale? You know how this ends.
This has happened before with the coins mentioned in this article [0] and more recently Internet Computer [1] which the price fell 75% since launching.
Does this really need to go on?
> There's more to crypto than bitcoin & greed is an unsolvable issue in humanity, not a crypto bug.
So you're admitting there is absolutely no point to crypto then, why do you think crypto will solve anything existing fiat money can't. Discuss.
> If it bothered you that much, you could have had millions to donate to any charity of your choice.
Donating a fraction of my ill-gotten gains wouldn't make them any less ill-gotten. There would still be real people who'd lost money on the other end.
> You started with airs of the moral high ground and now you're the supposed smart guy to the rest of the idiots. By extension, you're implying Bitcoin buyers are also idiots.
I believe it's worthless. I'm not going to make money selling something I believe is worthless (to the people I'm selling to; I have no problem selling e.g. fashionable clothes to people who put value in that even if I don't personally). If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, and I'll lose out.
> The hubris. The gall. The cope.
People selling things that have actual value don't talk like this. You're sounding like a huckster.
> if you’re wrong, you’re not accountable to your actions because there was never any actual money on the line.
I mean, that's the risk you run right?
Either you're a regulated system where you can avoid this kind of thing, or you're an unregulated system where you go 'screw the man', but you don't get the protections that are associated with the traditional financial system.
There's some deep irony about complaining about it; isn't the 'good' thing about crypto?
> I feel ppl like you act in very bad faith, but you also claim crypto isn’t even financial infrastructure, so perhaps you’re just clueless.
You did not present any argument in your defense beyond "I looked at it, trust me br0", and then claimed the person you're responding to is acting in bad faith.
However, the Bayesian in me says that (from a simple search on, say, youtube or twitter), anyone who is extolling the virtues of crypto is highly likely to be selling me something worthless, and thus acting in bad faith. How do you expect people to reconcile these facts?
> I think part of this sentiment boils down to the commenter seeing no point to Bitcoin.
I thought cryptocurrency was an interesting and promising idea. But I got away from it around the time it became clear the entire space was overrun by wall-to-wall scamming. And it's safe to disregard anyone who doesn't acknowledge that.
If someone says "Yeah, it's wall-to-wall scamming, and other than that, the main use of it is for organized crime transactions, but there's this silver lining of X", then I might listen to X briefly, even though it seems irrelevant at this point.
If someone doesn't phrase their advocacy with acknowledging the massive BS, then I assume the person is just another scammer (and they might be even if they acknowledge it).
If it bothered you that much, you could have had millions to donate to any charity of your choice.
>I'll probably never be a millionaire
You won't with that attitude.
>There are plenty of points in my career where I could've chosen to make more money by selling something that doesn't work to idiots
You started with airs of the moral high ground and now you're the supposed smart guy to the rest of the idiots. By extension, you're implying Bitcoin buyers are also idiots. The hubris. The gall. The cope.
Please keep such low-effort hyperbole off HN. It's just so unnecessary and contributes so little.
[some group you dislike uses thing everyone has access to] is just not a useful statement.
What do we do now, ban all crypto currencies to force 'Terrorists' back into using cash?
Has terrorism gone up since cryptocurrencies came around?
Did Bin Laden have access to crypto?
I'm not even a big fan of cryptocurrencies and think that the environmental impact of BTC is a heck of a lot worse than 'terrorists' possibly, potentially using it.
But I just don't understand what you were trying to achieve by throwing such an incendiary statement into the discussion with so little evidence to back it up.
> His statements were not false and not about a company or stock. It is debatable if they were even positive.
Correct, it's not about a company or a stock, which is something I led with in my initial reply ("In any other asset class this would be..." -- which I have since learned applies unevenly to security types although for the record I was talking about stock). I haven't said he committed a crime, and I do not believe he has committed a crime.
I think it's pretty distasteful however to take advantage of the crypto community he claims to champion. Your claim he's not actively working them into a froth is certainly at best a generous take. [1]
> ...not about a company or stock.
> There is no "exception" here.
This I do not believe to be entirely true. Some of the rules I linked, specifically the Securities Exchange Act, are written to apply to securities, not stock (which are of course a sub-type of security). I believe, and IANAL so this should be taken with a grain of salt, that security tokens should be covered by at least that law.
How about cryptos that represent stock, like the Tesla-stock backed coin Binance launched? That might just be a job for a judge to sort out.
> This is a hallucination. I didn't accuse anyone of anything.
I was making reference to past times you've specifically accused me of not understanding crypto. With that in mind, I read "nothing here would be significant if the other side of the equation wasn't people soaking up the slightest drip of nonsense and turning it into a frenzy of something they don't understand" as referring to me. If it did not, I apologize for misreading.
However, your characterization is once again neither charitable, nor particularly civil.
> But baby-boomers with nest eggs cashing me out because they feel entitled to make an easy buck and are buying something they don't understand doesn't seem like the most important injustice.
That's condescending, hypocritical bullshit. Why do you feel entitled to "cashing out" on their savings because you're tech savvy?
> Not necessarily rich people (not just rich people), but well-off people who have money they don't need sitting around.
This is straight up delusional. I'm appalled that you would spend so much time describing who you think invests in cryptocurrencies, just to justify yourself profiting off them. Actually, most people who invest in the stock market know better than to get involved with bitcoin. Most people who hyped its value lately are the kind of people who have no idea what's about, invest poorly and have fewer funds. [1]
So yes, most likely your profit came from "broke people, people working several jobs on minimum wage, people who have to use food pantries, people trapped in debt". At least don't try to pretend it's otherwise.
I think you're conflating "someone who is defending crypto in this particular instance" with "someone who thinks bitcoin will take over the world".
>I mean this guy is already demanding the FBI get involved when the FBI's position is you should just put it in a bank account and not need to call us in the first place.
Yeah, I think we're in agreement here that he was acting like an idiot.
reply