Quote from: aesma on September 12, 2020, 10:06:29 PM

Quote from: JayJuanGee on September 12, 2020, 06:20:42 PM

Quote from: d_eddie on September 12, 2020, 02:56:00 PM

Quote from: nullius on September 12, 2020, 01:59:10 PM

Quote from: Biodom on September 11, 2020, 10:10:13 PM

EU developments:
https://www.euractiv.com/section/economy-jobs/news/leak-eu-to-create-superbody-of-watchdogs-to-oversee-digital-currencies/

Quote from: Euractiv (2020-09-10)

Cryptocurrency developers should produce a white paper with all the relevant information about the issuer, the token or the trading platform to enable potential buyers to make an informed purchase decision and understand the risks relating to the offering, the proposal says.

National and European regulators must approve these documents before issuers can start operating.

A faceless Tor user who calls himself Satoshi Nakamoto will seek approval from self-entitled bureaucrats before releasing bitcoin.pdf and a bunch of source code, because... because. Everybody is a bank-loving masochist with a regulatory fetish! Confirmed by strongest science.

Quote from: Torque on September 12, 2020, 02:31:01 PM

Quote

"Because they are tied to national currencies, supporters of stablecoins claim they can avoid the bubble-and-burst evolution seen with Bitcoin."

Because they are tied to national currencies which are already digital, they have no fucking point...except pointless redundancy, I guess? They continue to miss the point of Bitcoin's reason for existence in the first place.

Bitcoin is bitcoin. There's no "issuer", there's no backing, it is what it is. You want some? Mine it or buy it.

The EU tentative regulation that Biodom mentioned, as I understand it, is aimed at tokens issued by corporate actors (libra is explicitly mentioned, and tether would qualify as well). My previous post simply states that I personally agree that such corporate entities should be held liable, and any failure to comply with redemption requests immediately should have civil and criminal consequences.

The last thing we need is more fractional reserve scams springing up like mushrooms everywhere.

Requests for immediate redemption of BTC only works if the individual contract with the institutional custodial entity does not exclude the ability to redeem immediately. Some services are written in such a way that redemption is not part of the arrangement, and there continue to be a decent number of normies who use those kinds of services (out of convenience, etc) (robinhood, GBTC and likely some other similar services).

Of course, if anyone is getting exposure to BTC through such custodial services that do not allow immediate redemption, then surely they are more likely buying some sort of voucher rather than actual BTC.

So, in that regard, hopefully investors in BTC are mostly using custodial services that allow them to redeem their BTC at any time, and if they use other kinds of services that do not allow for immediate redemption of BTC, such usage is very limited in nature and ONLY a fraction (perhaps less than 20%) of their actual BTC exposure.

The other day I was doing some research on Google about amazon gift cards and BTC, and found something along the lines of "how to buy Bitcoin, the easiest way" as the first or second result. I click, and here is an article about how to buy BTC on eToro. Except at no point do you actually get BTC, there is no wallet, there is no withdrawal, it's just an "investment". I had thought about using such services to invest in the US stock market, although they're not really available in my country yet, but that made me realize that it's exactly the same thing with stocks, you don't hold any, it's just a pile of IOUs, total BS.

Probably we are a bit more sensitive regarding ability to directly hold if we understand the scarcity value proposition in bitcoin that could be undermined (to some extent) with third parties that do not allow you to hold or claim the underlying asset. It could take a long time for regular customers to figure out that particular angle of bitcoin's value proposition.

At the same time, there seems to be quite a bit of evidence that NOT too many BTC are moving around, which surely could affect the BTC market but also bring into question, from time to time, the extent that some third parties might not be holding the quantity of BTC that they claim to be holding, and sure it is possible that some of them will get rekt because they do not have the underlying asset that they claim to have - especially if the BTC price goes shooting up and they are making shit up regarding how much BTC they have... It seems quite likely that their customers could (and maybe even would) get screwed in such a process, too.