> The @SECGov X account was compromised, and an unauthorized post was posted. The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products.
The price of BTC initially jumped 3% on the hacked tweet. That's $25bn+ of market cap. The irony is the SEC itself is probably now responsible for the largest crypto pump and dump in history.
They didn't say the SEC did it, they said the SEC was "responsible" for it.
Which may or may not be true, if they were using "password123" then sure that's negligent and they'd bear some of the responsibility, but it might not have been the SEC's fault at all.
> Which may or may not be true, if they were using "password123" then sure that's negligent and they'd bear some of the responsibility, but it might not have been the SEC's fault at all.
It seems like SEC didn't even have some basic protections in place for their Twitter account, like having 2nd-factor enabled. That feels kind of negligent already, even if they had a very secure password.
Since we're all being a bit pedantic here... the SEC would be responsible for negligently allowing a third-party pump to happen-- they would not be responsible for a pump and dump. Pump and dump requires intention (and requires dumping).
> The SEC didn’t buy, nor did it sell, nor did it pump up the price (someone pretending to be the SEC pumped up the price).
How do we know it's not an inside job? Pretty tempting to pull a twitter account takeover and make potentially millions if you a lonely cog in the SEC wheel.
These guys hacked the SEC, made huge announcement tweet, and only got a 3% move from that. More over, they only had a 10 minute window to close whatever positions they had before BTC crashed through it's pre-hack price.
There is a fair chance that they actually lost money on this play, lol.
This wasn't a pump and dump. If they wanted to, they should've posted about a rejection when it was 95% surely going to be approved and with a long squeeze happening along the way, they could've easily gotten a 10% movement down and back up.
Twitter/X is not an authoritative source of news, regardless of whether it is an "official" account doing the Tweeting or not. Anyone can get a blue check by paying $8/mo.
> We really really really need some legislation about governmental agencies using privately owned companies to announce things.
What kind of legislation? There's a whole lot of existing law that applies in that domain (both statute and Constitutional case law), but if you think we need different laws, it probably helps to at least present the general shape of the law you want rather than just that it should in some way touch impact government using private platforms for announcements.
An example might be that the government sets up its own very basic one-way tweet-like notification service, something as simple as or simpler than an RSS feed, with the official content accessible directly via a .gov hosted web page.
Whatever X is or becomes, as owned by private interests, is trusted with nothing more than scraping and rebroadcasting the original and authentic source.
A solution with less developer and user overhead ma ybe that government webs host a list of public keys by which any "gray or blue check mark" type of authenticatuon signal capability on any private service can be validated against, and the government can revoke keys at any time if for some reason there's a suspicion that a counterfeit message is being distributed via these private services. Maybe repurpose the creaky old atomic clock time sync radio signal that is deployed almost everywhere as a means to distribute a rotating secondary factor. just old PKI tactics proven to work for two plus decades.
But this approach is still open to exploiting human tendency to trust things that have been trustworthy for a long time, until they aren't. So I still think hosting official messaging feeds directly from a government run server, accessible by any barebones http client capable of displaying plain text with basic paragraph/item formatting at most, is the gold standard.
The current situation, where X or meta or google or even a mastodon instance is entrusted with the entire conduit from human input to broadcast output, is a terrible precedent to normalize.
It looks like all of their tweets are just links to items on the news room portion of their website. If you click around a little there, you'll see that they do have RSS feeds:
So it looks like they're already doing exactly what you suggest: they post official announcements on their website which you can subscribe to using the standard way to do that (RSS), and they also rebroadcast on Twitter by linking back to the original source. What should they be doing differently? Periodically tweet reminders that you can subscribe directly to their RSS feeds? Stop posting to Twitter at all and leave only a message that you can find official news on their website?
Your ideas are honestly great and both of the solutions you presented (RSS->.gov site and public keys) feel like great solutions. I think the problem is that both of those require the general public to have some amount of technical knowledge which is, apparently, a big ask. The first would be a lot easier to present and avoid confusion but it'd still require people to know to go to that site.
For what it's worth though, I think the solution to that is people should have some real amount of education about the function and potential dangers of the internet before getting on it.
which while resolved, really opens more questions than it solves (which is fine because legislating from the bench shouldn't be the norm...)
There need to be very clear laws about how social media and modern tech is used to present information. Hell for the first time the government should have the ability to directly release information and not be reliant on normal privately owned distribution, and that should be investigated as well.
This whole thing is a giant can of legal worms anyways, and it only gets worse because our legislative branch has decided to devolve into high school popularity contests and just let the judiciary sort it all out.
> There need to be very clear laws about how social media and modern tech is used to present information.
What laws? “There should be laws about X” is a bunch of words with no substance unless you can say what the laws should, at least in general terms, require and/or prohibit.
> Hell for the first time the government should have the ability to directly release information and not be reliant on normal privately owned distribution
The government is able to do so, and has done for... quite a long time, though until recently wide distribution was a problem. Now, you can get information directly from the websites of most government agencies.
They also release information via private conventional media (via several mechanisms) and social media (via government run accounts), but they aren't exclusively reliant on such media.
The government has always used privately owned companies (newspapers, news channels, news websites) to make announcements. Social media is just the latest iteration of that. The government operating its own websites is in fact the aberration, and I'd wager the vast majority of people don't even know they exist or visit them. So not sure what such a law would accomplish.
The big issue is you can't be banned from newspapers, radio, and news channels. And there was still some question about "can you just announce this on the news or is that going to be unfair to people who don't own TV's". You can absolutely be banned from twitter.
There's also the standard of keeping records. The government is supposed to have immaculate records of these sorts of things with a whole shitload of legal nonsense involved in it. Twitter has complied with this under recent presidents but it's a big question of "do they need to?" and "what happens if they don't?".
For starters it like violates the FOIA, which is a serious thing.
I think we just need media literacy at least for now while the noise is still manageable. It’s perfectly fine to rely on private news to spread the information IMO, the issue is that people should independently verify said information.
After reading said announcement on Twitter, the first thing I’d do (if I cared about it) would be to head on over to sec.gov or use a search engine to find the official SEC site, then from navigate to find the official announcement. Any reputable news source should include a link in their announcement to the official announcement to save you this verification step.
At some point there may be so much targeted disinformation/misinformation out there that we need legislation to help protect against it but I don’t think we’re there yet.
Right, but I think paxys’ point is that the message you get when you click a blue check also implies the account is verified (which is not true in any rigorous sense of the word “verified”). The average user can’t be expected to know that the white one is “more verified” when they both say “verified”.
"The grey checkmark indicates that an account represents a government/multilateral organization or a government/multilateral official. Eligibility criteria to receive a complimentary grey checkmark are listed below. Additional government and multilateral accounts can receive grey checkmarks through Verified Organizations.
Eligible government organizations at the national level may include: Main executive office accounts, agency accounts overseeing specific areas of policy, main embassy and consulate accounts, and parliamentary or equivalent institutional and committee accounts. Eligible government organizations at the state and local level include: Main executive office accounts and main agency accounts overseeing crisis response, public safety, law enforcement, and regulatory issues.
Eligible government individuals may include: Heads of state (presidents, monarchs and prime ministers), deputy heads of state (vice presidents, deputy prime ministers), national-level cabinet members or equivalent, the main official spokesperson for the executive branch or equivalent, and individual members of all chambers of the supranational or national congress, parliament, or equivalent.
Eligible multilateral organizations may include: the main headquarters-level, regional-level, and country-level institutional accounts. Eligible multilateral individuals include: The head and deputy-head or equivalent of the multilateral organization.
US only: Accounts of current US state governors and senior military leaders are also eligible.
Eligible accounts may apply here. (link)
Any government or multilateral accounts that do not qualify under our current grey checkmark criteria can see if they’re eligible under our Verified Organizations feature."
Lol, I can't believe this is really what they ended up with: multicolored stars to indicate different things? I thought it was a joke at first, but no, that's really how it works now. What a strange world...
They used to have blue check marks which was this exclusive thing that meant that someone was important enough to have been verified. Then Elon decided to start selling blue check marks for money, so now there are apparently a bunch of different colored check marks that you need to keep track of and know the meaning of.
Whereas it used to be just. Blue check mark = this is probably the real person I think it is.
(But in this case it don’t matter anyway. They were hacked and even if we still had only blue check marks their account would have been hacked all the same.)
to be fair in the app you can click on the badge and it will tell you what it means
but really it'd be better if they didn't, since it opens them up to liability, "the website said this is a government account and they verified it, what do you mean someone was impersonating the SEC"
"We continue to be committed to keeping people safe and secure on Twitter, and a primary security tool we offer to keep your account secure is two-factor authentication (2FA). Instead of only entering a password to log in, 2FA requires you to also enter a code or use a security key. This additional step helps make sure that you, and only you, can access your account. To date, we have offered three methods of 2FA: text message, authentication app, and security key.
