The crypto thread

[Birdjaguar]

Advertised on MSNBC tonight
Upgrade is a new on line CC service and will pay you bitcoin!

Upgrade Bitcoin Rewards

• 1.5% back in bitcoin when you make payments
• Credit lines from $500 to $25,000
• Affordable monthly payments with no annual fee
• Use wherever Visa® is accepted with safe and fast contactless card technology

 

[Hygro]

This "in bitcoin" thing doesn't make sense. Maybe they have lower transactions fees and you want BTC, but at the end of the day they're paying you a dollar amount regardless of how inconvenient its form takes.

Same goes for salaries in BTC. They aren't getting "5 BTC/year" they're getting "$150,000/year delivered in BTC" at whatever is the current market rate.

 

[El_Machinae]

Credit cards use all types of rewards programs, though. Movie theatre points, grocery points, airmiles points, etc. Of course, they're using USD to get them. But, I guess this could be a source of demand.

 

[Birdjaguar]

My point is that bitcoin is being used as a draw in mainstream TV ads and ubiquitous CCs. It is seeping its way down to more common people.

 

[Hygro]

CASHBACK OR DETH

 

[AmtrakQuebec]

Advertised on MSNBC tonight
Upgrade is a new on line CC service and will pay you bitcoin!

Upgrade Bitcoin Rewards

• 1.5% back in bitcoin when you make payments
• Credit lines from $500 to $25,000
• Affordable monthly payments with no annual fee
• Use wherever Visa® is accepted with safe and fast contactless card technology

I was watching that advert with interest (pun intended) tonight as well. I think I'll do some more investigating.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I went to their site to see what it was all about. The various terms of service seem terrible to me compared with my current card. No atm service is a big one.

 

[Samson]

I went to their site to see what it was all about. The various terms of service seem terrible to me compared with my current card. No atm service is a big one.

Can you open one with just bitcoin, or do you need a conventional bank account as well? That seems like an obvious selling point of this defi thing, giving people access to payments tech who were previously excluded.

 

[Birdjaguar]

https://www.upgrade.com

idk

 

[Samson]

https://www.upgrade.com

idk

I am guessing from their requirement "to obtain and use your personal credit profile and/or other information from one or more consumer reporting agencies, such as TransUnion, Experian, or Equifax" the answer is no.

 

[Samson]

Demonstrating real world utility of cryptocurrency

Digital currencies, impervious to international sanctions, allow handful of young Afghans to avoid the worst of crisis.

In the middle of a bazaar in western Afghanistan, Arezo Akrimi takes out her smartphone and, after a few taps of the screen, changes some cryptocurrency for a bundle of hard cash.

Akrimi, 19, is one of the 100 students in Herat receiving approximately $200 a month in cryptocurrency since September thanks to the American NGO Code To Inspire.

“Crypto is an incredible way to overcome all kinds of political and economic sanctions, but also a tool that can change the lives of people living in an authoritarian regime,” says the American, whose parents fled Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Beyond this humanitarian initiative, cryptocurrencies are gaining other followers in the country’s second-largest city Herat, according to forex dealer Hamidullah Temori.

He has seen an influx of new customers over the past six months, many of whom regularly come to convert crypto assets sent by relatives from abroad into Afghanis.

“Since the Taliban came to power [cryptocurrency] transfers to and from abroad have increased by 80 percent,” he told AFP.

Transfers are instantaneous [FSVO instantaneous] and commissions are much lower than transactions made through Western Union or hawala systems, which are traditionally favoured by Afghans. Hawala forms of cash transfers exist outside the banking system.

In Kabul, Noor Ahmad Haidar has become a crypto convert by force of circumstance.

The young man, who started exporting saffron to the US, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada in early 2021, now has 90 percent of his orders paid for in Bitcoins.

“I avoid going through the chaotic process of bank transfers,” he says.

“Since August, it has really become the only option available, and the most convenient for me.”

Its growing popularity in Afghanistan was noted by Chainalysis in its 2021 Global Cryptocurrency Adoption Index, which ranked the country 20th out of 154 countries for “grassroots take-up”.

