Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Monday April 23 2018, @01:40PM   Printer-friendly
from the eggs-and-baskets dept.

This hasn't been the best week for WikiLeaks, to put it mildly. Coinbase has shut off the WikiLeaks Shop's account for allegedly violating the cryptocurrency exchange's terms of service. In other words, the leak site just lost its existing means of converting payments like bitcoin into conventional money. While Coinbase didn't give a specific reason (it declines to comment on specific accounts), it pointed to its legal requirement to honor "regulatory compliance mechanisms" under the US' Financial Crimes Enforcement Network.

This doesn't prevent WikiLeaks from accepting cryptocurrency, but it will have to scramble to find an alternative if it wants to continue taking digital money from customers buying shirts and coffee cups. Unsurprisingly, the organization is less than thrilled -- it's calling for a "global blockade" of Coinbase, claiming that the exchange is reacting to a "concealed influence."

Source: https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/21/wikileaks-loses-coinbase-account/


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 23 2018, @05:43PM (5 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday April 23 2018, @05:43PM (#670814)

    Cryptocurrencies are commodities.

    Almost - they're digital shares in... nothing. Each "cryptocurrency" has a public ledger which establishes ownership of, in the case of Bitcoin and most of its derivatives: a fraction of the total pool of currency represented in the ledger. The breakthrough genius of the scheme is that participants can be reasonably assured that once they see an entry in the ledger, that entry will never be erased - thus they know that when someone gives them control of a piece of the total pool they cannot later take that back - only the holder of the secret key controlling that statement of ownership has the ability to transfer the ownership to another.

    Prevention of "double-spend" is the key. It's a decentralized version of title companies vouching for ownership in the public record.

    In my opinion, the only value of bitcoin is entertainment, gambling, speculation on the belief that somebody is going to pay more for your share of the coin than you did. Why do people believe this? "Ground floor opportunity" is a strong theme in our culture, as is mass hysteria.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @06:02PM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @06:02PM (#670818)

    Your conclusions are based on the fallacy that bitcoin represents "nothing". Clearly, a global network of computers, a relatively well-defined protocol of interaction, and an active userbase amounts to a lot more than nothing.

    Money is a logistical technology; it allows disparate people (maybe even people who otherwise hate each other's guts) to organize their activities for mutual profit. That's not nothing. And, Bitcoin is unarguably the most advanced form of money ever developed, and includes means by which to become ever more advanced.

    When you purchase U.S. dollars, you are purchasing a "share" in the dollar-accounted economy. The more productive that economy, the more valuable your dollar. It's the same with Bitcoin, and find it very odd that you've developed this strange ideological blindspot that makes you incapable of appreciating that technical fact.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 23 2018, @09:04PM (3 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday April 23 2018, @09:04PM (#670884)

      find it very odd that you've developed this strange ideological blindspot that makes you incapable of appreciating that technical fact.

      Not odd, quite common in the real world, which is where my money derives its value.

      Bitcoin is unarguably the most advanced form of money ever developed

      Oh, I'd argue that Bitcoin is playtime as compared the the US Federal Reserve and their information gathering network, research and theory (largely speculative and subject to error) developed around the predicted effects of policy changes, political negotiations, etc.

      Just applying some public-private key pairs and hash functions does not make a technology advanced. It's primary success has been in attracting money from speculators, and that has almost nothing to do with how advanced it is or not in reality, and everything to do with people's emotional desire to get rich. The success has run so long because the p2p network backing it up has managed to operate without losing control of the blockchain for all this time, and that's mostly because the miners are all trying to get rich and incidentally defending the blockchain in the process.

      --
      🌻🌻 [google.com]
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @10:02PM (2 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @10:02PM (#670900)

        The worst financial crises and largest bubbles have occurred under the watch of the Federal Reserve, and the dollar has lost around 98% of its purchasing power since the Federal Reserve became responsible for managing it.

        Yet, that's irrelevant. We're talking about money as a logistical tool, not money as a tool of governmental policy power; indeed, Satoshi was explicitly motivated by the need to escape that very policy power.

        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 23 2018, @11:58PM (1 child)

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Monday April 23 2018, @11:58PM (#670944)

          the dollar has lost around 98% of its purchasing power since the Federal Reserve became responsible for managing it.

          As compared to what other readily exchangeable currency during the same period (1913-present)?

          Not talking about precious metal coins - those aren't exchangeable in the open market, and they have a nasty bid/ask differential when you go to use them.

          For example, in the late 1970s, I watched the evening news with my parents - I knew how to compute CAGR and, being bored (it was the 1970s after all), I calculated the rate of return for gold as it bounced up and down on the evening news reports. While my bank account might have been paying ~5% on my massive $240 balance, I could see that with good market timing of gold, I could make >8%. So, I watched and (accurately) predicted a trough in the market and bought a 1oz Krugerand for $220 - slightly more than the evening news price, but I figured that was just market fluctuations - it was still a good buy, it went to $230 shortly thereafter. I watched it bounce up and down for weeks, and finally got to my CAGR target of 8%, took the Krugerand back to the coin shop and sadly learned about purchase price commission margin - it cancelled my gains to worse than bank rates of return... hell no, not selling yet. I waited for months, watching it bounce up and down, caught a peak and made a kingly 9% CAGR on my investment even after the coin shop took their cut. End of demonstration, margins suck, but you can still do well even with them. Ironic closing: Triumphantly, I watched the evening news in the following days as the price of gold sank back down, even below bank interest again, then... within less than a week after I sold, Iran took the hostages and gold doubled overnight, peaking around $880 per ounce within a month.

          --
          🌻🌻 [google.com]
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @12:43AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 24 2018, @12:43AM (#670958)

            After WWII, the devastated countries realized that the only way to keep the global currency system working was to based every currency on the U.S. dollar, which was based on the Gold Standard, but then to maintain the enormous power that this gave the United States, the U.S. government unilaterally took the U.S. dollar off the Gold Standard, taking with it all other currencies of the planet.

            So, your question is meaningless, because everything leads back to the U.S. dollar, and all modern governments have adopted the same central planning of their currencies. We're in new, uncharted monetary territory, where the whole globe is engaged in counterfeiting.

            And, the only thing that literally millennia of history can teach us is that when governments may counterfeit, they do, and the results are always catastrophic failure.