[HN Gopher] MasterCard Acquires CipherTrace
___________________________________________________________________
MasterCard Acquires CipherTrace
Author : cjlm
Score : 115 points
Date : 2021-09-09 15:27 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mastercard.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mastercard.com)
| vesinisa wrote:
| Press release from Purchase about corporate purchase by the
| Purchase-based company that makes purchasing easy.
| jmt_ wrote:
| It seems CipherTrace provides security/compliance/etc services
| similar to that of a traditional bank but for cryptocurrency?
| Will cryptocurrency effectively end up becoming just another
| currency/security traded and managed by giant companies rather
| than flourishing as the decentralized cowboy-esque financial
| system advocated for by crypto enthusiasts? Even those crypto
| users who choose to forego services offered by companies such as
| CipherTrace will still be effected by big companies attempting to
| regulate and control crypto in various ways, so I'm wondering
| what the sentiment is in the crypto community regarding this
| acquisition.
| javert wrote:
| As a bitcoin fan, I think that's missing the point.
|
| Bitcoin is about ending US monetary hegemony over the world.
| That dominance allows the US to grossly abuse its own citizens
| (future generations in particular) and people around the world
| (e.g. borrowing and throwing away trillions of dollars on
| unjust foreign wars).
|
| Bitcoin is about hard money. It's about eliminating the Fed,
| but it's not about ending banking middlemen like Visa. Those
| will always exist, but they are "small fry."
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I think that was definitely the initial intention of bitcoin
| when it was launched. Perhaps not specifically to fight off
| USA influences, but definitely to end government control over
| the monetary system, be it the dollar, the yen or the euro.
|
| However, I don't think that goal has been relevant for a few
| years now. Bitcoin has turned into an uncontrolled
| speculation adventure for people with more money than sense
| or access to cheap electricity. Just the transaction costs
| alone make it infeasible to use Bitcoin to order pizza.
| External payment networks related to but not affiliated with
| Bitcoin have spun up to battle these transaction costs, but
| Bitcoin itself is nothing like it was way back when.
|
| I don't think Bitcoin will ever reach its potential as the
| initial activists thought it had. However, it has cleared the
| way for other cryptocurrencies to step up and replace it as a
| payment system for common people.
| qecez wrote:
| > Just the transaction costs alone make it infeasible to
| use Bitcoin to order pizza.
|
| Blatantly false. Transacting on the Lightning Network
| (Bitcoin L2) costs next to nothing and the settlement is
| final and immediate.
|
| Screw pizza, top-of-mind, you can pay a fraction of a
| cent's worth for an API call with Bitcoin
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28459713)...
|
| or pay 66 satoshis (~$0.03) / hour for a VPS instance
| (https://www.bitclouds.sh)...
|
| or buy gift cards for any amount
| (https://www.bitrefill.com/buy/)...
|
| or tip anyone as little as 1 satoshi (~$0.00046) (here's 5
| cents worth https://ln.cash/tFVDMpUMRQPYwyj9DZHMqg)...
|
| or hell, if you're feeling like pizza, DM me on Twitter and
| I'll get you one, paid for in Bitcoin (https://ln.pizza).
| Geee wrote:
| Not really. The idea is to cut all middlemen and controlling
| entities.
|
| Quote from Satoshi:
|
| "The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust
| that's required to make it work. The central bank must be
| trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat
| currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be
| trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but
| they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a
| fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy,
| trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts.
| Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.
|
| A generation ago, multi-user time-sharing computer systems
| had a similar problem. Before strong encryption, users had to
| rely on password protection to secure their files, placing
| trust in the system administrator to keep their information
| private. Privacy could always be overridden by the admin
| based on his judgment call weighing the principle of privacy
| against other concerns, or at the behest of his superiors.
| Then strong encryption became available to the masses, and
| trust was no longer required. Data could be secured in a way
| that was physically impossible for others to access, no
| matter for what reason, no matter how good the excuse, no
| matter what.
|
| It's time we had the same thing for money. With e-currency
| based on cryptographic proof, without the need to trust a
| third party middleman, money can be secure and transactions
| effortless. "
|
| Source: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com/forum/topics/bitcoin-
| open-sour...
| inter_netuser wrote:
| "The central bank must be trusted not to debase the
| currency"
|
| "not to debase"
|
| hard money?
| Geee wrote:
| Yes, bitcoin is predictably hard money.
| lottin wrote:
| How can an imaginary asset be hard money?
