Money and State

> 4. White House Monitoring FTX Collapse, Calls for Crypto Regulation

Officials were precisely busy receiving gigantic bribes (well, "donations", the biggest ever made from any sector after those made by George Soros) from SBF/FTX to draft legislation giving the CFTC jurisdiction over crypto exchanges. And who was the chief lobbyist of FTX? An ex-CFTC commissioner.

Let that sink in: the main FTX lobbyist was an ex-CFTC commissioner lobbying for a legislation giving... Full control of crypto exchanges (including the decentralized ones) to the CFTC.

You cannot make that shit up.

So crooks running scams have drafted a legislation that'd give them complete control over crypto exchanges.

The ongoing legislation, if it passes, is the one drafted by the very villains who were planning to execute the biggest scam ever (he was obviously after pension funds and sovereign wealth funds: there was no limit to his megalomania).

As Erik Vorhees just blogged:

“The complex derivatives and custody issues which froze financial flows in 2008, back when safe, regulated financial institutions had no idea who owned what and markets collapsed under the layers of counterparty risk... these would not (can not!) happen in DeFi."

"Have they even learned how to use it? How many of those drafting crypto laws have ever actually executed a DeFi loan?”

“Yes, DeFi removes some of your power as regulators... but it solves the problems you’ve been trying to regulate. Isn’t that more important?”

I…

2 weeks seems like an outlier. A recent thread [1] described someone getting cash from an ATM via bitcoin in 20 minutes.

One of the comments theorized that this was because the ATM service used only 2 verifications instead of 6, taking a slightly higher risk due to the small transaction amount (which implies a typical wait time for a large amount of an hour, not 2 weeks).

Of course, even 20 minutes is too long to wait for a vending machine transaction, so your point still stands. I also found an article [2] that incorporates the problem of delay in even determining what the fee would be.

What was also interesting is that it [2] detailed a transaction cost 8x what was quoted above, and seems to be backed up by https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees.html . It brings a new concern, volatility, to someone like a vending machine operator whose transactions aren't "micro" but are always going to be on the small end of "every day".

Presumably, it's possible to have a cryptocurrency without these issues. Lightning may sufficiently solve this for Bitcoin (and/or other cryptocurrencies), but that has yet to be seen in practice, at scale. If a DDoS attack forces all (or even just some) Lightning transactions on-blockchain, what does that do to transaction times and costs?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17898721

[2] http://moneyandstate.com/the-true-cost-of-bitcoin-transactions/

I've just run across this the other day, it is a set of guidelines for securing cryptocurrencies: https://cryptoconsortium.org/standards/CCSS . It is about the core crypto asset concerns, not about how to protect a web server.

Here is a report which uses the guideline to assess a company's posture after a hack: https://www.scribd.com/doc/309591980/ShapeShift-Postmortem (sorry about the scribd link, haven't been able to find pdf.)

Here is a narrative description of the hack that the above report is about: http://moneyandstate.com/looting-of-the-fox/