Binance admitted that they enabled funds to be sent to Hamas, ISIS and Al-Qaeda, in addition to Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories, Russian darknets, tens of millions of dollars in ransomware, North Korean hackers, and more than 1,000 child porn transactions.
The most heinous crimes and atrocities in today's world are being funded with cryptocurrency.
At this point, somebody will jump in with: "So what, cash dollars are being used by Hamas too!" — yes, of course. But moving a million dollars in physical cash is much harder. Crypto companies like Binance have built their entire business models around evading the systems that exist to prevent money laundering and terrorist funding. And the criminals have certainly been paying attention. The entire crypto ecosystem is severely tainted by this association.
The key question for me now is: once you subtract all the plainly unethical transfers, securities-laws-runarounds, pump and dumps, and wash trading, how much of a business is left? Secondarily, is that ‘total remaining market cap’ larger or smaller than the total value of VC funding in the ecosystem?
> ... once you subtract all the plainly unethical transfers, securities-laws-runarounds, pump and dumps, and wash trading, how much of a business is left?
Coinbase, a HN unicorn, probably knows? Their KYC/AML is top notch (which is a PITA for honest people btw). They know how many USD actually entered and whom send them. They may have had insiders accused of pump and dumping but AFAIK Coinbase hasn't been accused of pump and dump.
Coinbase has now been chosen by BlackRock to keep the Bitcoin backing the BlackRock ETF in custody: I take it if Bitcoin ETFs are accepted, and if BlackRock and Amundi and I don't now who else start launching Bitcoin ETF, we may begin to see what's left?
Someone else who may know: that weird dude who is behind MSTR: he basically bought 158 000 Bitcoins at an average price of $29 K USD and he plans to buy much more. (if you want to long or short Bitcoin, you can do so on the MSTR stock for it basically follows the ups and downs of Bitcoin).
What's left, for all we know, could be much more than what's already in (I've got no crystall ball though).
The one thing that I'm sure of is that it's not all fraudulent.
For example an estimated 25% of all people in argentina have cryptocurrencies: I doubt one person out of every four there is a criminal!?
Switzerland: if there's one country where its citizens really don't strike me as criminals it's Switzerland. 20%+ people owning cryptocurrencies there.
I can understand the "there are no use cases besides speculation" argument.
But I cannot understand the "all the people using cryptocurrencies are criminal" one.
When you've got several countries in the world where at least one out of every five person did at least try cryptocurrencies, there is something.
I always wondered why the US didn't crack harder on these exchanges (and crypto in general) and my conclusion is that the government has a second agenda for these.
Either because they can trace the money path more easily (than physical money) or that they are using it for their own covert ops.
The only problem is the right hands aren't getting paid off.
The Reinsurance Industry doesn't work in Lloyds, Macau, basically a PO Box in the Caribbean because they're moving millions and billions of dollars FOR CHARITY.
So Binance didn't commit the crimes? The were just a conduit for funds between criminals? Kind of like the bank branches in Miami FLA that used to bank for drug dealers?
> The most heinous crimes and atrocities in today's world are being funded with cryptocurrency.
Just for kicks: according to several sources (IMF, CIA world factbook, UN, ...), the percentage of the world's GDP tied to criminal activities is 2% to 5%.
2% to 5% of the entire world's GDP. We're in a $100 trillion+ world GDP.
So 2 to 5 trillion USD are tied to criminal activities.
The most heinous crimes and atrocities in today's world are, sadly, not very different from the most heinous crimes and atrocities from 15 years ago.
And 15 years ago they had nothing to do with cryptocurrencies.
There's no way to launder 2 to 5 trillion using cryptocurrencies. These amount are just way too big.
> But moving a million dollars in physical cash is much harder.
A million? Criminals have to move 2 to 5 trillion USD yearly. Cryptocurrencies are insignificant and helpless here: the amounts are way too big.
Moreover most cryptocurrencies uses aren't fraudulent (you have to be dumb to leave tracks in Bitcoin or Ethereum public ledgers, as shown by TFA once again) and most crimes do not involve cryptocurrencies.
What about priorities? As in: going after the actual crimes instead of a totally insignificant source of funding of said criminals?
2 to 5 trillions, yearly, tied to criminal activities. Ponder that.
A lot of crime is obviously very local. The 2-5% of GDP number is irrelevant in this context.
> “What about priorities?”
Yeah, whataboutism is the primary line of defense for crypto.
It’s possible to do multiple things at once. If we shut down this environmental disaster of a virtual casino that’s used primarily by the criminals, it won’t take away anything from all the other efforts to fight crime.
