What do people think about Bitcoin?

LOL. I'm sounding like a broken record here, but I had an interview with the company mentioned in that article, Chainalysis, right after my interview with Coinbase (my job search is finally over now thank god). Really interesting business proposition they're after. Basically trying to educate gov & finance on how to monitor and investigate crypto movement. Kind of a chaotic situation right now but I got really good vibes from them.

 

How about... don't do illegal stuff at all?

Crypto/BTC affords the most privacy/anonymity of any non-physical transaction method we have. That being said, if you do illegal stuff that is severe enough in nature or frequent enough, you will make yourself a target, and if you're careless enough you're gonna get popped.

 

That privacy is definitely not out of the box. People have been defrauded out of their metamask wallets from something as simple as not using a VPN. Hard Wallets are better, but it's not guaranteed.

I've seen too many stories about victims losing their stupid 20 thousand dollar mspaint gifs because they opened an unsolicited and unblockable gifted nft that contained a malicious payload.

Bottom line - You hit a certain threshhold, you are not anonymous and your privacy isn't even guaranteed on the blockchains. As tools become more mainstream (think Moore's law), that dollar threshold decreases until...

Wait for it...

...there's a centralized clearinghouse/enforcer to determine fraud and enforce clawbacks.

 

Bitcoin fan are all like HEY WE NEVER SAID IT WAS ANONYMOUS.

SOON: hey we never said it should be decentralized! someone needs to control all this chaos. perhaps a govt entity.

 

When I'm watching CNBC and they're talking about tracking crypto, who may own what, what wallets are moving what, and government(s) agencies following the flow of money or just metrics, they usually talk about Chainalysis. There was an article earlier that I was reading where Chainalysis was talking about why it would be difficult for Russia to evade sanctions using crypto. For the past couple of years, when it comes to metrics like this, it's always been Chainalysis' name that I keep hearing over and over. There are others, but I think they're pretty much the largest in the arena.

 

I've honestly never thought about it a lot, so I've probably said otherwise before, but yeah I'm not sure how BTC/Crypto really provide all that much anonymity/privacy. Guess you could obfuscate some things to make things a bit more difficult, but doing that probably makes it more difficult to receive things like "customer support" (i.e, you give up privacy in exchange for certain services). I'd probably push back against the claim that it offers the most privacy of any non-physical form of transaction (especially given the interests of folks like Thiel, Zuck, etc.), but honestly they're all pretty bad when it comes to honoring a user's privacy, so I'm not particularly interested in debating it much. It would be more constructive to discuss how we can actually make things better across the board.

That ECASH bill I linked to earlier seemed like a reasonable approach to a digital solution that *actually* provides users with a privacy model mirroring physical cash. Don't know if that's worth it by itself, but it seems plausible to me (at least by its design).

 

Correction on March 31, 2022: This article previously misstated that e-cash is a form of CBDC. While both e-cash and CBDCs are government-issued digital money, e-cash would be issued by the Treasury and have a hardware-based architecture, but CBDCs would be issued by the Federal Reserve and have an account-based architecture.
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This is a very important distinction along with a commitment to privacy, and I'm thankful the lawmakers behind it are clear with their intent.

It could serve as a transition point for average Americans to transact digitally without being beholden to banks or "fintech trad-fi disrupters" like Square/Paypal/etc that already operate on a digital ledger.

You don't want Central Banks to handle this. It's pretty explicit that monetary policy like printing money (Treasury) and fiscal policy (Fed) should be divided and for good reason.

Economic growth is usually more real from the bottom up (local banks making productive returning loans) rather than the top down (Fed heavily influenced by large regional banks that generally don't care about local 5/6 figure loans) because macro numbers can be easily gamed without any inherent provable basis while people suffer from on the ground market conditions or inflated asset prices.

 

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2...-for-48m-it-ended-with-a-top-bid-of-just-280/

Cant wait for the rest of the idiots to realize ENNN FFFF TEEEES are worthless.

 

Bottom line is, if you have a good chunk of ETH or BTC from 2+ years ago, then NFTs are a fun way to throw it around, pretend it's an art investment and have a low risk primer on how real-world art collectors dabble in tax evasion. Supposedly 80% of the NFT trades are wash trades, so it's not for the faint of heart if you're griping about hundred dollar (present value) gas fees.

Otherwise it's a risky lotto ticket where it's not for the faint of heart. The avg meme bro burger flipper to riches story gets peddled too much, but I guess you can make money if you (have nothing else to do, then) start early and often.

I have no doubt people have made 10-100x on some mspaint gifs but there's an obvious learning curve that goes beyond reading a blog or watching a ten min vid.

 

"Someone" just made off with 2.9M in tax free crypto. "Someone" just earned a 2.9M tax writeoff. I suspect these two people are one and the same.

 

That dude's past history and affiliations are hilarious and sad at the same time.

 

Yep, the distinction you made was a huge point that was emphasized on the podcast I mentioned. In case people want to learn more about that, Rohan Grey was the one discussing this, and this was from the Crypto Critics' Corner podcast (hehe):
https://twitter.com/rohangrey
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ecash-act-feat-rohan-grey/id1557045965?i=1000556236375
He made the point about how bankers (the Fed) would just create digital solutions like bankers (with accounts, services, etc.), but tackling this problem from the perspective of the Treasury would allow for a different solution. I'm just repeating stuff I heard, so I'd just recommend listening to Rohan talk about it, but it all seem pretty reasonable to me.

I'm still a little unclear on some of the "hows" for this kind of solution, but I'm OK with them trying to work that out with a pilot program.

 

Look at his twitter bio. Enough said. Self proclaimed CEO of some random website...i mean company..

Estavi
@sinaEstavi
owner of the first ever tweet ‌‌‌‌‌‌ ‌ ‌‌‌& ‌CEO at @Bridge_oracle

 

30k and dropping fast
so whats the magic number for michael saylor/microstrategy margin call? 21k? 28k?

 

not playing margin but 28/29k or further if the stock market keeps going down... So probably further lol.

 

Who knows how much he has on margin, but the bulk of his debt doesn't need to be serviced until 2025.

IIRC there are rumors that the pot starts boiling at sub 25k ranges.

 

Holy hell, if he's forced to sell... lol. But here you go : https://fortune.com/2022/05/04/michael-saylor-microstrategy-margin-call-bitcoin/

 

bUt bItcOIn Is thE fUtUrE!

Biggest ponzi scheme yet.

"taking out a loan collateralized by Bitcoin to buy more Bitcoin is a risky game"
YOU DON'T SAY!

 

I'll be buying more BTC if it dips under $28K. I think it is even more relevant now in light of all the financial sanctions placed on Russia.

 

-26,807.40 (46.03%) past year
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Wow, what's happening?