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Topic: Decentralized exchanges 'make crypto unstoppable'? (McAffee bullshits?) (Read 198 times)

legendary
Activity: 1638
Merit: 1163
Where is my ring of blades...
a cryptocurrency like bitcoin is only successful if it has more utilities, to put simply bitcoin or any other coin in the future are unstoppable when they have real usages. things such as exchanges (centralized ones or decentralized counterparts) only concern a small use case and a small group of people known as traders. and being unstoppable has nothing to do with how easy or hard it is for them to buy and sell bitcoin on daily basis!
legendary
Activity: 1918
Merit: 1012
★Nitrogensports.eu★
Why do you need fiat? Most of tokens are UTILITY TOKENS what means that you use them inside of project to be able to use it at all. So he is talking about world where crypto works how it should (not as current invesotrs think - pump and dump assets on which you need to be able to exchange them quickly into fiat and back). You hold tokens to use them. You can buy them FROM COMPANY that sells them.
Imagine this scenario:

In a world where cryptos are used for real world transactions, you do need exchanges (decentralized or otherwise). I expect most applications / retail outlets would accept Bitcoin in addition to any other altcoins. So you could use Bitcoin (the US dollar of the crypto world) and not really need any other altcoin. Decentralized exchanges would be useful for those speculating on altcoin prices.
legendary
Activity: 1946
Merit: 1137
(country-bans would be ineffective)
BUT how do you GET FIAT IN and FIAT OUT on decentralized exchanges?

when talking about bans and the decentralized exchanges it is not about how you use them to circumvent the bans it is about whether people want to even use them. for example if bitcoin was banned you should ask whether people would still want to buy it or not. and the answer for most of them would be no, specially at this point.
but if they want to do it, then there are many ways of doing it, which are already discussed here. and people will do it even if they are harder methods or cost more, as we can see in real life cases in some countries with some bans in effect.
legendary
Activity: 2590
Merit: 3015
Welt Am Draht
I guess he is right though, decentralized exchanges make crypto unstoppable.

Only if the loop was closed and fiat became an irrelevance. Until then you'll still need it to pay tax, bills etc.

It would be very interesting to see what measures governments took if enough of their populations were clearly uninterested in handling government currencies.
legendary
Activity: 3906
Merit: 6249
Decentralization Maximalist
Even if worldwide regulation was so tight that there were no ways to buy Bitcoin via Bisq-like exchanges, there is still a possible solution which doesn't require identification by the buyer: Blockchain-based services like storage and computation markets.

Basically, in the case of storage, it would work this way:
- If you want to buy BTC: You buy storage (hard drives or cloud space) with fiat and then rent it for Bitcoin.
- If you want to "get out" you can re-sell storage space you rented with Bitcoin for fiat. Governments would have to be overly restrictive (e.g. banning private renting of storage space) if they want to forbid that.

Solutions like Siacoin already exist today and can very likely be adapted to Bitcoin, e.g. with a Counterparty-like second layer. (Advertisement: A long time ago, I've started a little thread about that some time ago.). The concept needs some more development and maturity, though, to be used massively.

Mining is, of course, another example: You can "get in" buying mining equipment and mining Bitcoins, and "get out" if you rent your mining equipment for fiat currency (like today's "cloud mining" services do).
legendary
Activity: 1652
Merit: 1483
But the main point here is, it doesn't matter if you need or not KYC to register and operate in an exchange. In fact, if you don't, and you operate with big amounts, it's just only a matter of time you'll be in big trouble.

These may only be useful for small transactions. Anything bigger and, who cares if you didn't need KYC? they will find out and ask what the hell is that money showing up in your bank account and you better be able to explain that.

So there's no point in trying to decentralize crypto to fiat transactions, its a non sequitur for obvious reasons.

KYC obligations only apply to those who carry on money transmission as a business. for some context regarding "small transactions", currency transaction reports disclose cash transactions exceeding $10,000 in one business day. suspicious activity reports are only filed if a customer appears to be avoiding filing CTRs, and i saw one tax attorney say that under $5k is completely under the radar.

so this is very relevant for most of us, who aren't MSBs. we have no legal obligation to do KYC, and we want to avoid giving our documents to unknown entities. at this point, that unfortunately means avoiding localbitcoins. Undecided
legendary
Activity: 1176
Merit: 1024
Not heard of that? - https://bisq.network

In the UK until recently there were no exchanges worth bothering with. Up until Localbitcoins introduced ID the vast majority of fiat stuff was P2P without needing to be verified. In China there are now no exchanges at all and they're seemingly doing fine with Telegram groups and OTC stuff.

