Bitcoin discussion and news

[Rob Ray]

Oh lord, give me strength!

Rob Ray On the one hand you are institant that regulation is the way to go, on the other hand you dismiss the organisation that the regulators rely on for their data.

So our trustworthy regulators are enforcing their rules based on data from a dodgy company set up by evil venture capitalists?

I specifically said I'd like to tear down the system that regulators oversee, so no I don't think "they're the way to go." I also said they're not trustworthy, instead noting that their main function is to maintain trust in the stability of the system. They are and always have been partially captured by the interests of the most powerful firms among those they regulate, but this doesn't matter in terms of their primary function, as those interests still require system stability to operate efficiently. As to whether their supposed seal of approval gives me particular trust in the leopards eating bitcoin mob, no, not really.

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

Anyway, here's another one. This time from Elliptic, which is more uptodate (2022) that you can download from the link below

Ironically, I specifically chose the chainanalysis one, over the more up to date elliptic one, BECAUSE Chainanalysis works more closely with regulators, whereas Elliptic tends to be more arms length from them.

The State of Cross-chain Crime Report 2022 | Elliptic

The State of Cross-chain Crime 2022. Crypto-crime and money laundering in a cross-chain world

www.elliptic.co

Neither of these extended and comprehensive reports back up the two pages of crap produced by some random 4 years ago.

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

Regulators aren't inherently trustworthy. No-one is. But the motivation of a regulator is primarily to maintain trust that the system will remain stable. It achieves this by enforcing rules. Not always fairly, or without corruption, but in enough cases to allow for a degree of certainty in trade and production. This is in fact the entire basis of first world capitalism, and most of why the major financial centres are so successful - stability and security with a (relatively) high degree of fair dealing.

Is it fuck.

Major financial centres are so successful because they facilitate the theft of resources from the global south, facilitated by installed puppets under neo-colonialism, who are richly rewarded through the shadow banking system.

 

[Rob Ray]

Anyway, here's another one. This time from Elliptic, which is more uptodate (2022) that you can download from the link below

Ironically, I specifically chose the chainanalysis one, over the more up to date elliptic one, BECAUSE Chainanalysis works more closely with regulators, whereas Elliptic tends to be more arms length from them.

The State of Cross-chain Crime Report 2022 | Elliptic

The State of Cross-chain Crime 2022. Crypto-crime and money laundering in a cross-chain world

www.elliptic.co

Neither of these extended and comprehensive reports back up the two pages of crap produced by some random 4 years ago.

I'll have to take your word for it that their study shows a wonderful haven of legality, as I'm not paying to read it.

But regardless, both of them (unlike say, the University of Sydney, where three senior professors of finance did the "study by some random" for the Journal of Financial Studies ) make their money from the continued relevance and growth of crypto. Now can you, oh cynic, think of any reason, any reason at all, why a firm reliant on continued confidence in crypto for its existence might have a more bullish outlook on the industry's legality than an institution that doesn't? I suspect you can't, otherwise you'd not be rapid-firing Coins4ever.com studies at me in the first place.

 

[Rob Ray]

Is it fuck.

Major financial centres are so successful because they facilitate the theft of resources from the global south, facilitated by installed puppets under neo-colonialism, who are richly rewarded through the shadow banking system.

That'd be cute if you were a 16-year-old Trot. It's utterly pathetic from someone claiming to understand even the basics of how economics actually works.

 

[beesonthewhatnow]

Huh, turns out 46% of crypto activity involves illegal activity - I always thought it was less than that, like a third or whatever.

https://freepolicybriefs.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/freepolicybrief_jan212019.pdf

The report notes:


That's presumably separate to people fucking each other over in paradise, which as has been noted repeatedly, is basically so habitual it has its own jargon. Most recently there's been a major uptick in crypto's use for people trafficking, with this report noting that the ease with which tracks can be covered makes it ideal for such a purpose. How lovely.

As Virtual Currency Use in Human and Drug Trafficking Increases, So Do the Challenges for Federal Law Enforcement

Federal data indicate that virtual currencies—for example cryptocurrencies—are increasingly being used in illegal activities, such as human and drug trafficking. The use of virtual currencies has added to the challenges federal law enforcement face when trying to prevent and discover these...

www.gao.gov

But, you know… something about freedom.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

Is it fuck.

Major financial centres are so successful because they facilitate the theft of resources from the global south, facilitated by installed puppets under neo-colonialism, who are richly rewarded through the shadow banking system.

Maybe we need to distinguish two things here.

