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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/
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday April 23 2018, @06:10PM (6 children)
No. They aren't. I can hand you $100 for any good or service, and there is no fee. You are choosing to pay a fee when you use a transaction-per-fee financial service, and that's perfectly fine in terms of you should have that choice... but it's not fine if it subsumes all other choices. Availability of options is good.
You don't have to hold it. You can invest it. Loans, infrastructure, inventory, art, collectables, etc. You can do all of this without incurring fees if you choose compatible venues. Not that you have to, not saying that at all; but it's highly functional in terms of getting ahead. As my mom used to say, "never a borrower, but always a lender be." It was great advice. You have to be at least somewhat clever about it, but that's true of growing net worth for most people anyway.
A useful currency in an inflationary environment is more easily passed around and less costly, not less easily and more costly. In this consideration, cryptocurrencies compare poorly to cash right now. That's the math, there's just no way around it as things stand today. Tomorrow... well, who knows.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @06:29PM
Firstly, you are free to ask the Bitcoin network to process your transaction without taking a fee, but it takes resources to mine, so you just have to wait for the altruism of one of the miners.
Secondly, the Bitcoin network is a zero-trust settlement layer, but the world has a lot more trustworthiness than zero; you don't need a zero-trust environment to buy a cup of coffee, and so you could exploit that non-zero trust for profit: There's nothing preventing you from handing a private key directly to a barista, as an extreme example. And, with something like the Lightning Network, you can transact in great volumes with tiny amounts without ever having to hit the Bitcoin network, and without having to trust anybody that much.
Your problem, which is replicated across so many people's minds, is that you are incapable of seeing the possibilities. You are arguing in two-dimensional land, when Bitcoin is running in three dimensions.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 23 2018, @07:50PM (4 children)
Where did you get that $100 bill? Did you get it from an ATM? Many of those charge fees, and if your bank is one that absorbs the ATM fees for you, you still have to get yourself to the ATM, transact with it, and then carry that $100 around in your pocket at risk of loss. I use a Credit Union which has exceptionally low fees, but mostly how they do that is by providing lower interest on savings than they otherwise could, it's not as if Banks provide higher interest, it's just that Banks siphon off more profits, and none of the insured interest paying accounts are even near to keeping up with inflation. Also, God help you if your time is worth so little that traveling to a bank, standing in line, and transacting with a teller isn't a cost to you.
Again, risk of loss, low returns in low risk investments, monetary and time/effort costs to purchase and liquidate an investment, all the while if your investment isn't returning CAGR better than inflation (which most low risk investments do not), then you're actually losing value.
Until you lend to a deadbeat. Or, invest in a risky commodity, like, say, FNMA or other home mortgage based securities about 10 years ago...
I agree there, the energy (literally, electricity) being put into Bitcoin and friends is insanity incarnate. I have been a fan of peer to peer network applications since the 1990s, and the Bitcoin demonstration of a distributed yet trustworthy ledger is an impressive leap forward, but it's just nowhere near being the "cash of the future."
I don't think the fault lies in the private key encryption of the value token (yet), quantum computers seem ~10 years out from breaking those (+/- about 1 order of magnitude at 3sd), but there are some quantum-safe alternatives already developing, sadly their signature sizes are currently running ~20K or ~80x larger than the signatures used by Bitcoin today, but hopefully our broadband speeds and cost of processing continue to increase and trivialize that difference.
To me, where the network is really weak at the moment is in scalability of the ledger processing. It seems to be shaping up that alt-coins are rising to fill the demand for additional transaction bandwidth, and a loose federation between the alt-coins and bitcoin has developed for their exchange, but that's even more speculative and volatile than solo-bitcoin.
I hope that compelling, valuable real world uses for bitcoin emerge before the mass hysteria subsides. Conversely, I hope the mass hysteria subsides before the amount of coal being mined to support crypto-mining gets any higher. I don't want to hear how BTC is mined in Iceland and the PNW where electricity is cheap (well, maybe Iceland, but it still sucks that those people's power supply is being strained for this, and it's not as if geothermal generating equipment is maintenance for free, or constructed without the use of real-world mined resources and energy...) that energy that Washington state can't feed into the grid is effectively increasing the load on coal fired generation far away.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Monday April 23 2018, @09:26PM
I get almost all of mine these days from being handed them by actual human beings buying stuff from me. This is not an accident.
Which is why I said "You have to be at least somewhat clever about it, but that's true of growing net worth for most people anyway." It works out very well in my case; the strategies I have chosen have been effective thus far. It's not for everyone, certainly.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday April 23 2018, @09:31PM (2 children)
I walked into my bank, asked for a counter check, filled in my name and bank account number both of which I have memorized, wrote "cash" on the "to" line, wrote out the check for $100 and signed it and they gave me $100. I didn't even have to pay for the paper check I used.
As for losing my wallet, apparently that happens to people who use bitcoin (or they lose some other physical object on which the bitcoin is inscribed -- isn't there a guy thinking about digging up a dump to find the HD he tossed years ago when bitcoins were worth nothing?).
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Monday April 23 2018, @10:20PM
If I could click a button and "back up" my money every night, that would make theft much less of a concern - particularly if my money were so compact that I could store Billions on a thumb drive and disguise it as vacation photos.
I tried using a local bank back in the 1990s, the fees and outright theft (they made a $20 addition error on a monthly statement, in their favor of course, and basically shrugged at me when I pointed it out - corrected it after a week), convinced me to continue to do business with my Credit Union by mail with the closest branch office ~200 miles away. Two or three times since then, I've opened brick and mortar bank accounts, only to close them within months because the reality of banking with them is much more expensive than the Credit Union. Bank by mail in the 1990s meant ~$0.40 stamps on the deposit envelopes, but that's cheaper than driving to a local branch anyway, unless your bank branch is directly on your normal daily path, less than 1 mile out of the way, and even then the time differential between: address, seal, stamp and drop in post box and standing in any kind of line at the bank is pretty huge. The banks I used that had "convenient" location right across the street from work (only have to walk 2 blocks to get there and back) seemed to always have 20+ minute lines to wait to talk to a teller.
And, if you think that your time face-to-face with that teller, in that commercial building, isn't being siphoned away from your money somehow, do you also believe in magic fairies? Banks explain that away by lending your money to other people and claiming that all their expenses are covered by the differential between savings and loan interest rates - which is probably why savings has paid virtually zero interest during the past 10 years. Notice any inflation in the cost of living over the last 10 years? That's your money in the bank, shrinking.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @11:30PM
Where I'm from, you get even steeper fees for doing that than getting it from the ATM.
On your monthly statement it doesn't have fees for $someamount?
Some banks offer low interest low (or zero or flat) fees accounts, it's possible you have something like this, but low interest rate *is* the fees.