This is great for crypto. Justice for scammers who thought crypto users could be taken advantage of without consequence. Ponzi schemes like Celsius are not exclusive to crypto and it's great to know the Justice department will prosecute scammers regardless of the unit of currency being used.
I get what you’re trying to say, but honestly? All this does is hurt the reputation of crypto further. It’s yet another headline about crypto scams/ponzi scheme/etc. projected to an audience that is weary of being easily scammed out of money they believe to be safer elsewhere.
No one who is skeptical or on the fence about crypto is going to see this headline and go “oh good! They must be catching the bad guys, so now I feel more secure about getting into crypto.” Just like no one who sees an explosion in arrests of violent criminals in their home town thinks “good, must be a lot safer here now.”
The nice thing about Bitcoin is that it's success is not based on good/bad PR. Bitcoin has a solid technical foundation and practical use cases that has weathered every kind of criticism for over 10 years now and is still on top.
Celsius and earn programs/scams like it is just another trial Bitcoin has passed through and is stronger for it.
Moving large amounts of money 24/7 worldwide, outside of any bank, quickly, low transaction fee - pure P2P, and then being able to store it securely outside of a bank in your pocket.
Have you dealt with wiring money before? How about holding large amounts of currency or gold outside of a bank? It sucks.
The problem is that the use case is generally criminal, which crypto people elide by complaining about whichever country's government is currently being attacked in the media. They do this in order to make dodging taxes and government oversight sound heroic. It's also a way to transform a conversation about fraud and free-riding into easy nationalist cheerleading.
What people want is anonymity, cheap/free checking, and cheap/free money transfers. Crypto thus far has partially supplied the first, and is so bad at the second two that the only profitable reason to use it is to dodge some sort of official oversight when dealing with large amounts of money.
I must be a criminal then lol. Banks are a pain in the ass to deal with. Bitcoin is a very practical and easy way to move large amounts of money around. That's why a lot of people use it. We pay our taxes when transacting it just the same. If you don't use Bitcoin, great, but don't make assumptions about those of us who do.
> Banks are a pain in the ass to deal with. Bitcoin is a very practical and easy way to move large amounts of money around.
There is no way you will convince me that setting up and using Bitcoin for daily transactions, all on your own wallet with your keys etc., is “easy” or any less of a “pain in the ass” than using a regular modern bank is on a daily basis. That’s even ignoring the baseline tech literacy one needs to have to get set up.
It’s a dead horse at this point but “practical” also comes at odds with bitcoin’s volatility.
As a US citizen who has lived for multiple years in Vietnam, I can guarantee to you that using Bitcoin is infinitely easier than dealing with the VN banking system. Forget the legal/identity aspects, just the language and cultural barriers alone are a huge pain in the arse.
I find it hard to believe you are doing even half your daily transactions without converting to fiat. I also don’t know how you can wait a few minutes for a transaction to clear potentially dozens of times in a single day. So my guess is you largely deal with dong regardless of how you store your wealth.
This just sounds like a quick sound bite where the day to day realities would tell a more nuanced story.
If it were more convenient, then more people would be doing it. There is nothing convenient about setting up a bitcoin wallet and converting your money back-and-forth between it dozens of times a week, if not a day. This is especially difficult without the regular use of exchanges, which many crypto advocates will try to dissuade you from storing any crypto on, because you are functionally just using a bank again at that point and exposing yourself. “Not your keys not your crypto,” plus another online account to get hacked.
Being your own bank is a ton of work and most people don’t want to deal with that.
You're stuck on bitcoin, there are other cryptos far more suited to these things, like USDC/USDT. I only mentioned bitcoin because, even with the complexities of it, it is still easier than dealing with VN banks. That's how hard it is to deal with.
This is not a sound bite at all. More people ARE doing it, you just don't have any personal visibility into it. TONS of viets living abroad send money back and forth all the time. Money remittance is a huge global industry and the existing solutions all suck. KYC and fees are the two general major issues for people who just want to send money to their families.
Expats, like me, have an even harder time. Language and cultural issues often get the in way. If you're a nomad who works online and doesn't have a 'regular' job... you're out of the system and hard for the banking system to deal with. Try walking into a bank where literally nobody speaks english and open an account.
