Comment by piva00
13 hours ago
> What coinbase needs are IRL offices where you can go and do things like account recovery, and where people trying to steal money can be caught and prosecuted (and makes a huge barrier for the overseas thieves who are usually doing this)
That's just a bank.
Beyond the regulatory-dodge and crypto marketing explain to me how Coinbase is NOT a bank
Cryptocurrency firms exist in a quantum superposition of bank and not-a-bank until you interact with them, at which point they collapse into whichever state costs them less money.
lol. I couldn't help but chuckle when I read this comment :)
Well, right now they’re applying for a charter which suggests they don’t think they’re a bank, but I can think of some other reasons, too.
lol they even do fractional reserve things like banks, except they're more shady and don't acknowledge it, now I'm either connecting dots that shouldn't be connected or some withdrawal locks that happened through some big arbitrage opportunities were very suspicious.
Correct. Coinbase is a bank that holds cryptocurrency.
And OpenSea is a zoo that holds apes.
Watching crypto enthusiasts run into every problem that society already tackled with in the past when developing currency and its controls, and then coming up with solutions that look exactly the same as what dirty fiat currency uses, has been a source of much entertainment the past few years
> every problem that society already tackled with in the past
More KYC creates more problems while solving some others. Why didn't the same society despite KYC/AML tackle the problem pointed at in a previous comment? "Florida teens kidnap Las Vegas man, drive him to Arizona desert, steal $4M in cryptocurrency"[1] Why is there this crime?
Without mandatory KYC laws, this particular attack would be near pointless. No name tied to account, bookkeeping doesn't archive wire transaction details for the past 10 years.
Let businesses easily accept cryptocurrency (like... regular cash?), without a blade to their throat held by the government, and the need for such centralization points will greatly diminish. People get in trouble by p2p-exchanging money with unknown peers; in some instances this "trouble" has the unit of "years".
It's in nobodies' interest to protect cryptocurrency payments as the alternative, other than the activists, and the big groups jumping in on it for the speculation purposes - something they had refined decades ago. There's CBDC is on the horizon.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43999011
Yea see the problem is that you are arguing under some implicit idea that you’ll just accept the results of the system.
Every single crypto property I’ve talked to has ended up at a point where they believes that someone cheated them outside the bounds of the system and then look to authority figures to rectify the situation, like the government.
If you are someone who actually believes that crypto transactions should be unmodifiable by any third party then what you said makes sense. I just don’t think that anyone telling me they believe that isn’t lying to themselves at best, and lying to everyone else at worst
This is an exchange problem, not a crypto problem. You don’t need an exchange to hold crypto.
But they need exchanges to get real money to flow in and out of cryptocurrency easily. Without it, cryptocurrency by itself would likely be worth far less than it is today.
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You need an exchange to do some core things that people want to use cryptocurrencies for.
It may not be a crypto-as-a-theoretically/ideologically-pure-construct problem, but it absolutely is a crypto-as-a-real-world-asset problem.
Yes, I think I’m familiar with the crypto enthusiasts defenses that all boil down to looking at a single aspect of their system in a vacuum and not realizing that if anyone wants to functionally use crypto as a currency and not as a speculative asset or tool in crime, then all these aspects actually have to work and work together
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As others have said, it has nothing to do with crypto, it is an exchange problem, and a government intervention problem.
Spherical cow in a vacuum
As I understand, the root of the problem is that Coinbase kept lot of sensitive information, including photos of IDs. If Coinbase was fully anonymous, and didn't require any KYC, the impact of the leak would be insignificant because it would be difficult to link user number 12345 with some real-world person.
So if we want to constrain impact of such attacks, we must make companies keep less data and delete them faster. For example, instead of storing a photo of ID, store just a checkbox that the person showed their ID and it was valid.
This applies not only to cryptocurrency, but to any company like Google, Uber, Amazon etc - if they didn't keep extra data, there would be little value in the leaks.
So the blame is not at cryptocurrency, but on companies not wishing to delete the data and governments demanding them to collect the data not necessary for operation. It's the government and capitalists who create problems out of nowhere.
> store just a checkbox that the person showed their ID and it was valid.
Doesn't work at scale. You get bribes, rogue employees, socially engineered employees. In the US, look up the articles about phone/SIM unlocks and SIM card copies. Russia has a problem with e-signatures, that most people have no idea about. It's possible to sell somebody's real estate with one of these. Loans granted just based on passport data. Neither politics nor media highlight these issues. Overall in this case your suggestion tries to handle the symptoms of the KYC requirement.
Here's a more extreme treatment: let people change their full legal name at will. Gender's already kinda possible.
Is there anything crypto does that paper currency doesn’t?
Paper currency can be devalued by the government by printing lot of paper (this has happened many times in our history). Cryptocurrency cannot.
Is there anything crypto does that paper currency doesn’t?
Gets you the equivalent of mugged by people on the other side of the planet?
At least with cash, it's a one-on-one involuntary transaction.
Yes, electronic transfer.
Come on, if you’re going to copy someone else’s snark, pick a good one.
"Cryptocurrency" is a misnomer, because none of them are actual currencies.
Cryptocurrencies are classified, for now, as securities.
Currency is currency and cryptocurrency is not. So please do not attempt to compare apples to oranges here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_(finance)
If you wish to compare cryptosecurities to other securities, then do that, but don't try to act like it is some sort of future utopian currency.