While historically a popular form of 2FA, unfortunately we have seen phone-number based 2FA be used - and abused - by bad actors. So starting today, we will no longer allow accounts to enroll in the text message/SMS method of 2FA unless they are Twitter Blue subscribers. The availability of text message 2FA for Twitter Blue may vary by country and carrier.
Non-Twitter Blue subscribers that are already enrolled will have 30 days to disable this method and enroll in another. After 20 March 2023, we will no longer permit non-Twitter Blue subscribers to use text messages as a 2FA method. At that time, accounts with text message 2FA still enabled will have it disabled. Disabling text message 2FA does not automatically disassociate your phone number from your Twitter account. If you would like to do so, instructions to update your account phone number are available on our Help Center.
We encourage non-Twitter Blue subscribers to consider using an authentication app or security key method instead. These methods require you to have physical possession of the authentication method and are a great way to ensure your account is secure."
(I don't have an account, cannot confirm current state of MFA auth story)
3% gain on BTC is really not that much for crypto, it's the size of the movement within a given timeframe that makes it impressive (e.g. it was within a minute or two). It would have been very easy to take out a leveraged long position in defi & profit off this.
How is the SEC responsible because they got hacked? Are you responsible for fraudulent charges on your credit card (you'll contrive some yes, but the answer is no)?
Generally I would expect a higher degree of security from an agency with a $2bn budget whose primary purpose is the integrity of communications about financial markets than an average person with a credit card.
Certainly you will admit at some size, responsibility and level of funding the organization should take responsibility for protecting itself from hacks. If the Department of Defense got hacked and nuclear secrets were leaked, I certainly hope people would get fired rather than sympathized with.
Twitter offers password based security. What other methods of security were you expecting? The SEC can't make Twitter functionality. We don't even know how they got hacked.
The DOD doesn't use Twitter, a social media platform, as the mechanism for launching nukes... what are you talking about?
By using Twitter as a communications channel for official announcements, they are at least legitimizing it.
If they have any reason to be concerned about the security of their account (and it looks like they should have at least from now on), they should arguably reconsider their choice of platform.
For people who are victims of identity theft, of course not, but for organizations or governments? Yes, clearly yes. Let's make sure that the burden of securing operations generally stays with, you know, the folks that have staff and budgets.
“Half as much” is unnecessary exaggeration. All assets with a high reading volume can be manipulated with a tweet. News of a Bitcoin ETF is no different than positive news for any other asset. I think your bias is making you ignorant to general market mechanics.
> Imagine your bank balance is suddenly worth half as much because someone wrote a tweet.
That's just as possible with regular stocks, which Twitter's owner has (unrelatedly) demonstrated multiple times in the past with both Tesla and Twitter... or, a bit slower, in the early covid months.
Stock markets are insanely sensitive to "insider" information and breaking news in general, which is why the regulations around them are so strict.
> The @SECGov twitter account was compromised, and an unauthorized tweet was posted. The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products.
Has anybody else poked around in a bitcoin blockchain block explorer recently to look at the individual transactions of a block?
Honestly I find it kind of suspicious but I could easily be missing something. I see multiple transactions spend more on fees than the amount exchanged in the transaction. A number of transactions looked enormous but turned out to be some form of washing. E.g address X sends $100MM worth of bitcoin to two addresses, with ~$1k going to address Y and the rest going right back to address X.
What’s the point? Why not just send $1k to address Y.
I originally started looking around to get a sense for how much bitcoin is being transacted relative to the block reward. As the halvings continue I can’t imagine how miners can profit without exorbitant transaction fees. Many of the transaction fees in the block I looked at were comparable to wire transfer fees.
Why would anybody want to use bitcoin outside of speculation after nearly all 21mm bitcoin are mined? Why would anybody want to continue mining as well?
Are you sure you aren't just misunderstanding how the UTXO model works? If you are a miner and you are rewarded with 1 BTC and you decide to send someone 0.5 BTC, your transaction will send 0.5 BTC to one address and send 0.5 BTC back to yourself.
You then end up with UTXOs that are each made up of a different amount of BTC and you keep grouping them in transactions and sending the leftovers back to yourself.
> E.g address X sends $100MM worth of bitcoin to two addresses, with ~$1k going to address Y and the rest going right back to address X.
What you are likely looking at is not fraudulent and is a characteristic of bitcoin's UTXO design in almost every transaction that doesn't deplete a wallet. If it didn't send the remaining BTC to itself, it would be the "mining fee". So you see these transactions where you see the remaining change is sent back to the same wallet.
> A number of transactions looked enormous but turned out to be some form of washing e.g address X sends $100MM worth of bitcoin to two addresses, with ~$1k going to address Y and the rest going right back to address X.
Bitcoin is based on the UTXO model, and requires the full amount of an input to be sent. For example, I might need to transact 20 bitcoin even if I only need to pay 1 bitcoin, with 19 bitcoin being transacted to a "change" address.
Perhaps a good starting point is spending a few minutes investigating how bitcoin works, perhaps with ChatGPT as a resource. You should attempt to understand it before forming an opinion and asking leading questions.
Bitcoin uses a UTXO model, a recipient address is specified for the remaining funds that are not intended to be spent. Similar to how you pay for a $20 item with a $50 note, you (recipient) receive $30 in change.
What does ChatGPT have to do with this? Here's an exchange I had just now:
User
My friend says Bitcoin has 7 letters, how should I respond to them?
ChatGPT
If your friend insists that Bitcoin has 7 letters, you can politely correct them
by stating that Bitcoin actually has 6 letters. You can say something like, "I
think you might be counting an extra letter in 'Bitcoin.' It has six letters,
not seven." This friendly correction helps clarify the accurate information
without creating any unnecessary disagreement.
As you can probably tell, I'm super confident about the rest of my learning experience about Bitcoin
This is really weird. Why would a digital transfer do this? I could understand if it was dividing up a single bitcoin, but why would it require sending all the Bitcoin?
To fix your example, it’d be more like paying for a $20 item with $100MM worth of $50 notes, and receiving $100MM-20 in change.
It's a database optimization. Whenever you send funds that entire UTXO is destroyed and redistributed to new ones. Because of this you can easily calculate the current state of Bitcoin by only looking at the current UTXO set, and ignore all the old destroyed ones, instead of having to go back in history and see who sent what where.
It also allows for easier parallel processing because you can check many UTXO's in parallel without having some shared state they interacted with.
Only a few chains use this system - Bitcoin, Litecoin, Cardano, Fuel, maybe some others. Almost everything else uses an account based model, where everyone has an account balance, like how you'd imagine a blockchain whould work.
Yikes—you can't attack another user like that, no matter how wrong they are or you feel they are. We have to ban accounts that do this, so please don't do it again.
A number of replies are wondering if I am misunderstanding bitcoin’s UTXO model. Considering the amount of replies I’m going to assume that is the case :). Thanks to most of you for your kind replies!
With that being said I’m still confused about how blockchain.com is representing this data. Consider block 825075 on the bitcoin blockchain.
Not all of the transactions in this block show with multiple outputs where one output is the originating address. In fact if you sort by value ascending you’ll be able to see multiple transactions from the same address to the same address amount to $.13 with fees $2.86 transaction ids 78b1741ee0946380d9ee31d51d160a637394b24b5cfdc2871861d8e1db484d2f and 201a94087323d152911575ea029df9d1a0d46626a1b18211727be913d747e72f and so on.
Now, contrast those transactions with transaction
f395de972c4ba3fea85a2c1621bfe9fa238950f6a2eb3d3b4932f7f620f63ce2
Why do they display differently on blockchain.com?
Not all transactions have multiple outputs as some deplete the UTXO with no remainder. The 2 single output transactions you mentioned are Bitcoin NFT mints. Their senders only care about including their data in a bitcoin block, they don't really care about the small value of the UTXO output being sent, that's why the overwhelming portion of transaction value is just miner fees.
The 3rd transaction you included is an ordinary bitcoin transaction that sends value.
Recently there has been a trend of inscribing data on the bitcoin chain representing issuance of new assets and in some cases media (images etc.). Keywords here are "inscriptions" "ordinals" "brc-20"
The speculation component of these new asset types has has created a high fee environment where instead of paying for bitcoin moving around, ownership of secondary assets encoded as data are being transferred.
There is currently a big controversy where one tribe says that these transactions are spam and should be banned via opt in from miners.
