SEC favoring Bitcoin?
 

Reuters says SEC told Coinbase to delist ALL OTHER CRYPTO besides BTC ... before suing Coinbase
https://www.reuters.com/technology/s...ng-2023-07-31/

Coinbase denies: https://cointelegraph.com/news/sec-t...rian-armstrong

Some funky shit is going down

One thing is clear though... BTC is here to stay and GFY'S FRANCK is a LEGEND

Legendary Franck instead of Legendary Lars

Well it's true, everything else is definitely a security, no question about that. Bitcoin is not a security, and I believe ETH will be given a free pass to also not be considered a security.

All the rest though, good luck, you'll need it, because unregistered securities, they'll be coming for you, look at what's happening with Richard Heart and his ponzi/scams Hex, PulseChain , etc

https://www.sec.gov/news/press-release/2023-143
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...investors.html

Gensler is crooked as a $3 bill is the problem.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/gary-...-one-you-think

:1orglaugh

There's literally nothing but questions about that. XRP won its case last month and now another court is taking an opposing view.

Fortunately, this is of little practical concern to the rest of the world, as the SEC, corrupted as it has become under Gensler, has no domain over what the rest of the globe does.

Furthermore, even if the SEC were to succeed in this nonsense, so long as Americans have access to BTC they can simply use a cross chain bridge to exchange BTC for anything else.

The most this will do is push innovation overseas and enrich competing nations, which is endemic of this administration anyway.

Long-term, it's a nothing burger. Other forms of crypto aren't going away no matter how much the bitcoin maxi's want it to.

Franck isn't running for President though, is he?

See Sig :thumbsup

How is ETH not a security?

I believe ETH is a security, it was an ICO and the company/founders enriched themselves, it definitely is, I just feel like SEC will "let it slide".

The rest of them are securities 100%.

Absolutely!

Nobody wants all crypto to go away, not even maxi's, that is like a cultlike mentality you're building. People who have experience and who support whats right & fair are more than willing to call out the scams and ponzi's, like Hex, Bitconnect, Elephant.Money, Celsius, Luna, etc etc

The courts can't decide what they are and cases almost certainly won't be resolved for many years - likely each of them reaching different outcomes based upon the unique factors of the case - but you know "100%" :error

You seem to have for some reason developed an emotional attachment to your financial instrument and are unable to analyze matters objectively.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/defi...erm=Twatwaffle

You lack the knowledge and experience required to speak sensibly about this topic. Merely buying bitcoin and reading biased promotional literature does not give one "experience" in this field.

For one thing, if you had the ability to comprehend simple tokenomics and took the time to research the project, you would not lump elephant.money into a list with anything suspect - it is one of the most ethical projects in DeFi and has amassed a significant volunteer effort to support it. Your persistent denigration of the project is at best willful ignorance.

Secondly, if you did have the "experience" and "support whats right & fair" you would be warning people about the significant risks associated with holding bitcoin long term. Many innocent people have found their bitcoin confiscated by the US government when it comes to light that their BTC had previously been used in the commission of some type of crime - remember, it's early days were rife with transactions for drug dealing, human trafficking, terrorism, and worse. Sometimes it takes years before an investigation even begins. You are telling people to hold for the long term something which should at this point be more properly viewed as a transactional / day trading instrument when it is subject to both extreme volatility and is a total gamble as to whether those bitcoin in your wallet might have been used in some type of crime at any point in the prior 14 years and be subject to confiscation. One way to help lessen that concern somewhat is to migrate to a more modern blockchain which uses an account model rather than a more primitive UTXO model, although I suspect even that is getting above your head.

Long story short, long term holding of bitcoin at this point in the game is a gamble to the extreme which entails many risks that you routinely fail to mention in your promotional spiel. The only thing that anyone can reasonably count on is that it will continue to lose market share over time to more modern forms of crypto - which doesn't necessarily correlate with price if more money comes into crypto as a whole. Put simply, it is no longer in the "growth sector" of crypto and bears significantly more risks than other blockchains which offer more potential :2 cents:

Learn what securities are, maybe check what the Howey Test is. BTC is not a security. The scams/ponzi's I mentioned already are (were) unregistered securities, sure the SEC maybe doesn't have manpower to go for them all, but they'll probably fail before they have a chance to be called out by SEC.

Please quit promoting the Elephant ponzi. You sound like you're getting really emotional about it, this is when you know you're culting it up. Control yourself. Take your emotion out. You must be overinvested. I really hope you can make money, but promoting ponzi's are not the way dude.