On the one hand you have high-street banking in countries like the UK. The kind of banking you and I do. Our wages are paid into a current account, and our expenses come out of that. We might transfer a bit to a savings account if we're lucky. We might have an overdraft facility. We might choose to bank with a mutual of some kind - fortunately a few do still exist. Mostly the likes of Nationwide still make their money by lending to people to buy houses. Hence the term 'building society'.

On the other hand, you have international finance, which is pretty much what you're on about - and one of the forms it takes involves the systematic theft of resources.

But if you're advocating people switching to bitcoin, you're advocating a move from the first form of banking - the kind carried out by relatively harmless institutions like the Nationwide Building Society - not the second, which most of us don't have anything to do with. That kind of banking is pretty safe and set up with various protections - no need for any kind of 'not your key not your bitcoin' equivalent. What is the problem we are fixing by switching from the Nationwide to Bitcoin?

 

[beesonthewhatnow]

Is it fuck.

Major financial centres are so successful because they facilitate the theft of resources from the global south, facilitated by installed puppets under neo-colonialism, who are richly rewarded through the shadow banking system.

Straight from the “I’ve smoked a lot of weed” school of socio-economics

 

[Rob Ray]

Major financial centres engaging in international finance do benefit from the exploitation of the global south, but saying that's The reason is completely ridiculous. People don't invest in Western firms or take out big loans from major banks simply because Rio Tinto shot up civilians in West Papua and punted the proceeds to shareholders in the US, they do it because they reckon they can get that investment back plus extra, which in turn is based on trust in the system's (relatively) high degree of stability and predictability.

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

No it's not. Crypto is about fucking making money. Even if we ignore the fact speculation is why cryptocurrency took off in the first place (to the moon!), you also gave away the acquisitiveness which permeates crypto culture when you boasted about the six grand you got for producing fuck-all of value.

Crypto might be about "fucking making money" to you, but hand on heart I can assure you that there is a very substantial constituent of Bitcoiners and other crypto folk that really dont give a flying fuck how much their tokens are exchangable for in fiat.

Staker One didnt get £6k, or even £1 for that matter, what he got was an allocation of (I;m assuming, but I bet I'm right) of Arbitrum governance tokens, which the Arbitrum Foundation allocated to wallets that they believed could best assist govern the Arbitrum layer 2 network. In order to claim them, you had to delegate them, either to yourself, or to a publicly identifiable delegate.

However people value that governance power (as they should) so people were willing to exchange tokens to the value of £6k to aquire the governance power that StakerOne was gifted, and some people decided to do that trade.

I don't see how any fascist would have a problem with getting funding by minting a bunch of NFTs and selling them for stupid prices to people with more money than sense. Remember you're talking about a technological tool, not some kind of ideological analysis. You don't need to subscribe to the Soviet brand of socialism (or even be left-wing at all) in order to effectively operate an AK-47. The AK can be repaired with pig iron and baling twine, and while this does make it useful for left-wing insurgents, that's also useful to right-wing insurgents. Why should fascists give a fuck about the decentralised nature of crypto? That just means that there's nobody within that technical space with the authority to comprehensively shut them out. Which gives them opportunities to operate. Especially when they can anonymously acquire work and funding for their projects, because as you said: "In a permissionless blockchain, unless programmed otherwise, you don't know the chraracteristics[sic] of the other parties involved, ergo, it's impossible to discriminate."

I want to talk a little bit more about discrimination here. Not all discrimination is bad. For example we discriminate against people who are on the sex offenders register by not allowing them to work in schools. Even discrimination on the basis of protected characteristics is not always bad - we discriminate about who can attend primary school, you cant just have 36 year olds rocking up there and whining about discrimination.

Similarly with the airdrop, the Arbitrum Foundation was discriminating in how it distributed its tokens, and it discriminated on the basis of past behaviour to identify the wallets that had evidenced behaviour that they would see condusive to governing their protocol. So while you cant discriminate on the basis of gender/race/sexuality etc (unless KYCed, but thats a whole other aspect), you can discriminate on behaviour.

 

[Rob Ray]

I can assure you that there is a very substantial constituent of Bitcoiners and other crypto folk that really dont give a flying fuck how much their tokens are exchangable for in fiat.

Then you're a fool. I doubt you'll have a moment of clarity, but eventually, years from now, you'll move away from this toss. I'll make a plea now, rather than later - don't just jump on another effing bandwagon. Take it as a learning experience that the world is not a movie to be solved with an exotic macguffin, it's a class struggle with no shortcuts.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

It all sounds hideous. I'm sticking to my building society, thanks. I don't want to have to think about this shit. It's booooooooring.

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

On the other hand, you have international finance, which is pretty much what you're on about - and one of the forms it takes involves the systematic theft of resources.

