The USP of cryptocurrency is the ability to self-custody. If you sent your money to a company like Voyager, instead of controlling your keys yourself, you missed the point.
Let’s be real, a large fraction of all interest in crypto is as a financial asset. The financial transaction / storage side is relatively uninteresting to people because the existing financial system generally works really well for them in terms of risks, fees, uptime etc.
Which isn’t to say the existing financial system works well for everybody all the time, but in practice crypto just isn’t showing real benefits to offset its many downsides.
One thing crypto does having going for it is the lack of moralising payment processors. I'm really baffled that sex workers and other groups who provide legal services that payment processors don't like aren't embracing crypto. Seems like a perfect environment for it and the on and off-ramps today are far better than what existed back in 2016.
Most customers weren't willing to enter their CC information online in the late 90s and early 00s. It took horny trailblazers to get us to where we are today, to the overall benefit of e-commerce. Comparatively, putting CC info in to Coinbase and putting an address to withdraw the crypto in is far safer than what horny people did back then.
It varied by country, but in general CC had risk mitigation built into them in the late 90’s and early 00s limiting their risks vastly below what most people sending money to Coinbase take on. US: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1643
This goes beyond the question of legal risks and statutory limits, CC’s are debt which means someones money isn’t tied up during a dispute.
The expansion of e-commerce was parallel and had little relation to 'horny trailblazers'. The CC issue was solved by services like PayPal that intermediated CC data, better internet security and better CC dispute resolution. I know people who still hesitate before leaving CC information but would not hesitate if there's Paypal (or similar).
If Bitcoin transactions involved giving your private key to every entity you wanted to transact with (like how credit card numbers work), then this would be a problem.
I don't think that really solves the problem... for instance, you can get your money back if the vendor does not render the product or service promised (with some restrictions of course). With Bitcoin, you're on your own.
With something like Ethereum, you can build refunds into your payment model as long as you and the merchant agree on a set of trusted 3rd parties who can handle any disputes. You can choose different trusted mediators for each transaction and can decide the rules (ex: how many of them are needed to decide that a refund has to happen).
You can also choose not to trust any 3rd party. If I'm buying an on-chain digital item, I probably don't need to support disputes, but if I'm buying something off-chain and don't trust the merchant, I might want that protection.
You are right in practice. But it sounds an awful lot bit like the old "I have nothing to hide" argument against encryption, too?
Many payment processors do restrict the business they want to deal with beyond what the letter of the law requires. (And that is their prerogative as a private business!)
Does it? It sounds like they have a credit card with fraud protection and they already understand how it works, and don't want to have to fiddle with some newfangled financial product that doesn't offer those protections and seems vaguely shady, to me.
Many states in the US have legalised buying and selling of marijuana. Many payment processors don't want to touch this, on neither the buying nor selling side.
You might declare marijuana vaguely shady, but as far as I can tell, it's a legitimate product that consenting adults might want to trade in.
How many people do you see choosing to use Bitcoin rather than cash at marijuana dispensaries? I'm puzzled at how this is a rebuttal of "people don't want to use Bitcoin unless they absolutely need to" argument. If the issue is that taking credit cards is inconvenient for the seller, I don't think buyers generally see that as their problem so long as someone else is willing to accept them.
I don't live anywhere with marijuana dispensaries.
Yes, if you buy in person, then cash works. I was more thinking of buying online. And also where a marijuana business would keep their money.
(For the latter, bitcoin isn't very useful, because suppliers won't accept it. But neither is the legacy banking system always willing to serve businesses in weird niches.)
Which government would come after them? There are lots of different governments around the world, with different views and different laws.
> How is refusing to serve legal sex workers different?
As far as I can tell, in the US discrimination is forbidden against certain protected groups / along certain protected differences only. But you are free to discriminate on all other grounds. Eg a restaurant can legally discriminate against people who don't wear a tie.
In the British rules, sexual orientation is explicitly mentioned, but your trade ain't. So as far as I can tell, it's illegal in the UK to discriminate against gays but legal to discriminate against sex workers.
(However, a government might come after you, if you do something they don't like, even if it's perfectly legal. Eg the government could just 'randomly' decide to audit your taxes all the time, or 'randomly' apply other regulations and rules more strictly.)
I understand and am sort of aware of the laws. It seems however very hypocritical to discriminate base upon profession. IANAL but I suspect that if for example airline will not let passenger to board a plane citing that they work "shitty low paying job" as a reason said airline might get in trouble anyways.
