>That's not the case for every country on the planet
It's not helping there either. Countries where the economy is strictly controlled by the government, like North Korea, are mainly using crypto and defi to centralize even more. Their government can use defi to steal from other countries with impunity, evading international laws while continuing to oppress their own citizens and disallowing them from using the internet.
>And how do those prevent rich person A from paying rich person B (by buying a painting owned by B for an inflated price) for some illegal service?
If it were done through a bank (or a law-abiding crypto exchange) they would be required to keep a log of the transaction and the legal identities of the participants, as well as a log of where the money came from and where it's going. The idea is, if buying the painting is just one of the steps to "clean" the money, they'll be able to trace it back to when the money was dirty.
Transactions and storage of money are already decentralized, through the traditional finance system that connects at least thousands of banks and payment processors and other financial institutions. So it can't be that.
>You could also argue that artists who sell their artworks for huge sums of money are associating themselves to money laundering.
Yes, that's why transactions for those huge sums are subject to AML laws.
Less of this, please. Obviously, not everyone into crypto and defi says those exact words. But there are enough saying that type of thing, where I think it's wrong of anyone involved with this to feign ignorance. They know what they're getting into.
I really don't think you want to continue the discussion in the direction of "what's wrong crime A and crime B", that'll get off the rails very quickly.
If they're smart, they wouldn't admit to it publicly. But do you not remember the early history of Bitcoin, and the Silk Road? Nothing's changed since then, except some people got arrested and some haven't yet.
When the "artists" have been openly and shamelessly stating, since around 2009, that the entire purpose of their "art" is to aid in laundering money and other crimes? Yes, absolutely.
Basically, the "sanction preventions" Aave is instituting are for show only, in hopes they fool the regulators. They'll annoy and disturb the casual crypto trader but will do nothing to stop the big criminals from money laundering. I hope the developers of these defi lending protocols get hit with the criminal charges next.
Sorry but I try to avoid dumping huge amounts of information on people in every comment, that often doesn't go down well either if you can imagine. If you want more I'll elaborate. There is no possible way you can deploy this service anywhere while effectively complying with AML laws. It isn't going to work. But it's also the only real effective way you can obscure the source of transactions on a blockchain that's forced to be public. There's no reason transactions need to be forced public in the first place, other than how blockchain designers insisted it was a fundamental design parameter, when you probably agree that it isn't and that some transactions should be private by default. The simple solution is to avoid all blockchains and cryptocurrency altogether. Yes, they are that bad. I wish it wasn't true and I could say something good about them, but I just can't after watching 13 years of bad things happen.
And no, things like monero and zcash aren't a working solution to this problem either, that's a whole different discussion though.
No, there are no other real applications for these mixers. The only reason you even need to do that on a public blockchain is because the design of them is so bad that there's no other practical way to have privacy without enabling large amounts of criminal activity. If you really care about privacy, and you don't like criminals, then just don't use any blockchains or cryptocurrency.
Are you making software that has the explicit stated purpose of facilitating illegal money laundering, like these crypto mixers openly say they do? If not, then you don't have anything to worry about from these sanctions.
Crypto isn't useful for that. The thing that's actually useful for that is the illegal, unregulated exchange that's making the trade. It doesn't matter what currency they trade it for, it could be anything else besides crypto tokens. Crypto actually just adds extra unnecessary steps because the end goal is almost always to get it back out in another local currency. Unless you plan to get the money and then only spend it on NFTs.
If you ask me, they should all be shut down for selling unregistered securities, because all crypto tokens fit closest to that definition more than anything else. It's impossible for these tokens to actually function as a currency, both technically and legally. They're not a new class of assets, the idea of tradable tokens is not new either.
According to some crypto promoters I've seen on Twitter, blockchain is apparently the solution to everything and will revolutionize every industry. By their definition, you'd be hard up to find a company that isn't competing with them.