I seem to remember him touting some decentralised in browser exchange. Going on his track record I'm not looking forward to it.
I guess track record will always haunt Grin. It is obviously something that will work. In the phase where government is banning and decentralized exchange becoming the savior of the day from that, how do you want to keep spending or utilizing the crypto you have asides from exchanging it for another on the decentralized exchange. What I mean is, in this kind of case, Mcafee is not subjecting his assumptions to the fact there will be need for real life usage, merchants accepting it as a form of payment, people can easily still use it and the same time trade on dex, but how will all that be plausible when it is banned.
legendary
Activity: 1372
Merit: 1252
localbitcoins does KYC now, and even if you don't need to complete it (because of low volume) or trade for cash outside the escrow system, lots of traders demand ID now. it's pretty hard getting USD out of the ecosystem now without getting KYC'd, and cash is getting harder to come by too. much worse than years ago.
Since this has been going on for a longer while now, is there already a viable LB alternative out? I can't seem to find anything even remotely close. The ones that I found are pretty shady in my opinion.

I can't say from experience, but I've had Paxful suggested to me a couple times. Apparently, they don't require KYC (yet) and they're the largest alternative to LBC.

I've also seen Bisq (formerly Bitsquare) suggested for peer-to-peer fiat/BTC trading. There's some sort of arbitration process with multi-sig, but I'm not sure how that works if the platform is supposedly decentralized: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/81q04l/i_tried_the_bisq_decentralized_exchange/

But the main point here is, it doesn't matter if you need or not KYC to register and operate in an exchange. In fact, if you don't, and you operate with big amounts, it's just only a matter of time you'll be in big trouble.

These may only be useful for small transactions. Anything bigger and, who cares if you didn't need KYC? they will find out and ask what the hell is that money showing up in your bank account and you better be able to explain that.

So there's no point in trying to decentralize crypto to fiat transactions, its a non sequitur for obvious reasons.
legendary
Activity: 1806
Merit: 1521
localbitcoins does KYC now, and even if you don't need to complete it (because of low volume) or trade for cash outside the escrow system, lots of traders demand ID now. it's pretty hard getting USD out of the ecosystem now without getting KYC'd, and cash is getting harder to come by too. much worse than years ago.
Since this has been going on for a longer while now, is there already a viable LB alternative out? I can't seem to find anything even remotely close. The ones that I found are pretty shady in my opinion.

I can't say from experience, but I've had Paxful suggested to me a couple times. Apparently, they don't require KYC (yet) and they're the largest alternative to LBC.

I've also seen Bisq (formerly Bitsquare) suggested for peer-to-peer fiat/BTC trading. There's some sort of arbitration process with multi-sig, but I'm not sure how that works if the platform is supposedly decentralized: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/81q04l/i_tried_the_bisq_decentralized_exchange/
legendary
Activity: 1526
Merit: 1179
localbitcoins does KYC now, and even if you don't need to complete it (because of low volume) or trade for cash outside the escrow system, lots of traders demand ID now. it's pretty hard getting USD out of the ecosystem now without getting KYC'd, and cash is getting harder to come by too. much worse than years ago.
Since this has been going on for a longer while now, is there already a viable LB alternative out? I can't seem to find anything even remotely close. The ones that I found are pretty shady in my opinion.

Or maybe I am too paranoid and handle extreme standards, but on the other hand, it's impossible to ignore how we more than ever before are walking targets. ATMs seem to be the way to go nowadays for local people.

It doesn't help you avoid KYC unfortunately, but it certainly gives you a peace of mind in the way that you don't have to meet up with a total stranger. The higher ATM fees have to be taken for granted.
sr. member
Activity: 448
Merit: 281
https://youtu.be/MO5Z_o9krNo?t=1m14s

McAffee says 'Decentralized exchanges make crypto unstoppable' (country-bans would be ineffective)

BUT how do you GET FIAT IN and FIAT OUT on decentralized exchanges?
No way to do that on decentralized exchanges, is there?
And it's the most important thing.

So right now to me it seems McAffee's point is total bullshit, or am i missing something
I would not doubt that. At least this is a market, and as long as things remain decentralized, there is nothing to ban unless we now want to see websites being hijacked by the FEDs, with people losing their money and all that which to me still sounds like something that would not work.