Still, while the momentum is growing the volume of trading remains very low, and will remain so due to the lack of internet access and high levels of illiteracy in Afghanistan, she says.​

 

[IgrOK[SU]]

My crypto history: invested $400 to sorare.com/r/igroknow (I think it's OK to give my referral link?) in March 2021.

Got about $6000 as for March 2022. Was not very active last months. Could get more.
Also, it was a very interesting to participate... actually, I switched from my PC games to this, lol

 

[Samson]

Thailand: You can only use crypto for speculation, which totally defeats the point

Thailand's Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced on Wednesday a ban on using cryptocurrencies and other digital assets as a means of making payments.

Trade in the digital currencies will continue to be permitted, but as assets only.

A statement from the SEC said the regulatory body, along with the Bank of Thailand (BOT), saw the need to supervise and control the use of cryptos as a means of payment for goods and services to ensure stability of the financial system and the economy as a whole. According to regulators, digi-Dollars and binary Baht undergo unhelpfully volatile price fluctuations, are at risk of theft or data leaks, and may aid criminals in money laundering.

The SEC reasoned that the development of any unit of pricing outside the official currency, the Thai Baht, would increase the cost of economic activities and reduce the efficiency of monetary policy transmission.

Enthusiasm for cryptocurrency in Thailand is high. The nation reportedly boasts a greater proportion of people owning the alterna-money than anywhere else in the world. The government reported in January that the value of digital assets owned by Thais was ฿114.5 billion ($3.4B).​

 

[Samson]

The democrats have invented a magical way to solve the double spend problem!!!!

Many words have been written about how to solve the double spend problem with digital currencies. This was solved by Satoshi Nakamoto amoung others who invented the blockchain. Now it seems that some US legislators have invented another way, in the ECASH Act they direct the US Treasury Department to establish an electronic US Dollar that "would be purely peer-to-peer, capable of offline transactions, and able to be held and used completely anonymously, like physical cash is today".

I think it sounds like a great idea, but if it is unclear I suspect this is more "I wish this exists" rather than "we have a way that this would be possible". In particular the well known "double spend problem" is about how to deal with the fact that information is infinitly duplicable, and if you do not have a single trusted source of information how can you make digital assets sparse.

 

[EnglishEdward]

.... in the ECASH Act they direct the US Treasury Department to establish an electronic US Dollar that "would be purely peer-to-peer, capable of offline transactions, and able to be held and used completely anonymously, like physical cash is today".

Is that so that no one can trace which legislators are taking bribes and who is bribing the legislators?

 

[Samson]

Is that so that no one can trace which legislators are taking bribes and who is bribing the legislators?

Yeah, that is what they want. I would like to see it, as there are other sorts of transactions it is nice to not be reported to third parties, but I do not see it is possible as specified.

 

[Hygro]

I am very torn between the values (measures of utility, not morals) of money as public and money as private.

 

[Samson]

Possibly biggest crypto hack/exploit ever

Axie Infinity’s Ronin Network Suffers $625M Exploit

One of the most popular play-to-earn games, Axie Infinity, suffered an enormous hack to the Ronin network on which it runs. The project announced that a majority of Ronin validator nodes had been compromised—four belonging to the Sky Mavis company that builds Axie Infinity, and one belonging to the Axie DAO. After gaining control of the validators, they were able to approve malicious withdrawals of 173,600 ETH (about $600 million) and 25.5M USDC (a stablecoin, worth $25.5M). The $625 million loss was possibly the largest to date in the history of defi projects.

Sky Mavis announced that they had halted the Ronin Bridge and Katana DEX, and were making changes to their network to try to guard against future attacks. They also wrote that they were "working with law enforcement officials, forensic cryptographers, and our investors to make sure all funds are recovered or reimbursed".

The most frightening thing about the hack is not the size, but rather the timing of realization. The Ronin team spotted the hack 6 days after it initially occurred!
​

I always wonder what the right term for these things are, if the whole organisation is defined by the code (as I think is the case for DAO's), when someone does something the code allows is it a hack or is it just someone understanding how the organisation works better than others?

