Just remember: they're all crooks. All of them:
Changpeng Zhao, founder of the world’s largest crypto exchange, agreed to plead guilty to federal money laundering charges and step down as chief executive of Binance, which will pay a $4.3 billion fine, according to court documents.
....Court papers filed by the government say that Binance chose not to implement anti-money laundering measures, essentially allowing the firm to become a clearinghouse for all manner of illicit financial transactions. Between 2018 and 2022, that led to nearly $900 million in financial transactions that violated sanctions against Iran, the court papers charge.
One way or another, the only real use case for crypto is still crime. It doesn't hold its value better than ordinary money. It's not cheaper to do transactions. It's certainly not safer. But if you want something untraceable and unregulated—and what aspiring criminal kingpin doesn't?—then it's great.
On the bright side, at least Binance hasn't imploded and taken everyone's money with it. I guess that's something.
Somebody mentioned the other day that El Salvador is doing well with Bitcoin.
Is this true? Has anyone been following this?
I heard a piece about it on NPR and apparently few folks are using it.and it hasn't improved the economy at all. Still a hot mess country.
That's absolutely not true. Bitcoin is a weird oddity in El Salvador. You basically can't use it anywhere but few gimmicky tourist spots. Nobody likes it.
i can concur on that. went to el salvador a year or so ago and no one used bitcoin. i saw some signs about it being accepted a couple places, but it was absurd imagining anyone would actually pay for their pizza with bitcoin.
See El Pais
https://english.elpais.com/international/2023-09-02/two-years-of-bitcoin-in-bukeles-el-salvador-an-opaque-experiment-with-a-little-used-currency.html
Also Financial times
https://www.ft.com/content/5e06e27b-a45d-435c-897b-3c8e0e1d2b6d
Or you can follow the Bitcoin bros.
Really it's a dollarised economy and orthodox actions - while a Bitcoin Bro spins pump and dump type claims... sound familiar?
I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
Can we please not use "use case", it's not a real phrase.
I've got some bad news about words for you, friend.
what are you talking about? it's not only real, it's common, it's useful to express a concept and perfectly clear and easy to deduce it's meaning if you're not familiar with the phrase.
It seems awkwardly wordy, given that Mr Drum's sentence would mean the same if just "use" was (er) used. "The only use case for"?? What does "case" add to that?
Of course, one wonders where Binance will get the readies from. They run one of the three big stablecoins, which means their financial holdings are supposed to be there backing up the value of the coins. If they dip into that to pay a big fine, well.
And of course Tether keeps quietly trundling along, being very silent and below the radar while almost nobody knows nothing about its internal workings.
Yep - criminal money laundering / tax evasion scheme. Just like these guys!
For the second time in a year, the Internal Revenue Service is delaying enforcement of a contentious tax policy that would require users of digital wallets and e-commerce platforms to start reporting small transactions to the tax collection agency. The I.R.S. said on Tuesday that it would slowly phase in the new policy, which would require individuals and small businesses to report digital transactions of as little as $600 to the federal government.
The new reporting requirement was supposed to take effect late last year, but the Biden administration abruptly postponed it following pressure from lobbyists and backlash from users of services such as Venmo, PayPal, Cash App, StubHub and Etsy.
I am sure some folks use Venmo / PayPal for nefarious reasons, and small business, may certainly be using it to avoid taxes, but a whole lot of people use it for far more ordinary reasons, like to collect for an office party, or splitting the bill for a group at a restaurant, or when a check my son sent me got ripped in the mail and he sent $300 via Venmo. Its unclear if the IRS wants to catch the income paid to babysitters via Venmo, which could far exceed $600 in a year per person.
It wouldn't have bothered me much if Binance HAD imploded and taken everyone's money. Non-criminals involved in Bitcoin are largely speculators who assume risk, so it's not like Bank of America going under with normal peoples' savings. And a spectacular loss of money involved in Bitcoin might drive people away from the entire crypto currency realm, which I see a a good thing.
The crimes in this case are the sanctions on Iran, making the criminal kingpin whomever is the US president.
No, in this case the criminal kingpin is whoever is trying to circumvent Iranian sanctions.
There are sympathetic counter examples like the one you are suggesting (e.g. separatist groups in corrupt countries, etc) but at the end of the day those are still descriptions of criminal activity- the issue is that people don’t agree on what should be illegal, which is not a problem that crypto can solve.
"On the bright side, at least Binance hasn't imploded and taken everyone's money with it."
Honestly, long run, it might have been better if everyone had lost their money. Seems like people are still failing to understand just how stupid and dangerous crypto is.
I prefer that crypto investors lose their money the old fashion way, because the value of the "tulips" they invested in goes down the shitter, instead of the exchange they used to store it commits fraud, like SBF.
You immediately reminded me of "Grandpa's Advice," by Adie Grey (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sry7q-V0_Kk), so I rewrote the chorus just for your post:
They're all crooks - not an honest bone inside
So you've got to pay attention, or be taken for a ride
I'll give you my philosophy, it's written down in books -
Repeat it after me, now: They're all crooks.
It's not even untraceable. The whole thing with the blockchain is that every transaction is public. Folks have figured out how to trace the transfers and even how to associate a wallet with a real identity.
This idea of bitcoin in particular, and thereon 'crypto' in general, has been totally corrupted from it's original concept (and proposed use).
When first presented the idea was to establish a separate, unrelated, ungoverned (so not taxable or manipulable) means of exchange, without reference to national currencies, and protected by technologies rather than legal fiat.
The moment people started trading bitcoin for cash that idea died in favour of chasing scams and illusions.
I don't think it's just about trading bitcoin for cash. Any point where an e-currency intersects with any kind of item that's traded for any other form of money-- items meaning goods, services, tangible assets, other e-currencies-- is an implicit mark-to-market. There's always going to be somebody who'll try to arbitrage a situation like that, the same way there's a carry trade between central bank currencies with different interest rates.
The one kind of asset or item I can think of that actually might escape this kind of arbitrage and be suited to a completely self-contained virtual currency untouched by any outside considerations would be items that exist only in virtual form, like boredapes, and only as long as there were no attempts to sell them on other secondary markets. And wasn't the limitation with apes that you couldn't pay for them any other way? So that part was forced, and it could hold only as long as the buyers refused to sell or barter for other assets or currencies.
To the extent that I understand anything about bitcoin (which isn't all that far, honestly), it seems to be about assuring mutual counterparty trust in the absence of any context-- no intermediaries, no guarantors, no courts or compulsory process. If that's accurate, it's a hypothetical construct that may be interesting in its own right but posits a situation that almost definitionally can't occur today among humans.
Between 2018 and 2022, that led to nearly $900 million in financial transactions that violated sanctions against Iran, the court papers charge.
And that was just Iran and just the ones we heard about. Imagine how many other such transactions went on that we didn't hear about.
Every time I see a post like this I get a chuckle thinking about the bitcoin (or whatever) machine sitting next to the ATMs at the convenience store near me, gathering dust. Never seen anyone use it. What's it for? Who would use it?