Will Calls to Scrutinize Digital-Currency Purchases of Oil Bring New Regulations For Crypto? (yahoo.com) 16
Last month Reuters reported that Venezuela's state-run oil company "plans to increase digital currency usage in its crude and fuel exports as the U.S. reimposes oil sanctions on the country, three people familiar with the plan said."
[The oil company] since last year had been slowly moving oil sales to USDT, a digital currency also known as Tether whose value is pegged to the U.S. dollar and designed to maintain a stable value. The return of oil sanctions is speeding up the shift, a move to reduce the risk of sale proceeds getting frozen in foreign bank accounts due to the measures, the people said...
Tether said in an email it respects the U.S. Treasury's list of sanctioned entities and "is committed to working to ensure sanction addresses are frozen promptly."
This week Reuters reported that now experts are saying the situation "will require greater scrutiny by regulators and law enforcement." They spoke to Kristofer Doucett, national security leader at U.S. blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, who said "Structures must be set up to combat this type of money laundering." Reuters writes: Technology for digital transactions is changing fast and transactions are rapidly growing in developing regions including Latin America and Africa benefiting people without access to the banking system. But some corrupt governments are moving faster, making it difficult to prevent fraud, the experts said. Doucette and Sigal Mandelker, a lawyer who previously worked at the U.S. Treasury Department, said during a conference organized by the Wilson Center in Washington that the U.S. administration is making efforts to increase regulation and encourage other countries to improve supervision.
Slashdot reader RossCWilliams asks a loaded question. Whether this is "the beginning of the end of unregulated cryptocurrencies... the recognition of cryptocurrency as a national security threat that threatens international financial controls."
Tether said in an email it respects the U.S. Treasury's list of sanctioned entities and "is committed to working to ensure sanction addresses are frozen promptly."
This week Reuters reported that now experts are saying the situation "will require greater scrutiny by regulators and law enforcement." They spoke to Kristofer Doucett, national security leader at U.S. blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, who said "Structures must be set up to combat this type of money laundering." Reuters writes: Technology for digital transactions is changing fast and transactions are rapidly growing in developing regions including Latin America and Africa benefiting people without access to the banking system. But some corrupt governments are moving faster, making it difficult to prevent fraud, the experts said. Doucette and Sigal Mandelker, a lawyer who previously worked at the U.S. Treasury Department, said during a conference organized by the Wilson Center in Washington that the U.S. administration is making efforts to increase regulation and encourage other countries to improve supervision.
Slashdot reader RossCWilliams asks a loaded question. Whether this is "the beginning of the end of unregulated cryptocurrencies... the recognition of cryptocurrency as a national security threat that threatens international financial controls."
Re:The grand master plan of crypto (Score:4, Interesting)
by virtue of them just pulling numbers out of thin air for its value>
I wish they pulled their numbers out of thin air for its value. They very much haven't. They set its value by how much electricity you can flush down the toilet and convert into waste heat.
Cryptocurrencies have been responsible for more resource wastage than many major wars.
Other considerations aside, if these coins need a proof of work, then for God's sake, pick something that actually benefits someone. Literally anything (aside from a count of murdered dead bodies) would be better than what they are doing now. It doesn't have to be wasting CPU cycles. Literally anything that expends resources could have been the work required. The only reason flipping bits was chosen is that it's automatable and easy and people are lazy. How about a proof of work that, rather than intentionally wasting electricity, instead relies on proving that you've added electricity to the grid. Or proving that you've built a shelter or a school in a developing nation? Real people could be employed in work verification services, and three cryptographic signatures verifying any particular work is completed (with publicly released details on location, with photographs) could be required before any work is accepted as a valid resource expenditure. A standard could be developed for how ingeniously your "proof of work" work has improved the lives of others. Make the amount of coin generated based on the outcome, rather than the amount of resources expended. Like bitcoin, where the work required to earn one coin goes up with the amount of coin generated, the same thing can be done for positive outcomes. As innovation makes positive outcome contributions easier, then the magnitude of positive outcomes required to generate one coin goes up. This will incentivize innovation in a competitive environment. In order to have your resource expenditure per coin generated go down, you have to out-compete everyone else at innovative ways to turn resources into positive outcomes for the most people.
Rather than requiring proof that you've pissed real fiat money (and thus real-world resources) down the drain into thermal waste, for pity's sake, let's require that something real be done. Every country in the world should legislate the right to waste electricity they way they do into oblivion.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
10x more power required for ChatGPT response than regular search.
Cryptos suddenly look like the status-quo and the new crisis will take the focus off old crisis. I"m Sam Altman. I need 7 Trillion Dollars.
Wasting CPU cycles is good for the economy. Think of all the new power generation being built (by google, amazon, microsoft) and all the new cpus and laptops needed to run that stuff... means more production demand. Clearly you don't care about the children.
Re:The grand master plan of crypto (Score:4, Insightful)
Wasting CPU cycles is good for the economy.
Breaking windows [wikipedia.org] is good for the economy too.
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Pyrite Pete's failed prediction (Score:1)
On Monday April 26, 2021 @02:16AM UTC, Pyrite Pete [urbandictionary.com] had said:
That was back when bitcoin had already fallen, and down to about $47K at the time. It should've been back up to "twice its value" no later than June 26 2021 - over 2.5 years ago. It's still nowhere near the $94K Pyrite Pete promised us.
Now that's what I call a prediction #FAIL!
Want more LOLs @ Pyrite Pete shitposts? Here are but a sample:
"It is pretty much a given that BTC will be up to 100,0 [slashdot.org]
Has nothing to do with Bitcoin (Score:2, Informative)
El Salvador has Bitcoin as a fundamental tenant of their government, and they are enjoying the lowest crime rate in all the Western Hemisphere due to wise and brave movements by their leader
Spoken like a true lemming. Bitcoin has nothing to do with El Salvador's lower crime rate, and has everything do to with Bukele being an authoritarian [slashdot.org] and simply making an example of the local gangs before he goes after the general population.
Get your facts straight.
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You're using crypto wrong (Score:2, Flamebait)
Just use bitcoin or litecoin, government can't freeze proof-of-work cryptos. This has the added benefit of using something a bit more stable than the US dollar, which doesn't have a fixed supply because they keep printing more of it. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/se... [stlouisfed.org]
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This has the added benefit of using something a bit more stable than the US dollar, which doesn't have a fixed supply because they keep printing more of it.
They also destroy it, but they should be printing more of it (and not destroying the same amount) when GDP expands.
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Crypto is so tainted by fraud these days, that it is hard to use. If one uses BTC, it means a huge buy-in and transaction fee, so it isn't feasible for day to day transactions. Using an altcoin that might be better may put people in danger of a 51% attack.
What would be nice if someone designed a cryptocurrency to be a Bitcoin version 2.0. However, it wouldn't be just for their profit. It can't have pre-mining, pyramid/Ponzi type scheming where early adopters get all the goodies by an exponential amount,