If 90% of those trillions go through cryptocurrency platforms, wildly justifies closing them down. Or at least implement drastic Know-Your-Customer rules. But at the same time, if those platforms are also only used by people who bypass taxes, then there is no legit usage left for those platforms. Might as well leave them open and investigate each customer.
> The entire crypto ecosystem is severely tainted by this association.
I don't understand the impetus to view it as a taint.
The fact that crypto can be used for things that the state wishes to prohibit is strong evidence that it is effective and politically neutral - and those are exactly the features it is striving for.
The desire to stamp out war and terrorism and violence is laudable, and I certainly agree on the importance of decreasing the influence of the groups you suggest. But attempting this by creating a complex, closed-source, global, locked down monetary and economic system has collateral damage - in the form of easy money available for imperial ambition - that is worse than the problem it is purporting to solve.
Surely if we all believe in the basic decency of people, and of our universal desire for peace and understanding, we can deprecate institutions of terror by means other than handing over limitless economic power to the state?
In a democracy, those limitless powers are limited by voters. The government can only pass laws and implement regulations that are acceptable to a democratic public. To the extent that voters want to move their money freely around the world, they also want policies that prevent the transfer of money to terrorists or child molesters. These powers are not limitless at all. They are limited through democracy.
Crypto is therefore a way to work around the wishes of the majority of others. That’s anti-democratic. It’s not freedom so much as it is tyranny.
It sounds like typical propaganda against cryptocurrency.
To be clear I'm 100% for cash, but also it is impossible to ignore all those fabricated narratives against crypto about financing everything currently wrong.
Crypto is real threat for banks and states and they'll do everything to hold their monopoly in financial system.
Regular Russian credit and debit cards‡ now work there, thanks to the magic of NSPK. I don't think Crypto had any significant market share there.
‡ Including the ones which were previously branded MasterCard and Visa, these no longer work internationally obviously, but domestically they didn't skip a beat thanks to aforementioned NSPK
This doesn't stop with kicking Binance out of the US, though, right? It's a step in the right direction for making it harder for criminals to access US dollars, but the liquidity of moving crypto around is still there and the ability to cash out into other fiat currencies is still present.
I have no idea how difficult it is to turn varying fiat currencies into dollars, though. Presumably challenging when dealing with large sums and trivial with small sums?
Everyone has been paying attention: the world of capital controls has been gone for 10 years and we let public figures play with themselves proclaiming the opposite. While they already knew that transaction whitelisting was a waste of taxpayer dollars and an impossible waste of private sector resources to do.
What you’re actually seeing is that everyone is using crypto as a public utility. Everyone as in all types of parties.
Crypto exchanges are not actually capable of pretending to play this game. Third party software has been created to attempt to flag transactions with an obvious sanctioned source, but the user unlinking that source is very easy. Binance reduced friction so much that users didn't bother doing that apparently either. Binance’s aspirations grew so big that they couldnt be just a website and server not incorporated anywhere. But basically every other centralized custodial exchange is the same.
It is simply not possible to play along with the state’s deprecated path of policing transactions. The most compliant exchanges will simply automate mountains of paperwork to FinCEN, the suspicious activity reports that the GAO points out are not read at all. Binance is in trouble for simply not doing that because the government doesnt really have a tool to police this either.
Many people have made this observation. Many people that made this observation are 10 years older now, have seen their own state fall apart and provided a convenience to the governance organization and people in that area. That’s how crypto propagates. The concept just waits until the human discovers a friction, and then flips them and all the nearest humans like nodes in a graph.
This understanding increases confidence in crypto from people that matter more than the pearl clutching people worried about “but criminals!” that don't matter, as it is predictable how more capital enters crypto from all sources around the world over time.
Its all quite relative, are we supposed to care that a Chinese citizen circumvented China’s capital control using crypto. Is a Chinese citizen supposed to care that someone on the US OFAC list can access international finance? in each country’s sphere both are “criminals”, but are they? Don't we value the freedom of the Chinese person escaping oppressive capital controls of their administration? Crypto supersedes this concept and debate, deprecating the need to debate it at all, capital flows.
These kind of court cases are instruction manuals to everyone that was on the fence. People that didn't have an example of anyone using crypto for goods and services or converting it to local currency now do. All they see is the exchange getting in trouble, nothing changing, and everyone including people on the OFAC list not getting in trouble or their assets frozen. More nodes flipped.
