Probably not everyone knows, but USDT has a "black list", and admins can prevent any address holding USDT from spending. The black list is implemented in USDT contract.
So USDT is not truly decentralized and your money can be frozen for any reason or no reason at all.
So USDT is a great amazing decentralized censorship-free drop in replacement to USD except:
- much more awkward to use
- more liable to hacks
- deposits are not insured
- fewer legal protections
- doesn’t pay interest (or not easily anyway)
- and as I find out, bannable by a central institution with lower legal oversight than the Fed
I’ll keep a mental note of this.
I have said this many times, and will probably have to say it many more: Stablecoins are nothing but a face-saving measure for the US government.
It is politically impossible to go back on KYC/AML measures in the traditional financial system, even if some of them were perhaps a bit too ill-advised. It's much easier to say "this is shiny new tech, very different from that old tech over there; we support innovation so we won't impose KYC requirements on it", even if there's no logical reason to do that.
As it stands, stablecoins let you make a keypair in the privacy of your own home (or your own agent sandbox, as it were) and immediately start transacting. They're allowed-by-default instead of blocked-by-default, with the US government still able to block you if they have a specific reason. No traditional bank I know of, in any country, works like this. This is a valuable capability to have, technologically, even if there's no technical reason why a Postgres database and a REST API couldn't provide the same service, but faster and more easily.
> It is politically impossible to go back on KYC/AML measures in the traditional financial system
It’s politically irrelevant more than impossible. Most Americans simple aren’t visibly encumbered by KYC/AML enough to make it a priority.
> They're allowed-by-default instead of blocked-by-default
So were banks in the wildcat era.
if its bannable by a centralized place please explain how it is decentral? i thought that was the kind of controls a decentral system was specifically designed against. is that understanding of mine flawed?
Suddenly, physical Gold in a safe at home looks fairly decentralized and censorship-proof
Until you need to move or share it. That's why monero XMR is the only serious fungible and decentralized cryptocurrency
I don't doubt what you're saying. But as someone who is really not buying into cryptocurrencies, this is exactly what someone who holds a big amount of some obscure cryptocurrency would say.
I've heard good things about monero from a friend. This is not an attack on monero, rather a reflection on the general tone of the message.
>some obscure cryptocurrency
Monero is so obscure the IRS has put out a million dollar bounty to trace it, unlike any other crypto even btc lol
It's a store of value, rather than a medium for transaction. If you want to move or share it, you pick it up and move or share it mostly...
I think how easy it is depends on the country and state of things. I would not want to move or share even small amount of gold outside of first world countries even in good times.
Unless you are moving more than about 1 million dollars in gold, it's actually quite easy to move it.
It's very easy to pick it up, put it in a car or van, and move it to a different location.
It's much less easy to convert it to something you can actually spend. Even if you can get it to a buyer, they'll always offer you less than you expect/want.
Reputable dealers have KYC reporting duties of their own. Disreputable dealers... may have other ideas.
Of course dealers have KYC (you generally need to give your id) but this thread was about having one's own gold in a safe, not about shady dealings or stealing gold.
Gold sells at about 1% less than the current market price of the gold content of your item which I find fair. It might be easier here in Antwerp than in other places to deal with gold because it's kind of a gold trading hub. You can basically show unannounced (I suggest going by bike rather than by car because there is little street parking) and trade your gold for cash at the -1% rate, obviously if you get to the million euros range it's going to be a bit different, but for a few tens of thousands it's business as usual. And it's not like it's a difficult place to reach from anywhere else in the EU.
I would be nervous moving borders with ~1 million dollars worth of gold.
Talk to airport security people. The number of travelers, particularly from India and the middle east, with gold bars is nuts. It isn't loose bricks in a sock bag, but piles of one-ounce bars in plastic wrappers, stacked like playing cards, is not unusual. The Canada mint has a reputation for excellent gold/silver. Middle eastern tourists regularly return home carrying stacks of canadian gold/silver bars.
As opposed to junk like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/Gold/comments/1xab90c/first_gold_ba...
When the canada mint does a movie tie-in, they do it better: https://cdncoin.com/collections/rcm-new-arrivals/products/20...
