Sure, but that remaining 5% is 100% PURE OPPORTUNITY.
Remember when the bitcoin evangelists said this kind of thing could never happen?
Well, it is a scheme run by crooks for crooks. Crooks gonna crook.
Really it seems with these exchanges it’s a matter of whether the hackers get the money before the exchange managers run off with it, and it’s very hard to tell which happened in any specific instance.
Reading through that, it sounds like the hackers had some good knowledge about how Binance operates and managed to time their attack perfectly. Sounds suspiciously like some inside knowledge.
I’m sure the invisible hand will work it all out; no need for laws and stuff.
Hey kids, do you want all the fun of cryptocurrency but want to buy it from a multinational surveillance company with a history of troubling privacy problems? Facebook has something it wants you to know about!
Oh, that’s delightful. Can we start referring to “multinational surveillance company [Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon]” in all reporting moving forward?
It’s really quite weird. There’s no reason at all for it to be crypto, other than to be trendy and maybe as an attempt at regulatory arbitrage, though there’s no good reason to think that aspect will succeed. It’s basically AliPay, but largely unregulated and referencing a basket of currencies rather than the domestic currencies of its users.
99% of blockchain ideas are ‘trendy’ solutions looking for problems that are already solved.
It just seems like it lacks both things that are the only reason people like cryptocurrency in the first place:
- Untrackable way to launder money, run scams, and buy illegal things.
- Highly volatile and thus able to be used as a get-rich-quick investment scheme
Without those two things, why even bother with cryptocurrency at all? Just create a payment network like Apple Pay.
True enough. Well, once you discount the outright frauds.
It seems to be part of their supposed arms length arrangement where they don’t actually control the currency - there are a bunch of sponsors who presumably each have the right to run a node of the blockchain processor. This then would give some protection against bad actors.
Presumably this is seen as an alternative to the tried and tested mechanisms used in banking, because they rely on strict regulation, which must be evil. Instead a technological solution with many well known flaws and limitations is used because DISRUPTION WOOHOO.
As Alphaville points out, you don’t need DLT to have a currency board. My confusion is why they think they’ll be able to avoid regulation. If this does actually take off (and it could - AliPay is absolutely huge), governments will regulate the shit out of it. They’re not going to get away with a piddling money transmission licence out of Switzerland if, like AliPay, they end up running the world’s largest money market fund.
So it begins.
I wonder if Zuck anticipated strong opposition by European governments and just said “fuck it” and did it anyway, or if he’s surprised by this.
It’s not just going to be Europe. If Libra were to represent a substantial part of the money supply in the US, you can bet the government and Fed would not stand idly by. And that’s before we get into the basic regulatory violations they talk about in the white paper.
trump is too stupid to do anything about this like he should. Him and Munchin are probably trying to figure out how to profit.