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  • finley@lemm.eeEnglish
    1353·
    4 months ago

    I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.

    “Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”

    “What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”

    “Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”

    The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”

    “Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”

    “Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”

    He laughed. “That’s why you’re the best I got, Lisowski. Now you get out there and find those bitcoins.”

    “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m on it.”

    I put a quarter in the siren. Ten minutes later, I was on the scene. It was a normal office building, strangled on all sides by public sidewalks. I hopped over them and went inside.

    “Home Depot™ Presents the Police!®” I said, flashing my badge and my gun and a small picture of Ron Paul. “Nobody move unless you want to!” They didn’t.

    “Now, which one of you punks is going to pay me to investigate this crime?” No one spoke up.

    “Come on,” I said. “Don’t you all understand that the protection of private property is the foundation of all personal liberty?”

    It didn’t seem like they did.

    “Seriously, guys. Without a strong economic motivator, I’m just going to stand here and not solve this case. Cash is fine, but I prefer being paid in gold bullion or autographed Penn Jillette posters.”

    Nothing. These people were stonewalling me. It almost seemed like they didn’t care that a fortune in computer money invented to buy drugs was missing.

    I figured I could wait them out. I lit several cigarettes indoors. A pregnant lady coughed, and I told her that secondhand smoke is a myth. Just then, a man in glasses made a break for it.

    “Subway™ Eat Fresh and Freeze, Scumbag!®” I yelled.

    Too late. He was already out the front door. I went after him.

    “Stop right there!” I yelled as I ran. He was faster than me because I always try to avoid stepping on public sidewalks. Our country needs a private-sidewalk voucher system, but, thanks to the incestuous interplay between our corrupt federal government and the public-sidewalk lobby, it will never happen.

    I was losing him. “Listen, I’ll pay you to stop!” I yelled. “What would you consider an appropriate price point for stopping? I’ll offer you a thirteenth of an ounce of gold and a gently worn ‘Bob Barr ‘08’ extra-large long-sleeved men’s T-shirt!”

    He turned. In his hand was a revolver that the Constitution said he had every right to own. He fired at me and missed. I pulled my own gun, put a quarter in it, and fired back. The bullet lodged in a U.S.P.S. mailbox less than a foot from his head. I shot the mailbox again, on purpose.

    “All right, all right!” the man yelled, throwing down his weapon. “I give up, cop! I confess: I took the bitcoins.”

    “Why’d you do it?” I asked, as I slapped a pair of Oikos™ Greek Yogurt Presents Handcuffs® on the guy.

    “Because I was afraid.”

    “Afraid?”

    “Afraid of an economic future free from the pernicious meddling of central bankers,” he said. “I’m a central banker.”

    I wanted to coldcock the guy. Years ago, a central banker killed my partner. Instead, I shook my head.

    “Let this be a message to all your central-banker friends out on the street,” I said. “No matter how many bitcoins you steal, you’ll never take away the dream of an open society based on the principles of personal and economic freedom.”

    He nodded, because he knew I was right. Then he swiped his credit card to pay me for arresting him.

    • TheDannysaur@lemmy.world
      41·
      4 months ago

      I’m never sure how to approach crypto on these platforms, because it’s rare to get a nuanced take.

      I’ve moved past bitcoin to ethereum, I think it answers a lot of the criticisms.

      I try not to get caught up on whether or not it’s a currency, store of value, or most other definitions. I just approach it from, is it a good product?

      I’m in the middle on things such as money laundering or criminal activity. On one hand, the ledger system makes it incredibly easy to trace back transactions if someone ever messes up. On the other it serves a similar function as cash except you don’t have the physical weight, which is non trivial to transport. I know some criminals have to have used it successfully.

      Crypto is hard. There’s so many goddamn scams and stuff like NFTs that could be a good idea if they got the weight of enforcement, but there’s no real enforcement mechanism. We have silly slips of paper that say whether we own things, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say we could make them digital with the right implementation. But those silly slips of paper hold the weight of law behind the. NFTs have no one to enforce anything, thus are useless.

      I’m always afraid to open this up on this platform because there’s so many non nuanced takes, and people writing just the same criticisms. I’m hoping to have a good discussion, and I’m open to other opinions on it. But I haven’t found an argument that makes me think Ethereum is a problem or something to avoid. It’s certainly risky, but I think that risk is justified to the level of which I hold it.

    • NautiNolana@lemmy.world
      942·
      4 months ago

      Everyone gets Bitcoin at the price they deserve. You’ll wake up one day. Our own politicians admitted our monetary system would cause a revolution if the citizens knew how the federal reserve actually worked. They said this in Congress when passing the law, look up the documents.

      But yeah, Bitcoin is the scam. Not the one that lawmakers literally said was a scam🤷‍♂️.

      • ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.worldEnglish
        226·
        4 months ago

        No one needs to be educated on Bitcoin. It’s like 15 years-old, raises electricity bills, enables organized crime, and is too volatile to be a currency. Developers know blockchain is too slow to ever be valuable beyond a few very niche use cases. What else is there to learn?