Meanwhile in the real world we often find new deposits of gold, and if we ever make it to space presumably we’ll find a whole lot more of it (perhaps infinite amounts).
but until space we have a finite amount of gold. Current known gold mines will be mined out at around 2030 and there is about 30 - 100k tons of gold left in unexploited gold.
Around 30% of known gold in the earths crust is accounted for. Nations included in the "BRICS Meme" have been purchasing large amount of gold and would like to see us return to a gold standard for monetary and policy reasons.
Is this fabled Bitcoin ETF really going to be the "to the moon" moment that everyone in the ecosystem seems to be expecting? From personal experience, I can't think of anyone who wants to buy Bitcoin but hasn't been able to by now. It takes a few clicks on Coinbase/Robinhood or a similar exchange. Plenty of 401k/IRA managers (including Fidelity) offer it as an option. So what exactly changes once this ETF is live?
Bitcoin futures ETF's are already allowed - several exist and they track the BTC:USD rate relatively accurately. I'm not sure that a spot price ETF is really a huge breakthrough in terms of actual mechanics.
But approval is an opportunity to create hype and buzz around cryptocurrency.
Bitcoin futures are correlated but nowhere near a 1:1 proxy for spot markets. Crypto markets are known for very steep "contango" in the curve, and it's not unusual for the price of the 30 days futures to be more than $1000 away from the current Bitcoin price.
The issue isn't just additional volatility and tracking error, but the fact that the con tango creates a "roll yield" which affects the long-term returns of the strategy. To keep constant maturity exposure, the futures ETF has to constantly "roll" its positions into further dated contracts. In particular because the market tends to be in contango it means further dated futures tend to be higher priced than near dated futures. So usually the futures ETFs in their daily rebalancing are selling cheap near dated contracts for more expensive longer dated contracts. Hence the roll yield tends to be negative. Then add all the transaction costs from daily rebalancing. It should be clear why the futures strategy has inferior returns to simply holding spot.
Spot Bitcoin ETFs truly are a game changer compared to futures ETFSs.
> several exist and they track the BTC:USD rate relatively accurately
They are terrible assets with severe discount/premium swings reaching the high 40%s [0]. The ratio's only tightening now that a potential arbitrage opportunity is on the table.
GBTC is it's own weird separate thing, with a whole bunch of red flags. It's not yet an ETF. They don't even distribute the fund prospectus online, it's only available by email request.
It’s very important because if you don’t like the standard finance system and want to use an alternate one that isn’t corrupted by greed and incumbents, the best way to do that is… to buy it through the current financial system?
It gives credibility to the thing that explicitly does not want credibility. Or at least didn’t. Maybe it does now. I don’t know.
ETF's are so pervasive because they're so easy. VIX futures can be held, but people still buy VIXY and similar products. You can buy literal physical gold, but people still buy GLD et al.
And it hardly matters that wrapping it in an ETF makes it potentially really weird (like how GLD and other gold ETFs are only barely nominally like holding gold, and VIX ETFs often hold cash-settled futures based on the value of a formula that is based on another formula that takes in various parameters of the prices and durations of options which themselves are priced based on the price movements of various equity securities and .........). The depths of weirdness have already been pretty well-explored by existing weird ETFs. A bitcoin ETF wouldn't even be particularly notable levels of weird, imo.
So, just the fact that it makes it really easy is typically a big boon to people getting exposure to whatever financial force the ETF holds.
It's the "it makes it easier" part that I am debating. Yes buying into a gold ETF is obviously easier because going out and buying physical gold takes more effort. But for a bitcoin ETF you are trading two clicks on one site vs two clicks on another. And in the ETF case you don't actually get to own any Bitcoin. So where's the advantage?
I believe the argument is that it makes it easier for institutions like fund managers and businesses because they don't need to be concerned with custodianship.
That may have made sense 8 years ago, but the problem has long since been solved. Coinbase can act as a custodian for your Bitcoin. Fidelity has its own service for it, as does every other fund/brokerage/bank of its scale. You can buy it as part of your 401k.
On the contrary, it makes a significant difference. Futures have to roll over monthly and there's costs associated with that. Depending on the slope of the futures curve, the costs can be high (10+%). Holding spot bitcoin solves this problem and makes the fund more palatable to advisors and institutions.
401k accounts at Fidelity don’t generally allow one to hold Bitcoin even if they do have a self directed account. With a Bitcoin ETF people don’t need permission from their employer anymore. I’m also skeptical of their current plans and whether they actually allow people to hold Bitcoin. Employees I’ve spoken to in the department have told me the most Id be able to get in a retirement account is “exposure” to the broader crypto market which is undesirable to those who are just interested in Bitcoin.
Why wait? It's been 15 years of Bitcoin outperforming every other asset. Nobody has found an exploit making the tech worthless, nor have competitors stolen its market share. Bitcoin is here to stay and the only ones shouting at it are too stubborn to ever admit it has value.
I live in Europe. I don't have a fund manager and I have invested in stocks on a low cost trading platform. Now I also have an account on Coinbase, which is an entirely different beast- different security, different responsibilities. It feels much more like owning physical goods than investing.
There is a friction that would undoubtedly be solved by bitcoin ETFs. There's hundred of millions of causal investors who prefer to simply treat btc as any other stock and don't want to bother with actual ownership of the asset in any form and don't want to have to deal with anything different from normal stocks.
And lowering friction increases usage.
If you’re in EU, why do you need to wait on a US ETF? There is already a spot Bitcoin ETF on Euronext, BCOIN. (Not rhetorical! I am curious about the mechanics of this)
And, further, the US ETFs, should they be authorised, almost certainly won't be available to EU retail traders, as the companies involved are highly unlikely to makes them UCITS compliant (for the likes of Blackrock and Vanguard, the general approach is to make separate non-UCITS and UCITS funds for the US and EU respectively).
I'd expect some upward pressure on price because the ETFs will own bitcoin.
But to your larger, exaggerated ("everyone"), question: It'll make it easier to include bitcoin as a part of larger trades when it can be bought and sold and used as collateral like a regular stock. It'll be another tool used by professional traders. I don't think it'll be a world-changing event, and like you said, it's probably not going to increase aggregate demand as trading desks will shift out of complicated ownership structures to use the ETF instead.
The main thing I think is that if there is an ETF then this could be the green light for big MMs to open/re-open crypto MM activities, on its own term and as part of being APs for the ETFs. Wintermute/Portofino/etc are good but if the big guys come in liquidity/order book depth will probably get way better.
This is likely going to be for certain large institutional funds where there are many restrictions on what can be bought. Buying an ETF is often the easiest path for them. Also, retail folks that like the idea of the SEC signing off on it (I think this is a silly reason but I can empathize with why that might be comforting for some).
Are we seriously suggesting that the password was intentionally leaked? The crackback against twitter and Musk with even a shred of evidence would be devastating. The idea that anyone's creds would be intentionally leaked is unbelievable to me, much less the creds of a US govt institution.
Yeah, and in fact, it was my first thought. He's an emotional man-baby with a God complex. Leaked credentials? Probably not. Those are hashed because competent engineers created the platform before he got there.
Made the account easier to be hacked? Yes, probably. That would be my assumption. Changed password, changed MFA, changed owner e-mail, etc. They no longer have a real support team, but I'm sure the support mechanisms are still all in place.
Yeah, out here in reality, when you keep doing unhinged things, people start to assume you are -- or are going to do -- unhinged things. That's why those of us living lives tethered by the rules of society try to preserve our benefit of doubt.
Why not? Musk has a history of direct personal attacks against people who criticize him (he just recently purged a bunch of people from twitter today, no less) as well as a history of directly pump and dumping shitcoins for him and his crony's personal gain.
It seems so likely that it should probably be assumed that this is the case imo.
Also this should be a massive warning to companies, non-profits, and governments who think "Sure, Elon is mismanaging this and platforming the worst people and making it a cult of personality, but its not that bad. We get to reach a lot of people, so its still good for us."
Now they have to worry about whether Elon is in the mood to give your account proper security or if your password hash leaked "by accident" by a "junior dev." Or just the everyday incompetence of all personality-cult organizations. Elon went from being sued by the SEC to hosting its humiliation.
Elon is chuckling it up right now. The problem with personality-led companies is that if you get on the bad side of that personality, then anything goes.
From a Slack of market observers I frequent: "Right now, someone is explaining to the BlackRock board, 'you got rugged, it happens all the time in crypto.' "
I have a hard time seeing the SEC not delaying until at least March after that fiasco (or even pushing back against the tweet itself if they were intending to approve anyway), but I guess tomorrow will tell the tale. It's fees BlackRock cares about, not the Bitcoin price.
This is exactly why official agencies should have their own mechanismm of public communication, and not rely on 3rd party corporate chat platforms...
