US Regulators To Back More Oversight of Virtual Currencies (reuters.com) 121
Digital currencies such as bitcoin demand increased oversight and may require a new federal regulatory framework, the top U.S. markets regulators will tell lawmakers at a congressional hearing on Tuesday. From a report: Christopher Giancarlo, chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), and Jay Clayton, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), will provide testimony to the Senate Banking Committee amid growing global concerns over the risks virtual currencies pose to investors and the financial system. Giancarlo and Clayton will say a patchwork of rules for cryptocurrency exchanges may need to be reviewed in favour of a rationalised federal framework, according to prepared testimony published on Monday. Congressional sources told Reuters the hearing will largely be a fact-finding exercise focusing on the powers of the SEC and CFTC to oversee cryptocurrency exchanges, how the watchdogs can protect investors from volatility and fraud, and the risks posed by cyber criminals intent on stealing digital tokens.
By the time regulation passes the fad will be over (Score:2)
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If people really want to screw with regulators, then they should start investing in highly volatile real currencies. Turkish Lira, South African Real, Colombian Peso.
You get the same volatility, the same amssive gains and losses.
All the benefits of Cryptocurrencies, but with none of the legal-greyness.
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If people really want to screw with regulators, then they should start investing in highly volatile real currencies. Turkish Lira, South African Real, Colombian Peso.
You get the same volatility, the same amssive gains and losses. All the benefits of Cryptocurrencies, but with none of the legal-greyness.
If you knew what you were talking about you wouldn't have goofed like that.
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If people really want to screw with regulators, then they should start investing in highly volatile real currencies. Turkish Lira, South African Real, Colombian Peso.
You get the same volatility, the same amssive gains and losses.
All the benefits of Cryptocurrencies, but with none of the legal-greyness.
What makes national currencies flaky in some cases is rampant inflation caused by the central bank printing uncontrolled amounts of lira, pesos, etc. This does not happen with cryptocurrencies.
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No they aren't
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Yes they are [cnbc.com].
Here in Europe, too: I actually know someone who tried to mortgage his home to buy bitcoin, but was fortunately talked out of it by the bank employee.
O, and then there's the famous bitcoin family [cnbc.com] who sold everything they own to buy bitcoin. They are living at a camp site.
All of those were in december, of course, right before the peak...
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Flooz lasted from Feb 1999 to Aug 2001, and was so obscure 99% of the population has never heard of it. I myself barely remember hearing about it.
I used Flooz to buy a CueCat scanner to scan my grocery list, and then groceries.com delivered my salad in a van!
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I still have my que cat and yes it still reads the barcodes on my printed media library where I have everything random filed. I also still have 2 bit coins, one I bought for about $5 and one my GF gave to me. I will probably keep the unless they top 2000 again. I did buy and sell several others over the course of the last 18 months.
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Strongly disagree about crypto being a "fad". But regulation is an extremely BAD idea at this point, because
(1) A major force behind the excitement for crypto is that "regulation" is flawwed and does more harm than good - that is the motivating force behind crypto AND the source of all the interest - Trust nobody, not even governments --- this is proven time and time again, despite peoples' best intentions ---- rules of the system are mathematical and determined by the consensus-based governance syst
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5) How do you enforce it? Worst case, people use VPNs. The government may be able to make examples of some low-hanging fruit, but the US doesn't have a Great Firewall, so all people do is just use TOR for their transactions, have the apps do a different function (for plausible deniability), and have some form of stego or PhonebookFS like storage of wallets, so if it is asked, one just gives up the partition showing the pr0n stash, and that's that.
Ultimately, crypto is math, and it is tough to ban math...
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5) How do you enforce it? Worst case, people use VPNs.
You go after businesses providing services pertinent to adoption --- mainly you create burdensome rules that make it even harder to have an exchange, or take or process vcurrency-based payments
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Strongly disagree about crypto being a "fad".
Why? I mean once the dust settles and it's a nice steady currency then what will be the point? What will you be able to do that you couldn't do before?
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1) " Trust nobody" .
Except the people who run the crypto currency, like bitcoin which is being run very badly and lightning which doesn't really exist yet.