​

Note this is a slightly old graph, and seems to be underestimating the size of the "incident"

 

[Samson]

Stable coin not so stable

• The flagship stablecoin of the Waves network, Neutrino USD, has depegged after rumors of "death spiral" risks began circulating on Twitter.
• USDN is currently trading around the $0.86 price mark.
• The WAVES token has lost over 30% or $1.8 billion in value over the last four days.

Neutrino USD, the flagship stablecoin of the Waves ecosystem, is seeing its peg challenged amid short selling pressure on the ecosystem’s native token, WAVES. Neutrino USD (ticker: USDN) is meant to roughly follow the price of the U.S. dollar, but it’s currently worth around $0.86.

USDN lost its desired $1 peg last Friday after a scathing post by the pseudonymous crypto investor 0xHamZ began making rounds on Twitter. 0xHamZ called WAVES, the native token of the Waves network, the “biggest ponzi in crypto,” and claimed that the project’s founders had been artificially pumping the token’s value using leverage.

WAVES is the biggest ponzi in crypto
It has recklessly engineered price spikes by borrowing USDC at 35% to buy its own token
Continuous WAVES market cap growth is needed to keep the system stable
WAVES will eventually crash and USDN will break with it
You're on notice

— 0xHamZ (@0xHamz) March 31, 2022
​

Waves began making headlines in March after seeing its market capitalization surge almost sixfold in just over a month amid otherwise relatively shaky market conditions. Its principal use case is to mint and support USDN, which has likewise seen its market capitalization surge from around $500 million to an all-time high of over $960 million over the same period before losing around $130 million in value today.

USDN’s mechanism works similarly to MakerDAO‘s DAI, only it is overcollateralized and can only be minted using the WAVES token. The surging demand for USDN could be attributed to the large staking yields offered for the stablecoin on various DeFi platforms in the project’s ecosystem. However, 0xHamZ said that the high USDN staking yields were heavily dependent on the continuous growth of the collateral token, WAVES, and that the team had been “folding leverage” to engineer a supply squeeze to pump WAVES’ price artificially.

They also shared on-chain data to substantiate their claim, showing that the Waves team had been depositing USDN on the Waves-native money market protocol Vires Finance to borrow USDC, transferring the USDC to Binance to buy WAVES, and converting WAVES to USDN. The data showed that they repeated this process multiple times.

If you think this is just a minor coin that is having teething troubles, you may be interested in this video about the biggest coin:

Spoiler 35 minute video about tether :

 

[Samson]

EU moving to criminalise using an exchange

I have to admit, I see this government flailing about to try and control crypto as just more likely to push people away from untrustworthy exchanges onto decentralised solutions. From this twitter thread:

The EU Commission’s AML package will extend the obligation of financial institutions to accompany transfers of funds with information on the payer and payee to crypto assets

It is the EU implementation of the so-called FATF travel rule that basically says that crypto service providers (exchanges, custodians etc) have to share personal information (name, address etc.) of their clients for transactions between one another.

Different from the initial proposal that only required to collect (not verify) personal data from transfers made from/to an unhosted wallet, the draft now requires to “verify the accuracy of information with respect to the originator or beneficiary behind the unhosted wallet”

For every crypto-transfer from an unhosted wallet over 1k EUR, companies are obliged to inform the “competent AML authorities”. For ALL these transactions, even if there is no sign/suspicion of money laundering.

One year after entry into application, the EU commission will assess the need of “additional specific measures to mitigate the risks posed by transfers from or to unhosted wallets, including the introduction of possible restrictions”
This means that the EU Commission might be prohibiting transfers from/to unhosted wallets entirely, as was already suggested by some members of the Parliament in an earlier draft - see Art 18 b on page 45 here.

While the FATF travel rule only requires these measures for transactions over a certain amount (1k$) and the TFR for fiat (wire transfers etc) only requires the information sharing for transfers over 1kEUR, the draft sets no minimum threshold for crypto transfers.
That means that soon every single satoshi transaction that is not purely P2P will have to be accompanied by the sharing of personal information.

There are more problematic passages in the text (e.g. blacklist for entities without legal entity)
​

Legislation Draft Report