hnthrow1010

That's not the case for every country on the planet

It's not helping there either. Countries where the economy is strictly controlled by the government, like North Korea, are mainly using crypto and defi to centralize even more. Their government can use defi to steal from other countries with impunity, evading international laws while continuing to oppress their own citizens and disallowing them from using the internet.

And how do those prevent rich person A from paying rich person B (by buying a painting owned by B for an inflated price) for some illegal service?

If it were done through a bank (or a law-abiding crypto exchange) they would be required to keep a log of the transaction and the legal identities of the participants, as well as a log of where the money came from and where it's going. The idea is, if buying the painting is just one of the steps to "clean" the money, they'll be able to trace it back to when the money was dirty.

Transactions and storage of money are already decentralized, through the traditional finance system that connects at least thousands of banks and payment processors and other financial institutions. So it can't be that.

You could also argue that artists who sell their artworks for huge sums of money are associating themselves to money laundering.

Yes, that's why transactions for those huge sums are subject to AML laws.

Your favourite castle is motte and bailey?

Less of this, please. Obviously, not everyone into crypto and defi says those exact words. But there are enough saying that type of thing, where I think it's wrong of anyone involved with this to feign ignorance. They know what they're getting into.

I really don't think you want to continue the discussion in the direction of "what's wrong crime A and crime B", that'll get off the rails very quickly.

By association, yes. All cryptocurrency and "defi" ostensibly has that goal. What is it exactly you think they're trying to "decentralize"?

If they're smart, they wouldn't admit to it publicly. But do you not remember the early history of Bitcoin, and the Silk Road? Nothing's changed since then, except some people got arrested and some haven't yet.

When the "artists" have been openly and shamelessly stating, since around 2009, that the entire purpose of their "art" is to aid in laundering money and other crimes? Yes, absolutely.

Basically, the "sanction preventions" Aave is instituting are for show only, in hopes they fool the regulators. They'll annoy and disturb the casual crypto trader but will do nothing to stop the big criminals from money laundering. I hope the developers of these defi lending protocols get hit with the criminal charges next.

Sorry but I try to avoid dumping huge amounts of information on people in every comment, that often doesn't go down well either if you can imagine. If you want more I'll elaborate. There is no possible way you can deploy this service anywhere while effectively complying with AML laws. It isn't going to work. But it's also the only real effective way you can obscure the source of transactions on a blockchain that's forced to be public. There's no reason transactions need to be forced public in the first place, other than how blockchain designers insisted it was a fundamental design parameter, when you probably agree that it isn't and that some transactions should be private by default. The simple solution is to avoid all blockchains and cryptocurrency altogether. Yes, they are that bad. I wish it wasn't true and I could say something good about them, but I just can't after watching 13 years of bad things happen.

And no, things like monero and zcash aren't a working solution to this problem either, that's a whole different discussion though.

No, there are no other real applications for these mixers. The only reason you even need to do that on a public blockchain is because the design of them is so bad that there's no other practical way to have privacy without enabling large amounts of criminal activity. If you really care about privacy, and you don't like criminals, then just don't use any blockchains or cryptocurrency.

Are you making software that has the explicit stated purpose of facilitating illegal money laundering, like these crypto mixers openly say they do? If not, then you don't have anything to worry about from these sanctions.

Exfiltrating money from foreign regimes, etc.

Crypto isn't useful for that. The thing that's actually useful for that is the illegal, unregulated exchange that's making the trade. It doesn't matter what currency they trade it for, it could be anything else besides crypto tokens. Crypto actually just adds extra unnecessary steps because the end goal is almost always to get it back out in another local currency. Unless you plan to get the money and then only spend it on NFTs.

If you ask me, they should all be shut down for selling unregistered securities, because all crypto tokens fit closest to that definition more than anything else. It's impossible for these tokens to actually function as a currency, both technically and legally. They're not a new class of assets, the idea of tradable tokens is not new either.

company that explicitly competes with

According to some crypto promoters I've seen on Twitter, blockchain is apparently the solution to everything and will revolutionize every industry. By their definition, you'd be hard up to find a company that isn't competing with them.