I'm talking both about international banking (the official inter-country banking system) and the shadow banking system (the quasi-legal shady obscured loopholes that ultra rich people use for tax avoidance, money laundering, credit raising etc) and how these intersect to give backhanders to complient friends to smooth trade deals

Official figures suggest that approx 15% of the worlds wealth is in the shadow banking system but that is likely to be a substantial underestimate.

But if you're advocating people switching to bitcoin, you're advocating a move from the first form of banking - the kind carried out by relatively harmless institutions like the Nationwide Building Society - not the second, which most of us don't have anything to do with. That kind of banking is pretty safe and set up with various protections - no need for any kind of 'not your key not your bitcoin' equivalent. What is the problem we are fixing by switching from the Nationwide to Bitcoin?

No, I'm not. Bitcoin is not a bank.

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

Then you're a fool. I doubt you'll have a moment of clarity, but eventually, years from now, you'll move away from this toss.

A decade ago, people said exactly the same thing to me.
Lets make a diary date for 2033 to see if you are using bitcoin or I am using fiat?

 

[Rob Ray]

A decade ago, people said exactly the same thing to me.
Lets make a diary date for 2033 to see if you are using bitcoin or I am using fiat?

Then you're a bigger fool than they thought. Ten years wasted on other peoples' grifts, you poor bastard. And your optimism continues if you think I'll remember you ten years from now.

 

[littlebabyjesus]

A decade ago, people said exactly the same thing to me.
Lets make a diary date for 2033 to see if you are using bitcoin or I am using fiat?

A few years ago on here, I was predicting that bitcoin would crash into nothing. It hasn't happened yet, and I was clearly wrong to massively underestimate how big it would get and how much damage it would do (around 0.5% of the entire world's electricity production goes into mining now ffs).

It has survived periodic crises. It survived China kicking the miners out. It survived the various collapses of other confidence scams. FWIW I predict that Tether detethering will be the next crisis. We'll see how it survives that.

Something else I underestimated was the gross stupidity of big institutions, including banks, hedge funds and now increasingly governments, getting involved in crypto.

But it still hasn't transcended any of the problems that were apparent years ago. It still hasn't solved its capacity problem. It still only involves a tiny number of transactions per second compared to fiat payment systems. Its inflated value is still wholly due to speculation, a bubble growing out of a system whose extremely limited use value mostly comprises the facilitation of illegal activity by a relatively small number of people worldwide. Its exchange value still bears no relation whatever to its use value. And it remains extremely vulnerable to a whole host of real-world events.

 

[Monkeygrinder's Organ]

Anyway, here's another one. This time from Elliptic, which is more uptodate (2022) that you can download from the link below

Ironically, I specifically chose the chainanalysis one, over the more up to date elliptic one, BECAUSE Chainanalysis works more closely with regulators, whereas Elliptic tends to be more arms length from them.

The State of Cross-chain Crime Report 2022 | Elliptic

The State of Cross-chain Crime 2022. Crypto-crime and money laundering in a cross-chain world

www.elliptic.co

Neither of these extended and comprehensive reports back up the two pages of crap produced by some random 4 years ago.

I've clicked on your links before and they've generally been a couple of speculative paragraphs in some crypto magazine that vaguely allude to what you're claiming. This might be different, I don't know because I'm not clicking any more because you've totally shit the bed on this. You don't have any standards - that someone says something pro crypto is enough.

 

[BristolEcho]

Staker One didnt get £6k, or even £1 for that matter, what he got was an allocation of (I;m assuming, but I bet I'm right) of Arbitrum governance tokens, which the Arbitrum Foundation allocated to wallets that they believed could best assist govern the Arbitrum layer 2 network. In order to claim them, you had to delegate them, either to yourself, or to a publicly identifiable delegate.

However people value that governance power (as they should) so people were willing to exchange tokens to the value of £6k to aquire the governance power that StakerOne was gifted, and some people decided to do that trade.

.

What is the extent of the power? As in what rights do they buy with that £6k?

 

[Storm Fox]

With Arbitrum; what's to stop people setting up load of sockpuppet accounts and controlling the asset?

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

What is the extent of the power? As in what rights do they buy with that £6k?

Arbitrum is an optimistic rollup, so a Layer 2 chain that has its own security but "rolls-up" periodically to the beacon mainnet Ethereum chain. It was initially established by the Arbitrum Foundation, which has now passed governance over to the ARB DAO. The $ARB tokenn is the governing token of the DAO

The governance actions that can be taken by the DAO include
- on-chain actions incl,
code updates to the protcol
direct on-chain governance of the treasury (currently valued at approx $5bn)
- appoint, remove and elect directors to the Arbitrum Foundation
- Elect members to the Arbitrum security council
- Appoint and remove Data Availability members.

