A lot of users depend on CEX withdrawals to pay crypto income and capital gains taxes. This is where regulation should step in: citizens should have a legally protected right to withdraw their crypto to fiat, if nothing else than to pay their taxes.
Why isn’t Binance looking to become a bank? It’d make more sense imo for Binance to operate as a bank with both a crypto backbone and a tradfi backbone
Over time the rules of traditional finance and the rules of crypto will converge because they are really two sides of the same coin. Some outdated regulations will be removed and some new ones will introduced in the process.
There is no conceivable future with a different outcome.
What if they bought a bank? If you have a bank as a subsidiary, obviously the subsidiary is heavily regulated-but is the same true for the non-bank parent company?
They bought a tiny bank in WA and like 10x’d their deposits overnight. I think they were going to use it for some kind of money laundering or some other scheme
If this was the problem maybe, but how do we know it's going to be any better if they were a bank? Also, can Binance actually be a bank and have so shady accounting at the same time? Hardly... That might be why the swift partner ceases collaboration in the first place.
Banks can do whatever they want. It's pretty annoying for people doing legal-but-controversial things, whether you're selling adult content, weed, or WikiLeaks.
Also porn is not handled the way it is because it's "controversial" - it's handled that way because the business is a magnet for stolen credit card numbers and payment dispute filings (i.e. from husband's trying to cover expenditures on a bill their wife found) and money laundering and just about every other type of financial crime.
It is locally. Also such bizarre situations don't only exist in the US, the Netherlands come to mind as another weird example where it's both legalized and at the same time isn't. And the shop owners also have banking problems: https://www.dutchnews.nl/news/2021/10/abn-raises-charges-for...
Mind you, that's coming from a bank with a history in slave trading only a few generations ago. I find such cases to be almost advertisements for decentralized people-owned banking. Those who control our money control society and almost everything we can or can't do.
All US localities are subject to federal law. Federal law enforcement is not currently enforcing the law in some situations, but the law remains on the books and still is enforced in many situations.
Federal law still enforced against the ~44% of the population who have constructive possession of a firearm by virtue of owning one themselves or having access to one via living with someone else with one and it either being unlocked or locked in a way other adults in the house may be able to get to it.
If you toss in those under the UCMJ and other people on federal property, etc, I'd say weed laws are federally enforced against the majority or a hair under it.
For such persons there is still actively enforced 10 year jail sentence for being a pot user.
Not to mention all sorts of weird state exceptions. In my state they have legal weed but also a law that says ANY metabolites in your body is a DUI. Inactive metabolites stay in the body a long long time and surviving here on the abysmal public transport without driving would be quite unpleasant. So basically just as illegal as it ever was.
I watched a documentary on police in Texas and apparently there you can get serious jail time even if just "caught" in a traffic stop with what I consider small amounts of relatively harmless drugs like marijuana. Saw them arrest a teenager and the cops said she was going to jail. Absolute unjustifiable madness, there must be so many lives that have been ruined over this. Really broke my heart watching this and the police have no sympathy, they treated the kid like she's some dangerous criminal.
It's hard to understand how a nation can pride itself in being the 'land of the free' while having such dystopian law enforcement. They apparently pick you up and drive you home if you're underage and out too late as well. Kids can shoot guns but they basically control every other aspect of your life. And you better not get into an argument with them or you may be assaulted, it's like dealing with the Sturmabteilung.
Crypto is high risk in the banking industry due to poor anti-money laundering enforcement and lack of compliance. Additionally, working with Binance carries reputation risk, since their practices are shady. So a bank processing payments for crypto absolutely has motive to shut it down, especially if it’s not lucrative to do so.
Banks are obliged by regulations to have AML/AF/suspicious operation checks. Any attempt to make a transfer to Binance ends with a blocked transaction and a call from the bank, at least in some Polish banks. Crypto is a can of worms and pita for them, not worth the money.
People use crypto to make payments. I know because I invested in a European company that pays a lot of Argentinian developers in USDT. Further removing the link between crypto and traditional payment rails just makes a true circular crypto economy more likely. You don’t need SWIFT once everyone accepts crypto.
The reason Argentinians want to get paid in this and not their local currency is economic instability and high inflation in Argentina. You don't want to be holding Pesos, it's madness. The situation is similarly dire in quite a few other countries. Turkey, Venezuela, Iran, Lebanon,...