Do you know who all the players in any given crypto-currency are? Do you really trust them more than the government
So far as I'm concerned cyrpto currencies deserve to die, the people that created them have shown nothing but greed and complete disdain for the environment. They could of tried to come up with solutions to lessen the amount of electricity ne
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Except the people who run the crypto currency, like bitcoin which is being run very badly and lightning which doesn't really exist yet.
That is just your personal opinion -- the network does not agree with you that Bitcoin is being "run badly".
Lightning is currently a TestNet technology that already has all the necessary capabilities in the Bitcoin network itself to be developed on top of BTC.
Do you know who all the players in any given crypto-currency are? Do you really trust them more than the governme
I don't think it's a fad (Score:2)
Now, if you could get drugs & prostitution legalized that would be a
Thank God! (Score:1)
Because it's soooo easy to buy and deal with Bitcoin currently...
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Re: I thought this administration was... (Score:2)
Because if there are two agencies regulating crypto as two different things (say, securities vs currency), then any defendent will use that in court to undermine the authority of the regulator.
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They are debating what agency gets to regulate it under current laws. Basically CFTC and SEC discussing how they see cypto and current securities law.
Probably none of the above..... Bitcoins are not security exchanges, AND they are not commodities contract exchanges, that is unless you're talking about those futures --- they're "Spot" exchanges or places of "Barter"; that is entities where you deposit your X or Y, and you receive trading tokens denoted in what you deposited that you can trade and
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Big banks that scammed consumers are getting deregulation and/or tax breaks.
Re: Ignoring regulators is one reason Bitcoin crea (Score:2)
Not necessarily. It might be illegal to - say - buy BTC on a foreign exchange. That doesn't stop me from skirting one regulation while following the important ones (like taxes).
Bitcoin won't be regulated, fiat/btc exchange will (Score:2)
Ignoring regulators is one reason Bitcoin created. We'll get to see if it actually works in practice.
Bitcoin itself will not be regulated. Exchanges that convert between real currencies (USD, Euro, etc) and bitcoin will be regulated.
The transfer of bitcoins from one bitcoin account/address to another bitcoin account/address remains, by design, beyond government control. As is the decision by the recipient to give the sender a pizza or something. This is essentially a barter transaction, which is taxable so there is government involvement but not government control up front.
Now will people/merchants d
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wrong, and communication between your server and a foreign one can fall under law. Already laws for fraud and terrorism can be invoked to inspect or seize your server, and more can be created.
Cryptocurrency correlates to crime/risk (Score:1, Insightful)
Two things that are being looked at are:
1. the higher correlation between cryptocurrency fiat assets and "dirty" money (e.g. crime or terror related sources/uses); and
2. the lack of traceability of cryptocurrency allowing extra-national actors (primarily rogue states like NK, or banned individuals not permitted to participate in fiat exchanges, like Russian/Iranian/etc top execs/politicos) to participate even when supposedly excluded.
Both are risk factors.
Both tie in to the Tulip bubbles that pump up crypto
Re:Cryptocurrency correlates to crime/risk (Score:4, Informative)
You clearly don't know how a blockchain works. The only trace required is at the exchanges.
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I'm a komodo dev.
Komodo has an atomic swap powered decentralised exchange and dICO for your fund raising needs.
Komodo is a fork of zcash with privacy and anonymity optionally available for use on z-transactions.
Komodo has a technology called JUMBLR to totally make the 'paper trail' disappear.
Fiat pegged gov/central bank issued cryptos are being investigated by 12 countries. This will be the new entry into crypto as centralised exchanges suffer from regulation controls (KYC/AML), and are honeypots for hacke
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No, my point is to the subject, as to why they are regulating virtual currencies. The internal methodology of blockchain is a technical matter, and has nothing to do with the reason, true or overstated, that they are pushing to regulate the virtual currencies.
It's like the Feds regulating how fast you can drive, or speed limits on highways. Neither depends on which fuel is used, although that is a technical performance matter. It may be easier to mask such "causes" using blockchain, but that's why they're r
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The problem is that if regulators step in, what are they going to do? Lets say they do an outright ban, with penalties of 20-life minimum sentences:
1: People will have a lot of offshore VPNs and/or TOR circuits.