Any ideas why Binance didn't file a single SAR? Especially because they were hiring all these compliance people, ex prosecutors, ex FBI agents, etc so surely it would've come up. I'm surprised they didn't just game the system and file a bunch of useless ones.
+ the SEC pretty much acting like a mob engaging in grand scale extorsion. The claim and demand for its chairman to step down was recently made by a congressman, not some crypto fanatic.
1. Ordinary banks are not sued for absolutely the same thing, which probably occurs to much bigger extent in major banks which pass many times more transactions than Binance
2. Forget about Russian darknets, Russian mafia lives in London, and New York in the open to complete disregard of the same financial regulators.
3. It's practically impossible to catch people who can fake, or buy a passport to do small scale money laundering, but forget about the small fish.
BILLIONS of Russian money gets laundered through biggest US banks every day completely legally, through schemes known to all big banks, and financial regulators for decades.
> Ordinary banks are not sued for absolutely the same thing, which probably occurs to much bigger extent in major banks which pass many times more transactions than Binance
The big question is if these things would be possible without crypto existing. History suggests they are, so I’m not sure if crypto really makes anything possible on that front that wasn’t before. Some of the largest terrorist attacks and most entrenched armed resistance movements took place pre crypto. I don’t think access to cryptocurrency would have made the vietcong significantly more effective for example.
It's not about a binary possibility of yes/no, it's about ease and frequency.
Crypto can mean an attack can be funded with 50x more money than had been possible previously, or 20 organizations can be funded where previously only 2 could have worked out the logistics.
Trying to frame this as a binary possible/impossible is the wrong lens.
No, the big question is what the overall percentage of dollar volume is being used for these crimes. Comparing to history is silly.
I would also assume that cryptocurrency makes moving money for crimes vastly easier. And I would also suspect a large amount of volume of transactions are illegal or gray in nature.
Note what has not really got attention yet, except in a Jason Calacanis podcast. Several VC firms in one specific US state were passing around instructions on how to do pump and dump schemes on these exchanges...the exchange mention was FTX.
This is the tip of what is coming as far as US govt investigations and court cases.
Investor wise what are the compliant safe exchanges? Anyone? Exactly, no one has any idea as of yet and that should scare all of us who want to use crypto.
What, and trust the people who have been doing QE for half my life with the soundness of my medium of exchange? The same people who froze the bank accounts of peaceful protestors in my capitol city last year?
I'll abandon crypto when it becomes the second-best alternative to a state-controlled money supply. The shenanigans of the Davos crowd are becoming too weird to do otherwise.
Crypto turned exactly opposite of what Satoshi wanted....he or they wanted transparent, mathematically (cryptographically) proven, decentralized open ledger transactions, not this sh*t show of fraud and anarchy.
Yes, but in majority of cases you still need some legal entity that can convert crypto to fiat so you can actually buy stuff with real money. Would be enough to forbid that and crypto is pretty much done.
I recall having a conversation in about 2016 with a lawyer who was looking into crypto for potential opportunities. After a thorough analysis, he said, “In a few years, all these people will be in jail.”
Except it's 2023, and almost no people who've dealt with cryptocurrency is in jail. A few notable exceptions exists, but you don't exactly go to jail for sending 0.1 Bitcoin around.
Is not they crypto is bad itself, but it creates incentive for people to be bad. Anonymous transfers? Issuing tokens like they are stock assets? Buy and sell the token to bid up prices and volume? These are clear and easy use cases.
I've been saying this from day 1, and here it goes again: 99% of the people involved in crypto is a scumbag. And every day that goes by evidence accumulates in my favor.
All of the other reasons barely register. One thing you may note about the list is how many are crimes or are crime adjacent. Even the honest speculators are living in a world that promises unreasonably high returns funded by the criminal activities of the rest of the items. You're probably saying "but ideological reasons doesn't necessary mean crimes", but when you ask them what those ideological reasons are they pretty much always boil down to not paying taxes or evading law enforcement for reasons they don't want to explicitly state.
I've seen folks mention that it's about "the future" in a hand-wavy, abstract, nebulous sense. But their actions demonstrate profiteering, opportunism, and the greater-fool theory in action. Basically, for me, it seemed like all the ideology was intellectual cover (aka rationalizing) for plain ole greed, so they don't have to admit to themselves and others that it has nothing to do with the betterment of humanity and the future, and they just want to get rich quickly. To call it greed would be somewhat unbecoming, and the ideological arguments sounded good enough to assuage any psychological conflicts in oneself.