That technically true for any coin where miners are organized enough, see the ethereum fork where bad contract made wrong people lose money so they forked entire chain to get the money back
Look into the history of USDT. It's creation was dodgy to say the least.
Over time I believe it's founders did start backing it with Treasuries so now it must turn a nice profit for them.
You missed out that it is run by crooks closely associated with SBF and shady banks like Deltec
https://dailycoin.com/sbf-tether-deltec-secretly-colluding/
Also, it's not decentralised, they just unilaterally froze 2 billion in funds.
> bannable by a central institution with lower legal oversight than the Fed
It’s way easier to take a company to court than any government entity.
> great amazing decentralized censorship-free drop in replacement
It's not and never supposed to be and everybody who uses it in any significant amount knows that. Don't mistake a cryptotoken with a cryptocurrency.
I love monero but then you have the problem that very few exchanges support it and if you need to convert big amounts of it in common currency it gets quite hard to do compared to eth/btc
Well, nobody said that the true anarchy would be easy. No government actually wants to approve the original spirit of crypto, everything they allow is either a toy or a scam they can take advantage of.
Then people get into shitty casino tokens that are widely available because the state doesn't care about a little gambling and got surprised that they are in the casino in the first place.
This is absolutely what true anarchy looks like. Before you can blink, someone else has taken over, and now you have a new boss, only worse.
Not the case at all. True anarchy is community governance where a very local group of people start working together. Anarchist meetings are not restricted to, but include, looking like a bunch of people in a room, voicing their problems with this week's chief speaker as moderator, and then everyone in the room splitting off into working groups to address each problem. The chief speakers rotate around the group each week to avoid moderator bias, and each working group might reach out to other anarchist groups to exchange information and resources freely.
This is but one model developed within academia for an entirely anarchist organisation, there are dozens of others and they have been both studied for efficacy (they tend to work better than a more hierarchical structure), as well as put into practice in real life within certain organisations. To this date there are a number of non-profit organisations and coöperatives that use this governance system to improve the situation where they are locally and achieve their goals — whether that's "everyone working to improve the local community" or "make good products for a client".
The entire point of anarchism is that there isn't One Big Guy, it's that it's people, deciding on a system and working together on a small scale — this then translates to the big scale through cross-group meetings, information sharing, and resource sharing. There is a lot of evidence within the social sciences to back these methodologies up as being very efficacious compared to traditional methods of group organisation, as well as being more democratic than traditional alternatives.
This additionally tends to be how some kinds of open mic nights work, as well as some kinds of modern speakeasys.
> True anarchy is community governance
It’s a bit antithetical to anarchy to start defining true and untrue configurations. It’s more accurate to say that while anarchy permits chaos, it also permits self-organization, one mode of which is hierarchy-free community governance. Most of us have experienced this among friends when e.g. deciding where to go to dinner.
This is one of these circular relationships. You and your friends can experience true, free, cooperation exactly because you don't have to be on guard 24/7 against enemies, because you live in a civil society that has rules, and people to enforce those rules - ultimately by coercion through violence.
Peaceful anarchy evaporates when bad actors arrive. I wish it wasn't so. A structured civil society is the nearest we've managed to get to being able to live in relative freedom almost all of the time. It's the least violent, least coerced option we've been able to find.
The other way would be to go live in a group by yourselves off the grid, and as long as every one of you is good and decent that will be fine, but the moment one of you goes bad, you either have to choose violence or they will do whatever they want to you.
The term anarchy is used in academia for all kinds of non-hierarchical civil societies. Academia being academia, they chose to stick with a dumb label. But the set I think OP is describing is more intuitively understood as non-hierarchical social systems.
No one ever said USDT was decentralized.
USDT is created by a super shady company and is not at all decentralized or censorship-free. You could have made the argument for Bitcoin (and still can to a certain level) but most cryptos that propped up after that or stablecoins do not follow the hacker philosophy and more the banker one. Ironic that the whole crypto movement got co-opted by the likes of JPM which it seeked to replace.
Recently I tried to donate to a project using their preferred crypto payment processor flow, which purported to support "Coinbase Wallet" integration. So thinking that was just like, Coinbase, I said "sure why not" thinking it'd save me the effort of copy/pasting long strings back and forth.