I'm not sure about Argentina specifically but from most of these cases I know personally they don't even use Binance for conversion, there are local money changers that trade hard currency for depreciating (t)rash, this was true even before Bitcoin & co when people still kept paper dollars under their mattress or in the bank. Those who think this will go away with regulation and bans are even more delusional than the folks who thought that alcohol or drugs can simply be banned and all will be fine. Financial security is a basic need, it's part of our drive for survival.
Binance is mostly used by speculators/retail traders, not people who actually use cryptocurrencies. I get the joke that Bitcoin people say everything's good for Bitcoin, but in this case it may actually be true. Binance isn't a good company and people have been concerned about their huge market share in exchanges for a long time. Binance isn't pro Bitcoin, Ethereum and other such networks. They heavily push their own coins and solutions which aren't decentralized. It's only slightly better for the ecosystem then FTX probably, in the sense that they're not outright stealing user funds - at least that we know of.
I would expect the opposite. Argentinians do that coz Argentinian banks cannot be trusted(they learnt it from banks forced converting foreign currencies held in their acounts). But still, they will need to convert back to peso so that they can buy groceries etc.. Cutting the link will not make everyone accept crypto but leave it as none wants something cannot be freely converted if they have a choice.
I guess the next move would be opening offshore accounts to accept payments.
If an Argentinian receives a SWIFT transfer of let's say 10k USD, it is forcefully converted to pesos at an absurdly bad, effectively asymmetrical exchange rate, basically less than 50% of the real value. In other words, if you try to buy dollars with the pesos that were converted for you, you will only be able to buy less than 5k USD.
And that's before taking taxes into account. When taking taxes into account, somebody who is paid 10k will basically end up with 3k USD, probably less.
Additionally, and this happens in every country, SWIFT takes days and fees are really expensive. Crypto is almost instant and fees much much lower.
> Argentinians do that coz Argentinian banks cannot be trusted
Incorrect. Argentinians do that because taxes are incredibly high, and if you earn in USD you must sell it at the official dollar rate (less than half of the real rate), and you can't even buy the dollars you sold back because there's a cap on how much USD you can buy per month (I think it's 200USD). Argentinian devs LOVE crypto because they love evading taxes (justifiably or not)
Yes complicity with theft makes one untrustworthy.
Describing it as mere tax evasion interests is a bit of a simplification. During Corralito accounts were frozen to the point they could often barely be drawn on. Whether you want to blame that on the bank or not, the end result is people end up not trusting the banks...
People don't trust the banks, that is correct, but the reality is that nobody buys crypto for that reason --- they buy it because the peso is a volatile currency and to avoid taxes.
On the other hand, supermarkets don't accept USDT or Bitcoin because there's little benefit: it's easier to have their customers convert it to peso first. But if the conversion becomes more difficult, then a shop accepting crypto is now more attractive to those that have it.
Of course that only works if the whole crypto hassle is still better than working with local banks.
Argentina only. I worked in super multi congloromerates HR. USD is near 100%. We avoided South America because unstability and persistent high inflation. We do have other South American working in different regions (yes, including those from IT/AI you name it). They all being paid with USD or their residence currency. When I was in another company, small one, we did paid with baseball cards too (I doubt anyone willing to consider that as usual payments)
At some point in the chain, people need to get out of it. You buy food from grocery store who buys it from wholesaler who buys it from farmers, who could all be spread around the world. How is that feasible without worldwide adoption of USDT?
At small scale, you can meet up with someone at the coffee shop, you transfer the USDT, he hands you USD bills (this has been a real thing for a while). At large scale you can have large distributors that buy your USDT at an agreed price, and then sell it on either to other large companies or to a distribution network to the people who will at some point buy stuff from you for USDT.
In the end it's a circular economy in a way, for anyone cashing out USDT there is someone cashing in (assuming the price stays constant). Right now we match them up with marketplaces and SWIFT transfers, but people running around with suitcases of cash would work just as well.
Surely you would agree that having crypto wired into the banking system inspires more confidence than “I give you a briefcase full of cash and you give me an entry in a ledger”
You have to have an awful lot of trust that this briefcase full of cash will be available to train back should you ever want it again.