Might not be a generous interpretation, but if the ideology were indeed at the core of it, I feel like other areas of their lives would reflect said ideologies.
For the record, greed was at the core of my own interest in crypto when I was looking into it, so I could be projecting. Or it could be that said people and myself both experienced this as the driving force behind our interest in crypto as laymen.
I think there is a strong technological interest in crypto, Bitcoin kicked off a triple-entry bookkeeping system so there is a new tech interest and ability to make money in a new financial space, many good communities have arisen out of that.
There is many tech communities buzzing with blockchain related tech and some serious innovation, a lot of interesting new projects from lower cost faster international transactions through to distributed GPU rendering, identity systems, and the possibilities with NFT's have barely got started.
It's also a new asset class for investors with ETF's from BlackRock etc round the corner its evident it's a now a rapidly maturing space, what's happened with Binance is evident that regulation is starting to catch up, but its regulation being so slow and indecisive that has made it easy pickings for illegal activity to occur.
This is so cynical it's hilarious. Why is ideological mentioned last? Most people I know who are into crypto (and I know a lot) are into it because they believe in economically sound, censorship resistant currency.
I think you are largely correct but I don't think it was always this way.
When I first heard about Bitcoin the price had just hit $5 and everyone was either a hardcore libertarian or they thought the idea of a digital currency was very scifi and exciting. I fell into the latter camp and became increasingly disinterested as the years progressed despite making really good money off a brief mining stint.
I'll take the other side of this argument and point out: it probably took decades if not centuries to start using paper currency. Will crypto fail? Maybe. But to say that people building an alternate currency to the one we currently have are "scumbag" is a bit much. They are building a financial system that we might one day decide is better than what we currently have available to us. Sure, some are opportunistic bad-actors, but 99%? I don't think thats fair.
Right back atcha pal. Crypto trades full transparency for full autonomy. It's hell for authoritarian regimes and corrupt middlemen both. 99% of people against crypto benefit from one of those two.
I'm confident that I personally know more than 1% of the engineers who contribute to production crypto codebases, and I have to say, I've not met the cohort you describe.
Every ethereum event is filled with the most tolerant, peaceful, healthy, hopeful, lovely, hard-working people.
I love playing these events, because the crowds are always so warm and enthusiastic and so apt so break into sing-along. :-)
Readit News
Bloomberg at least bothered to get the details:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-22/binance-l...
Binance admitted that they enabled funds to be sent to Hamas, ISIS and Al-Qaeda, in addition to Russian-occupied Ukrainian territories, Russian darknets, tens of millions of dollars in ransomware, North Korean hackers, and more than 1,000 child porn transactions.
The most heinous crimes and atrocities in today's world are being funded with cryptocurrency.
At this point, somebody will jump in with: "So what, cash dollars are being used by Hamas too!" — yes, of course. But moving a million dollars in physical cash is much harder. Crypto companies like Binance have built their entire business models around evading the systems that exist to prevent money laundering and terrorist funding. And the criminals have certainly been paying attention. The entire crypto ecosystem is severely tainted by this association.
Coinbase, a HN unicorn, probably knows? Their KYC/AML is top notch (which is a PITA for honest people btw). They know how many USD actually entered and whom send them. They may have had insiders accused of pump and dumping but AFAIK Coinbase hasn't been accused of pump and dump.
Coinbase has now been chosen by BlackRock to keep the Bitcoin backing the BlackRock ETF in custody: I take it if Bitcoin ETFs are accepted, and if BlackRock and Amundi and I don't now who else start launching Bitcoin ETF, we may begin to see what's left?
Someone else who may know: that weird dude who is behind MSTR: he basically bought 158 000 Bitcoins at an average price of $29 K USD and he plans to buy much more. (if you want to long or short Bitcoin, you can do so on the MSTR stock for it basically follows the ups and downs of Bitcoin).
What's left, for all we know, could be much more than what's already in (I've got no crystall ball though).
The one thing that I'm sure of is that it's not all fraudulent.
For example an estimated 25% of all people in argentina have cryptocurrencies: I doubt one person out of every four there is a criminal!?
Switzerland: if there's one country where its citizens really don't strike me as criminals it's Switzerland. 20%+ people owning cryptocurrencies there.
I can understand the "there are no use cases besides speculation" argument.
But I cannot understand the "all the people using cryptocurrencies are criminal" one.
When you've got several countries in the world where at least one out of every five person did at least try cryptocurrencies, there is something.
Either because they can trace the money path more easily (than physical money) or that they are using it for their own covert ops.
