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almostkorean

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wow, I was still using the 2018 version of TAD and didn't realize they pushed updates in 2022. The 2018 version was still better than other tools I've tried, really happy with all the recent upgrades.

Last Flight Out 3 years ago

My grandpa did the same thing when he was 72 years old. Applied for food services, worked in the cafeteria but did extra stuff like DJ a radio show, drove a shuttle, and gave tours. A couple weeks into his stay, my grandpa ended up being the "most qualified" person at the station to take over the greenhouse (he had an agriculture degree which he hadn't used in 48 years) but ended up doing a good job. He travelled a lot but Antarctica was his favorite adventure.

Is there a database or something to lookup stats of car manufacturing failures? A family member of mine recently got a Model X and the back wheel came off while she was driving it on the highway. Never occurred to me that it might be an issue that happens with other manufacturers but would love to see the numbers.

This article has nothing to do with how crypto exchanges make money. They make money from trading fees. Let's say your claim about wash trades is true, why wouldn't the exchange make money from those fake trades?

To answer GPs question, legit exchanges do spend a lot of money and effort on keeping user's assets secure so it's maybe not as easy as it seems. But in the case of FTX, I totally agree. FTX was like 2nd or 3rd highest volume exchange and could have been a highly profitable business on it's own. Only SBF knows the answer to why that wasn't enough.

not a defi expert, but I think the most common way to do this is to use Aave:

  1. borrow Tether
  2. swap it for USDC (or stablecoin of choice)
  3. wait for Tether to crash
  4. pay off your Tether loan at a fraction of its original value
risk is that your tether loan will be accruing interest (currently 1.4%) so if it doesn't crash or takes too long to crash you could be liquidated.

Completely agree, they make claims like this and I'm instantly turned off because it feels like they are lying to my face.

I think they've set up a system that incentivizes long term storage (and possibly a better setup than IPFS) but theres no way in hell they can make a guarantee for more than a few years at best.

I was talking about Coinbase MPC wallet, where they have part of your private key. I think that's pretty far from back to square one, is it not? You still own your private keys but are trusting a centralized organization to keep the other, so it would require both parties to be hacked for the wallet to be at risk.

This is a huge UX issue for anyone that wants to self-custody. In the same spirit as the OP, people are working on solutions for this. Vitalik posted about it last year: https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/11/recovery.html. I don't know the technical details, but Coinbase is launching a wallet system where the private key is "split" between the user and Coinbase.

After explaining improvements to this specific issue, it still feels like way too much friction for the average person to deal with. I think there will be more improvements as time goes on but maybe that's just the cost of doing self-custody. In the end, I guess it's up to the individual to decide whether it's worth it or not.

I think automatically is not the best term here. I'm not an expert, but there are borrowing and lending protocols that let you borrow a large amount of their token pool as long as it is paid back within the same block (plus some fee). So you can write a script to run a transaction that:

  1. borrows a large amount of money
  2. use the large amount of money to do arbitrage
  3. pays back the large amount of money plus any fees
  4. keep profits
and it does so "atomically", so if you can't repay the loan then the transaction fails and the whole thing never happened. or you could lose money if the transaction is successful but the trade is not profitable.

like I said, I'm not an expert so someone correct me if I'm wrong

Pretty close, I'm guessing there are peer to peer lending platforms but typically you do it through a smart contract where assets are pooled together. So when you put your 10 BTC in the lending pool, you can only borrow up to ~80% of that value. If the price of BTC goes down, your BTC gets liquidated if it gets to within 5% of your borrow amount

Sorry, taxes comment was out of place. Just frustrated.

The loans aren't interest free, they have a variable rate determined by supply and demand. For USDC its been pretty steady around 3%. There was a day or two last year where it spiked to 40% when Justin Sun removed billions of his capital.

In response to wire transfer, I was more complaining about having to be at a physical bank branch to do it. Not sure if that is unusual either.

edit: Just remembered that normally I wouldn't have to physically go to the bank. I had to do so to make sure it arrived in time for the signing. I think they told me it would take a day or two if I did it online/over phone? But being there in person they said it would "probably" arrive in a couple hours

Jesus, is the comment about dodging taxes necessary? For the record I paid a fuckton of taxes for my crypto transactions, it would be idiotic not to. Do you know why?