That's a matter of adoption. These things move very slowly. If you look at the adoption of debit cards, it looks similar. They were first released in the 1960s, and most retailers fought against them and said they would never accept them.
A few years ago there were valid technical reasons for why crypto is not being adopted by retailers in the form of slow transactions throughput and high fees. Nobody wants to wait a minute and spend $10 for their transaction to go through. These technical reasons no longer exist. L2s are extremely fast, secured by L1, and fees are small. And with the upcoming sharding upgrade Ethereum is going to be even more efficient. From a technical perspective, you could now accept USDT (or any other token) and have verification be about as fast as most card payments, with lower fees. But all of these are relatively recent developments (~1-2 years), and it will likely take a few years before all this technology trickles down into real-world adoption.
It’s a no-brainer for low margin stuff like gas and groceries. That’s why credit cards offer 10x points or whatever on that kinda stuff. Could totally see e.g. Costco moving off Visa.
1) Volatility is relative. USD Stablecoins are not volatile compared to the US dollar. It's the same. In other countries, the fiat currency is much more volatile than ETH or BTC. Like I mentioned above, 5+ years ago there was a push for retailers to adopt this stuff, but at the point stablecoins were not around, or unusable due to slow transactions or high fees. That's no longer the case.
2) True, I think the negative image and bad UX of retail crypto is a big reason of why retailers have not adopted it. I'm not sure this will continue forever though.
3) I would add that taxes are another reason retailers are vary of adopting crypto. Depending on the country, dealing with crypto taxes is a pain, and not worth the effort.
The magical solution? It's time, competition, and the free market. If crypto is truly cheaper and easier to deal with, startups will push it onto retailers to replace credit card incumbents. But these things don't happen overnight.
We exchange crypto por Pesos in "black markets" and use the pesos to buy the everyday stuff.
Larger transactions are almost always in USD (a car, a property), but it's harder to justify the funds.
Most people getting paid in crypto aren't declaring any taxes. Even if you do, the limit for the most common method is 1k USD/month
Exactly how it works in these countries. More and more of the economy is flowing through Black Market crypto dealers located in neighborhoods. The government takes a 50% tax on foreign cash coming in to convert to local currency, and once you do it you have to deal with 50% inflation. As a result there are black market crypto Banks. Someone will convert crypto for pesos to buy groceries at the crypto bank. The grocery store takes the peso they get and puts it back in the crypto Bank. Nobody wants hold the pesos any real time because it is a losing proposition.
To put it in perspective, prior to crypto, people would take their entire paycheck and savings and immediately buy pallets of bricks for the same purpose. They would fill their houses and yards with these bricks because they held value better than the currency, even after accounting for the cost of trucking them around
I’m less familiar with Argentina than other countries. I know in Lebanon a lot of money changers will take crypto (Bitcoin / USDT primarily) and give you paper currency. There are a lot of money changers who earn a living this way. Very likely the same in Argentina.
Yep, pretty much the same here in Argentina. People are only now getting used to digital money (I don't mean cripto, I mean thinks like PayPal). Except for some places in Buenos Aires or online shops that sell contraband tech, you don't see widespread use of crypto.
For us it's just a proxy for USD. Our currency is a joke (95% anual inflation) and we can only buy legally 200 USD month, so crypto is our way out.
In Lebanon, $500 USD goes a long way, and a lot of KYC rules are under that limit. All manner of mechanisms exist such as gift cards and cell phone minutes to make conversion without KYC. And to be honest the entire KYC system is pretty ineffective anyway, a straw man can be found extremely easily if they have a pulse and a valid ID card.
I’m sorry the truth doesn’t match what you want but this is reality I’m speaking of.
I think it's clear that this whole process is not really circular and hinges on people who collect bitcoins thinking they will keep growing in value. These folks are willing to not be able to get out for now, but they will be making a hell of a lot of effort to push the croins onto all of us because it would put them right at the top of the pyramid along with Satoshi and friends.
Hawala has been a thing long before crypto, with plenty of experience creatively dodging such regulations. And I would expect there to be a considerable intersection between the two in a place like Lebanon.
It's Argentina. Read about its economy. To use it as an example is somewhat disingenuous. The government rations foreign currency in something like a few hundred USD per month per person I think. If cryptocurrency is another way to work around legal inconveniences, so what.
