Man the anti-crypto news piles on like clockwork as the bull begins anew.
Crypto is finance without borders. It is literally the cypherpunk dream come alive - money issued on computers, censorable by no one, existing only as numbers. You could ban crypto with every government on earth and it would be severely reduced in price, but it would not die - it would just delay its inevitability. This is because cryptocurrency is an ideology - one of anti-state money, pro freedom, decentralized, empowering individuals. A circular economy of crypto does exist - it’s small vs. the speculation, but people do receive crypto and spend crypto without ever cashing out to fiat. As that economy grows, there is no longer anything the state can do to stop it.
But the state won’t stop crypto. That time has passed. Some in power saw the threat, but mostly the elites called it “rat poison squared” and laughed at it. Now crypto is so big you have major Republican presidential candidates issuing pro-crypto policy platforms and senators and powerful representatives defending it in committee hearings. It’s all over.
The real solution is to out compete crypto. Why do people like it? How can state currency do better? If you can’t solve that puzzle, then you aren’t going to defeat it.
"Crypto is finance without borders" is not a positive statement.
Borders are important for security. Especially because states have varying degrees of ill-intent towards each other's citizens.
But more important than borders is jurisdiction of regulators. At least a significant portion of crimes are also evil. Lack of regulation really helps those evil things happen. Generally financial regulation is one of the more effective forms of crime prevention.
There's certainly regulation so stupid it almost reaches malice. There's probably regulation that is intentionally malicious. That needs to be solved, but solving it by saying 'only regulation as the cryptocurrencies currently allow' throws out way too much regulation. It lets too many evil things all of a sudden happen.
> Especially because states have varying degrees of ill-intent towards each other's citizens.
I think the major risk crypto people see is not other states, but their own state.
> At least a significant portion of crimes are also evil.
Likewise, a portion of non-crimes is evil. For example money printing. And it's huge, we're talking trillions.
The same trillions that can't be traced once they enter the Pentagon.
Generally, there seems to no longer be a moral authority the state wields, crimes and evil decoupled a long time ago, and people now see that they can choose who fleeces them and how.
The single issue is that real world has borders in the form of nation-state borders and barriers (regulations) to the money transfer between entities. Crypto does not, and this leads to a conflict.
I am personally all in for a no-borders real world as long as there are no states which don’t believe in my ideology. But such a thing is utopia and doesn’t exist yet.
Borders are important for the security of governments, and very little else. A reminder that passports and mandatory travel restrictions outside of a few countries didn't come into existence till WWI.
Border enforcement by governments as a whole has caused more death and human suffering than literally any other action by any nation state in the world.
Are there any factual assertions that you disagree with in the piece? Otherwise this seems to be more anti-Binance than crypto itself (although the author's viewpoint on crypto is clear).
I am extremely deep in this space since nearly the beginning. My take on Binance is it started like many YOLO exchanges back in the 2017 boom but pioneered the exchange token model. They had very good customer service and onboarded nearly everyone. The model was FAFO with the understanding they would pay a fine later.
If the US government had the nuts they would have shut it down. They didn’t, and CZ probably won’t get any jail just like Bitmex’s Arthur Hayes. If they do put him in jail it’s a pittance vs. his massive equity stake and wealth.
As an addendum, the Tether Truthers assumed that when the US government was done sifting through their subpoenas, the Truth about Tether would be revealed and it would collapse. Just like with the NY AG, didn’t happen won’t happen - Tether is backed at this point after 8 quarters of high interest rates.
I was way, way more worried about crypto 2 years ago than I am now. The bad actors are being shaken out, the SEC mostly lost vs. Ripple, and the US and the world itself is yo-yoing back to conservative government after a period of progressive governments. All of this bodes well for crypto and its anti-state ethos.
> A circular economy of crypto does exist - it’s small vs. the speculation, but people do receive crypto and spend crypto without ever cashing out to fiat.
Can you provide examples that do not involve extortion or drugs?
Well i live in shitty country where trying to transfer USD or EUR is very dangereous and could get you a prison time and not that amount you think of, it just we want to buy things from Amazon. thanks to binance and other ways we could transfer money and buy things from out of borders.
If any of those people or businesses are located in the US or similar countries, they're either selling some of that crypto for taxes or just not reporting it.
Once people start receiving the scary and confusing 1099s next year from using Venmo et al. from Bidens new policy, crypto may seem preferable to some people. Pro taxists often underestimate the fear common people have of tax authorities.
Most of these 1099s are going out to people who owe little or no tax on the transactions, such as people who split restaurant bills worth more than $600 over the course of a year.
Transactions in most crypto are even more visible to the state than in normal banking, because they're in an uneditable public database that never loses history.
Crypto tumblers are a thing, and they make the public history unreadable. Bank transactions aren't public, but the government can get access, and stuff like money laundering is easier to detect than with crypto.
I’ll go further. All transactions should be public, especially those by government, all politicians, and anyone in a position of authority over others.
Crypto is finance without borders. It is literally the cypherpunk dream come alive - money issued on computers, censorable by no one, existing only as numbers. You could ban crypto with every government on earth and it would be severely reduced in price, but it would not die - it would just delay its inevitability. This is because cryptocurrency is an ideology - one of anti-state money, pro freedom, decentralized, empowering individuals. A circular economy of crypto does exist - it’s small vs. the speculation, but people do receive crypto and spend crypto without ever cashing out to fiat. As that economy grows, there is no longer anything the state can do to stop it.
But the state won’t stop crypto. That time has passed. Some in power saw the threat, but mostly the elites called it “rat poison squared” and laughed at it. Now crypto is so big you have major Republican presidential candidates issuing pro-crypto policy platforms and senators and powerful representatives defending it in committee hearings. It’s all over.
The real solution is to out compete crypto. Why do people like it? How can state currency do better? If you can’t solve that puzzle, then you aren’t going to defeat it.