In actuality, the word "blockchain" usually refers to a specific type of distributed database based around a consensus layer on top of a merkle tree. Its usage competes (poorly) with other commercial distributed databases, not with Ethereum. And these "commercial blockchains" still failed to find a single effective use. All of them I've seen are just worse versions of other databases, and are either forks of some open source code, or are directly inspired by Bitcoin or Ethereum or another similar project.

has a vested interest in the failure of open source crypto projects like Ethereum.

I also have a vested interest in the failure of projects like Bitcoin and Ethereum, and it's not because I'm invested in a competitor. It's because I don't like fraud and ponzi-style scams. And all crypto tokens are a variant of the same scam, because they inherently don't have any real value. All of them depend on the miners/validators pumping up the value so they can sell the block rewards and realize their profits. These tokens are all completely useless and valueless without a steady influx of new "investors" artificially inflating the price. Inherently they're just not like a stock, but the false idea of "crypto investing" is suggesting that they are.

You don't have to be invested in another product, to dislike scams and want them to go away.

You're perfectly allowed to criticize your competitors

This author is far from being the only one to criticize blockchains. Lots of others shared the same conclusions: https://concerned.tech/

Ok, thanks. I get what you mean, but English language diffs can easily be falsified with a thesaurus :) A better analogy might be that every comment should be like a unique algorithm, or something along those lines.

But for the average crypto investor who isn't a whale and isn't insider trading on the whales, the dynamics of the market are effectively just random. This isn't like a stock where you can objectively look at the company, compare it to other companies and understand how it derives profit. It can't work either as a currency or as a reliable investment.

I am quite hopeful that the ability for governments to extract wealth is limited greatly by the rise of crypto

I described a situation where this wouldn't happen though.

If the government wants taxes they can do it by selling services to people who can pay for them if they agree it has value.

I'm sorry, this seems contradictory. I thought the possibility of this was already discarded when the idea of reform was thrown out. The assumption with the "bottom-up" idea seems to be that the government will always stay corrupt. If you take that approach then can't you see how this probably will end up like another failed bailout where nothing changes? Effectively all that's happening is more foreign money is being dumped into the system, except now it's just coming from offshore crypto speculators instead of from other governments. Try to look at this from a macro view.

Just my opinion: Crypto is pretty bad regardless of what your politics are. The ridiculous amount of fraud and scams in crypto, and other bad things like ransomware, are wrecking common people too. It can absolutely be worse. And, the theory and ideology of crypto doesn't actually stop a government from collecting taxes anyway.

Ok, you can think that, but there's still no explanation here as to why they can't do it. You should read some other comments further down in the thread, like this one:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32292222

If the hope is that they just won't shut down the internet, or the government will be too weak to stop it... what's the point of cryptocurrency? You could again just get them to use USD or Euro or something else.

That would be disastrous for anyone who has a debt to repay.

I don't have time to listen to this podcast (I'll read a transcript if you have it) but just to respond to your comment: I've never seen the question of what happens after a society becomes "bottom-up crypto centric" get addressed. You have a country where the central bank is suddenly not doing anything, tax fraud is rampant, and the local currency is now further on the brink of collapse. All the citizens' money is effectively being funneled away into entities operating as foreign banks. The government is forced to accept crypto to avoid insolvency and now makes it so you have to pay your taxes in it. If they're still corrupt they'll force people to follow the same regressive restrictions again, and no one will be able to do anything about it because the blockchain is all public. How is this going to help anything? I'm trying not to be bleak here but the idea here seems to be disregarding any hope of reasonable reform.

I've never seen any reasonable explanation for that to be true. Crypto is very easy to censor, just ban the exchanges. Or if the government is really nasty, shut down the national internet.

And if you think they could set up a satellite connection and a mesh net in response to this, they could also use that kind of setup to transact strictly in USD, with an offshore bank. No crypto required.

You're so against people hoarding, i.e. saving money?