Turns out, Coinbase "Wallet" is a completely separate thing from Coinbase, and long story short, ultimately ended up accidentally converting some spare ETH I transfered into some kind of garbage Binance "wrapped" Litecoin. Which had zero indication/warnings in the app other than a like 4 pixel Binance logo superimposed on the 16 pixel Litecoin logo that it wasn't the real thing.
Once I gave up on this Wallet experiment I ended up needing Gemini to walk me through all the Binance "gas" nonsense to finally manage to swap into a real coin I could transfer out (like 80% of what I started with after subtracting gas fees and miscellaneous leftover change I was stuck with). And while transferring I had to avoid like a dozen alternative networks consisting of seemingly random strings and a scary red banner saying "yo don't fuck this up".
My first red flag should have been that Coinbase Wallet's Play Store name literally advertised betting on prediction apps. Second red flag was while looking for "Litecoin" in the list of coins, there were literally about 5000 different spam/meme coins with dozens of near identical clones that were all name squatting on top of each other.
As someone who came of age in the Crypto 1.0 "Bitcoin is for buying drugs" era the entire exercise was utterly baffling and somehow significantly less usable than crypto was a decade ago for actual payments. I guess for a young person looking to illegally gamble their paychecks at some unlicensed offshore prediction market it provides some utility I'm missing but man, the experience just made the post-Web 3.0 crypto scene look .... grim.
Normally they publish the wallet id, then you send money there using any method you want. What Gemini would do in your place?
Tether isn’t decentralized or censorship free in any way
[flagged]
Tether's entire business model, providing an almost-unregulated USD cryptocurrency, relies on them not arbitrarily banning people. They don't do it frequently or without thought. You're far less likely to get banned from USDT than just about any non-cryptocurrency financial institution.
> Tether's entire business model, providing an almost-unregulated USD cryptocurrency, relies on them not arbitrarily banning people
No, their entire business model relies on bank/CC providers don't ban them. Somehow, they treat all crypto related transactions as iffy but USDT, bought to buy crypto, got under much less scrutiny. The entire problem their solver was that new users couldn't move cash to exchanges fast enough to join bull runs.
You can say the same for many other industries:
> almost-unregulated except when the authority say no.
Yeah, until Trump (or whoever is president at the time) tells them to.
What will they do when the alternative is broken bones?
Turns out that there are quite good reasons to have a centralised currency after all. Who would’ve known.
Isn't the centralization the reason they got stolen? It was Binance that was hacked, not the blockchain technology.
By the way, it wasn't just Binance that got hacked. Several other exchanges were hit too.
A supply chain attack? Do all these exchanges routinely import new cryptocurrencies?
Well in traditional banking you essentially have the ability to reverse
True, but it gets complicated or even impossible if you try to do across international/fragmented transfers & countries.
yeah the issue is if you built it they will co opt it
All systems can be bent, broken, or subverted.
not bitcoin-core in the past 14 years of being a public network
Btc has a similar blacklist with tainted coins because it's not fungible unlike actual decentralized cryptocurrency like monero xmr
lol no. you can mix them over and over and it becomes a p^n complexity
The topic is bitcoin being hacked and stolen. I do not think this outcome was the intended outcome for users?
Perhaps I am missing your argument.
no. binance was hacked, again, again. the wallet was not. else they would have stolen only from the btc wallet.
not your keys not your bitcoin
Not practical for ordinary people. No regular person is holding their own wallet, and even the technically sophisticated who do get their keys stolen or lose them to faulty backups or technical snafus.
Calling/implying that it's technically sophisticated is not really reasonable. Having a BTC (or other currency) wallet is utterly trivial, let alone from a technical standpoint, it's much easier than setting up an e.g. Coinbase account. The only issue, outside of choice of course, is people being ignorant of what needs to be done and I think that can largely be explained by the fact that centralized providers spend billions on marketing while decentralized wallets spend nothing on it.