I think the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Iran since the Islamic Revolution etc went for a less legalistic and more moralistic approach.
(Of course, you should still evaluate these policies on their own merit, instead of tarring them guilty by association. To give a counter-example: Nazi Germany was one of the first places to put anti-animal cruelty laws on the books and officials were very concerned about the dangers of smoking. Two stances that are widely popular today, and rightly so.)
Other than the data outlier of the US basically no nation considers hate speech to be free speech. The US has plenty of asinine speech restrictions too that no one seems to find a 1st amendment problem with, like broadcasting a recent marvel film on my own personal website.
Who’s requiring them? Nobody in the US if that’s where they’re operating. The issue is that that content is so off-putting to the average person that it kills the platform. Nobody is hanging around a site full of hate speech unless that’s specifically what they’re looking for.
It does not appear to be justified to make claims about what's true of "the majority of sex workers online". This is not an area where reliable numbers exist.
> I'm really baffled that sex workers and other groups who provide legal services that payment processors don't like aren't embracing crypto.
These people also need to pay their bills and not have their money stolen or otherwise disappear in the “fraud all the way down” world of crypto. Cash solves most of these problems, as well as basic intermediate layers like LLCs.
Cash is not reasonable for internet-based transactions. Payment processors like Stripe and Braintree are better, but they have moralising terms of service and will drop you the moment they find out what you're doing, and good luck getting your money out of that. Banks will frequently give you a hard time or not work with you if you're a sex worker so bank transfers are much more difficult and probably more info than you're willing to give to Johns. OnlyFans bans a lot of (legal) fetish content because of pressure applied by their payment processors, and they take a fat cut (20%) of what you're making on top it.
In an industry where getting fucked by payment processors regularly is part of the business, I think there is obvious appeal to pseudonymous transactions for both buyer and seller. Again, off-ramps are far better in 2023. I can deposit crypto and get cash in my bank account in a working day or two.
…and yet these systems all still outcompete crypto for the use cases you cite. We must therefore discern that the risk of getting fucked by payment processors is less than getting fucked by the crypto ecosystem.
It sounds like you don't work in the adult industry and don't have empathy for how difficult it is do deal with payment processors deciding you can't get paid anymore.
This is a common problem in these discussions. The HN crowd tends to have better access to payment infrastructure and reliable income from their industry. Not everyone has those benefits and many people are punished by our existing system for doing completely legal work that some see as immoral.
No, it sounds like the exact opposite of this: People who have no connection with the reality of a class of people they don’t understand or care about but want to use as puppets to prove a point.
It’s the people saying “Sex workers should just use crypto, it will solve all their problems!” who are lacking empathy, and not the people listing very plausible reasons why “Magic solution X” doesn’t make any problems go away.
> The financial transaction / storage side is relatively uninteresting to people because the existing financial system generally works really well for them in terms of risks, fees, uptime etc.
In sane countries that is, yes. And that's where most of the global wealth is, too.
However, there are places where you need to worry a lot more about the government arbitrarily seizing your funds, or the banks just 'misplacing' them.
(I specifically write 'arbitrarily' above, because sane countries also typically want a cut of your income and/or wealth, but they write laws and regulations _beforehand_ that you can read to figure out how much you'll owe in taxes. Of course, some people also use crypto and other tricks to avoid paying taxes.)
As a compromise, let’s ban cryptocurrency exchanges in all “sane” jurisdictions, because the downsides outweighs the upsides. That seems to be where things are heading already.
These companies will be free to operate everywhere else.
Different jurisdictions generally have their own lawmakers (mostly democratically elected in 'sane' places), and they can decide what they want or don't want to ban.
I'm not really in favour of bans here, because just as no one forces you to enter a casino, no one forces you to trade on a cryptocurrency exchange (or hold any cryptocurrencies at all). Matt Levine's Money Stuff reported a lot on people losing money in crypto over the last two years, and was always amazed that the media couldn't really find those sob stories where orphans and widows lost their life savings. It was always some guys who admitted that they gambled and lost.
However, if eg American elected officials, or their appointed proxies at the SEC, want to ban certain things, who am I to judge?
Here in Singapore the authorities are a lot more crypto friendly, which works for me.
(I don't hold any cryptocurrencies. My investments are all in the most boring index fund available.
My position on weird financial assets is the same as for drugs: I don't think cryptocurrencies are a good investment for most people (on the grounds of insufficient diversification, if nothing else), but I don't see any reason to ban consenting adults from them. By default, let people make their own choices.)