In Vietnam, there is also something that the US doesn't have much of. A black market for funds. I can send USDC to Vietnam and a local there will convert it to VND for a very small fee and zero hassle.
These are all things that based on your comments, don't impact you. That doesn't mean they aren't valid or that the usecase is moot. Try walking in others shoes for a bit before you jump to conclusions about things.
I have to ask: Do you think it's reasonable to expect even 10% of people to set up multiple wallets for all their coins and have a system in place for constant conversion to the fiat currency of where they are for daily transactions? Because you keep glossing over/ignoring this serious sticking point. Setting up a crypto wallet and having your systems in place is not an easy task for most people - especially when most of us go weeks (or longer) without seeing a single vendor who takes crypto. Being your bank is a lot of work and if you forget your password (who does that right?) you lose your money.
>This is not a sound bite at all. More people ARE doing it, you just don't have any personal visibility into it. TONS of viets living abroad send money back and forth all the time.
Do you have any numbers? "More" and "TONS" are, to be blunt, meaningless. And we all know the value of anecdotes.
>Expats, like me, have an even harder time. Language and cultural issues often get the in way. If you're a nomad who works online and doesn't have a 'regular' job... you're out of the system and hard for the banking system to deal with. Try walking into a bank where literally nobody speaks english and open an account.
If you move to a country like Vietnam and don't have a functional grasp of the language, you have way more problems than simply banking. Your expecting to be serviced at a Vietnamese bank while speaking english is the problem, not modern banking. Cryptocurrency does not solve language barriers any better or worse than other currencies do.
>In Vietnam, there is also something that the US doesn't have much of. A black market for funds. I can send USDC to Vietnam and a local there will convert it to VND for a very small fee and zero hassle.
Is this legal? Because this is just saying "crypto is great for violating the law." I'm not saying it's a good or fair system, that legality = moral, but this does not build your case like you think it does.
>Try walking in others shoes for a bit before you jump to conclusions about things.
I don't have a lack of imagination/empathy and find the insinuation a bit insulting. I can see why it's good for you. But to try and fit your very specific shoes on even 10% of the 7bill people on this earth, to graft your needs and solutions on to them and say "this is more convenient and better in most ways," does not make sense to me.
> If you move to a country like Vietnam and don't have a functional grasp of the language, you have way more problems than simply banking.
I did it, don't know the language at all. Spent years driving around on a motorbike in some of the most remote areas of the country, where nobody speaks English and heck, some speak totally different dialects of Vietnamese (there are dozens of the dialects).
Banking really was the toughest thing I had to deal with there. No money, no honey.
> Is this legal?
There are all sorts of money exchange businesses there. It is super common.
> But to try and fit your very specific shoes on even 10% of the 7bill people on this earth,
No, what you're saying is that crypto HAS to be valuable for 10% of the earth in order for it to be useful or valid.
My argument is that it is just for the people who need it.
In Vietnam, the equivalent 'fdic' insurance is about $3k, if you are lucky. Banks also go out of business there, left and right. So when you generalize about the banking system, maybe in whatever your country is, things are rosy, but in so many countries in the rest of the world, things are a huge mess.
These are all things that based on your comments, don't impact you. That doesn't mean they aren't valid or that the usecase is moot. Try walking in others shoes for a bit before you jump to conclusions about things.
Transaction fees are based on volume, and can vary wildly up to $50. And you can't store Bitcoin "in your pocket", you can only store your key, like storing your bank password. Except if you lose your bank password, you don't lose all your money.
I've noticed this pattern with a lot of other crypto-evangelists: you put a lot of emphasis on being able to transact "outside of banks", but most people don't care. They just want convenience, and the safeguards that banks provide are worth it for them.
> Moving large amounts of money 24/7 worldwide, outside of any bank, quickly
But who needs this every day? Most people value security of their money over that kind of flexibility, especially when modern online banking gives you 95% of the same benefits.
Besides, one can tout all the “real” advantages they want, but perception is everything. If people think crypto is a quick way to get stolen from they simply won’t use it. No amount of convenience will get someone to go through the process of setting up a wallet, downloading the ledger, setting up an account on an exchange (which requires them to link a bank account!), and convert their money to crypto. All so they can maybe get some perks a small % care about, let alone need.
I can move $10,000 or less daily, all near-instantly from my computer with my bank. I can’t imagine a world where I need more than that on the regular. That’s something many go years without doing.