        If anything, Bitcoin fans need to be educated on economic history — maybe start with the free banking era — so they’d know why central banks were created in the first place. But to do that, they’d have to read real textbooks instead of screeds containing dozens of long discredited economic theories. It’s just a modern version of right wing goldbuggism.

        • NautiNolana@lemmy.world
          78·
          4 months ago

          15 years is pretty new in terms of assets. Of course it’s going to raise electricity bills, it uses electricity. All currency enables organized crime.

          Are you a developer? We can take this to the technical level if so, because I am, and I’ve studied the code and cryptography. I have answers for all of your inquires if you approach this topic with an open mind.

          The economic history is the most important part - I agree. Do some research on the history of currency, how it developed, where paper money came from, and how that turned out. Then we can talk some more if you want.

          • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
            4·
            4 months ago

            Just out of curiosity, are you old enough to have or remember multiple forms of dead media (digital or analog)?

            This, along with nefarious actors (state or otherwise, like Musk with dogecoin even), have kept me skeptical of crypto currencies.

      • MagicShel@programming.dev
        81·
        4 months ago

        Look at our current set of lawmakers. Many of them are unserious people and you can’t take what they say seriously. Which is why we should endeavor to stop electing them.

      • finley@lemm.eeEnglish
        85·
        4 months ago

        Whataboutism

        Whataboutism or whataboutery (as in “what about…?”) is a pejorative for the strategy of responding to an accusation with a counter-accusation instead of a defense against the original accusation.

        From a logical and argumentative point of view, whataboutism is considered a variant of the tu-quoque pattern (Latin ‘you too’, term for a counter-accusation), which is a subtype of the ad-hominem argument.

  • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    4 months ago

    I follow crypto, and Biden’s SEC has been inconsistent in its crypto policies. I think Gary Gensler thinks he’s a crypto expert, but gets a lot of it wrong. Still, though, even the US crypto exchanges asking for regulatory clarity have been playing loose with the rules a bit. The article mentions New York State’s beef with Coinbase, but that was in regards to its “Earn” products, which attempt to tie deposits with “rewards”, and convince people those rewards are the same thing as interest on their savings accounts. They aren’t really, even in Proof-of-Stake coins which are the closest thing.

    But make no mistake, the only reason Trump now likes crypto is it allows foreign actors to contribute to his campaign while disguising the source of the funds. And since Trump has captured the RNC, any donation to his campaign is a donation directly to him and his legal fund. The Winklevii are US citizens, so they are not obligated to hide their contributions. They must realize that a good portion of that contribution goes directly into Trump’s pocket. That’s the only reasonable explanation for announcing this publically – in case Trump wins, they want their transaction formally recorded, and they will expect Trump to deliver.

    • bartolomeo@suppo.fi
      4·
      4 months ago

      Does Trump then sell BTC for USD on an exchange and then pay tax on it? Why didn’t the Winklevii just send USD?

      I don’t get this use-case for BTC, overbanking the overbanked.

      • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        4 months ago

        The Winklevii sent BTC because they have a buttload of it, bought at a very low price. Their actual cost for that donation is basically the long-term capital gains tax (and maybe not even that if their accountants are creative).

        And yes, Trump (or his campaign) have to convert that to fiat at an exchange. (Probably Gemini, owned by the Winklevii.) But the key thing is that with Crypto, they have no way of knowing where the donations are actually coming from. Someone in Saudi Arabia or Russia could be filling out donations forms through a VPN, and list their location as Branson, MO, and there would be no way for anyone to prove it wasn’t really from Branson. (Maybe if they were careless and reused BTC addresses. Some Monero shill will probably reply and make sure everyone knows how Monero is even better at money laundering…)

        • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
          2·
          4 months ago

          I mean just because you say some pithy thing at the end doesn’t make it wrong. Nobody should still think, in 2024, that Bitcoin is in any way anonymous. If you want privacy you don’t use Bitcoin.

          I guess that makes me a shill for Monero 🙄

          • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            4 months ago

            Bitcoin is pseudonomynous. If you are careful it can be anonymous but that is not a guarantee.

            Monero is anonymous, as anyone who uses it will remind you about, repeatly. Monero users are the vegans of crypto.

              • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
                1·
                4 months ago

                I’m not sure I understand the question… Monero doesn’t need a “mixer,” that’s kind of the entire point. You swap your BTC (or literally anything, shoutout to godex.io) for XMR and poof, it’s gone.

                Unless someone gets physical access to your wallet keys, there is no way for anyone to know where that money went, where it came from, or where it will go in the future. For all intents and purposes, it’s invisible.

                • Victoria Antoinette @lemmy.world
                  2·
                  4 months ago

                  I seem to recall that the anonymity of car is based on obscuring transactions through bundling, but that method was deanonymized by poisoning wallrts somehow. this was like 10 years ago so my memory is fuzzy.

    • AmidFuror@fedia.io
      31·
      4 months ago

      I’m starting a Super PAC aimed at doing just that. Stay tuned for details.