The Reinsurance Industry doesn't work in Lloyds, Macau, basically a PO Box in the Caribbean because they're moving millions and billions of dollars FOR CHARITY.
Deleted Comment
Just for kicks: according to several sources (IMF, CIA world factbook, UN, ...), the percentage of the world's GDP tied to criminal activities is 2% to 5%.
2% to 5% of the entire world's GDP. We're in a $100 trillion+ world GDP.
So 2 to 5 trillion USD are tied to criminal activities.
The most heinous crimes and atrocities in today's world are, sadly, not very different from the most heinous crimes and atrocities from 15 years ago.
And 15 years ago they had nothing to do with cryptocurrencies.
There's no way to launder 2 to 5 trillion using cryptocurrencies. These amount are just way too big.
> But moving a million dollars in physical cash is much harder.
A million? Criminals have to move 2 to 5 trillion USD yearly. Cryptocurrencies are insignificant and helpless here: the amounts are way too big.
Moreover most cryptocurrencies uses aren't fraudulent (you have to be dumb to leave tracks in Bitcoin or Ethereum public ledgers, as shown by TFA once again) and most crimes do not involve cryptocurrencies.
What about priorities? As in: going after the actual crimes instead of a totally insignificant source of funding of said criminals?
2 to 5 trillions, yearly, tied to criminal activities. Ponder that.
> “What about priorities?”
Yeah, whataboutism is the primary line of defense for crypto.
It’s possible to do multiple things at once. If we shut down this environmental disaster of a virtual casino that’s used primarily by the criminals, it won’t take away anything from all the other efforts to fight crime.
who says it's physical?
I don't understand the impetus to view it as a taint.
The fact that crypto can be used for things that the state wishes to prohibit is strong evidence that it is effective and politically neutral - and those are exactly the features it is striving for.
The desire to stamp out war and terrorism and violence is laudable, and I certainly agree on the importance of decreasing the influence of the groups you suggest. But attempting this by creating a complex, closed-source, global, locked down monetary and economic system has collateral damage - in the form of easy money available for imperial ambition - that is worse than the problem it is purporting to solve.
Surely if we all believe in the basic decency of people, and of our universal desire for peace and understanding, we can deprecate institutions of terror by means other than handing over limitless economic power to the state?
Crypto is therefore a way to work around the wishes of the majority of others. That’s anti-democratic. It’s not freedom so much as it is tyranny.
Moving a million dollars by wiring it from your HSBC account is actually much easier than doing it with crypto.
edit: and in the HSBC case the CEO didn't even lose his job!
To be clear I'm 100% for cash, but also it is impossible to ignore all those fabricated narratives against crypto about financing everything currently wrong.
Crypto is real threat for banks and states and they'll do everything to hold their monopoly in financial system.
Regular Russian credit and debit cards‡ now work there, thanks to the magic of NSPK. I don't think Crypto had any significant market share there.
‡ Including the ones which were previously branded MasterCard and Visa, these no longer work internationally obviously, but domestically they didn't skip a beat thanks to aforementioned NSPK
I mean, Tzahal moved 40 millions a month from Qatar directly to Hamas-controlled checkpoints for years, so i guess it depends.
Cash App
https://hindenburgresearch.com/block/
I have no idea how difficult it is to turn varying fiat currencies into dollars, though. Presumably challenging when dealing with large sums and trivial with small sums?
What good are sanctions if you can easily get around them?
Why are there sanctions? What’s the objective of sanctions? … What happens if sanctions fail? Whats the worst thing to happen? …
What you’re actually seeing is that everyone is using crypto as a public utility. Everyone as in all types of parties.
Crypto exchanges are not actually capable of pretending to play this game. Third party software has been created to attempt to flag transactions with an obvious sanctioned source, but the user unlinking that source is very easy. Binance reduced friction so much that users didn't bother doing that apparently either. Binance’s aspirations grew so big that they couldnt be just a website and server not incorporated anywhere. But basically every other centralized custodial exchange is the same.
It is simply not possible to play along with the state’s deprecated path of policing transactions. The most compliant exchanges will simply automate mountains of paperwork to FinCEN, the suspicious activity reports that the GAO points out are not read at all. Binance is in trouble for simply not doing that because the government doesnt really have a tool to police this either.
Many people have made this observation. Many people that made this observation are 10 years older now, have seen their own state fall apart and provided a convenience to the governance organization and people in that area. That’s how crypto propagates. The concept just waits until the human discovers a friction, and then flips them and all the nearest humans like nodes in a graph.