The problem with this kind of system: It's not just about saving. What's actually happening is those who have saved more are accumulating even more money by doing nothing, and everyone else who needs to spend it to buy food and shelter is suddenly losing more and more of their money. When it starts happening at a faster rate than the economy is producing actual value then you hit hyperdeflation and the economy spirals.

But if you could pay them in USD or pesos, you would? Can't you see how the government would take an issue with that, the very same issue that they have with USD or pesos?

That has nothing to do with bitcoin specifically though. What you're describing is either someone using another currency or using some kind of digital payment system. It doesn't have to be cryptos.

The internet did not have to overcome network effects in the same way that cryptocurrency has.

This line of thinking is extremely dangerous, even moreso for something that's claiming to be a currency. This is the mentality that lead to these ponzi-like schemes; the promoters are prioritizing growth at all costs for the sole purpose of overcoming the network effects. Not because they actually built decent products.

If we relied on blockchain tech, it would've been processed in a day.

Why? This is an unsubstantiated claim. Blockchains still have an outside body that you're required to trust, several in fact. The most prominent one is the miners.

I can't tell what the admin issues with your sale were because you didn't mention them, but it seems like being able to see the validity of the claim wasn't the issue that took 6 years for lawyers to resolve. You can show them the validity in person on the day of the sale.

Crypto isn't helping there, that's just another form of regulatory arbitrage. If you're exchanging the crypto for USD or pesos anyway then what you're doing is still probably illegal.

I can't speak for the parent comment but I've had the same problem myself in discussing this. I would actually love to have to stop repeating myself, but the crypto CEOs keep also repeating the same marketing lines over and over again with reckless abandon and then a new group of people reads it and pops up the next day asking the same questions. Sometimes I can even directly map some comments to a series of tweets from a CEO just by searching and it's really frustrating. Dan, you should know this as well as anyone: it's easy for some startup to dump out unverified claims all over the internet. It takes continued and constant effort to refute those claims. So what can we do here? It feels like the amount of hype that's (still) happening is inherently not conducive to good discussion.

That seems obvious to me that they absolutely don't want crypto. If it's stablecoins they're after then what they really want is USD, so badly that they'll use whatever shady unregulated crypto bank sells it to them.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think that decentralized DNS, and decentralized naming in general, is one of the few use cases that can be neatly solved by a blockchain, but is extremely hard to solve any other way.

It's an unpopular opinion because it doesn't hold up to scrutiny. Here, let's go through it piece by piece:

A major problem when designing a decentralized naming system, or any naming system at all really, is preventing malicious users from grabbing all the cool names for themselves.

This has nothing to do with malicious users. Any system that allows users to exclusively claim names permanently (or semi-permanently) will have this problem. Even if you invented a way to define and eject all malicious users out of DNS, domain names like facebook.com and youtube.com would still be highly contended and expensive, because of the inherent demand of those names in the current market.

The only way to do this is to make acquiring domains costly

No, that wouldn't exclude malicious customers, it would only exclude customers who don't have a lot of money. You'd just select for the customers who are both malicious and wealthy.

and blockchains are a perfect way to enforce that in a decentralized manner.

In practice, blockchains aren't decentralized at all. This much was obvious to anyone involved, since the first bitcoin mining pool formed in 2010. By making the system costly to join, you're only accelerating the process of centralization.

Other problems include accurately tracking domain ownership and letting the owners transfer domains to others, which cryptocurrencies have solved long ago.

Cryptocurrencies didn't solve this and never will. A blockchain isn't legally binding, so tracking ownership just can't be done there. At best, you can have something that's an approximation of ownership, but still requires a trusted authority (i.e. an oracle) to make the final say on what the ownership actually is.

As an added benefit, because all domains in such a system are owned by a public key, we suddenly no longer need a root of trust for TLS, instead, we accept any TLS certificate signed by that public key.

This is just shifting the problem. Now instead of worrying about trusting the root, you have to worry about trusting every single key out there, and make an individual decision for each of them.