Programmable money like what China is planning sounds like even more chains to the consumer and a repeat disaster when monetary and fiscal policy become even more entwined (think planned state economies). Paper money wasn't designed to be tracked nor expirable. It kind of acted like printable gold. Having a planned digital currency won't be great for the little guy. Just more data points as software eats the world. Americans started getting spooked at the idea that they were nothing more than number or statistic at the beginning of the century. This would likely abstract them more into meta data. On the brightside, maybe we really won't have to file taxes anymore. The IRS already has that capability... You can find any coin name on Binance Smart Chain...
Personal story time! Just this week I had a job interview with Coinbase, and the team/department I would be joining was based around CX for institutions. They said that institutional investment is their fastest growing sector and they need to build an ecosystem for their account management around that line of business. Retail investors (the part they've already mastered) require a lot different of an approach and touch and upkeep, so they're having to pivot fast and the folks they have in place are having to kinda free-wheel it. Edit: I also applied for a similar role at Kraken but they didn't call me back lol
I think this is true at most brokerages, but I could be mistaken. When I worked at a brokerage where we just focused on equities/options, forex, and futures, we were always looking for institutional accounts. The retail client was fine, but the money was with institutions. I'm guessing with crypto it's even "worse" because places like Coinbase earn most of their revenue from people trading like crack monkeys. So when that either dries up or is inconsistent, it's hard on the company/stock. They've been trying to branch out into other offerings to get a more consistent or bigger revenue stream for a while.
No doubt this is the case for all brokerages, but I relay the story because breaking into the institutional trading realm has long been considered an important barrier & milestone for crypto.
Yeah, but that's not something new with them. They've been saying/trying to do that for at least a couple of years. They announced their "Coinbase Prime" for institutional investors about a year or two ago. I don't know how it's been doing. Their attempt to go after institutional investors has been in the works for a while but I don't know how much traction it's gaining. I think Kraken already has something like this, too, don't they? Also, I'm scared when you say they've "mastered" the retail investor when I read the reviews and how easily they crash during heavy load. lol. Good luck, though!
LOL yeah thankfully that's an infrastructure problem, not an onboarding problem. Coinbase, for all its faults, has created a clearly market leading on-ramp for retail investors.
Anonymous eh? https://www.wired.com/story/tracers-in-the-dark-welcome-to-video-crypto-anonymity-myth/ Inside the Bitcoin Bust That Took Down the Web’s Biggest Child Abuse Site
?? The only people who think Bitcoin is anonymous are the people who know absolutely nothing about Bitcoin. Do NOT do anything illegal with Bitcoin. You will be caught. Use cash.
Speaking of cash, I listened to a podcast about this ECASH bill in congress: https://www.popsci.com/technology/us-lawmakers-introduce-ecash-act/ I'm not necessarily a fan of all the ideas (and I have questions about how certain things would work), but at least it doesn't give me bad vibes like crypto. It's probably been talked about long ago, but this was the first time I actually bothered to learn a bit more about it. Back to criticizing crypto, I liked this video from Münecat: It is pretty similar to the Dan Olson video, though she covers some things Dan didn't. She also has some good videos on other topics (mostly MLM/pyramid schemes...totally unrelated, right?).
I am glad these people from the article were naive, unfortunately the top level people probably are not as stupid (ie it mentioned some switching up or not using easy public facing ways of tracing making it harder to catch), but I wish they all were this stupid. I also would prefer people to keep thinking it's all anonymous vs articles detailing/educating more people, especially when it comes to this type of crime.
I guess @Commodore doesn’t know crap about bitcoin because he listed anonymity as #1. I miss the days of Apple vs Samsung fans. now I got to hear Finsplaing and crypto bros…and Tesla fans… wait those all might be the same group of people.
On the first page I qualified my description of it as having "relative anonymity" vs other forms of digital payment