How the FED, SEC, and any government office thought having a faceplant or twit account was good idea is beyond me...
Of course, those who throw themselves gushingly at every corporate slime to crawl out from under a rock will have a hard time understanding this opinion. That is also part of the problem...
I wish these platforms that are used to distribute information had the option for important organizations to re-centralize their communication.
Instead of a Twitter account that could be hacked, why not let the SEC post to a feed hosted by themselves that Twitter can poll against and post to Twitter for them? Then you get the benefits of centralization for dissemination of information but decentralization for security? Then these important accounts can invest as much as they want in their own security?
It seems like the only benefit that Twitter actually gives vs the SEC just posting on their site is that centralization.
This is so wild. Assuming it was financially motivated, wouldn't the involved party stand to benefit more by shorting and posting that the ETF was denied?
Perhaps. There were an odd couple of "likes" made by the SEC X account during the same time period though (they've since been "unliked"), and Chair Genlser + a follow up post by @SECGov both specifically say that the account was compromised.
You could still make money on the way down and then the way back up. And you’d probably move the market more than the ~3% that it was moved because the market consensus already gives a high probability to an approval this month.
I get your point that it may not rebound quite as much because the hack itself lowers the odds of approval, but imagine the optics of Gary Gensler saying “it's not true that we denied the ETFs” -- bitcoin boosters would read that as a signal that it will be approved.
The problem with HN folks is they think it's all about the gains.
Many hold ethereum and bitcoin because of the utility. It's a permissionless and portable store of value that you can 100% be in control of and not have to worry about your account being locked, funds being frozen, asset seizure, operational hours, etc.
Why do government agencies even have accounts on proprietary walled-garden online platforms? Those are for purposes like celebrity publicists, influencer brand promotion, disreputable mob behavior, and astroturfing.
The SEC doesn't need brand promotion, nor to be caught up in nastiness like pervades X/Twitter. The SEC already has the authority, they do their job with it, and presumably they value respectability.
Earlier Web showed us how to do this right, before commercial entities steered the influx of the newbie masses back towards being captive to proprietary walled gardens.
Stop choosing proprietary walled gardens to endorse with the government seal of approval.
Put press releases on your .gov open-systems Web site. Optionally do supplementary alerts with an open-systems email announcements list and/or Atom feed. Let journalists, citizens, and lawmakers take it from there.
There is value in government agencies engaging with people where they are. Even the SEC gets some value out of promoting their activities, even if it's just awareness of their existence and function and corresponding public support.
That said, now that the Fediverse exists, ideally all of those government agencies would self-host their accounts, either individually or via a server for many different agencies of the same government. It makes sense for the SEC to be @sec@sec.gov or @sec@usa.gov rather than example.com/SECGov . (Which, of course, does not prevent them from having security issues.)
The people who would be responsible for hosting such a Mastodon instance would likely be at least a bit more technically competent than those paid to post on Twitter.
My two cents: they should cryptographically sign their messages in other platforms. There is enough length in Twitter now. I think the SEC is really responsible for not protecting investors in this case.
>Why do government agencies even have accounts on proprietary walled-garden online platforms? That's for purposes like celebrity publicists, influencer brand promotion, disreputable mob behavior, and astroturfing.
You're describing some of the behaviors that occur on those platforms, not their purpose. Governments have accounts on those platforms because it makes communicating with their constituents easier, because that's where the people are. It would be grossly irresponsible in this day and age for a government not to have any social media presence at all.
There was a time when Twitter did generally seem to be a decent steward of public discourse, and many groups wanted to participate in the conversation. Ironically, that time ended around Oct. 2022.
While your point is perhaps valid for publishing information, it doesn’t (for me) extend to not even having an account.
Companies have cited that their Twitter account is an official source of company comms and that gives the SEC a reason to have an account and access that information as part of enforcing securities laws.
Should agencies never have published information to privately owned corporate newspapers? After all, you could just tell people they need to mosey down to city hall (or whatever govt agency) to look at the notice board for all the official topical information.
It looks like their tweets just link to their press releases on their website, though they're in random order for me and I can't see whether they have any replies or whatever, so I could be missing something.
Agreed. I don't see why they need to do interviews on the new fandangled television and radio programs either. If you want to learn about what the government is doing, pick up a newspaper or speak to your senator on congressman over the telephone line.
Honestly you should pay the respect and invite them over to discuss things over a few beers. Telephone lines, government agencies should have no need for.
> Unless specifically indicated otherwise, social media content expresses the author's views only and not necessarily those of the Commission, other members of the Commission, or other staff. Content posted to social media is not a rule, regulation, or statement of the Commission, and the Commission has neither approved nor disapproved of such content. Retweets, follows, or likes by SEC social media accounts should not be construed as an endorsement of any individual, group, or entity by SEC staff or the Commission. Paid for by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission.
SEC's twitter isn't SEC. What they mean is this: https://www.sec.gov/news/pressreleases and even that should be verified across multiple outlets if you want to be sure.
The SEC should never have put itself in the position where it was vulnerable to this type of online impersonation.
This seems less about crypto - after all, crypto will crypto - and more about "why the heck did the SEC normalise Twitter as a communications outlet!?".
I don’t believe it was the SEC who normalized Twitter as the default communications platform. It was the public and the media who did that and the SEC followed
Yeah this is really bad for BTC longs. now it will probably be delayed. it's obvious that there is too much fraud and manipulation.. The SEC cannot in good conscious allow an ETF to protect investors (yes, ETFs which have lost all value like UVXY have been approved). Whoever did this furcked over wall street and these funds. Wow. never a dull moment.
In the past few years we've seen ample evidence that crypto is largely a complete scam, and likewise strong evidence that none of crypto's hoped for value will come to fruition (we didn't see it useful for fighting inflation, it's not being used to avoid sanctions, it certainly isn't being used as a currency, etc).
The fact that crypto still has any market value, and that companies like coinbase not only exist but have had a stellar year defies the imagination.
I get a few years back when there was still a lot of speculation/optimism, but clearly today everyone see that it is just a con. Today even my most cynical view of markets seems naive.
Most of the ecosystem is scammy garbage, but I think there's still going to be enough demand for sound money that a currency that can't be artificially manipulated by a central bank will do well, relative to currencies that can.
Perhaps I'll be wrong, but that's why I'm not heavily leveraged and I hedge my bets.
I don't think the entire ecosystem is garbage. I do think there are a few useful ideas other than bitcoin. But I can easily support the assertion that more than 99% of the "crypto" things that exist are worthless and/or outright scams.
Takes like these are so moronic it hurts. I just paid an artist across the globe for some icons; the transaction took seconds to resolve and cost me cents to send via SOL. The closest I've come to that is Canada's eTransfer system, but it only works in Canada.
You are ignoring the possibility he got paid in SOL for some other work. Or the possibility the recipient of his SOL can buy dinner using SOL. This is all possible, even if unlikely.
I’ve used DeFi for as long as it’s been around and will continue to do so. It’s safer and can be more profitable than TradFi, even with stablecoin yield. It’s a larger area than you might realise, and there is a lot more to it than degen gambling.
Just because it’s obviously a con, doesn’t negate the possibility of get rich quick outcomes for blockchain participants. Human beings are quite well known for being easily suckered into lazy profit opportunities, and for rationalizing away complex ethical concerns when complicit in suckering others. Otherwise pyramid schemes would never work.
In my opinion, only the scammers OR people who truly believed in the promise of crypto and still are delusional to think it will materialize some day. Either way, it is terrible. I can't believe that a digital currency that cannot be used by most people is worth $xx,0000. But may be I am dumb.
You don't seem to understand the purpose of UVXY. It's not meant to be held for longer periods of time, it's a financial product for traders to make short term volatility plays.
Yeah but a lot of people have probably lost a lot by holding and not understanding how it works or underestimating the decay. Same for leveraged gold miners, which have also lost all value. A BTC etf is probably safer than UVXY.
I mean, I know it's the SEC and all, but did they really not have their account locked down with all kinds of fail-safes to prevent something exactly like this? One is tempted to speculate about an inside job to sabotage an approval they never wanted to grant in the first place.
it wasn't hacked I think, more like another blue check account impersonating it tweeted that out. This is the official account @SECGov tweeting out fake news.
I know making millions off crypto doesn't make me an authority, but... It's not an investment. I made money off people speculating by taking advantage solely off an inefficient market. There's nothing else to it. Money put in is not used to generate more wealth. Whether it's going to be used as an official currency in the future in no way would make an investment, nor would it mean it should even go up an value.
This is half a joke, but maybe there is demand for a vehicle for speculation that isn't tied to anything real, at all.