As for Bitcoin, i dont care what you do, don't buy it, BTC doesn't offer yield off the backs of new users like Elephant ponzi. I suggest people protect themselves from inflation, BTC is best from my research/knowledge, but others might choose real estate, index funds or gold, but holding cash for long term is financial suicide.

Have luck fella & thanks for the twatwaffle lesson, reminds me of 4th grade lol

I am well aware of what securities are and if you had any understanding of the Howey test beyond having seen it referenced in an article that was above your head you would understand the controversy and conflicting opinions.

There is nothing "ponzi" about Elephant.money and your continued reference to this is laughable. Anyone who has taken the slightest amount of time to research the project will understand that your statements regarding it are not to be trusted.

I point out that you are emotionally invested in bitcoin and lack substantive knowledge on the general crypto market and your response is to claim I'm emotional and cultish? :1orglaugh

It is rather amusing to watch you keep doubling down on wrecking your reputation here and demonstrating the extent of your ignorance while this thing keeps going parabolic while simultaneously building deeper liquidity:
https://www.tradingview.com/x/dCwXReKZ

Remember when I posted this, all of 2-3 weeks ago?
That's changed:
https://i.ibb.co/Hhb5zp0/image-2023-08-04-150850273.png

Keep trying to argue with your betters. I appreciate the pageviews :thumbsup

If you read the whitepaper they offer high yield at low risk. This is exactly what scammers will tell you.

And remember, if offering you high or fixed yield, that means YOU are the yield (is why they need to bring in new dummies, it is classic ponzi)

Have luck yall :)

If you understand the whitepaper, unlike captain twatwaffle here, you'll see that this is a highly profitable business model which is why it can offer high yields. Profitability is not an indicator of a scam; there are ways to earn money in crypto beyond gambling like it's the stock market.

The price keeps going up, the liquidity keeps getting deeper, and the treasury keeps getting bigger because it earns profits from trading fees and the algorithm reinvests them intelligently like a properly designed business. Even if the price were to enter a downward trend for some reason, the treasury still exists to handle debt obligations and offer yield... which eventually should entice more investors and get the ball rolling in the right direction again.

If you see a simple "dumb" commodity growing in price on thin liquidity, you can expect it to crash eventually when the optimism wears off and its promoters use you as their exit liquidity. Bitcoin would be a prime example of this, and hence why some people can't associate anything in crypto as being more advanced than the first example they were exposed to.

I can't believe people still fall for this ish

The shit show at Luna and all the other garbage SBF and others were involved with haven't taught a lot of people enough...

I hate to say it but most of Crypto is a ponzi except BTC and possibly a handful of other projects

That much I agree with. In DeFi most of them are copycat projects that re-use slight variants of the same code. The majority aren't malicious or scams, they're simply bad tokenomics destined to lose money from the start. The number of rugpulls/scams is dwarfed by those which are simply poorly designed. Ethical and competent developers are few and far between.

BTC isn't a ponzi however it is definitely heavily manipulated, hence it's attractiveness to all the trading firms getting involved with it. They'll be able to push the price up and down largely as they please and squeeze profits out of the suckers who keep buying during bull runs and selling on panic.

I see no reason for the price to repeat the growth phases of the past when its market share will simply keep dwindling and the volatility will continue to scare away serious long term investors.

Greener pastures exist.

Agreed. And, sadly, on the roughest of economic times is when the ponzi's come out full force. They prey on the desperate. We've had sooooo many opportunities to learn from past ponzi's/scams and protect ourselves from future ones, but greed fills the eyes of desperate people. Fact is, everyone loves the idea of high return with no/low risk, which is not sustainable unless temporarily through ponzi, or we could compare it to "investing by gambling".

Bitcoin has no central authority to reel in new people, it only exists, and is more secure than any database on Earth. Sorry, to those of you who are interested in it, BTC has nothing to offer but that, to exist and to transact safely & securely. No referral marketers or central authorities who claim that high yields will be paid at little/no risk.

Jscott, you're right. BTC is always going to exist due to its decentralized nature.

ETH isn't decentralized at all.

you sure about that?

https://www.techopedia.com/bitcoin-m...a%3A%209.55%25
bitcoin hash power:
United States: 35.4%
Kazakhstan: 18.1%
Russia: 11.23%
Canada: 9.55%
Top 4 nations control 74.28% of the hashrate

https://www.ethernodes.org/countries
ETH nodes:
US: 43.19%
Germany: 13.14%
Singapore: 4.67%
United Kingdom: 4.12%
Top 4 nations control 65.12% of mining power

BTC validation is more centralized than ETH.