| Geee wrote:
| Hard money is money that is hard to produce. Such as
| gold, silver and bitcoin. The alternative is money that
| can be produced easily (soft money, easy money), like
| modern fiat currency or glass beads, which were used to
| buy slaves from Africa.
| lottin wrote:
| They used glass beads to buy slaves from Africa?
| Interesting... although I don't know why feel the need to
| bring this up.
|
| Anyway, most bitcoins in existence today were produced on
| a laptop so I don't know about hard to produce.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Which history has shown us is bad. But by all means let's
| re-learn our lessons the hard way.
| javert wrote:
| No, because there were other variables with the banking
| crises that occurred in the gold era (which,
| incidentally, was nonetheless the greatest era of
| economic growth in human history).
|
| You cannot simply extrapolate directly from that era to
| today in the way you are trying to. The situation is
| different.
|
| Anyway, why do you want to defend dishonest money that
| funds generational theft and international unjust war?
| Like, the banking crises of the gold era are MUCH better
| than the massive evils perpetrated by the modern US
| federal government. Why are you defending that? What
| solution do you propose to ending US money hegemony over
| the world? Or do you support that? I mean, are you like,
| F those children in the middle east, let's send more of
| our boys to be cannon fodder, etc.? Do you LIKE letting
| the big banks steal the country's wealth?
| arcticbull wrote:
| > Anyway, why do you want to defend dishonest money that
| funds generational theft and international unjust war?
| Like, the banking crises of the gold era are MUCH better
| than the massive evils perpetrated by the modern US
| federal government. Why are you defending that? What
| solution do you propose if not hard money?
|
| Uh because it doesn't. That's tinfoil hat conspiracy
| talk.
|
| > What solution do you propose if not hard money?
|
| There really isn't anything wrong with fiat lol. You
| obtain it, you spend it on necessities, you invest the
| excess. Inflation is an incentive to productively
| allocate capital. The variable supply allows an expansion
| and contraction of the supply to retain stability.
|
| It's backed fully by demand.
|
| The system works just fine lol.
| javert wrote:
| You haven't intellectually engaged with anything I said,
| you've just called it a "conspiracy" and tried to laugh
| at it. That's says a lot.
|
| You totally ignored the essential point of my post which
| is that many things have changed since the gold money era
| and you can't extrapolate directly from that era to this.
| In particular, we have instant communication and much
| better ways to verify institutional financials.
|
| (I'm leaving the conversation now. I know you'll do your
| best to make it look like I'm wrong, but I'm going to
| ignore it.)
| arcticbull wrote:
| I actually responded to, I think, each of your points.
|
| (1) I don't support ending US hegemony because it's the
| least worst option.
|
| (2) US hegemony doesn't depend on the dollar.
|
| (3) All major historical wars were fought on hard money
| so there's no reason to think reverting to hard money
| would somehow end war. In fact we live in roughly
| speaking the most peaceful time in recorded history.
|
| (4) Fiat works fine.
|
| (5) Variable supply is ideal because it creates stability
| and separates long-term store of value (volatile) from
| short-term store of value and medium of exchange
| (predictable).
|
| (6) Inflation is useful because it incentives productive
| allocation of capital.
|
| (7) Banks aren't stealing huge quantities of money from
| Americans, they make a 1% annualized return on assets on
| deposit, which is returned to bank shareholders. Money
| circulates.
|
| (8) Honestly its up to you to explain what changed and
| why you think there would be a different outcome.
| Quantifiably.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > What solution do you propose to ending US money
| hegemony over the world?
|
| I don't, it's the least-worst option. The US hegemonic
| order is better than a Russian hegemonic order, which is
| in turn better than a PRC hegemonic order. But make no
| mistake, the currency alone isn't the reason for US
| hegemony.
|
| > Or do you support that? I mean, are you like, F those
| children in the middle east, let's send more of our boys
| to be cannon fodder, etc.?
|
| Hey remember that there World War? That was fought on
| hard money. Napoleonic Wars? Hard money. Boer War? Hard
| money. Basically any war in any history book covering
| pre-mid-century 1900s was fought on hard money. _All of
| colonialism_ happened on hard money. There will always be
| sufficient lending resources available to fight a war.
| That 's not a function of monetary policy that's a
| function of social policy - a matter for congress, not
| the Fed.
|
| > Do you LIKE letting the big banks steal the country's
| wealth?
|
| Surely you have some citation. Retail banks serve the Fed
| in that they expand and contract the money supply via
| lending. They make very little actual profit for their
| role. Return on assets on deposit for major US retail
| banks is roughly 1% annually. That's their fee for
| managing the money supply on behalf of the federal
| reserve, which exists at the whim of congress.
| javert wrote:
| > Hey remember that there World War?
|
| Wars like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan could not be
| financed or prosecuted under a hard money regime.
|
| The wars you name as examples were "real" wars, i.e. they
| required real sacrifices of the nations involved,
| political buy-in, and were financially limited in a way
| that modern US fakewars are not.
|
| (Aside: Of course, our fakewars do require _limited_
| sacrifices---of our young "grunts" that are recruited
| from high schools and haven't received a good enough
| education to know that signing up for Iraq makes you a
| sacrificial victim, not a war hero; and that sacrificing
| yourself in the Middle East _hurts_ our country and is
| anti-patriotic, rather than the reverse.)
|
| > Surely you have some citation
|
| The rich are getting richer by buying assets (like
| equities, US homes en masse turning us into a nation of
| renters, farmland, etc.) while borrowing for nearly
| nothing. The Fed is what allows the rich to borrow at
| near zero interest. It isn't literally the banks as
| corporate institutions that are getting rich; I was
| referring to "banking" in a more general sense.
|
| If you're serious in asking for a citation, you'll know
| that in modern scientific and semi-scientific literature
| works in such a way that there are dozens of "citations"
| for any position anyone wants to take. "Citations" are
| not the way to go. Understanding fundamentals is what is
| needed. That's why we have these conversations. The
| answer does not lie "in the literature."
|
| I'm leaving the conversation now.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > Wars like Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan could not be
| financed or prosecuted under a hard money regime.
|
| And yet World War 1 could? C'mon now. There is no reason
| to think that lending would be impossible under hard
| money. That's how wars are financed now lol.
|
| > The rich are getting richer by buying assets.
|
| Yes, this is social policy not monetary policy and can be
| addressed easily with a wealth tax. It's a question of
| appetite not means.
|
| > "Citations" are not the way to go.
|
| Yeah, they are...
| seibelj wrote:
| Citizens of Britain were destroyed financially by WW1,
| and the British Empire fell apart. Afghanistan lasted far
| longer and had no real sacrifice of current citizens,
| other than debt which will be paid by debasement.
|
| The benefit of hard money is citizens actually feel the
| pain of taxation. With forever wars financed by fiat
| money, we can funnel freshly printed cash into the meat
| grinder forever.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > Citizens of Britain were destroyed financially by WW1,
| and the British Empire fell apart.
|
| They were destroyed financially because they were
| destroyed physically. There are a lot of reasons the
| British empire fell apart, including losing Hong Kong to
| the Japanese showing the world they were no longer able
| to protect their territorial posessions. Pinning this on
| hard money is really difficult IMO but if it _was_
| actually hard money, that sounds like a great reason not
| to adopt it? Empire collapse sounds bad...
|
| > Afghanistan lasted far longer and had no real sacrifice
| of current citizens, other than debt which will be paid
| by debasement.
|
| What makes you think lending won't be possible in a hard
| money environment? Afghanistan was expensive but not that
| expensive. US GDP is 21T. Afganistan cost $100B/yr, or
| 0.47% of GDP. America can fight forever-wars because of
| its largesse, not its ability to create debt. That's just
| accounting.
|
| You can't _make_ a $21T GDP country feel $0.1T /yr.
| That's a rounding error in appropriations. The Defense
| budget alone is $700B/yr.
|
| > With forever wars financed by fiat money, we can funnel
| freshly printed cash into the meat grinder forever.
|
| This is social policy not monetary policy. Japan has a
| soft monetary system, struggles constantly with
| _deflation_ and has _no army_.
| quantumBerry wrote:
| The populace is easier convinced to fund a war if it is
| in defense immediate or perceived imminent threat to
| sovereignty of their territory. Vietnam and Iraq wars
| were no such threat. Afghanistan arguably so only to the
| extent of suppressing the forces responsible for the Twin
| Towers attack. For instance, I'm quite sure America would
| have defended any attack on American soil in WWII under
| any conceivable currency scheme.
|
| Taxation is an explicit act that is visible on your
| paycheck; something you sign on at the end of the year.
| Debasement is more subtle and the common man who has
| little in his bank account may not even consider the
| effect, thus rationally would be more likely to go along
| with a war based on implicit debasement rather than
| explicit taxation.
|
| >This is social policy not monetary policy. Japan has a
| soft monetary system, struggles constantly with deflation
| and has no army.
|
| War is a social and monetary policy in a fiat currency
| nation; including a tacit approval for debasement to pay
| for that which cannot or will not be paid via other
| means.
|
| In the past you have argued that illegal immigrants /
| criminals should not be aided with easier monetary tools
| for their trade. If that point follows, that could be
| extended to the criminals who authorized the latest Iraq
| War and last decade of the Afghanistan war as well. Fiat
| debasement is just one tool in the toolbox of the
| criminals in legislature and Federal Reserve. [*Note:
| personally I do not agree with your hypothesis that we
| should restrict the monetary tools of criminals. I think
| instead we should focus on the underlying crime itself.]
|
| Of course, the rich already know all this, and seek to
| hold most of their wealth in assets and then hide any
| capital gains with any shell game they can.
| arcticbull wrote:
| > Taxation is an explicit act that is visible on your
| paycheck.
|
| You don't have to tax in a hard money environment, you
| can borrow. That's how wars have been funded in the past.
| You sell bonds. There's _no_ reason to think a bond
| market would disappear under a hard money environment is
| there? You a can borrow against Bitcoin today lol. With
| 125X leverage!
|
| > Note: personally I do not agree with your hypothesis
| that we should restrict the monetary tools of criminals.
| I think instead we should focus on the underlying crime
| itself
|
| Por que no los dos?
| [deleted]
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Please just read a macro textbook before pouting
| nonsense.
| javert wrote:
| You can't find a real criticism of anything I said? You
| don't have a real argument?
|
| Mockery in a place where an intellectual response goes
| says a lot. Learn how to have an adult conversation.
|
| Why are you even on this site?
|
| P.S. I've taken econ classes. Can you think, or do you
| just accept whatever any particular book tells you as
| truth?
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I can, it's just not worth my time. Suffice to say macro
| policy is the reason the US didn't have decades of
| stagnation like japan did and it requires fiat currency.
| If you want to disagree with every economist you can go
| ahead and write a peer reviewed paper that I'd be happy
| to check out.
| jollybean wrote:
| We don't need to extrapolate.
|
| There's a 100% chance of some kind of crisis in our
| future.
|
| The first crisis in a system with no monetary policy will
| knock everything down.
|
| Hard monetary policy is like nailing a board between the
| dock and the boat - it's great for stability ... until
| the tide goes out, or, a big wave comes.
|
| That's why we use ropes, not boards.
|
| Currencies can only exist within an economic zone and
| they're a useful tool wit price stability etc.. BTC
| provides none of that so it's not very useful.
|
| It's a neat idea.
|
| Also, the US definitely does not have 'Monetary Hegemony'
| in the world. Just an outside influence, that's waning a
| bit.
|
| The 'Big Banks' are not stealing your wealth because of
| monetary policy, for the most part. They will steal your
| wealth just as well with BTC.
| javert wrote:
| I don't agree with your interpretation of what this passage
| really means, i.e., what its message implies and what is
| essential vs. accidental.
|
| The Fed is the ultimate "middleman."
|
| Anyway, I do not think the philosophical underpinnings of
| bitcoin are reducible to Satoshi's words. Even if it were,
| that would not be interesting to talk about. I don't want
| to have a pedantic conversation like this.
|
| There is a higher authority than Satoshi on what bitcoin is
| about, and that higher authority is the truth about what
| bitcoin is and is not good for. And that has been the case
| since day 1. Nobody who got involved in bitcoin early on
| professed any allegiance to Satoshi or "his" vision (or
| even worse, certain paragraphs in the whitepaper...).
| Bitcoiners' allegiance is to the best possible thing that
| bitcoin can be. Which means thinking primarily about root
| causes and fundamentals, _not_ primarily about paying for
| coffee.
| jollybean wrote:
| "The root problem with conventional currency is all the
| trust that's required to make it work.
|
| The statement implies a lack of understanding of what
| currency is.
|
| Currency is inherently a social construct, and there is no
| 'avoiding it' because that's 'what it is'.
|
| We could try to avoid it by having for example very 'hard
| money'. We could just use Gold to back all currency.
|
| This wouldn't work in normal conditions, almost assuredly
| leading to deflationary spirals, but given that a total
| lack of monetary policy, and a 100% chance of a 'Black
| Swan' event, which happen every 10 years or so ... the
| first crisis would wipe out the economy.
|
| The 2008 crisis and COVID would have knocked all the
| dominos down. (Yes, there are good arguments that there
| would have been less risk in 2008 with better currency, but
| the conditions still remain).
|
| Of course, on the other end of the spectrum - you have
| 'abuse of monetary policy' which is bad, which is what
| Crypto would like to get rid of, but I'm afraid there's
| very little opportunity there.
|
| "It's time we had the same thing for money."
|
| No - this is a missatribution of the problem. For the same
| reason that BTC very quickly stopped being a currency and
| became 'kind of a store of value' (really just
| speculation), you can see the issue is not 'trust'. As
| people begin to speculate and as it increases in value,
| businesses cannot use it as a currency, and, people are
| likely to hoard it.
|
| So if we want a 'better currency' what we need is a 'better
| monetary policy'.
|
| Unfortunately, that part is fairly entrenched.
|
| Because currency is so intertwined with the nature of the
| economy, it's hard to separate.
|
| Alternatively - you could develop an 'easily tradable
| asset' that is backed by other assets, like property, but
| that would still require centralization.
|
| Or you could start your own economy, and use a kind of
| Seigneurage and export the currency, allow other nations to
| use it, but again, requires trust.
|
| BTC was a nice experiment but it's not going to work for
| reasons that are fairly predictable and obvious to people
| on the finance side of the fence.
| Geee wrote:
| I'll just answer with another Satoshi quote:
|
| "If you don't believe me or don't get it, I don't have
| time to try to convince you, sorry."
| jmt_ wrote:
| But can Bitcoin eliminate the Fed and have any meaningful
| impact on the US financial system if the big actors of such a
| system are steadily centralizing and controlling it? How
| would Bitcoin be able to change anything if its "enemies" are
| embracing it and applying traditional banking approaches to
| it? I can't help but wonder if crypto will be the victim of
| embrace-extend-extinquish schemes.
|
| I'm not sure Visa is small fry. Regular people will want the
| easiest way to utilize crypto and if they can go through
| means familiar to them, they probably will. If companies like
| Visa end up having a hand in the majority of crypto
| transaction some day then crypto is effectively owned by the
| system it's trying to fight.
| thebean11 wrote:
| Building centralized things on top of it is not the same as
| centralizing Bitcoin itself.
|
| None of it allows them to print more, or prevent you from
| making on chain transactions.
| lottin wrote:
| > None of it allows them to print more
|
| What stops an exchange from crediting an account with
| newly created bitcoins just like commercial banks do?
| thebean11 wrote:
| You mean giving out more BTC IOUs than they actually own
| BTC? Nothing does, but creating IOUs is not the same
| thing as printing actual currency/gold/BTC.
|
| edit: And by "nothing", I mean there's no technical
| barrier. There are certainly legal barriers if they are
| lying about reserves and falsifying audits..
| lottin wrote:
| No, I mean crediting an account with an amount of
| bitcoins that came from nowhere. This is how commercial
| banks create money, and I don't see the reason why crypto
| exchanges can't do the same with bitcoin.
| thebean11 wrote:
| What do you mean by an "account"? They could not credit
| my BTC address with BTC they do not own, no. Obviously
| they could give me a login to a webpage showing I hold
| 10e99 BTC that I can't withdraw. They could do the same
| thing with gold bars and free Wendy's sandwiches. It's
| not the same thing as printing BTC, creating gold bars,
| or manufacturing actual sandwiches.
| lottin wrote:
| What do you think printing BTC means? They don't have an
| actual printing press that prints bitcoins. Instead they
| create a transaction that credits a BTC address but
| debits no addresses, thus creating new bitcoins out of
| thin air. On the bitcoin blockchain the number of
| bitcoins that can be created in this way is limited, but
| off-chain there is no such limit. A bitcoin exchange can
| credit an internal account with a number of bitcoins that
| it has created out of thin air, in exactly the same way
| that bitcoins are created on-chain, in effect increasing
| the total supply of bitcoins.
| thebean11 wrote:
| > They don't have an actual printing press that prints
| bitcoins. Instead they create a transaction that credits
| a BTC address but debits no addresses, thus creating new
| bitcoins out of thin air. On the bitcoin blockchain the
| number of bitcoins that can be created in this way is
| limited, but off-chain there is no such limit.
|
| Crediting a Bitcoin address is an on-chain event, so I'm
| not sure what you mean. If the address was not credited
| on chain, my Bitcoin node will not reflect the new
| balance, so the credit simply did not happen from the
| perspective of any honest node on the network.
| lottin wrote:
| The transaction happens off-chain. If you struggle to
| understand this you need to look up "fractional reserve
| banking". As soon as crypto users flock to centralised
| payment platforms, fractional reserve banking becomes a
| possibility and the supply of bitcoins is no longer
| limited to 21 billion. In the real world, central bank
| money (which in the bitcoin world is the equivalent of
| on-chain bitcoins) represents only a small fraction of
| the money supply.
| thebean11 wrote:
| A transaction that credits a _BTC address_ cannot happen
| off chain. Do you know what a BTC address is?
|
| I understand that an exchange can show you a UI, saying
| you have BTC that the exchange does not own..
| lottin wrote:
| It DOESN'T credit any BTC address, that's why it's an
| OFF-CHAIN transaction.
| thebean11 wrote:
| From your comment:
|
| > Instead they create a transaction that credits a BTC
| address but debits no addresses
|
| Apologies if I misunderstood?
| lottin wrote:
| This is how they print bitcoins on-chain. Centralised
| payment platforms can do the same thing, except they
| would credit an internal account, instead of a BTC
| address. Hopefully now it's clear.
| thebean11 wrote:
| Got it, yeah that's clear. Centralized platforms can
| certainly credit accounts for BTC that don't exist, on a
| technical level. Will this happen in practice? Will it be
| legal? Will it be possible to transfer these fake BTC to
| other platforms? I don't think so.
|
| In the case of USD, the answer is yes. Banks are
| incentivized to accept fractional reserve dollars from
| other banks, because in practice they are exactly the
| same. Why is that the case? Because the issuer of those
| dollars, the government, has specifically deemed it to be
| a legitimate practice. There's no risk in accepting
| fractional reserve dollars. Fractional reserve dollars
| can be withdrawn as cash, used to pay taxes, used to pay
| debts etc.
|
| Let's think about Bitcoin now. Fractional reserve BTC
| cannot be used to pay on-chain transaction fees. It
| cannot be used on the lightnight network. It cannot be
| used to participate in smart contracts. Would Coinbase
| accept fractional reserve BTC from Gemini? There would be
| no way for Coinbase to redeem them for on chain BTC,
| without trusting Coinbase to fulfill it. There's no
| government that can print extra BTC to fulfill Gemini's
| debts..so it would be surprising if Coinbase accepted
| these IOUs from Gemini. The issue with fractional reserve
| BTC is that they are completely unportable. Usable within
| the issuers ecosystem, sure, but not beyond that.
| lottin wrote:
| The thing is that these fractional reserve BTC are
| indistinguishable from normal BTC. If you receive a
| payment to your BTC address, you have no way of telling
| whether these BTC have been created by an exchange. So,
| to answer your question, yes, Coinbase would accept
| fractional reserve BTC from Gemini, because they wouldn't
| know, they would just receive BTC. As long as Gemini has
| enough BTC reserves to remain solvent, nobody would
| notice that they have been creating BTC out of thin air.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _borrowing and throwing away trillions of dollars on unjust
| foreign wars_
|
| Because the era preceding fiat currencies was peaceful and
| devoid of hegemony and global power struggles?
| agustif wrote:
| Current fiat dominance is also thanks to the petrodollar
| since Nixon nixxed the gold standard when the french asked
| for their USD in gold and send that ship to get it...
| thenewwazoo wrote:
| CipherTrace provides KYC/AML and related services for companies
| and governments who need and want it.
|
| Here's the thing: transactions on the blockchain are
| _anonymous_ but they 're not _private_. If you 're going to do
| things out in the open, someone's going to watch what you're
| doing. That doesn't necessarily result in regulation, though it
| may. It may doesn't necessarily result in incumbents squashing
| competition, though it may. CipherTrace builds tools, and how
| they're used is a political question, not a technical one.
|
| Disclosure: I know the CipherTrace folks and did a tiny bit of
| contracting for them between jobs.
| quantumBerry wrote:
| Accurate for BTC, although it's worth noting there are some
| privacy coins with blockchains that currently have very
| limited susceptibility to chain analysis, and thus as far as
| we can tell are private.
| jackson1442 wrote:
| > Will cryptocurrency effectively end up becoming just another
| currency/security traded and managed by giant companies
|
| Yes, that is exactly their goal. The only way Visa and MC
| continue to make money with crypto is centralizing and
| regulating it to death so no one else can enter the field, just
| like with payment cards today.
| rvz wrote:
| I'm afraid you are totally correct. Involving Mastercard and
| Visa will allow them to put in place a similar fees structure
| they use for card payments for cryptocurrencies so that they
| don't miss out on making money with a fee system.
|
| Why do you think they 'embraced' cryptocurrencies all of a
| sudden and Visa making Coinbase and many others exchanges
| principle partners to allow them to convert crypto into fiat
| currency?
| jmt_ wrote:
| That's what I'm thinking too. Why would Visa invest anything
| in crypto if they don't think they can reasonably control and
| benefit off it? Risk assessment is at the very core of Visa's
| company and I cannot imagine they would invest in something
| that has unreasonable risk. Crypto is risky and difficult to
| predict, which makes me think they have a plan to minimize
| risk by controlling crypto thru means well known to them and
| traditional banks.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| 1) Bemoan how people with all the money abuse their surfeit of
| capital.
|
| 2) Create a new currency, and give it to new people.
|
| 3) Create a way for the currency to be converted to standard
| money.
|
| 4) Watch as the newly wealthy become the people complained
| about in (1) and the link created in (3) enables the old
| wealthy to abuse their capital advantage on the new system.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| there are names for this sequence of statements, in logic, in
| rhetoric, but I will offer the seasonal ML machine-learning
| version: underfitting the data
| [deleted]
| samsquire wrote:
| Bitcoin has a landed wealth aristocracy just like land
| ownership has. It's not based on merit.
| gruez wrote:
| >Bitcoin has a landed wealth aristocracy just like land
| ownership has.
|
| You're thinking of PoS. If you hold 1 bitcoin now, you'll
| still only have bitcoin 100 years from now. On the other
| hand, with land and PoS, you'll have the land/coin _and_
| the rent you were able to extract.
|
| >It's not based on merit.
|
| How is it not meritocratic? Literally anyone could mine.
| This is as opposed to getting land, which typically
| requires you to be politically connected, or buying it from
| someone who was politically connected.
| samsquire wrote:
| My argument is that mining is not meritocratic.
|
| In the same way first ever land ownership is definitely
| not meritocratic. (See violence over land or enclosure
| acts stealing land from the commons)
|
| We need universal basic income to distribute wealth. Any
| new currency suffers from the landed wealth problem where
| a group of people is designated the aristocracy through
| landed wealth. That is, it's not democratic, universal or
| voted.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Title needs editing; crypto != cryptocurrency.
| vmoore wrote:
| I've grown used to thinking crypto = cryptocurrency. That's the
| nature of language.
|
| A language (and its people) gets to vote for the use of a word
| based on the heuristic of popularity. It's something that has
| been going on for some time now.
| Tenoke wrote:
| That's the original title and I'd wager most people read it
| correctly.
| Joeboy wrote:
| I noted the ambiguity but initially assumed cryptography,
| based on the name "CipherTrace".
| rewtraw wrote:
| this is HN where its a race to be as pedantic as possible
| MorePedanticer wrote:
| it's*
| legrande wrote:
| *You're
| throwdecro wrote:
| > I'd wager most people read it correctly.
|
| That's unlikely. Before cryptocurrencies, "crypto" generally
| meant cryptography. The term "crypto" now refers to
| cryptocurrencies almost 100% of the time.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I didn't: "CipherTrace" definitely made me think this was
| cryptography related. Mastercard has some pretty large
| investments into cybersecurity because of their position on
| the global money market, so I thought this company would be
| about trying to break encryption or something similar.
|
| I consider crypto to only refer to cryptocurrency in an
| informal, non-technical context, or in the middle of a
| paragraph talking about cryptocurrencies. On HN I kind of
| expect crypto to refer to cryptography with the amount of
| programming and computer science posts that get discussed
| here
| rfd4sgmk8u wrote:
| Yeah, crypto = hidden.
|
| In this context, crypto = cryptocurrency, because MasterCard is
| a major fintech company. The context is obvious.
|
| Don't die on the crypto != cryptocurrency hill. Its not worth
| it. Language is fluid and words represent concepts that change
| over time. We use contextual information to solidify the
| concepts.
|
| There is nothing special about cryptography that owns the word.
| Cryptozoology and Cryptosporidium are also valid candidates for
| using the short form.
| echelon wrote:
| I totally misread this and rolled my eyes about MasterCard
| getting into the cryptocurrency business.
|
| It's to the point where we need to start labeling
| cryptography as such. Crypto now means cryptocurrency because
| the crypto folks like to shorten it in every conversation.
| vmception wrote:
| This is about Mastercard expanding their digital asset
| business. I don't think you misread anything. Not sure why
| you rolled your eyes, lots of liquidity and transaction
| activity there and Mastercard is a liquidity and
| transaction activity business.
| denton-scratch wrote:
| Well, I for one thought Mastercard had acquired a
| cryptography company, so felt let down when I arrived at the
| article.
|
| I accept that "crypto" nowadays mainly means
| "cryptocurrency"; and that I will have to learn to sound-out
| "cryptography" in full.
|
| What I meant, using that terse notation, was that crypto _is
| not identical with_ cryptocurrency.
| defanor wrote:
| > In this context, crypto = cryptocurrency, because
| MasterCard is a major fintech company. The context is
| obvious.
|
| I, for one, was confused while taking the context into
| account (but having no idea what CipherTrace does): fintech
| companies, and especially those dealing with bank cards, are
| among the most common examples of encryption and
| authentication usage; I think it's even common to say "that's
| how your bank card transfers are secured" when explaining the
| usage of asymmetric cryptography to laypeople. Though the
| possibilities I've imagined were rather silly: e.g., some
| custom cryptographic hardware, for either efficiency or doing
| something fancy with quantum cryptography. Upon skimming the
| article, I'm not sure if the reality is much less silly, but
| the brief confusion happened either way.
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| > Language is fluid and words represent concepts that change
| over time.
|
| HN is largely a technical site so using the technically
| correct language is meaningful. Chemists often joke about
| that all foods are "organic" foods, but this is a deliberate
| joke about two technical terms for the word "organic". In
| both contexts using the correct is important.
|
| Language of course evolves, but it always evolves with this
| tensions between changing use and consistent use. The
| argument that one should just lay down and let words mean
| anything is silly.
|
| > We use contextual information to solidify the concepts.
|
| In this context both meanings of the word "crypto" make
| perfect sense to me. It's quite possible (and imho more
| interesting) that MasterCard is interesting in having more
| advanced cryptographic capabilities as it is for MasterCard
| to expand its use of cryptocurrencies. I would read an
| article about the former and am not interested in the latter.
| vmception wrote:
| They are tracing cryptographic hashes that represent
| transactions in cryptocurrencies, as thats how
| cryptocurrencies work.
|
| Who cares what you're interested in. Skim the first
| paragraph and move on.
| stouset wrote:
| The issue is that cryptography and cryptocurrency overlap
| relevancy in the fintech space. Without specifying which,
| it's ambiguous. I say this as an engineer on the security
| team of a major fintech company who also has a cryptocurrency
| arm.
|
| It's fine to call cryptocurrencies "crypto". It's less fine
| to be unnecessarily ambiguous and create confusion when
| either might be relevant. If not for this discussion, I had
| assumed the article would be about them acquiring an HSM
| vendor or someone else in the cryptography space.
|
| Admittedly this is the original title. But it's an ambiguous
| and confusing title.
| 0des wrote:
| Unless you also say "cellular telephone" I wouldn't lean
| into this one too hard, it's not worth it.
| vmception wrote:
| They are tracing cryptographic hashes that represent
| transactions in cryptocurrencies, as thats how
| cryptocurrencies work.
|
| Its the proper use of the word in one, two or even three
| contexts. If you're not interested in it, you'll find out
| from the subtitle or the first paragraph and move on.
| joshlk wrote:
| How much is the MasterCard paying? Is that published anywhere?
| abstrct wrote:
| This is a pretty smart purchase, with it MasterCard is getting a
| fairly mature technology stack (by cryptocurrency standards at
| least), an incredible amount of data (mostly attribution data
| relating to addresses and transactions), and a team that's
| experienced with the industry (which there is a massive void in
| skilled workers for).
| Forbo wrote:
| Welp, looks like this is going to be another avenue by which a
| major corporation engages in mass surveillance capitalism. I'd
| rather my financial activity not be constantly monitored,
| profiled, and sold off for advertising or whatever other
| purposes.
|
| This is why I hope that privacy coins catch on, but I'm
| unfortunately quit pessimistic that they will ever see mass
| adoption. If not for the lack of user will, then for the massive
| pushback we'll see from corporations and governments.
| Trias11 wrote:
| The friction in crypto adoption happens where crypto needs to
| be converted to fiat and vice versa.
|
| The more goods and services can change hands without touching
| fiat - the faster the global evolution away from all kind of
| government and corp nonsense will happen.
| bob229 wrote:
| Crypto is trash
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-09 23:01 UTC)