The intention of bitcoin was to have a digital medium with similar properties as cash: no need to trust anyone else, and you can exchange it with whoever you want. Cash can also be stolen if someone takes your wallet, leaving you no recourse except the law
Imho Bitcoins being stolen is not at all Bitcoin being "bent, broken, or subverted", it's just a natural consequence of the design goals. If an unrelated third party could block my bitcoins by accusing me of terrorism that would be subverting the system, and such things have not happened to bitcoin-core (but have happened in other parts of the bitcoin ecosystem)
> Cash can also be stolen if someone takes your wallet, leaving you no recourse except the law
The issue that is often raised with Bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies is that not even the law can help you in case of theft. Now, it's true that the police wouldn't bother helping me recover a wallet with 100€ into it, but things change if someone steals millions or even billions like in this case.
You steal billions, you just pay the police 100000000 to look away.
Ok, so you are saying this is business as usual, and the theft is exactly what one should expect, as with any other store of value.
I find something odd about this, because it seems to contradict some of what I understand of the arguments for bitcoin.
However, there is merit to your point, and if something is working as intended, then nothing was attacked in the first place.
The argument for bitcoin being secure is more along the lines of "if you store your own bitcoins securely nobody can take them from you". Storing them securely is easy in principle (just keep them on an airgapped computer, or write the key down on paper, then "just" do physical security well) but hard in practice (major security-convenience tradeoffs). However, storing your bitcoins with a major provider like binance has a terrible track record and not something the hardcore bitcoin advocates actually recommend
Huh? You can trace bitcoins forever, and people would probably pay extra for some vanity bitcoins; and probably pay less or nothing for some bitcoins that are legally questionable.
Your answer does not answer anything. The discussion is about whether or not to have the trusted third-party. Pro-ttp said that ttp protects from criminals. Anti-ttp said that ttp can make your own money dissappear because ttp is bending the rules. You said nonsence, your examples are not showing any rules or contracts about digital property which are being bent. Why any bitcoin criticism from anyone is always so weak?
All bitcoins are legally questionable; but no: ones that can be traced to contract killings not just stealing do not trade at a discount.
Turns out the reason crypto was invented isn't "decentralization" at all, it was nerds feeling left out and wanting their own financial instrument grift.
You mean the smart nerds
For the less economical-savvy ones it was like Beanie Babies or Tulips (with predictable consequences)
I still buy tulips, just not at boom market prices.
The predictable outcome is that the deers get to them, but I got to see a few go into full bloom last year and it was wonderful.
Yes, but there are more good reasons to have it be decentralized.
Well sure, but the average consumer needs and/or wants some protections, safeguards and insurances. If my bank gets hacked or even if I get skimmed it's considered their fault and I'll get my money back.
>I'll get my money back.
If the police retrieves your money from the thief?
That's if it was stolen from you directly.
If it's stolen from a bank, it's their obligation to recuperate you.
FWIW, most countries have a type of insurance if a legally operating bank goes under, at least some of your savings are protected (eg. in Serbia that's up to 50kEUR).
While I can't speak for other places, in the UK, if you haven't been careless and report quickly enough, your refund is not dependent on anyone being caught.
Arguably any fiat-collateralised stablecoin is ipso facto centralised and trusted (someone needs to 1) issue the coins only against fiat collateral and then 2) hold onto that collateral reliably and 3) return it upon presentation of the coin), and at step 3 they can always say "no, we won't give it to you".
Your point has nothing to do with fiat.
It applies equally well to a fiduciary coin with a promise that 1 gcoin = 1g of gold or whatever.
Indeed.
However, it does not necessarily apply to algorithmic stable coins (Terra) or crypto-backed overcollateralised coins (DAI). That's why I said "fiat-backed".
Why couldn't a privacy focus coined, like Monero, be a stablecoin?
You don't need to see where the coins are and move to promise $1 of going for every coin.
Probably the founders/employees of the company issuing/redeeming the token would be arrested very quickly. Tornado Cash people got arrested for much less.
How are you guaranteeing that your private stablecoin will keep its $1 value?
How are you bootstrapping a network to validate private transactions without the promise of potential gains in coin value as its popularity takes off?
Who makes that promise? That's who you are ultimately trusting.
Decentralized is a great concept but it’s 99.9% rug pulls and you can’t get any safety unless you centralize. As an investor there is no way to protect yourself because the rug pulls are several orders of magnitude more sophisticated than most people’s understanding.
> As an investor there is no way to protect yourself
Why? BTC is pretty stable longterm and nobody is going to touch your cold wallet. Anything that has an owner or legal entity is not decentralized, subject to either rug pull or censorship and shouldn't be touched, sounds very easy.