It achieves some sort of purity of concept. Plenty of people _gamble_ on the stock market but there has always been some sort of link to reality. With crypto, you can cut that tether and really treat it like gambling, rigged odds and all.
> but maybe there is demand for a vehicle for speculation that isn't tied to anything real, at all.
I'll go with completely agreeing with this statement, the way it's written. Let's be honest...There's nothing semantically or generally wrong with it to argue against.
As far as the "gambling" part... My objection would be that speculative vehicles aren't really on the "stock market" as much as they are the "derivatives market", if anything. Problem here is that the derivatives are, by definition, tied to the value of something else that could be called an investment. I'm not opposed to people trading. I made my money with market making algorithms and will make more as people keep trading. I'm just saying that classifying it as an "investment" poses quite a few issues for the SEC in terms of regulating it. Introducing it into an ETF that does nothing but hold crypto will be viewed by the public (that doesn't understand what crypto is) into presenting it as an investment. There are issues with that.
The Twitter / X account of the SEC was compromised: [0]
> The @SECGov twitter account was compromised, and an unauthorized tweet was posted. The SEC has not approved the listing and trading of spot bitcoin exchange-traded products.
Isn’t approval expected and already priced in? The hackers should have announced it wasn’t approved, maybe then the price would have moved more than 3%.
Why would someone buy this vs. just holding the Bitcoin? ETFs are interesting when 1. they bundle multiple securities together to diversify or 2. they are backed by an asset (like gold and barrels of oil) that is physically difficult for an individual to hold. Is this just for people who can't figure out how to open an account at a Bitcoin exchange?
Holding equities through a brokerage and using their interfaces are a well-understood problem. Managing a bitcoin wallet requires a bit more effort (though hopefully not too much more). Even worse is managing KYC & identity verification through existing Bitcoin exchanges, and navigating the scams and frauds from the real spot markets, and being able to transfer money in and bitcoin out from those markets.
Same reason gold ETFs are big -- people want exposure to the price of gold, but managing physical gold requires effort that many are not willing to put forth.
On a systemic side, ETFs have a number of advantages; notably a credit market (share borrow, etc.) which can lead to effective shorting of the price of the underlying, something that is difficult to pull off without getting suckered in by the next FTX. Plus inclusion in other ETFs, inclusion in various retirement schemes, and generally the wide availability of liquidity in equity markets.
1. Low fees. I think five of the ETF filers even have 0% fees for first 6-12 months. Compare this to Coinbase, where the fees will seem astronomical in comparison (maybe this drives Coinbase fees down.)
2. There is a non-zero number of people in the family office investing world that don't want to deal with learning new tech and just want to call up their stock person on the phone to buy them something.
As someone completely out of the loop what was preventing ETFs from including Bitcoin? Is there some regulation about what types of assets can or cannot be part of an ETF?
Can I go make an ETF for magic the gathering cards? How about restaurant reservations or taylor swift tickets?
Each ETF needs to be approved by the SEC. You are welcome to submit an application for your restaurant reservations.
Historically the SEC has refused these grants for Bitcoin ETFs on the basis that the underlying asset does not have well-established spot markets and credit mechanisms. See for example [1].
Greyscale finally sued the SEC for applying arbitrary and capricious standards, and prevailed in federal court. But even so the SEC has not approved spot bitcoin ETFs (that is, ETFs that "physically" hold Bitcoin) but had only given guidance for cash-settled Bitcoin tracking ETFs. That makes this announcement a very unexpected surprise.
EDIT: And it does in fact appear that this is too good to be true. Looks like there was a brief spike up to $48k from the $46k baseline so somebody made out nicely on this little scam. Also goes to evidence that Bitcoin markets might be a bit too sensitive to manipulation to be suitable for inclusion in an ETF.
> Also goes to evidence that Bitcoin markets might be a bit too sensitive to manipulation to be suitable for inclusion in an ETF
I don’t understand how you came to that conclusion. $2k is a relatively small fluctuation. Do you think other securities wouldn’t be subject to the same fluctuations given positive news? If not, there shouldn’t be laws against it like there are now
$2k is ~5%; that's enough in a short enough time to trigger equity market circuit breakers and temporarily pause trading. Bitcoin has no such controls because there is no NMS regulation applied here, which is one of the SEC's fears around allowing Bitcoin ETFs.
I generally don't agree with this guidance as it is not universally applied to ETFs that the SEC has allowed historically, but it does buttress their case to a degree.
EDIT: bad math; closer to 4% price move -- although the rebound from the spike might break the threshold, current SEC rules use a trailing price band so wouldn't trigger here.
If we're just talking percentage changes, that can already happen with other commodity ETFs. I'll concede to the point that Bitcoin has historically been more volatile and could have a higher frequency of halts, but I personally don't think that should impact the formation of the ETF.
Violent agreement here, I think -- I also feel that the criteria are being applied arbitrarily and capriciously and we accept many things as ETF members that have far less liquid spot markets than Bitcoin. But incidents like this don't help.
Since they're exchange traded it's the SEC in the US (or other regulators in other countries) who decide if an ETF is approved or not. If you can convince them that magic the gathering cards are traded in a market that's sufficiently compliant with their regulations, I don't see why not. Maybe if BlackRock & co were really into MTG card trading, they'd be more compelled to approve. Seems to have helped Bitcoin because it many have filed and all were rejected until those big name asset managers got in ;)
Blatant market manipulation was preventing the ETFs. Then a court ruled that since the SEC mistakenly approved Bitcoin future ETFs they also have to double down and approve Bitcoin spot ETFs.
I doubt they were hacked. If someone is smart enough to hack them, they would be smart enough to realize they would make more money if they released a note saying the ETF was rejected. My theory is that the SEC just posted it at the wrong time accidentally.
More approved use means more standard financial industry products using BTC, means more overall volume/value in BTC, means higher price. Of course people holding BTC will like that.
Given that the original Whitepaper is titled: "A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" and a news article describing the 2009 bank bailout is literally baked into the very first block people celebrating slow morphing of Bitcoin into a traditional finance product is at least a little bit funny. Instead of a hedge crypto is now just effectively a correlate of the financial markets.
Conversely, traditional finance making products based on an asset which some of the most radical anarchocapitalists hold market-moving amounts of, bodes well.
Does it? Traditional finance is no stranger to extremely speculative assets, the difference is just when those assets go to zero for the banks it's a tiny fraction of their portfolio, for all the anarcho online enthusiasts it's usually their savings. Reminds me of the Gamestop fiasco one or two years ago.
Yes, if in your mind a summer of Gamestop meme trading equals a technology with 40 years of research from the top applied cryptographers, 10 years of production testing, and an asset with thin markets and extremely asymmetric holdings.
The ability to easily reduce crypto to some hot take and equivalence is why otherwise quite smart people keep missing the space for the last decade.
A lot of people are expecting to get rich off Bitcoin. They still think it's a ticket to financial freedom even though returns since late 2017 have been mediocre. Relative to volatility, they would be better off with 3x tech etfs like TQQQ or TECL, which have more upside and less risk compared to Bitcoin for the same amount of volatility.
The TQQQ ETF hasn't experienced a downturn as severe as the 2000 crash. Market crashes recur; it's unrealistic to expect a perpetual bull market. In a major crash, TQQQ could plummet by 99.9%, turning $1 million into $1,000. Being swap-based and not replicated, TQQQ could potentially drop to near zero and face delisting, as seen with some 3x leveraged ETFs before.
It’s not irrational: an ETF would make it a lot easier to buy Bitcoin, which would increase demand. It’s funny though, because if Bitcoin would work as well as advertised, a traditional exchange shouldn’t offer this kind of advantage.
"Currently, Fidelity Crypto does not support borrowing against assets, leverage, or margin trading. You can only transfer, and use collected and settled available cash, as well as processed EFT deposits, to trade within your Fidelity Crypto account"
Reminds me a bit of how whenever a stock starts getting rumors of being included in an index there are HF guys bidding it up to dump on the index ETFs.
Widely believed Ethereum ETF coming in Q2. Will make it much easier to put 401k / IRA money in, and capitulation by SEC makes a Bitcoin and Ethereum ban in the US basically impossible.
No it isn't. It has two use cases, a stablecoin platform and a platform for token scams. It's losing market share all the time to other rubbish like Solana. Why would anyone in their right mind hold chuck-e-cheese arcade token Ethereum as actual money. Hint: they won't.
You're basically describing Bitcoin in the same words. I despise Vitalik Buterin like nobody's business, but pissing down on Ethereum as a Bitcoin holder is too funny to not call out. Both of them are monopoly-money investments, with the L2 joke altcoins trailing close behind.