If argentinian developers are reading this, you are probably better off making a bank account in the US than using crypto. Please refrain from transferring large amounts to local crypto companies, as those transfers are tracked and can be used against you in the future.
If you mean the country as a whole, then yeah, the solution is obviously different.
But if you mean some random person stuck in that country, who have zero control over its economic policy - then yeah, crypto actually solves the problem that government creates.
And Argentina is far from unique in that regard. Most people in the world live under oppressive governments.
All real estate in Argentina is sold via USD as hundred dollar notes in a brief case. Entire businesses exist to facilitate these transactions. I don’t think you understand what a basket case this country and its government is.
I'm always baffled by people that think the way that laws are written must be the way things operate. Taxes in BA are above 100% of profits. On paper it's illegal to make money. Yet businesses exist. Some peoples' minds may explode.
And I'm always baffled by people who fail to understand arguments. If a country can't regulate currency, USD is far superior to crypto. If a country can, neither works.
The reason why they can enforce the regulations on USD is because you're either bringing physical cash across the border - which can then be intercepted by the customs - or you're doing a wire transfer to some local bank, which said bank will then duly report to the government.
They can certainly pass equivalent regulations on BTC. Good luck enforcing them, though.
How do you get USD held abroad into the country, short of physically smuggling cash past the customs with all the danger that entails? A bank wire or something like Western Union is within the regulatory framework and will get you reported.
Let me get this straight: the world's largest Bitcoin exchange just announced that they will no longer allow retail customers to withdraw cash, and you're telling us, with a straight face, that this is good for Bitcoin?
Please don't take HN threads into generic flamewar. We've been through this a zillion times. It never goes anywhere good and this time we got religious hell. The guidelines ask you not to do this for good reason!
It's true that the comment you were replying to was generic and therefore not good, but yours was repetitive generic flamebait and therefore much worse. Please don't post like that here. We want curious conversation.
These comments make more sense when you realise that bitcoin is more of a religion and way of life than a technology. Nothing can ever be bad for bitcoin because it’s an accepted fact of life that bitcoin _is_ the future.
On the one hand in a cynical and sarcastic way, I wholeheartedly agree with you.
OTOH sha256 proof of work mining is a billion dollar industry and the Bitcoin mining hashrate just hit an all time high after a long protracted bear market.
You did not name atheism you made some weird statement about 'the other institution' and how they would prevent births, which makes zero sense at all. Women should have the right to choose what they do with their own bodies, atheists and religious folks alike and those that have no horse in the race should stfu because all they are doing is telling other people how they should live, something that unfortunately is very common.
That's one way of looking at it. But pro-lifers don't see it that way, so I was just presenting another point of view. I don't think telling them to stfu is productive.
Are you aware that a secular scientific approach to sexual health results in far fewer abortions? Chiefly proper sex education and freely available contraceptives to minors.
> The other institution may prevent your birth. Which is worse?
You're mixing worldviews in your rejoinder.
For an atheist, Atheism not preventing "your" birth as there is no soul ("you") waiting in the wings to prevent. No you to prevent until personhood after birth.
Rather, to an atheist, it's enabling the filtering out of unfortunate humanist futures. No child need be brought into unwantedness, disease, insufficient support, or other misfortunes. As there is no supernatural providence (no God to provide), logically, one should not bring forth future humans into a lack of providing.
The atheist assumes the mother is best qualified to evaluate this choice, and thus to make it. The atheist further presumes the mother is the person most affected by this choice (there is no other "you" yet), and thus has greatest right to make it.
To be clear, many Christians hold the same view as this example atheist, particularly those who think living is defined by knowing, and being dead by not knowing:
"For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten." – Ecc. 9:5
Roughly, those who believe there is no separate soul hanging around before or after an independent body by-and-large have no problem with holding a woman has a right to choose.
> To be clear, many Christians hold the same view as this example atheist, particularly those who think living is defined by knowing, and being dead by not knowing
And there are many Christians who regard support for abortion within the faith to have been influenced by atheism.
I just think it's an interesting question that has no easy answer. When does life begin? Clearly, the fetus is alive. Saying they "don't know" doesn't make sense to me because it's not like I remember my first year outside the womb either.
Bitcoin maximalism has immediate parallels to religious doctrine that regular currencies do not.