Yea funny story:
My bank won't allow me to buy crypto with my credit card. BUT I am allowed to gamble online with my credit card, those they let through :D
We have casinos here. Our government is an interesting mix between laissez-faire and paternalistic with a strong Puritan streak. (I don't think it's actually of Puritan origin, but a parallel evolution from Chinese culture? Would be interesting to look into the origins.)
The result is that foreigners can enter the casinos willy-nilly, and lose all their money as they please. But as a local you have to pay an entry levy of 150 Singapore dollars, just to remove any illusion that you might be come out ahead when you visit.
You can also tell that government that they should ban you from entry completely (if you know you have a gambling problem). Curiously enough, your relatively can also do that for (or rather, to) you.
And then you are still losing your money, because your supposedly secure hardware wallet had a backdoor all along. Or you are downloading a wallet app that is compromised. Or you are making any one of a million possible mistakes that can lose your everything you have in crypto.
At the end of the day, you need to keep your keys on an a dedicated air-gapped system where you have epoxied the USB ports and have ideally written the OS and all of the firmware (and the compiler) yourself. But then what's the point of a supposed currency of the future that is barely usable without paranoid security measures?
Bitcoin is a crypto nerd’s impractical fantasy of currency that became the ultimate speculative asset ever although it failed dramatically at being an actual currency. It’s traded almost exclusively on gray market exchanges right now, but this and the SEC Coinbase case are the government shifting it to regulated KYC exchanges. They will probably inevitably win, at least in dollar denominated trade
I'm fine with taking on that risk. I encrypt my laptop's hard drive and my backups. If I forget those passwords all my data is gone forever too. I'm willing to take that risk with my data and my money. If you aren't willing to take that risk, crypto might not be for you.
(These are the hard truths they won't tell you in the super bowl commercials)
> If you sent your money to a company like Voyager, instead of controlling your keys yourself, you missed the point.
so eschewing exchanges, you conduct all your commercial transactions directly in crypto straight from your crypto wallets? it's cool you can avoid all fiat like that, but doesn't it limit your purchasing options? Or have I missed another one of the points of crypto?
Most of my commercial transactions are still in fiat. I do use crypto when I can, and yes it's done straight from a local wallet. I use an android app called Cake Wallet and the private key stays locally on the device. I keep as much on my phone as I would paper cash in a leather wallet, under $100. The rest is on a hardware wallet.
I use an exchange occasionally, but I don't keep money parked there long-term like a bank. Deposit fiat, trade for crypto, withdraw crypto. I'm never exposed for more than an hour.
To a lot of people the USP of crypto is spending a few bucks for a chance of making money without leaving home or doing anything. It’s like scratch off tickets that you can buy online.
It's really not though. The point was to get rich and if you can get rich quicker in a custodial pump-and-dump than in a self-custodied decentralized boiler room... you might as well.
There's nothing in the bitcoin whitepaper about getting rich quick. If that's your goal, go ahead and send your money to FTX, Luna, Voyager, or Binance. But that's not my goal. I'm here so I can have self-sovereignty of my money.
the entire concept of money is a social construct. It's a culture wide bluff that we all agree to never call. "self-sovereignty" is antithetical to the idea of money.
It's also notable how much technological infrastructure is required to make this "self-sovereign" money possible - from specialized ASICs to constant internet connectivity. Gold is a much more self-sovereign store of value than any cryptocurrency.
Why does that matter? I'm pretty sure Bitcoin couldn't go back to CPU/GPU mining without killing the transaction rate or spiking the transaction cost. Using your self-sovereign money successfully (and at its current value) requires specialized ASICs to continue to be available.
> I'm here so I can have self-sovereignty of my money.
Except you aren't really. You will always be beholden to one entity or another, in bitcoin the 51% who need to clear your transactions. You just decide to not trust in the current financial apparatus and instead bet on the new.
Betting on something where there is no single interest that can decide to screw you is fundamentally different than trusting something where one entity is in control. In a more principled world, I'd like to think the latter would never exist and people would be willing to go to great lengths to avoid or even protest against its existence.
> There's nothing in the bitcoin whitepaper about getting rich quick.
Sure there is. The capped supply is intended to cause deflation and enrich early adopters if/when Bitcoin goes mainstream. To argue otherwise is to claim that the author of the whitepaper was ignorant of how a currency with limited supply would behave. And if that's true, it's more damning of Bitcoin than the "get rich quick" stuff.