People say this all the time, but why don't they say that about videogames? or actual mining? I also think access to and freedom to use electricity as you wish is really underrated as a freedom. Maybe consider that if you start this precedent people will end up policing your energy use too
Are you claiming that video games waste more electricity than crypto mining PoW? Do you have evidence to support that? It's a pretty strong claim, since most of the power being used to play a video game is doing something (rasterizing images/synthesizing audio/simulating physics in order to provide the game experience) while most of the power used to do PoW mining is Wasted On Purpose.
This is a complete double standard you're applying (which was kind of my point, policing electricity leads to everyone imposing their own private values on others). You could say that 100% of the power spent on videogames is wasted since they're a luxury/distraction/unnecessary. You could also say that none of the power is wasted on bitcoin since it's providing security for the network.
To be clear, I'm not saying either of these is "correct". My entire point here is that everyone talking about "waste" is just imposing their own private value system on everyone else and I've yet to see a single person apply some kind of consistent standard for what should and shouldn't be banned
Why do games have to use so much electricity? They should be fine with a few kb of storage and maybe some minimal networking. Back in the day games were completely fine and playable in tiny cartridges. Games should be regulated to not consume a certain amount of network and processing power.
On the other hand, without the PoW mechanism of Bitcoin, it's impossible to have the properties that bitcoin has - global decentralised money and payment network. If you believe otherwise, make one! Very quickly no one will be willing to pay for Bitcoin, and all those "wasted electricity" will suddenly become available again.
> People say this all the time, but why don't they say that about videogames? or actual mining?
The difference is that, for videogames or mining physical rocks, the power use is an undesired side effect, so the incentive is to minimize it, while for POW cryptocurrencies, the power use is an essential component of the mechanism they use to prevent double spending, and the incentive is to use as much as possible.
I don't think anybody really has an issue with a stable coin that people use to send money back and forth or keep some savings, but most of crypto isn't that. It's full of disgusting pyramid schemes that completely overshadow the few legitimate uses.
And replacing unstable fiat money with even less stable, totally speculatory crypto like Bitcoin? Seems like it's better just to buy some USD and stash it somewhere. Hell, even buying and reselling Steam keys is probably less volatile.
Who derives utility from the PoW component of PoW crypto? Is the work doing something useful to you? Is the utility "I feel good about using electricity to do nothing"?
I'm not sure which of the many consensus protocols you may have in mind, but proof of stake is the most popular alternative.
A 51% attack for PoW requires that someone can afford to power 51% of the network. That's expensive. Once the attack is detected, the community can fork away from the moment of the attack.
A 51% attack for PoS requires that someone owns 51% of the tokens. At that point, the attack costs nothing. If the attack is detected and the community forks, the attacker still has enough tokens to attack again on the new network - at no cost.
All of this stuff is brand new. Saying that any of it is "proven" is pretty bold.
This is a tired complaint built on a faulty analysis of Bitcoin's power usage. There are a lot of things that use more power than the Bitcoin network, such as all of the idle electronics in the USA. Or christmas lights during the season. In the case of Bitcoin, the power used to mine is often power that would otherwise be wasted. Excess power from hydroelectric damns as well as gas being burned off in the oilfield are both used to mine Bitcoin. Bitcoin isn't robbing anyone of power they need for anything else because the moment the cost of power goes up, Bitcoin mining leaves town. Because Bitcoin creates a market for power and can be mined anywhere with power and Internet, it creates unique opportunities to improve our power grid. We can now build power stations in areas where there are not yet enough residential customers to fund it by using the excess power for Bitcoin mining. Net result is that Bitcoin is a value add for our power infrastructure and the negative impact of Bitcoin mining is grossly exaggerated. The current banking system has a significantly worse impact on the environment.
You wouldn't say that if bitcoin used no more power than it did in its first 4 years, before all the speculative use that drove up prices and energy use.
Btc crashing because this will probably lower the odds of approval. this is why tech stocks are so much better . no need to have to worry about these shenanigans. The SEC cannot approve when there is so much fraud.
The fake news problem has gotten so bad on twitter. total shitshow. sub 30k soon on delay, imho
You could absolutely manipulate tech stocks by hacking Twitter accounts. For example, you could hypothetically pump JNPR by 25% by leaking an upcoming acquisition.
I mean a diversified etf like QQQ, which was up 50% or TQQQ, up 150%. Why deal with individual stocks at all when the leveraged tech etfs have less risk and more upside.
It’s such a reasonable thing to expect any level of hacking. Consider the idea that w3 is the transition of assets into literal Internet money. We digitized wealth and w3 concentrated those supplies into readily available large quantity targets.
The idea that there would be anything but a massive acceleration of crime and fraud as a result of the digitization of actual money is actually hilarious.
It’s a fact that North Korea relies on hacking it for funding critical imports at this point…
The real question is who and how this massive financialization and tokenization exercise will benefit, because it’s increasingly clear that the old guard has designs on how to control it pretty effectively and it’s not actually as free or anonymous as many people think. Some exceptions apply.
Maybe a bespoke (mostly) decentralized implementation that requires more power than mid-sized countries isn't worth it; especially if it's throughput is 7 TPS.
You could also say "more power than 3 large US cities" (Los Angeles = 60 TWh/yr, Bitcoin = 180 TWh/yr) and your statement would be equally valid, yet much less impressive. Saying "mid-size country" is about as useful as "mid-size rocks" since mid-sized countries, like mid-sized rocks span 3-4 orders of magnitudes. Fist-sized? Regrigerator-sized? Bus-sized?
Did you know that China curtails more hydropower (200+ TWh/yr [1]) than the global electricity consumption of Bitcoin, than entire "mid-size countries"? China literally spills water through the dams without powering the turbines, because they have a hydropower surplus that they can't redistribute through their national grid. When you start learning things like that, you realize Bitcoin's electricity consumption is, fortunately, still a drop in the bucket compared to the immense waste from, well, everything else humans do on the planet.
Cybersecurity is a problem that affects all computer related industries not just cryptocurrency. North korea doesnt rely on hacking just crypto. Lazarus group has been around and targets many infrastructures. You cant blame crypto for the field of cybersecurity. Its been a problem long before crypto existed.
the fact that there's a whole crowd here that think the old guard actually got hacked by dastardly crypto punks instead of just their own incompetence with scheduling a tweet
Crypto is a scam (including Bitcoin) anybody treating it otherwise is overly credulous or in on the scam. Maybe it started out with better intentions but it is irredeemable.
Cryptocurrency, when used as intended, is pretty boring. Send funds from A to B. Done. yawn. You won't see headlines about it. The news that make it to your eyeballs are always sensational: fraud, crime, scams, etc. So if your exposure to crypto is only through the media, as opposed to actually using it yourself, it is logical for you to associate crypto with fraud.
1) that’s very rarely the most important feature to me and 2) no it isn’t. Moving crypto around is fast but I don’t want crypto, I want money I can spend. USD -> crypto -> USD is not fast. There are faster ways to send money you can’t spend.
I have a crypto debit card I can fund as needed and spend anywhere. In fact for me it’s faster and easier than any bank. It can be sent to anyone in the world and with a stack of a few different crypto debit cards can be spent immediately in pretty much any country in the world with their local currency. Yes currently the exchange fees are not great on those cards for exchanging to fiat, but the trend is down and improving.
If you’re using a crypto debit card than you’re layering the cost of a standard bank transaction on top of the cost of crypto. That just sounds like extra steps to do what I just did with my debit card at the convenience store 5min ago - which took seconds as well and required no steps to convert currency or load up from a wallet/exchange. I’m just not entirely sure what using your crypto debit card accomplished beside spending a currency that takes more work to utilize.
I have no counterparty risk, no confiscation risk. There are no extra steps, I don’t understand what you mean, moving funds to a bank or debit card at a convenience store is massively more complicated.
I open a wallet app and the paypal app, copy the deposit address from paypal to the clipboard, paste into the wallet, type the amount, hit send. 5 seconds later paypal receives it. With one button I swap any portion of it to USD on the paypal app. I do this in large enough amounts so the crypto TX fees are insignificant to get into paypal, and the conversion fees are also small.