2: Someone will have a cryptocurrency or cryptocurrencies that are anonymous, perhaps with good old fashioned Chaumian blinding factors, DC-nets, or other rock-solid security.
3: It would be a waste of money to enforce, similar to how much money gets wasted on hunting down pot smokers.
4: It might
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The problem is that if regulators step in, what are they going to do? Lets say they do an outright ban, with penalties of 20-life minimum sentences:
1: People will have a lot of offshore VPNs and/or TOR circuits. 2: Someone will have a cryptocurrency or cryptocurrencies that are anonymous, perhaps with good old fashioned Chaumian blinding factors, DC-nets, or other rock-solid security. 3: It would be a waste of money to enforce, similar to how much money gets wasted on hunting down pot smokers. 4: It might cause people to just rebel and ignore the law, creating secure, private social networks, just to be able to trade securely.
Regulation makes sense, but if it is pushed too far, people will just give a middle finger and ignore it, finding means to get around it.
We've already got the dark web and the vast majority of people don't want to go anywhere near it, regardless of what it actually is and what's actually there. That's enough to reduce the numbers of people using it so that it doesn't become available to general consumers.
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Very true. People tend to avoid the deep web. However, if told by the government that cryptocurrencies are bad and they will go to prison for a long time if they look at cryptocurrencies cross-eyed, they will fire up a VPN, which has little to no relation to the dark web. Not going to jail is a good incentive for people to use technologies which they wouldn't have bothered looking at in the first place.
In fact, a good currency app will handle all the TOR functionality, perhaps using a VPN for the entranc
Re:Cryptocurrency correlates to crime/risk (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile ... (Score:5, Interesting)
*Now referred to as bespoke securities [wikipedia.org] so as to skirt around market valuation requirements.
X Regulators To Back More Oversight of Y (Score:3)
C'mon editors, this is "dog bites man". "Man bites dog" would be a regulator who wants a smaller kingdom.
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Not with Trump in the White House.
Ummmmmmm (Score:1)
Sell?
Where's your Trump now, hm?
I bet they feel a need to regulate it! (Score:1)
Congressional sources told Reuters the hearing will largely be a fact-finding exercise focusing on the powers of the SEC and CFTC to oversee cryptocurrency exchanges, how the watchdogs can protect investors from volatility and fraud, and the risks posed by cyber criminals intent on stealing digital tokens.
Translation: "We need to figure out how cryptos can't be a real choice vis-a-vis fiat money, because our pals in the 'financial system' need to keep control of your money and skim constantly off your mone
Defeats the purpose of blockchain "currency" (Score:2)
This is welcome (Score:2)
This is a buying opportunity (Score:2)
I'm bullish on cryptocurrency, and plan to sell some of my stock portfolio to buy more BitCoin.
**looks at stock portfolio today**
OK, never mind. Maybe I'll sell my collection of 10 Beanie Babies, which by now must be worth several million dollars.
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Not that I would recommend it, but if that was your plan today is a good day for it. Sure, the stock market is down 4.6%, but bitcoin is down 12.6%. So you get 9.4% more bitcoin per share (average share price) today compared to yesterday.
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I'm not sure, because I've been drinking since the markets closed, but I get the feeling there's a logical fallacy in that.
But you could be pulling my leg. The first thing to go is the ability to discern sarcasm.
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But you could be pulling my leg. The first thing to go is the ability to discern sarcasm.
Thank you so much for that. For years, I've been saying the mind is the second thing to go. I never could remember what was first, now thanks to you I remember.
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I'm dead serious. (Pretending all your cash was in the DOW 30.) Your 100k just turned into 95.4k. That's a massive loss. But BTC are cheaper. So, yesterday (Friday??) you could have gotten ~14 BTC (~7k/BTC) for 100k. So your stock is worth ~14.3 BTC. But now BTC dropped (to ~6.1k/BTC). So that's ~15.6 BTC. So exchanging your portfolio now nets you about 1.3BTC more per 100k you had in the market Friday.
There may be some tax implications, but I doubt that they apply. Most likely, moving a few perc
Real threat? (Score:2)