The idea of getting fiat in and fiat out only depends on whether people see the need to have to convert to fiat or they really do not. Imagine the scenario where people easily accept cryptocurrency for value of something, then you really would not need fiat. However, in this case of not needing fiat and the government banning crypto, we both know it would be hard to achieve not needing fiat, since there would not be much real life usage in that case.
legendary
Activity: 1652
Merit: 1483
BUT how do you GET FIAT IN and FIAT OUT on decentralized exchanges?
No way to do that on decentralized exchanges, is there?
And it's the most important thing.

you can't. that's why the emphasis of regulation and enforcement has been on unlicensed/unregistered exchanges and exchange-enforced KYC. in the USA, they've been tough on p2p traders too. localbitcoins does KYC now, and even if you don't need to complete it (because of low volume) or trade for cash outside the escrow system, lots of traders demand ID now. it's pretty hard getting USD out of the ecosystem now without getting KYC'd, and cash is getting harder to come by too. much worse than years ago.
STT
legendary
Activity: 4088
Merit: 1452
Dont rely on the ideas of one man.   He cant say so on anything, but if he can reveal something you can agree with and observe in the world generally then sure its a fair point.   I wouldnt bother going by anyones fixed price forecast.

Dollar itself will change before 2020 and over decades so who knows what the worth of a fixed number will be anyway.   Doesnt really matter, I agree its the exchange and usage of crypto that only matters.   Dont worry about FIAT, that is the rope that leashes us to the past really.

When people stop asking the dollar price, then we've got some progress.  I really think its about efficency for exchange of BTC, to allow it greater velocity.  Thats what matters, the faster BTC can be exchanged the greater the overall worth of BTC market capitalisation can hold as many people are using each unit each day to describe their own transactions.  So great speed requires efficency and accurate exchange without problems, BTC has advanced this year by reducing its fees thats a great help so the optimism of McAffee is not all wrong
legendary
Activity: 1372
Merit: 1252
nd FIAT OUT on decentralized exchanges?
No way to do that on decentralized exchanges, is there?
And it's the most important thing.


Obviously, there's no way to integrate fiat within the equation. It will never work for rather obvious reasons. Fiat is a closed source system, it's not really tokenized, it's just centralized banks changing some numbers somewhere. There is no way to keep coherency with that going in and out of it.

The only way would be local exchanges with cash, but cash will disappear, and it's irrelevant, we are talking about keeping things digital, so there's no way out.

The big point of crypto is that the crypto economy happens within crypto (people getting paid in BTC and buying services in BTC so the circle is closed)

McAfee is not wrong, but BTC must have economic activity, if it all still depends on fiat then it will not be as relevant. In the future we will see if second layers can allow for a proper bitcoin economy to happen or it will remain a store of value mostly.
legendary
Activity: 2590
Merit: 3015
Welt Am Draht
Not heard of that? - https://bisq.network

In the UK until recently there were no exchanges worth bothering with. Up until Localbitcoins introduced ID the vast majority of fiat stuff was P2P without needing to be verified. In China there are now no exchanges at all and they're seemingly doing fine with Telegram groups and OTC stuff.

I seem to remember him touting some decentralised in browser exchange. Going on his track record I'm not looking forward to it.
legendary
Activity: 2156
Merit: 1622
Why do you need fiat? Most of tokens are UTILITY TOKENS what means that you use them inside of project to be able to use it at all. So he is talking about world where crypto works how it should (not as current invesotrs think - pump and dump assets on which you need to be able to exchange them quickly into fiat and back). You hold tokens to use them. You can buy them FROM COMPANY that sells them.
Imagine this scenario:

Starbucks has his own token:

You go to starbucks and buy 100 tokens to have 10% discount paying from them for coffe (like prepaid card).
You store them on your mobile wallet and use everyday for coffe enjoing discount.
you want to use another company tokens that you dont want to go to buy tokens personally? You can jump into decetralized exchange and switch your sturbacks tokens into f.e. adidas tokens and than buy shoes via internet (with discount).
You want to have acces to all tokens? You have BTC now and enjoi full power of decentralized exchange in future.
full member
Activity: 266
Merit: 111
https://youtu.be/MO5Z_o9krNo?t=1m14s

McAffee says 'Decentralized exchanges make crypto unstoppable' (country-bans would be ineffective)

BUT how do you GET FIAT IN and FIAT OUT on decentralized exchanges?
No way to do that on decentralized exchanges, is there?
And it's the most important thing.

So right now to me it seems McAffee's point is total bullshit, or am i missing something
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