Any extra fees are more than covered by the long term appreciation of the Bitcoin, which will obviously continue as governments worldwide are drunk of their own power to print.
one thing that's important to understand is that your experience is very different from someone that already has crypto, and earns crypto. for you, you have to go buy crypto first, and you won't do that. for someone that already has an inventory of crypto, its just get cash as needed.
for them its just crypto -> USD which is very fast. for me, in the US as a US citizen, that is 2 minutes up to $25,000. from a personal crypto wallet, to the exchange, to my bank or brokerage account. beyond $25,000 it is 15 minutes to 2 hours via domestic wire transfer.
so one likely unreported aspect of crypto is that it likely has reduced international wire transfers, and cross border transfers that are prone to error and erroneous reviews and holdups
for about a decade now I have paid people in other countries in crypto. and been paid in crypto from some revenue sources. and we both liquidated as domestic transfers in our local countries. specifically because we didn't want to bother with international bank issues and time delays.
even hedge fund and private equity fund administrators that are more competitive allow in-kind investment of new limited partners in crypto, for many years now
the other thing thats important to understand is that there is a growing group that doesn't want "money they can spend" because they are liquid. they can buy goods, services, invest, day trade, passive income all in crypto within the crypto ecosystem. and for other things they can get the cash when they need it, or simply use a debit card that is custodying their crypto and representing it as the local fiat currency
but truthfully, going from USD -> crypto is fast too. if you're a US citizen you just need to use wire transfers to the exchange. SEPA region can also do same day settlement.
your user story and assumptions are really antiquated and don't represent what's been happening for at least 10 years now. if it doesn't apply to you then thats fine and move on
I recently used Wise (formerly transferwise) to send money to someone in Pakistan. It was about $10 to send $1000USD. The exchange rates are competitive too. And the recipient is guaranteed to get the correct amount in their destination currency. It even has some degree of fraud protection and customer support baked in.
It’s more important to have an unstoppable digital store of value than to stop people getting scammed.
Sure would be nice to have fewer scammers, and we should try. I, too, detest many of the actors in the space, the whole number-go-up get-rich-quick culture, and much more.
But it’s a sideshow. The reality is I’m not giving up digital assets I completely control (preferably private ones) any more than I’m giving up strong encryption, e2e encrypted comms, or the right to run whatever software I like on my computers. I’m not the only one.
It’s really irrelevant if you or anyone else considers it irredeemable. What does that even mean? There’s not even a single coherent “it” to be irredeemable.
What makes you think that the kids of tomorrow are going to give a damn about today's notions of what's valuable? Using an unstoppable ledger doesn't make the underlying values any more legitimate than they were before.
I do think that creating a censorship resistant place for data is more important than preventing people from being scammed, but when I think about what ought to go there, I come up with nothing so status-quo-preserving as abstractions that ensure the continuity of asset ownership. It's like you hate banks so much that you went and built one just to show-em.
> What makes you think that the kids of tomorrow are going to give a damn about today's notions of what's valuable?
I mean, on a long enough time scale, they won't :) Same with USD, other currencies, or any given stock or bond. There are no guarantees. That applies doubly to crypto assets.
> What makes you think that the kids of tomorrow are going to give a damn about today's notions of what's valuable?
Why would this change my assertions?
In any case there are a myriad socio-political views and values represented in blockchain/“crypto” projects. It’s not all hypercapitalist libertarians…
Perhaps a greater percentage of the people, projects, and attention are part of the “parasite” as you put it, but that was my point: while it is bad, and something we should work to minimise, it’s may be a price we have to pay for something that at its core is very important.
For discussion purposed just a few historical fiat currencies, since your confidence in USD seems a bit overblown, especially for a currency whose issuer is now spending more on interest payments than their military, an indicator of possible future instability as a store of value.
1. German Weimar Republic (Germany) - The German Mark, introduced in 1924 after World War I, was originally intended to replace the hyperinflated German Papiermark. However, the Great Depression and military reparations led to massive deficit spending, resulting in hyperinflation starting around 1921. By 1923, one US dollar equaled approximately 4.2 trillion Reichsmarks.
2. French Revolutionary Franc (France) - After the French Revolution in the late 18th century, France's new revolutionary government issued the assignats, which were paper money used as part of a monetary reform program. Initially, these notes held value due to their being backed by goods such as grain; however, excessive printing eventually led to severe hyperinflation between 1796 and 1797, where prices rose exponentially.
3. Hungarian Pengő (Hungary) - Introduced in 1946, the Hungarian pengő suffered from rampant inflation due to economic mismanagement and Marshall Plan aid exchange rates. Between 1945 and 1946, the exchange rate for one US dollar was set at HUF 52, but due to various factors, including nationalization, hyperinflation reached an estimated 44 quadrillions to the US dollar by 1946.
4. Zimbabwean Dollar (Zimbabwe) - Succeeding the British colonial Rhodesian dollar, Zimbabwe adopted its own fiat currency, the Zimbabwean dollar, upon independence in 1980. Hyperinflation began in the mid-1970s, and by November 2004, it had become virtually worthless, forcing the country to abandon it.
5. Mexican Peso (Mexico) - Following the Mexican-American war, Mexico faced significant debt. To finance the national debt, a silver peso coin was minted. Despite its initial value, hyperinflation struck, and by the late 19th century, the Mexican peso became almost worthless. Numerous attempts at currency stabilization failed until the introduction of the "El Banco" gold standard in 1914.
Fiat currency is a scam (including the USD) anybody treating it otherwise is overly credulous or in on the scam. Maybe it started out with better intentions but it is irredeemable.
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Yes yes. I’m sure 15 years later you will be saying the same thing even when Bitcoin is showing up on reserve holdings of major central banks. I believe Bitcoin is around the 16th largest currency in the world today and it’s daily transaction volume indicates extensive real world use. But don’t worry you can keep ranting about how Bitcoin is a scam, you or others like you were 10 years ago, and will be in another 10 years. I have a hunch it’s a phenomenon somehow related to how socialists are still ranting about socialism 200 years now, the most failed ideas in human history, yet according to them never been done “correctly”, this is some collectivist mindset equivalent in reverse, ranting about how big a failure one of the most successful ideas in human history is.
It rather seems like the opposite; an altruistic gift to humanity. An anonymous programmer produced a decentralized currency that solved the double spend problem and didn't even sell his coins.
An irreversible permissionless way to send funds near-instantaneously to anyone anywhere in the world is pretty darn good at a lot of perfectly legal use cases. My personal favorite example is that I once used Bitcoin for an emergency so my (then-homeless) friend could receive cash in hands from a Bitcoin ATM, in a matter of less than 1 hour, on a Sunday, while I was vacationing remote. Nothing, and I truly mean it because we searched, nothing else would have worked that fast: try setting up a new Western Union/MoneyGram account online on a Sunday, and have it verified and activated... nope. Fun thing is my friend had never used Bitcoin before that day. Bitcoin ATMs are a very convenient gateway to "cash in hands", when needed.
Can do this for free in Canada with Interac as long as both parties have Canadian bank accounts. But for international transfer theres not a good solution AFAIK.
Bitcoin ATMs are an interesting example because they involve at least one trusted third party - the Bitcoin ATM operator.
Wise (previously Transferwise) can do international transfer within seconds. If you're in Europe then payments between any bank in Europe take seconds (SEPA payments).
Wise wouldn't have worked as my friend was among the 10M American adults who are unbanked. Also I doubt him and I would have been able to do account setup on a Sunday, within 1 hour, which is the time it took us to do the transfer, despite this situation being his first time ever using Bitcoin.
I opened my Wise account in 20 minutes. The ID verification is all automated so it's really quick. I haven't heard of anyone who is unbanked before though, what would be a reason for that?
Interac wouldn't have worked even if him and I had been Canadians. My friend was unbanked due to past financial issues (which is also the reason he was homeless at the time.)
This is one significant advantage of Bitcoin, that it works for the unbanked.
I have not used the online version but you could have just as easily walked into a western union and done the exact same thing for substantially less fees.
Nope. The closest Western Union/MoneyGram/similar services to me were hours away by car. Hence why we tried to do it online. We tried MoneyGram because my friend was banned from Western Union. But even MoneyGram wasn't possible quickly online.
I’m straining to see the relevance of that, especially since at one point in my life I was a member of that statistic.
One thing I definitely didn’t need any more of back then was glamorized systems of financial predation and exploitation targeting me because of it. There’s no version of the world where the cryptocurrency ecosystem as it actually is, rather than how it is idealized to be, would have made my plight better had it existed at the time.
In any case, it still seems like a non-sequitur.
I’m just laughing at the premise that the many, many, many billion dollar investments and valuations of cryptocurrency firms, and the unending deluge of fraud and scams they reliably leave in their wake is meaningfully offset by the total amount of money transacted in the niche of homeless friends who need fast cash from their wealthy friend who is half way around the world outside of normal business hours. I mean, if that’s the case, then it would really behoove Western Union and MoneyGram to keep a few locations open on the weekend.
pretty sure the only time I ever used Moneygram I managed to send funds from my UK bank account without any MoneyGram account. Was a really easy way to get cash in a city that definitely didn't have Bitcoin ATMs
That's much closer to being true now than it was when bitcoin started getting popular, in no small part because it scared financial institutions into competing on convenience. But really, who says legality is the arbiter of greatness anyway? Are you really prepared to say that every illegal use of blockchain should never happen? I'm not.