This understanding increases confidence in crypto from people that matter more than the pearl clutching people worried about “but criminals!” that don't matter, as it is predictable how more capital enters crypto from all sources around the world over time.
Its all quite relative, are we supposed to care that a Chinese citizen circumvented China’s capital control using crypto. Is a Chinese citizen supposed to care that someone on the US OFAC list can access international finance? in each country’s sphere both are “criminals”, but are they? Don't we value the freedom of the Chinese person escaping oppressive capital controls of their administration? Crypto supersedes this concept and debate, deprecating the need to debate it at all, capital flows.
These kind of court cases are instruction manuals to everyone that was on the fence. People that didn't have an example of anyone using crypto for goods and services or converting it to local currency now do. All they see is the exchange getting in trouble, nothing changing, and everyone including people on the OFAC list not getting in trouble or their assets frozen. More nodes flipped.
You're in a social bubble.
At this point you need to jump up and point to:
1. Ordinary banks are not sued for absolutely the same thing, which probably occurs to much bigger extent in major banks which pass many times more transactions than Binance
2. Forget about Russian darknets, Russian mafia lives in London, and New York in the open to complete disregard of the same financial regulators.
3. It's practically impossible to catch people who can fake, or buy a passport to do small scale money laundering, but forget about the small fish.
BILLIONS of Russian money gets laundered through biggest US banks every day completely legally, through schemes known to all big banks, and financial regulators for decades.
No? https://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/2013/investing-n...
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/jpmorgan-chase-co-agrees-pay-...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/apr/03/us-bank-mexico...
Dead Comment
Crypto can mean an attack can be funded with 50x more money than had been possible previously, or 20 organizations can be funded where previously only 2 could have worked out the logistics.
Trying to frame this as a binary possible/impossible is the wrong lens.
I would also assume that cryptocurrency makes moving money for crimes vastly easier. And I would also suspect a large amount of volume of transactions are illegal or gray in nature.
This is the tip of what is coming as far as US govt investigations and court cases. Investor wise what are the compliant safe exchanges? Anyone? Exactly, no one has any idea as of yet and that should scare all of us who want to use crypto.
Zhao’s worth 10bn and is asked to pay 150m?
Binance pays 10bn while it is still worth 36bn?
I am shocked. This clearly sends the message that if you make money fast enough, you’ll get away with anything…
I'll abandon crypto when it becomes the second-best alternative to a state-controlled money supply. The shenanigans of the Davos crowd are becoming too weird to do otherwise.
There is no longer such thing in 2023.
Try to do anything "globally" and get ridiculed out by China and Russia. Rest of the team being AFK.
That's especially significant in light of pretending there's a "global" climate change fight going on.
He was right.
Deleted Comment
I've seen folks mention that it's about "the future" in a hand-wavy, abstract, nebulous sense. But their actions demonstrate profiteering, opportunism, and the greater-fool theory in action. Basically, for me, it seemed like all the ideology was intellectual cover (aka rationalizing) for plain ole greed, so they don't have to admit to themselves and others that it has nothing to do with the betterment of humanity and the future, and they just want to get rich quickly. To call it greed would be somewhat unbecoming, and the ideological arguments sounded good enough to assuage any psychological conflicts in oneself.
Might not be a generous interpretation, but if the ideology were indeed at the core of it, I feel like other areas of their lives would reflect said ideologies.
For the record, greed was at the core of my own interest in crypto when I was looking into it, so I could be projecting. Or it could be that said people and myself both experienced this as the driving force behind our interest in crypto as laymen.
There is many tech communities buzzing with blockchain related tech and some serious innovation, a lot of interesting new projects from lower cost faster international transactions through to distributed GPU rendering, identity systems, and the possibilities with NFT's have barely got started.
It's also a new asset class for investors with ETF's from BlackRock etc round the corner its evident it's a now a rapidly maturing space, what's happened with Binance is evident that regulation is starting to catch up, but its regulation being so slow and indecisive that has made it easy pickings for illegal activity to occur.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410
Deleted Comment
When I first heard about Bitcoin the price had just hit $5 and everyone was either a hardcore libertarian or they thought the idea of a digital currency was very scifi and exciting. I fell into the latter camp and became increasingly disinterested as the years progressed despite making really good money off a brief mining stint.
Every ethereum event is filled with the most tolerant, peaceful, healthy, hopeful, lovely, hard-working people.
I love playing these events, because the crowds are always so warm and enthusiastic and so apt so break into sing-along. :-)
Where are all these scumbags?