As BTC mining continues becoming less and less profitable over time - an inevitability, due to the "halvening" and increased difficulty over time, the barrier to entry for miners should be expected to continue to rise, requiring ever more capital expenditures for new mining participants, encouraging ever greater centralization.

ETH nodes have the same problem, it requires 32 ETH (~$59k USD) to run a single validator, which is pretty steep for most people. That cost will rise (and fall) with the price of ETH, of course. Still, it's significantly cheaper than the initial capital required to make BTC mining worthwhile, and if a jurisdiction should fall prey to a hostile legislative environment (as happened with China and BTC mining) it is far easier to move software nodes to a more friendly jurisdiction than to ship physical bitcoin miners and the massive support infrastructure they require.

^^ he posted an article that says:

"A single Bitcoin transaction requires 1,449 kWh to complete, which is approximately the same amount of power consumed by an average US household in 50 days."

Which we all know is not true. See this article https://blog.trezor.io/three-myths-a...on-ef613a1f3d5
with also mention of this https://hackernoon.com/the-bitcoin-v...y-8cf194987a50
They lump energy & electricity together which makes these statements absolutely false, so usually you can tell who is dishonest by these.

(Not saying you are Aflix, but your article is incorrect, author is either wrong or intentionally dishonest, which ofc is very common with so many BTC-haters aka anti-mathers around these days)

And yes ETH is more centralized, lookup the 2016 Dao hack, they rolled back the chain, that is proof of centralized control. You cannot rollback the Bitcoin chain ;)

I'm not going to vouch for the validity of either article, but all of the recent data I've seen regarding hashing/node distribution seems largely the same.

No idea what correlation you're trying to make between a 2016 hack when ETH was under proof of work - and in its infancy without widespread support - compared to current node distribution under proof of stake. It's like bringing up stats about bitcoin from 2010 when people were still mining on PC's.

BTW, the civil discussion is appreciated.

You're saying PROOF OF STAKE is more decentralized than POW?

No.

I am saying that he referenced an event from 2016 when ETH validation was under a completely different model than it is currently.

The current data - from 2023, not 2016 - now shows that ETH validation is somewhat more decentralized than BTC, if the numbers quoted are correct. A 9% difference among the top 4 of both blockchains doesn't really seem that significant either way.

...

As a matter of concept, neither POS or POW has any inherent advantage insofar as decentralization. However the barrier to entry for mining BTC in a significant way is pushing out smaller players, leading to more centralization, and I don't see that trend reversing. ETH validation could suffer the same fate if the price of ETH rises; I suppose the point could be argued that POS can have a lower barrier to entry when pooling is considered, but that's not really what I was getting at.

PoW/Bitcoin is clearly more decentralized than any PoS.

https://river.com/learn/proof-of-wor...proof-of-stake

A few good reads:
https://seekingalpha.com/article/449...proof-of-stake
https://zycrypto.com/ethereum-becomi...-pundits-warn/
https://www.lynalden.com/proof-of-stake/#proof (Lyn Alden is a genius, this article of hers is pre-ETH merge to PoS, but still interesting read)

PoW/Bitcoin protocol value's decentralization as #1, because being decentralized is what will allow it to exist for a very VERY long time. PoS protocols seem to value decentralization at #2 or even less

“The decentralization of a network is a secondary, if not forgotten, measure in this decision-making process.” - Noah Buxton, regarding ETH. https://decrypt.co/111485/has-proof-...re-centralized
^^ this is true.

History shows that centralization can lead to the destruction (or non existence) of a crypto. So keeping a crypto decentralized is of upmost importance, and Bitcoin's protocol is the only one of all crypto that strives for that.

Slightly off topic: isn't one of the reasons why BTC is the "gold standard" of crypto is because a fairly large % of it is IRRETRIEVABLE (ie., mined but lost/forgotten/destroyed/etc)?

I don't believe the lost forever BTC has any relevance of why it is the gold standard.

It is the gold standard because it is the only truly decentralized crypto of all and is the most secure of all BY FAR, which means it will continue to exist, unlike the others.

Decentralization addresses several attack vectors; a 51% attack is the most common concern.

In that regard, bitcoin probably wins, hands down.