In actuality, the word "blockchain" usually refers to a specific type of distributed database based around a consensus layer on top of a merkle tree. Its usage competes (poorly) with other commercial distributed databases, not with Ethereum. And these "commercial blockchains" still failed to find a single effective use. All of them I've seen are just worse versions of other databases, and are either forks of some open source code, or are directly inspired by Bitcoin or Ethereum or another similar project.
>has a vested interest in the failure of open source crypto projects like Ethereum.
I also have a vested interest in the failure of projects like Bitcoin and Ethereum, and it's not because I'm invested in a competitor. It's because I don't like fraud and ponzi-style scams. And all crypto tokens are a variant of the same scam, because they inherently don't have any real value. All of them depend on the miners/validators pumping up the value so they can sell the block rewards and realize their profits. These tokens are all completely useless and valueless without a steady influx of new "investors" artificially inflating the price. Inherently they're just not like a stock, but the false idea of "crypto investing" is suggesting that they are.
You don't have to be invested in another product, to dislike scams and want them to go away.
>You're perfectly allowed to criticize your competitors
This author is far from being the only one to criticize blockchains. Lots of others shared the same conclusions: https://concerned.tech/
Ok, thanks. I get what you mean, but English language diffs can easily be falsified with a thesaurus :) A better analogy might be that every comment should be like a unique algorithm, or something along those lines.
But for the average crypto investor who isn't a whale and isn't insider trading on the whales, the dynamics of the market are effectively just random. This isn't like a stock where you can objectively look at the company, compare it to other companies and understand how it derives profit. It can't work either as a currency or as a reliable investment.
>I am quite hopeful that the ability for governments to extract wealth is limited greatly by the rise of crypto
I described a situation where this wouldn't happen though.
>If the government wants taxes they can do it by selling services to people who can pay for them if they agree it has value.
I'm sorry, this seems contradictory. I thought the possibility of this was already discarded when the idea of reform was thrown out. The assumption with the "bottom-up" idea seems to be that the government will always stay corrupt. If you take that approach then can't you see how this probably will end up like another failed bailout where nothing changes? Effectively all that's happening is more foreign money is being dumped into the system, except now it's just coming from offshore crypto speculators instead of from other governments. Try to look at this from a macro view.
Just my opinion: Crypto is pretty bad regardless of what your politics are. The ridiculous amount of fraud and scams in crypto, and other bad things like ransomware, are wrecking common people too. It can absolutely be worse. And, the theory and ideology of crypto doesn't actually stop a government from collecting taxes anyway.
Ok, you can think that, but there's still no explanation here as to why they can't do it. You should read some other comments further down in the thread, like this one:
If the hope is that they just won't shut down the internet, or the government will be too weak to stop it... what's the point of cryptocurrency? You could again just get them to use USD or Euro or something else.
I don't have time to listen to this podcast (I'll read a transcript if you have it) but just to respond to your comment: I've never seen the question of what happens after a society becomes "bottom-up crypto centric" get addressed. You have a country where the central bank is suddenly not doing anything, tax fraud is rampant, and the local currency is now further on the brink of collapse. All the citizens' money is effectively being funneled away into entities operating as foreign banks. The government is forced to accept crypto to avoid insolvency and now makes it so you have to pay your taxes in it. If they're still corrupt they'll force people to follow the same regressive restrictions again, and no one will be able to do anything about it because the blockchain is all public. How is this going to help anything? I'm trying not to be bleak here but the idea here seems to be disregarding any hope of reasonable reform.
It's not helping there either. Countries where the economy is strictly controlled by the government, like North Korea, are mainly using crypto and defi to centralize even more. Their government can use defi to steal from other countries with impunity, evading international laws while continuing to oppress their own citizens and disallowing them from using the internet.
>And how do those prevent rich person A from paying rich person B (by buying a painting owned by B for an inflated price) for some illegal service?
If it were done through a bank (or a law-abiding crypto exchange) they would be required to keep a log of the transaction and the legal identities of the participants, as well as a log of where the money came from and where it's going. The idea is, if buying the painting is just one of the steps to "clean" the money, they'll be able to trace it back to when the money was dirty.