I'm not sure if my wire transfer experience is uniquely bad, but I had to do a wire transfer when I made a down payment on my house last year. To do this I had to drive to a physical bank location, sign some papers, and then they told me it will probably arrive within a couple hours.

Google says the bank I use is 6th largest in the US so maybe bigger banks are better but I'm guessing my experience is not an outlier.

edit: oh also forgot to mention wire transfer limits. I don't know the exact limit is for my bank but I'm guessing it's under the amount I transferred. I'm guessing this would mean multiple trips to a physical bank branch in the year 2022

You're coming from a BTC direction but you don't know what self custody means?

Anyways, an example of what I would use stablecoins for: I expect the price of $TOKEN to go down so I swap it for USDC. While I'm waiting for $TOKEN price to go down I lend my USDC on Aave for ~3% APY (and yes, there is smart contract risk here but I chose Aave in my example for that reason). When $TOKEN price drops enough I swap the USDC back for $TOKEN.

Another situation: I want to send my family member money to help with down payment on a house. I don't want to sell $TOKEN because I think the price will go up, so instead I lend $TOKEN on Aave and borrow stablecoins. I send stablecoins to family member (worth noting this would be difficult to do in FIAT due to the amount) and when he pays me back I can then withdraw my $TOKEN.

One more: I just sold a jpeg and want to make sure I have enough cash to pay taxes next year. Instead of hoping my $TOKEN price will stay same or go up I sell some for USDC to cover taxes

Stripe Crypto 4 years ago

If you were certain an NFT you were buying was not fraudulent and was created by the artist would you still think it's a shit way of supporting them? Is it bad that they have an additional way to make money on top of commissions, Patreon, and merch?

Stripe Crypto 4 years ago

Not what I was trying to say at all, I'm saying that NFT tech is good because the default option is that the artist gets royalties and this happens probably >95% of the time?

I think I felt compelled to mention that people send it anyway because it's good behavior and not all scams/crimes people say it is. In general I think the royalty thing is just one nice bonus of using smart contracts

Stripe Crypto 4 years ago

Not sure what you mean exactly by commercial art pursuits? I'd say about 99% of NFT projects are garbage but I'm a fan of artblocks (https://www.artblocks.io/).

I can talk more about how the system works if you are interested, but some established generative artists have created projects on their platform and have made more than they could before web3.

Stripe Crypto 4 years ago

What makes it a shit way of supporting artists? I have seen some fraud like you describe, but I think it makes a lot of sense for digital only artists.

Stripe Crypto 4 years ago

Royalties are built into marketplace smart contracts. Individuals can do P2P trades where the artist doesn't receive any royalty but this doesn't happen very often. Anecdotally, it typically only happens on large deals and people who do a P2P trade often send the artist their royalty anyway (but still benefit from not paying the OpenSea fees for example)

Not sure what you mean by the second question

No idea what the actual numbers look like, but I think I see your point and think that level of overreach is unlikely to happen in most scenarios. If the government could track cash as well as they could track crypto, should a business or individual that unknowingly receives illicit cash be punished? It's certainly possible but I think it would be untenable in a country where people can vote. I also didn't expect Canada to freeze bank accounts before last month, so maybe I'm off base

That is mostly correct and a big issue with crypto in its current state IMO. If government blocks your off-ramps, it's possible you could still sell via a bitcoin ATM or find someone to do an OTC trade but those are obviously not ideal.

If we are talking ETH, it's possible to use zero knowledge proofs to send money and make it impossible to trace back to the source (see https://tornado.cash/). This also has some limitations, like you wouldn't be able to tornado 8 figures worth of ETH but certainly better than an OTC deal. It's also possible that the off-ramp exchanges could block any ETH that was sent through tornado. This gets hairy pretty quickly though, as the tornado ETH could easily be wash traded or mixed. Or it could be used legitimately, swapped for stablecoins, etc.