But a 51% attack isn't the only concern, and some of the other concerns could lead to a rapid centralization of validators that could more easily allow a 51% attack to become more relevant. It's also important to distinguish between the technology and its implementation in any specific application. What holds true for BTC vs ETH may be implemented differently for other blockchains in regards to PoW vs PoS.

For instance, what happens if one or more nations decide to ban crypto or crypto mining, as China did recently? Validators within those nations are taken out of the pool, altering the distribution significantly. With PoW, it would require moving physical equipment to a new foreign location in order to re-establish the network status; PoS is no less vulnerable to legislative demands however it is a simpler matter to transfer nodes to a different server. In that sense, PoS is more resilient.

Also when analyzing validator distribution, even the proper counting of them may prove difficult. ETH has something over 6000 nodes at the moment; how many are owned by the same individuals and organizations? Bitcoin probably has far more validators running, but how many of them are controlled by sole individuals or organizations?

There is really no way to know, as one lone person might have hundreds of miners contributing to multiple pools with different addresses, but ultimately all of those miners are controlled by just one person/company.

In that sense, something like the BSC has a distinct advantage. The number of actual validators is quite low, however they are spread out over many different legal jurisdictions and there is no concern of a 51% attack because they're all controlled by one multinational corp whose entire value and reputation relies entirely upon providing correct data. The US government hit Binance's US branch with every bit of legal firepower it could muster and it had no impact on the viability of its blockchain, serving only to batter the price somewhat.

Ultimately I don't believe validation technology has fully matured yet, as none of the current major ones are ideal. Proof of Space-Time holds much promise, although it is not yet widely used. Imagine a world where everyone who has some spare flash memory space on their cell phone is a validator; that could become a reality in the coming years, and it's hard to imagine a more decentralized, democratized system.

I think the US government likes bitcoin. Easier to track than cash.

"Lost" bitcoins sure jack up the value by decreasing the FIXED supply

Tracking freshly mined Bitcoin, or coinjoined Bitcoin? How would that be done?

But I agree, cash is the most difficult to track, that's why most criminals use it.

That's already priced in though, the early days compared to now days lost BTC is like night & day. Some still lost today, but nothing near as many as decade ago. I remember hearing something like 2-3mill will be lost forever, including 1mil of which Satoshi took to the grave.

Yes because....
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michael...ey-selling-it/

Serious question: is there any REAL use case for ALTcoins?

DeFi = decentralized ponzi, amirite?

Well, altcoins can have faster transactions than Bitcoin, because they are centralized. But Bitcoin can beat that because now with Lightning Network or Liquid you can keep the decentralized nature of Bitcoin txns while having free & instant txns. So, that said, altcoins imo are a cash grab. I don't mean that as they're all a scam, because you can't blame people/companies for trying, and with a good marketing team you can sell anything to anyone. Look at Ripple/XRP, an 80% premine and people still willing to buy it and support their network. If you asked ANY altcoin creator/founder to leave the project they won't, because they like to have their hand involved in the project, one of many aspects of their centralization. Only Satoshi of Bitcoin could do it, none other.


Another note, we all knew an ETF would come:



I don't like the idea of Blackrock showing interest in Bitcoin, but I do believe it is inevitable, they want their hands on the best performing asset of the past decade(s).

Some blockchains yes, like DAG and VET. Their coins are something like "shares", so u gamble with them.

That's a real use case?

LOL.
Imagine buying bitcoin right before the US gov't takes a $5 billion shit on the market :error


See sig for one example. Blockchain based community bank.

All of the real advanced development is going on in DeFi. Sure, it's filled with scams and failed ideas, but there are some real gems in there as well. Smart contracts are the way ahead; in the long term simple "dumb" coins are passé and have no reason to do anything but lose market share as the field evolves. There's also a ton more info easily available in DeFi for traders; centralized exchanges pull all kinds of shady shit that is much more difficult to hide when everything is fully transparent.

The biggest problem that the wider crypto market has, ironically, is Bitcoin. Not saying that to slam BTC, but it's just the way it is; a lot of people made their fortunes in BTC and now they use BTC deposits to create leverage for use in DeFi, so every time bitcoin drops they have to close out their leveraged positions to pay back their loans. This ends up causing a chain reaction which leads to the entire crypto market tending to move as one.

The best thing that could happen to crypto is for people to spread their investments out over other coins, any other coins. Don't really see that happening anytime soon, next best thing is to invest in something with a lot of stablecoin liquidity to back up the price.

Does it have scale?