Yea I guess this is where you anecdotal experience runs out because there are a lot of busy people and companies out there working in all sorts of industries moving a lot more than 10k around constantly. Banks are an unnecessary middle man not only slowing things down, but taking a a cut out of transactions as well.
Anecdotal? Most people aren’t corporations. Most people have absolutely no need to move over 10k USD in a single day regularly. You can take it at face value, it’s very obvious.
You’re also forgetting that businesses already can. The 10k example was for me as an individual. It sounds like you're saying businesses are currently unable to transfer large sums of money regularly and Bitcoin is their solution. It's very perplexing.
Well I know that I can't pay my mortgage or children's tuition with bitcoin (my two largest regular expenses), I know that transactions actually can take minutes so I don't want to use it to buy coffee, I know that if I forget my password I lose literally every cent in my wallet with no recourse, I know I need to convert it to USD to do 99% of my daily transactions, I know that the price it's at today is not the price it will be at tomorrow with margins much wider and more frequently occurring than with USD, and I know that most people have absolutely no desire to learn how to use it (as evidenced by over a decade of modest adoption and most vendors not accepting it).
> All this does is hurt the reputation of crypto further.
There is exactly one legitimate “crypto”, and it is named Bitcoin. All else ranges from speculative promises about future possibilities (smart contracts etc) to straight up scams.
Don’t let the people abusing the name of “crypto” detract from the greatness that was the invention of Bitcoin.
It seems to me that after more than 10 years Bitcoin can be most accurately described as "an investment vehicle hopefully not correlated with the stock market".
I guess that's fine and nothing out of the ordinary since people constantly invent new financial instruments.
But since more and more trades happen on regulated exchanges and (as was expected) regular financial regulations such as KYC and AML apply it seems not that revolutionary to be honest.
No reasonable person would (or does) use Bitcoin as an actual currency if they expect the value to increase in the future so it can't become a means of exchange for real world goods.
Most of us have established and secure alternatives for that and inflation doesn't really matter for most of my income (which is spent within 30 days). Even people in countries with unstable government mostly seem to prefer other methods.
Maybe I'm missing something but given all that the underlying technology of Bitcoin and friends look like an implementation Detail that doesn't really matter.
> No reasonable person would (or does) use Bitcoin as an actual currency if they expect the value to increase in the future so it can't become a means of exchange for real world goods.
I take issue with this statement because it reflects a fundamental misunderstanding that people have about Bitcoin.
The point is not to “HODL” the Bitcoins waiting for the USD or EUR value of the BTC to increase.
The point is among other things:
1. to be able to freely transact with anyone, and
2. to not have a central authority adjusting the purchasing power of your savings
As of yet we are still relegated to caring about the USD and EUR prices of Bitcoin, because in order to use our savings we have to exchange to fiat. But the ultimate goal is indeed to be able to use BTC directly for everything from buying a house to paying for groceries.
For example, I receive 100% of my paycheck in bitcoin.
From week to week I don’t have any desire that it increases in value of USD or EUR.
My main problem is when it decreases in value, so that my purchasing power is worse from having gotten my paycheck in Bitcoin.
But even then, over time it probably averages out.
And if not, well at least I am still receiving my paycheck in the currency I believe in, and maybe some day more people will believe in it too. And then finally some day I can buy my groceries with BTC directly.
> The point is not to “HODL” the Bitcoins waiting for the USD or EUR value of the BTC to increase.
This is some pretty typical “no true Scotsman” stuff if we’re being honest. If you go to a crypto sub or forum any given day, they will all say “no no no bitcion isn't for daily use, you want ______ coin.” one day. The next day it’s “HODL, DCA in on a few cryptos, and watch it rise.” Two days later when it crashes it’s “I never thought it was good for currency, I just like the tech.”
People tend to forget Bitcoin is a monetary experiment where nobody controls the printer and the total supply over time converges to a certain value. There's no good reason not to try a different model of supply e.g. a supply function that emulates a clock. An asset like this could be named TIME and a coin could represent a second that passed in real life. Valuing time as money would make for an interesting experiment.
There's little illegitimate about a cryptocurrency whose emission averages 1 coin per second forever (not letting the current generation hoard nearly all the supply, or letting the founders get any) and otherwise simplifies many aspects of bitcoin.