Assuming staker one was using the current value of approx 1 $ARB = £1, he would have received around 6k tokens.
The circulating supply is 1.275 bn with a 10bn cap.
So staker one holds around 0.0005% of the total governance power of the protocol. (there are approximately 250k holders)
-

 

[q_w_e_r_t_y]

With Arbitrum; what's to stop people setting up load of sockpuppet accounts and controlling the asset?

I dont really understand you question?
What asset are you talking about - the ARB token itself? the ARB treasury? assets that have been bridged to arbitrum?

(btw, arbitrum is an L2 optimistic rollup, this may get complicated)

 

[kabbes]

A decade ago, people said exactly the same thing to me.
Lets make a diary date for 2033 to see if you are using bitcoin or I am using fiat?

A decade ago, people were saying that within a decade, Bitcoin would have changed the world

 

[moochedit]

It all happened while staker one was on a temp ban.

Good point

 

[StakerOne]

With Arbitrum; what's to stop people setting up load of sockpuppet accounts and controlling the asset?

That's called airdrop harvesting.

It's impossibe for anyone to threaten the decentralised nature of the airdrop.

People are limited to the amount of sockpuppet accounts they can create by the number of on-ramps they can buy ether from.

 

[Storm Fox]

That's called airdrop harvesting.

It's impossibe for anyone to threaten the decentralised nature of the airdrop.

People are limited to the amount of sockpuppet accounts they can create by the number of on-ramps they can buy ether from.

But if it's anonymous then how would anyone know? If it's not anonymous then the governance can be discriminatory. Maybe not to on this project but on others.

 

[Storm Fox]

I dont really understand you question?
What asset are you talking about - the ARB token itself? the ARB treasury? assets that have been bridged to arbitrum?

(btw, arbitrum is an L2 optimistic rollup, this may get complicated)

There was talk of governance tokens, so I thought those tokens were related to the governance of the chain
I may have misunderstood. Luckily it can be explained to a four year old so with a little luck I should be OK with the explanation.

ETA. I replied to your quote of my post without catching up on the rest of the thread and your explanation. Useless those 4 year old you speak of are the children of hyper-intelligent pan-dimentional beings with a liking for Brockian Ultra Cricket. Then I think you are out of luck getting a four year old to understand.

 

[gosub]

The collapse of Silvergate means I'm having to use Ramp and Argent to route my desired position. That they have now requested SoF is, to me, a good sign (an inconvenience yes).

Time for bed BTC imo. (Sell on this rise.)

 

[gosub]

Very good ... and the corporates / banks then went after a shit tonne of others.

May I remind you that Mastercard by proxy (the payment processor "Square" went to Patreon and told them to pull Jordan Peterson or Patreon's Sqaure account would be shut down. So Patreon were forced to pull Jordan Peterson.

You might have a dim view of Peterson, but you have to conceed, that any minute, someone else who you like could be pulled as they don't tow the line with the "narrative".

All of this isn't going away. Today right now ANYONE can raise money and say what the fuck they want.

That's what the internet was originally supposed to be.

Of course, we can't technically say anything we want.

If I was to incite murder and raise money for illegal firearms on the internet, quite rightly the police would smash my door door in and put me in cuffs.

That costs money and rightly so.

Because if all it took to switch off my website and my crypto fundraising, was a flick of the switch, costing pennies, then surely you know that they'd just switch off millions of people, if not tomorrow, then the day after.

Relevant to SEC vs XRP. imo

 

[NoXion]

In related news: I'm rich!



That's 1444.75 GBP, how could I possibly miss out?

 

[BristolEcho]

Arbitrum is an optimistic rollup, so a Layer 2 chain that has its own security but "rolls-up" periodically to the beacon mainnet Ethereum chain. It was initially established by the Arbitrum Foundation, which has now passed governance over to the ARB DAO. The $ARB tokenn is the governing token of the DAO

The governance actions that can be taken by the DAO include
- on-chain actions incl,
code updates to the protcol
direct on-chain governance of the treasury (currently valued at approx $5bn)
- appoint, remove and elect directors to the Arbitrum Foundation
- Elect members to the Arbitrum security council
- Appoint and remove Data Availability members.

Assuming staker one was using the current value of approx 1 $ARB = £1, he would have received around 6k tokens.
The circulating supply is 1.275 bn with a 10bn cap.
So staker one holds around 0.0005% of the total governance power of the protocol. (there are approximately 250k holders)
-

Okay, so the more money people have the bigger say they have on the Arbitrum Foundation if I am following correctly? Surely this is not a positive for the ones who feel Crypto offers a more equal world, it sounds just like the Fiat world. No idea if I've really understood what you've said.