Everything that promises you any return is a scam in crypto, simple as that.
The U.S. government is the largest beneficiary of this service. More than $2.1 billion in USDT connected to or requested by U.S. authorities out of over $4.4 billion in total illicit USDT freezes globally.
It's tethered to the USD. It seems expected that the government in charge of USD is doing the most blacklisting.
If they baked in a function to freeze USDT, why not also add a function revert a transaction flagged as part of a hack?
Because they own and control their own smart contracts but do not own the network that the contracts are deployed to.
Plus, freezing funds and waiting for US law enforcement to weigh in rather than being the proverbial judge, jury and executioner is now likely to keep you on the right side of said law enforcement.
> Because they own and control their own smart contracts but do not own the network that the contracts are deployed to.
I assume they call a method on the contract to freeze the coins (with some superuser kind of signature), so they could easily write a method that moves the coins back, too. This should be similar in terms of gas costs.
The law enforcement theory seems more likely, yeah.
Did they ever show proof that they actually hold $1 for every tether? This was big a few years ago but never heard anything about it since. (I could Google it but others here probably want to know)
I lost ~20,000 USDT by accident once and the CTO just sent me some freshly printed ones. That was many years ago though.
Anyone can refuse any bitcoin, too. But that's not implemented in the contract, just by how much real money people want to give you for bitcoin.
A shame that they can and do so here but happily facilitate transfers or scam victims, human trafficking and sexual abuse including of minors.
So when tether is blacklisted, is it reissued?
The financial system has evolved over 5000+ years and is like an endless series of Chesterton's Fences at this point. Here we find another: the ability for a regulator or a bank to freeze assets is once again proven to be a feature not a bug.
Managing a wallet where there is no recourse if your wallet is compromised is simply too difficult when even crypto exchanges get hacked and otherwise sophisticated people get compromised when taking cautious measures (eg [1]).
Crypto really is and always was a race to the rug pull.
[1]: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/about-3-5-million-los...
You know what isn't a Chesterton's fence? Payment processors being able to dictate what I can or can't spend my money on.
This by itself is a reason to push for more crypto acceptance, in my eyes.
I must live a very vanilla, sheltered life because I’ve never bought anything and wondered if a payment processor would object to it.
The payment processors don't object to you. They usually object to the store or the platform you're getting things from.
It's invisible, insidious censorship. They don't hit your hands with a ruler and say "stop, no buying that, bad". They make it so that what they don't like doesn't get to be on the store shelves in the first place. Hard to buy what isn't being sold, isn't it?
As for why they do it - it's unclear, but there's speculation that payment processor leadership might be in part ideologically captured by the usual "think of the children" moralizers and puritans. The same types that used to spurn moral panics, rally against D&D and later GTA, and are the first in line to propose sacrificing freedoms for imaginary safety - now allowed to wield covert influence over most of the payments that happen online.
If you mean Visa's porn jihad, that's most likely a saudi dude threatening to pull a large investment, it obviously has nothing to do with children, but any haram.
The usual given reason is that porn/adult stuff tends to generate a relatively large number of chargebacks, due to factors like (1) predatory/dark patterns by porn providers (2) guys’ partners seeing porn charges on the credit card statement and freaking out, and guys claiming they were “hacked” or whatever and then following through and disputing the charges.
Even if the absolute number of chargebacks is small, in relative terms it’s still several times larger than it is for non-“adult” charges, and that kinda destroys profit margins — more support calls, more work, etc.
Or so they say.
I’m not in the industry, so I don’t know. I can certainly believe that many of the oligarchs in charge are weird shitheads with bizarro conservative views, but payment processor leadership doesn’t seem to give a fuck about morals in any other manner, so it’s also kind of weird to me that they’d pick porn and porn only (a seemingly passé target for most conservatives these days) as the one and only target of a uh, decades-long distributed lowkey conspiracy that spans multiple generations of payment processor leadership. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Absolutely agree 100%. Even if they’re not trying to be puritans, this is absolutely the outcome.Yeah but what if I hacked that money fair and square? Why should anyone have the right to block my hard earned not-cash?
Frozen assets are still a wallet with no recourse.