1) Divine creator whose existence is impossible to prove
2) A holy book: (whitepaper) that's taken as absolute truth and therefore doesn't require any revisions or updates. Proposed changes to core beliefs create split factions (BTC v BCH, Old v New Testament, or the Shia-Sunni split in Islam).
3) Monotheism: Belief in the primacy of Bitcoin blockchain over all other competing chains, and warning of divine punishment for apostates (NGMI).
Anything that increases the probability of another crash large enough to significantly reduce the amount of speculation is good for the ecosystem long term. Not so good for the "store of value" believers, though.
I don't hold a strong opinion one way or the other, but let me make an argument for why it isn't necessarily all bad (which: is different from it being a "good thing", to be clear).
Blur your eyes enough and any "thing" in an economic system is (at least) one of: Consumable, Utilitarian, Currency, or an Asset. The fun thing about economics is: which category some Thing lands in depends as much on its Design as its Perception; cars are generally Utilitarian, somewhat Consumable, but rare ones could be classified as Assets. Houses are, generally, Utilitarian Assets in the United States; but in many countries they're Utilitarian Consumables. Perception matters.
Critical characteristics of an asset: it has a dynamic market-priced value denominated in a currency; that market has a meaningful level of liquidity to support its actors; and its actors, to varying degrees, Perceive the value of this asset as priced to that currency to increase over time.
There are obviously a ton of different, diverse voices in every community, but a big problem the "crypto is money" crowd has had is that, traditionally, crypto has been perceived as an Asset, not a Currency; even though its functionally good at being one. The vast majority of actors in the crypto economic system perpetuate this; we talk about Ethereum as it is priced to USD, we talk about Bitcoin going down 20%, etc.
There's an argument to be made, though I don't totally believe it, that forcing crypto to become more divorced from traditional currencies could, especially outside of the developed US-led western world, force it into a place where it starts looking less like an asset and more like a currency. The recent scandals, schemes, and restrictions concerning traditional-to-crypto bridge systems are all doing a fairly good job of perpetuating this; but this ultimately comes down to what you mean by "good for Bitcoin". None of what has happened to crypto over the past two years will be good for its USD-denominated market price. But; its utility as a currency hasn't changed, and would actually become more stable as perception on its purpose changes and its exit liquidity reduces.
To spin a metaphor: Britain formed the US as a colony, and in the early years the US was tremendously reliant on trade and resources from Britain. With that reliance came a natural cap on the US's ability to grow; and the conditions of that reliance (e.g. taxes) eventually made the relationship unsustainable. Severing that relationship was bloody and ugly; but now, the US is far more powerful. In this metaphor, that relationship is the traditional-to-crypto bridge; and severing it is a reduction of traditional-to-crypto market liquidity.
To be clear, I'm not arguing this will be good for crypto no matter the camp you're in. Just that, this would be the argument if you are in the crypto-is-money camp. My opinion is: crypto-as-money is still far, far too nascent; the world's assetization of crypto over the past decade has mostly destroyed any hope of it becoming money without some kind of civilization-level shock to existing money systems (which would be just as likely to impact the vast network of computer systems necessary to keep crypto running). And even if it did happen, at any level of significance, there are no existing crypto systems I'm aware of which would actually make Healthy Money at a country/regional/global macroeconomic scale (not remotely high-scale enough & too much deflation).
An unintended consequence of AML regulation: making operating an honest business more difficult and forcing them into become more shady operations or be outcompeted by those who do. Same problem faced by Tether.
That's not the main Binance organization. They have various silos (like Bifinity and Binance USA) that are registered and claim to be siloed from the other organization, but even a little bit of research makes it clear that they're not actually separate organizations. Binance US is under investigation for things like KYC/AML avoidance and money laundering...
> Bifinity, whose annual report said it has 147 employees, does not have a website or publicly provide any contact details. The company's chief executive, Saulius Galatiltis, did not respond to requests for comment. At its registered address at a business centre in Lithuania's capital Vilnius, Bifinity is not listed on the tenants' board.
This is not the first time a Binance organization has claimed to be filing from / regulated in a particular country or location, but when anyone actually tries to look into it there's nobody there or the registration was withdrawn.
Could also be that binanceis in trouble, and wants to prevent a bank run by the majority/mass.