Quote from: nullius on Today at 08:02:17 PM

Quote from: JayJuanGee on Today at 06:39:42 PM

There has been increasing kinds of funding in the bitcoin space towards developers, research and other matters, and of course, bitcoin will NOT be dead (and probably not even meaningfully disabled) if Bitmex funding towards bitcoin development and research ends up drying up.

Of course, I did not intend to suggest that Bitcoin was in any way dependent on BitMEX or any other single party. I should hope that I was not misunderstood that way by anybody!

I did not conclude your post to be suggesting that Bitmex is or would be indispensable in the event that they were totally incapacitated (we are likely quite a distance from that), but I did decide that some further comment seemed warranted.

Quote from: nullius on Today at 08:02:17 PM

Quote from: JayJuanGee on Today at 06:39:42 PM

I do agree that through the last several years, Bitmex seems to have served as a decent steward of the bitcoin space, and surely it remains a bit irritating that they are being attacked in such a seemingly strenuous way...., whether that is too much, or merely the US government employing seemingly overbearing tools in order to attempt to negotiate from a better seeming position of strength.

Indeed, I somewhat noticed that U.S. regulators went aggressively after an exchange that has demonstrated pro-Bitcoin behaviour, instead of ripping into one of the many exchanges that never saw a forked shitcoin they didn’t love. It’s not as if the U.S. government has ever been in any direct or indirect way connected to shitconery. Just joking. I think.

Of course. Should not go unnoticed, and sometimes there can be additional costs that are imposed by bullies (or BIG dogs) when there seems to be some kind of potential ideological challenge... perhaps part of the reason that bitcoin attempts to be a bit milder in a variety of ways - including NOT coming out blatantly with secrecy on its base layer.

Quote from: nullius on Today at 08:02:17 PM

Quote from: JayJuanGee on Today at 06:39:42 PM

I surely do not claim to know many of the details of the purported egregiousness that the USA govt is proclaiming against bitmex and four of its officials to justify criminal rather than civil charges, and overall through the years, I have considered Bitmex to be greatly on the net positive side of Bitcoin's development.. even though surely some people (even pretty BIG ass players have gotten quite reckt) have been quite fucked in using their exchange when the market has moved against their bets.

I suppose that that’s called “taking responsibility for your own money”. I presume that it’s a Bitcoin thing.

Purposes can likely be served by leverage, but 100x does seem to be quite outrageous.

Personally, I cannot really conceive of any frequent way of using 100x in a kind of practical and legitimate way, but people who are more experienced in playing around with leverage are likely more capable of figuring out meaningful and legitimate uses for 100x, besides pure gambling.

Quote from: nullius on Today at 08:02:17 PM

Waving my hands a bit over the nature of levers:

If I wanted to gamble in a casino at 100x or even 10000x leverage, I don’t suppose that any do-gooding busybodies would want to protect me from potentially losing my own money through my own choices and my own follies... Oh, wait! Meanwhile, savvy traders who do not go insane or get drunk on leverage have probably made a reasonable profit at the MEX and other exchanges.

Aside, it always astounds me that some people seem not to know that market trading is zero-sum. If somebody lost a fortune, somebody else gained—and vice versa. TANSTAAFL.

There are likely ways to conduct trading to be profitable, so it may not matter too much what happens with most people, if you know what the fuck you are doing.

Sure, there are a lot of folks who trade who likely believe that they know more than they do, and so they may well not be employing their time effectively.