> nothing legal it can do that something else can't do better
Eh, Treasuries should probably be traded on a blockchain. Cryptocurrency is nonsense. But the tech has legs. It just needs to, ironically, clear its way of the crypto/web3 crowd first.
I tend to think highly of most of the comments I see from you man, but you are quite confused about how this stuff works if you believe that the pay-to-play aspect of a cryptocurrency can be divorced from the blockchain used to track it. They are no more separable from one another than front is from back or up is from down.
A blockchain without the economic carrot-stick power to protect its own integrity and internal rules, power that comes from aligning the behavior of otherwise unrelated and even mutually antagonistic custodial participants by incentivizing their common interest in getting rich (or at least not losing their existing wealth), is no more than a database with superfluous "decentralization theater" yak shaving bolted on.
If defecting from the game doesn't cost you a meaningful penalty (and such cost is defined by a fixed unit of measure, in order to distinguish in-game gains from losses) then you are not compelled to follow its rules except by your own conscience. This would be noble, but it would not be a blockchain.
Blockchain is not a technology in the sense of being a better "how" for some existing problem. blockchain is before anything else, a social contract based on the premise that everything humans care about ('value') really does boil down to "voting with money," and thus requiries enforcement of such economic consensus through technology. It is sufficiently removed from expectations people normally have about how they relate to one another that it would require quite a revolution indeed to be adopted in the capacity in which it is intended to function as intended, that is, to become the ultimate source of truth for every transaction on Earth.
It's a back door attempt to fundamentally rewire how value is routed through society, and in the abstract this _might_ be a good thing (perhaps too generous with that 'might') in practice it cannot possibly happen due to physical constraints on consensus formation at the global, realtime scale that it would have to happen. As a result shortcuts are taken (or appear organically, i.e. exchages) in the form of centralized nodes of consensus settlement (what the promoters like to call Layer 2, sharding, or similar), and it's the people controlling these centralized nodes who end up becoming the new kings of this "revolutionized" system, the trust-me-bro's of trustlessness. I've met some of them, and they are not people who I would ever want to have anyone I care about to be under the thumb of.
No disagreement here, not a fan.* but so many arguments miss this point. the problems with blockchain are rooted in the why; the how is mostly a sideshow but admittedly much more expedient to criticize in comparison.
* were not for HN's character limit my username would have started with the word 'block'
Its sad to think web 2.0 so long ago was a move towards more human centric websites, UI's, AJAXy sites, etc and now web3 is just a marketing term for fraudsters, exit scammers, shady VC's, and criminals. The late-stage capitalism of the internet is obvious to see.
Web3 never had anything to do with the web. It was always a vain attempt to cash in on the aura associated with web 2.0 by sounding like a legitimate heir to the heritage of the WWW. It is however, as you said, just a convenient marketing term for crypto bros and blockchain scamware.
Web 3.0 as Tim Berners-Lee envisions it might have some legs, but web3 was a always an empty marketing vessel.
Blockchains are a fun tools, i really like some ideas (ipfs, etherium and solidity), but i want to separate it from the cryptocurrency nonsense. Luckily, almost all grifters and zealots started talking about "web3", to re appropriate the term (like they did "crypto", which mean cryptography for old and cybersec people).
Hence i associate web3 with the grift, and blockchain with the technology. Probably gp does the same.
I can't speak for the other commenter, but I don't think they said that "web3 is responsible for all the crypto nonsense". My impression is that they're just hinting at a relationship between the two.
The 2023 Chicago mayoral candidate, Paul Vallas, did very similar. He was found to have liked a bunch of posts and claimed it was hacked. It was clear almost immediately that he was lying about it, since it kept happening on his other accounts.
It is a bit weird the tweet went out exactly a day before the approval is supposed to happen.
Let's assume it was the SEC's fault, either by accident or otherwise, could they be charged with market manipulation? Which agency would have authority to investigate? Quite a few people were tricked into buying right before the price dropped like a rock. Shorters have made a killing.
I’ll admit it has been deeply entertaining watching the crypto community speed-run 200 years of “finding out the hard way why modern financial regulations exist” and “how to recognize a blisteringly obvious ponzi scheme” in the span of 15 years.
I say this as someone who got his first 0.05 btc for signing up for a newsletter in 2009 or 2010.
0.05? You probably misremember the amount. For reference, in 2010 the Bitcoin faucet gave away 5 BTC just for visiting a web page. A decent incentive for subscribing to a newsletter, more involved than visiting a web page, would have to have been higher than 5 BTC.
I must be misremembering the year then! It was 0.05 because I thought it was 5 then found the old hard drive last year and managed to recover it from an ancient bitcoin client. I don’t remember the details but I had to let it sync (downloading data?) for days before I could make a transaction to an exchange and sell.
What "chants" are you referring to specifically re differences in markets? AFAIK it has always been pushed as a decentralized alternative to sending money, but that has little bearing on the way the traded price changes?
When was that the chant?
They said more financial inclusiveness and self sovereignty. There are some with code is law and more cypherpunk ideals that is true. The early internet and open source movement had similar movements and these people still exist trying to improve society. Once things become mainstream the majority of focus becomes business and what products/services it can provide. The same companies in this space focused on business want clear regulation not lack of it.
Tomorrow your bank could cut you off from your own money because you protested the government[1], and what could you possibly do?
Having the freedom to truly own your own money and investments is valuable in and of itself, no matter how much crypto "devolves" towards traditional finance in other regards.
If your government wants to cut you off from your money, they'll do it for crypto just as easily as they do it for traditional banks. With the exception of direct-crypto purchases from shady internet sites, at some point your payment rails must pass through an entity that your government has some degree of authority over—you're not going to buy your groceries using Bitcoin over an onion service.
Even if crypto becomes 100% ubiquitous, the end game isn't "now the government can't control finance" the end game is "now the government will find a new way to control the new finance". Eventually, the government will intervene because people will be begging them to, because they don't actually want to live in a world where theft and fraud are irreversible and their entire financial life is tied to a set of cryptographic keys that they barely understand.
You're trying to push a technological solution to authoritarianism, and it's not going to work for the masses. Canada doesn't need crypto, Canada needs voters to hold the government accountable for its abuses.
Apart from some edge cases, Western democracies have quite solid property rights upheld also by the judicial system. But yes if you’re in Russia or China then this argument is moot. They have much less property rights. However, Bitcoin is also not a solution because there is no point in owning Bitcoin if you fell trice out of a Russian window or are sentenced to a labour camp or to the death penalty in China for "fraudulus activities“. Difficult to spend your Bitcoin in both cases.
Not only Russian or Chinese, you should open the bracket for any individual, organization or country that the western democracies will deem bad in their view. Or even have the any doubt of association with them. For example we can talk to many Muslims in the UK where no banks will grant them accounts (close account without notice) and how safe they feel [1]
Not that I am a crypto supporter, but the current western based financial system hegemony is good until you are have wrong name, religion, country... etc.
Being a trucker in Canada is a edge case. Also being a human interacting with police in the US.
Did you mean intellectual property? You draw Mickey a year ago and a FBI helicopter would soon be overhead to kill your dog and take any cash they find in your wallet.
> People seem to forget part of civil disobedience is going to jail and paying a fine.
That's not even vaguely what happened here and it's well beyond arguing in bad faith to attempt to trivialize it to such.
The goal of freezing the accounts was to make the truckers unable to buy food or pay rent to force a near immediate end. If the civil disobedience starts being evictions and starving protests are going to become a thing of the past.
Yes, like you can lose your treasure by forgetting where you buried it. Or you can lose your silver when an accidental fire melts your palace into slag. Or you can lose your wheat harvest to mold! Self-storage is the default way of holding wealth, not a new one. And it's a tradeoff that people will always choose to make as long as personal wealth exists.
Among the innumerable problems with cryptocurrency, this is not one of them.
Honestly, the first thing I'd do is hope that they forgot that I make house and car payments though them and that they forgot how much damage they could do to my professional life just by intentionally sabotaging my credit. Crypto doesn't provide any realistic protection to me from their whims should they become bad actors.
@EricBalchunas
"On TV right on talking about this.. and yes, I think someone prepped a planned tweet and put wrong date, bc the tweet would have made PERFECT sense tomorrow at this time. The language sounds legit SEC-ish IMO vs a crypto knucklehead pulling a prank but I guess we'll see.."
nope. this is 100% a hack. the sec would not make such a post using that picture. why would there be a picture of Gensler? that makes no sense. it would be a press release of some sort, maybe followed by a tweet.
https://twitter.com/SECGov/status/1744837121406349714