Of course not (and you could have looked that up). If the whole point of crypto is to get away with all that icky government interference. Like the FDIC.kyphysics said:
OneCoin appears to have been an example of that, @russ_watters, with the added mystery that founder, Dr Ruja Ignatova, has vanished, purportedly with much of theruss_watters said:
My understanding is that bitcoin is only an anonymous as the wallet addresses are. That is, everyone can see all the transactions into or out of wallet AxX76TTcF (or whatever the wallet address is), but they don't know who actually controls that wallet and there's no way to find out by purely looking at the blockchain. But if I link a wallet address to, say, Coinbase, who I think require an ID verification, then Coinbase knows that I control that wallet and thus the transactions aren't entirely anonymous anymore.fluidistic said:
"Know your customer" law is the weak link in the libertarian blockchain ideal, @Drakkith. Exchanges are increasingly bound by banking regulation in order to convert between crypto or into fiat currency, so your point is absolutely spot on.Drakkith said:
They often do, @fluidistic, and it seems the immaturity of crypto is one reason we're seeing significant theft, but do you think that if hacks and scams continue to plague the crypto world, the hype phase will pass and use / acceptance will start to wane?fluidistic said:
I don't think so, I think crypto has a bright future.Melbourne Guy said:
fluidistic said:
I would have hoped a little bit more research. It's not the known smart contract address that redistribute parts of the stolen funds. There are relayer addresses, I would guess they are similar to nodes in the Tor network. Anyone is free to set up such wallets.Office_Shredder said:
You can't request a proof of origin for every piece you receive. With putting everything in a common pool somewhere and distributing it among random transactions the traces are messed up just sufficiently.Office_Shredder said:
Latest news on Tornado Cash is a blacklist status from the US Treasury that is likely to catch up honest retail investors and likely to be applied to other sites that provider similar services:fluidistic said:
$1.9 billion is a lot of value (granted, total crypto market cap has hovered at $1-$2 trillion the past 12 months).
I don't understand what actually happened there. Sure, I sometimes accidentally close a program without saving, but why did closing the program brick the funds? Isn't the data on who owns what in a database that the program is just accessing? Heck, even if the database got corrupted, couldn't they go to a backup?Drakkith said:
2% of the market being stolen a year sounds like an awful lot. I don't know what it is for normal money/investments, but it can't be a significant amount of money. When was the last time you heard of a bank getting robbed of all its money? Part of the issue is that unlike banks, it seems like knowing which crypto exchange is going to be the next to get robbed (or collapse due to being a scam) is a blind game of Russian Roulette.kyphysics said:
I don't know either. At least almost all of the lost funds were from themselves.russ_watters said:
For theft, it's a lot.russ_watters said:
russ_watters said:
Oh, I dunno.russ_watters said:
It's 2 billions out of a marketcap a thousand (or 500 times these days) times bigger, so that would be about 0.1 percent.russ_watters said:
Speculative investments are not necessarily comparable, @russ_watters, even if they're in the same asset class, and 'superior' depends on your perspective. BTC seems a better hold for value, but ETH offers smart contract / app features that BTC does not support, and ETH has higher name recognition than most other coins with comparable features, so it's likely 'superior' in that regard.russ_watters said:
From an energy consumption this is a terrific move, even though it's been a long time coming. From a fundamental business model move, though, it's gutsy...and perhaps fatal.russ_watters said:
I'm not asking why they are different, I'm asking why they aren't different, because that's what the reality seems to be in terms of how they are behaving. The markets are treating them as if they are nearly exactly the same thing. As it turns out, basically everyone who is driving the market doesn't think either is superior to the other at all.Melbourne Guy said:
Yeah, that's part of what I don't understand about the new model. If mining drives the perceived value, then removing it should remove perceived value. And certainly with any major change should come uncertainty about the future. That should cause Eth to behave differently from other cryptos...if any of those things matter.
Aha! Sorry, I missed your intent. Sure, all coins are viewed as a generally equivalent asset class because they pretty much are.russ_watters said:
Well, the merge only just happened but the first response was the price of ETH plummeting, so the market very much removed value. Maybe, over the longer term, reduced issuance could drive individual token prices up, but nobody knows at this stage. As for ETH being different...it isn't, until / unless it can develop as an app platform and show significant recurring revenue for participants.russ_watters said:
Mining isn't really a driver of value in my opinion. Miner influence in the market usually shows up as selling pressure, since miners typically have to sell some proportion of their mined BTC to pay for expenses. If the price of BTC fell 99% and stayed there, most miners would shutdown, reducing the hash-rate of the blockchain until the algorithms caught up and reduced the mining difficulty. The remaining miners would then be able to mine more BTC (proportionally to what they used to be able to do) and remain in business.russ_watters said:
Well, it just looks to me like it is just acting 50% more volatile than Bitcoin: down 30% to BTC's 20% in that time, but up 6% to BTC's 4% today. I haven't taken a deep dive, but I don't see much to indicate a divergence yet.Melbourne Guy said:
Sure, returning value/revenue is ultimately what matters in the end. But before that what drives an asset is belief that it will. I guess what the market is saying is people don't believe that it will, and that surprises me.
Investors across most asset classes believe that the gravy train has pulled out of the station, and since the belief that crypto was disconnnected from the traditional economy has evaporated, it is no surprise the market has lost its mojo. But that's across the board, so trying to untangle exactly what's driving one asset compared to another in the same class can get complicated.russ_watters said: