The world has seen many, to many wars in the human history.
It's quite interesting that two biggest wars of the last century were started by Germany. Stockpiling weapons works as a deterrent. Think about it, when you're a small guy at school you're asking for trouble. At some point some bully will see you as inferior and want to unload his frustration and anger on you, because it's safe for him. Guys who go to the gym and do sports have it much easier. Bullies just avoid them because even if they win they walk out of it with a broken nose or a black eye = not worth it. |
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I mean this not cool ! you buy a piece of land and it can be taken from you because you can't keep up with inflation.
It can be worse. Your grandparents had land, gave it to your parents and finally it was inherited by you, but it will be taken by the government because times have changed, taxes went up, wages went down and you know the rest.
States that do not have property taxes have income taxes.
Come to the EU. We have both property and income taxes and 15%+ vat on top. |
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The pressure is building up. Iran issued a statement that if a US invasion happens it will wipe out Israel. There's too much at stake so I doubt there will be a war. In fact there aren't many US allies in the area, but there's plenty of enemies. Everything North and East of Iran will support it in case of a US invasion. They can also count on support of Syria and large part of Iraq. We'll see how Turks will respond, but they used to buy oil from Iran before the US sanctions, so they will either remain neutral or support Iran. Russia of course will go against the US, as they always do. If a war really begins it will be another Vietnam for the US and Trump knows it.
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I still find gold and silver interesting and worth having but if you compare these two charts you can see how bitcoin took in gold refugees in 2017 or maybe it's better to say it ripped a hole in gold's value. You can see a sharp drop on the gold chart and a nice big FOMO candle on bitcoin at the same time. Some gold holders got bored after 3 years of waiting on gold to go back up, saw bitcoin rising and sold to jump on the moon rocket. I bet that it will happen again if Bitcoin breaks 20k, gold will go even lower.
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The question is will paying for tracing every single customer out of for instance 100k people is going to be worth it for the exchange. They will probably limit the screening to whales, but still CipherTrace won't do a thousand traces a day for cheap.
As for Gemini there are stories about them circulating on the forums. For instance, they tend to lock your account and demand a pay slip from your job to unlock it. Imagine that! Like what would that prove if? Say I'm selling 10k worth of crypto every month, but I'm earning 1k a month at my day job. How does that help them establish if I could or couldn't have that specific number of coins. I personally know an unemployed guy with over 10 BTC stashed away. They'd probably lock him forever on Gemini for money laundering.
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I always find it completely ridiculous that people are fighting nationalism. Nationalism is good in moderation just like almost everything you eat, drink and do. Go for a 10 minute run every day - great, you're gonna be healthy. Run 10 km every day and you'll burn your muscles and look like a skeleton in a few weeks. Every country should protect its national identity and culture. We should protect our borders and allow in only those who will respect our values and be able to live in our society. Nationalism and Nazism are different but try to explain that to some masked moron with a bat.
"It's different when we do it!" That part was great.
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If it pumps whenever you sell just don't sell. How difficult is that?  It's been great for me, but I can't relate to OP because I'm a hodler. I had that feeling a few times when I sold a little bit to buy myself some stuff on Amazon and later realized that it was the most expensive HDD or LCD monitor in the world, since a year later Bitcoin was worth 4 times more. I could have bought a whole new computer for the cost of a single stupid monitor had I waited. |
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I thought about it once and the two main reasons for the existence of religion was fear and lack of knowledge (understanding). There's also a third one and that is tradition.
Fear is that thing that makes people pray because what if there is a god and when they die there will be no turning back, they will have to face him.
Lack of knowledge comes from low IQ and laziness. Believe me, there are people out there who think they are smart but barely managed to go through primary school. They are religious because smarter and more educated people are telling them to be.
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Very true. I was initially under the impression that compliance was pretty widespread. It's the opposite really. Many dozens of monitored countries fail to implement the majority of FATF rules. This is decades after these standards were initially put in place. Often times, a mere pledge by a country to work towards implementing some of the standards is enough to stave off FATF pressure for years.
That means we'll probably see non-compliant exchanges persist for many years. My biggest concern is how compliant exchanges will interface with customers who send coins from non-compliant exchanges.
Let's say BitMEX continues their no-KYC policies in the face of these rules. What happens when you send a few bitcoins from your BitMEX account to your Gemini account? Will Gemini close your account? Seems possible to me.
Is this even possible and/or worth the time and money put into retracing transactions? Even if they (in general) agree to not receive transfers from non-compliant exchanges, how much effort will they put into it. Probably not much because time and effort = money. Who's going to pay them to retrace millions of transactions back to their origin and sending transactions back? What will happen if somebody sends money to a third party first and then to the exchange, or sends money from a casino, or from a mixer? It's going to be one of those laws people agree to obey and then they don't like speed limits and no parking signs. |
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That's right. After reading posts in signature threads for a while, I'm pretty sure people who see posts by OP read it in this exact way: |
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I like the irreversibility and don't see it as a weakness. Reversibility is also a weakness and you can see a good example of this in paypal chargeback scams. Now, the important part is to see which of these two are more annoying for the end user. We are used to the banking system and being able to call for help to the higher power whenever something goes wrong, therefore irreversible transactions will be a burden. IMO it's a matter of getting used to. A matter of perspective.
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I heared a lot of rumours in the past months about the exchange Yobit. Not sure if they are all true, but I have used it for many transations and never had one problem. It's strange that they would hold another signature campaign, but if you're losing support you have to try and get your name out again, right?
You had no problems because not allowing people to withdraw is a very big red flag and if that happened you'd all run to every forum on the Internet to tell people about it. They won't steal your couple hundred dollars worth of crypto because it allows them to maintain a facade of a legitimate exchange and do the dirty work behind the scenes. This includes manipulating the markets, listing scam coins for a hefty fee, most likely participating in pumps and dumps and running a ponzi scheme in the form of an "invest box". I wouldn't be surprised if they were laundering stolen coins as well. |
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Now all we got to do is make it warm and...  Who knows what will come out of it. Fate of mankind: dreamed of becoming dragon riders and became food for parasitic alien life forms. |
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FATF rules aren't accepted all around the world. Even within the EU some countries do not participate in this "project" so it's not the end of the world yet. That said, it won't be long until all exchanges fall and you'll have to use cash to remain semi-anonymous and even that will come to an end with the ideas of cashless society that more and more countries are supporting. Denmark is one of one of the current leaders when it comes to going cashless.
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It's a funny thing when you can see this pressure building up. At a time when the US presidents were for decades being chosen from white males there was a big drawn towards a change. People needed someone different and they chose the first black dude that looked about right to take the chair. Most people will agree that Obama was a mediocre president. Now there's another push for a woman and obviously parties will want to play that card in the next election. At some point people will become desperate to finally choose a woman and probably will choose a mediocre one, or worse.
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I'm not completely dismissing any theories, but thinking that the Moon is full of chambers where aliens live and conduct experiments is to me equal to thinking that there are devils bathing in tar somewhere beneath our feet. I doubt it's even partially hollow. It's most likely porous and may be full of caves and tunnels, but it isn't empty like an egg shell. Forms like that are very rare in nature.
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What I have seen since 2010 is that there is Bitcoin and there are scams. Even if you find the more legitimate alt-coins you are kidding yourself to think you are "Diversifying your portfolio". If Bitcoin fails for some reason then it is extremely likely that it will effect almost all (all?) alts. On the other hand, if an alt collapses it is just another normal day.
Diversifying is a term from traditional markets that doesn't really work with cryptocurrencies. In the crypto world Bitcoin is the original cryptocurrency, the root and altcoins are just small branches coming from it. When bitcoin gains value, the root becomes stronger and the sprouts gain a stable platform to grow on. If the root dies so will the rest. This is not like gold, silver and diamonds, where you can pick one or the other and all will have relatively high and stable value but by buying all three you're protecting yourself from possible manipulation. Buying altcoins makes you buy cheap chinese knockoff instead of the real deal. |
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Perhaps the reason why EU is pressing Malta so hard on setting up regulations is because most crypto businesses are taking refuge on the said island and do their business in there instead of the big guys in the Union. The question is up until when would they be able to be so 'crypto-friendly'? For sure, there will come a time that the little island would be a hotspot for money laundering and other stuff if left unchecked, and that's why the EU is stepping in. Of course, due to favorable crypto conditions, Malta becomes the 'Swiss bank account' of legitimate and illegitimate crypto users alike, and that's no good in the long run.
AML is not the only reason why businesses are running to Malta. I remember an article about a Polish exchange that had to move there because of some unfavourable conditions in the country. Long story short, they banks there were cutting ties with crypto businesses and the government demanded them to hand over all user information for the purpose of taxation, even people who didn't trade for fiat but only exchanged cryptocurrencies. On one hand money laundering is bad, but on the other handing out user information to every agency that asks for it, even when they aren't investigating that user, is a bit too much. Show me the man and I will show you the crime. |
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And the drama continues. Karpeles was using exchange funds to buy apartments in Tokyo and hire hookers, butterfly labs delayed shipping to mine with their client's hardware, the owner of BTC-e laundered money, this guy traded... Maybe I've been in crypto for too long because these things no longer amaze me. Another day, another scammer.
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This is ridiculous. They want to know what when and where you're buying. How about some privacy? I don't really want the whole bureau to know what kinky stuff I'm into. Think of the implications.
Guys, look, this one is suspicious! He bought a safe and spent bitcoin on some gold and silver bars. He's storing everything at home. Let's check what properties he owns and we'll have a location in case we need to look for some precious metals.
Thankfully, not all countries are members of FATF.
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