UK Minister Wants Nation To Be a Crypto Hub, Minus the Criminals - Slashdot

Posted by msmash

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  UK Minister: "We want to be a hub for crypto, minus the criminals."
  
  Austin Powers: "And I want a toilet made of solid gold, but it's just not in the cards now, is it?" [ref [youtube.com]]
  • 1 hidden comment

  • Re:

    Crypto has no legitimate use. We already have money. We can already buy/sell anything we want.
    
    That only leaves the "illegal" stuff.

    • by bkmoore ( 1910118 ) on Wednesday June 15, 2022 @11:59AM (#62621496)

      Crypto has no legitimate use. We already have money. We can already buy/sell anything we want.

      Crypto is for people who don't have any money.... I know, I'll just make my own money!!! Just like any good pyramid, enough people fell for it. The insiders quietly cash out, while publicly saying "buy the dip!!!" Everyone else is left with magic beans.

      Any politician promises to make his country/state/city a crpyto-haven needs to be voted out of office before it's too late. Otherwise you'll all be on the hook for magic beans when the carnival leaves town.

      • 1 hidden comment

      • Re: Gold-Plated

        Yep and when history takes it the other way, you'll be there deflecting the I-told-you-so's with a bunch of high ground morality bullshit even though YOU were the big naysayer up front.

        "There was no way to know" or "it was the mindset of the times" you will say.

        Just make sure to remember which side you were on in the future because people like you often flip sides exactly when I'm there to say you were wrong.

    • You know the UK's really gone downhill when it's resorting to copying Venezuela as a means of trying to dig itself out of the hole it's in.

  • Re:Gold-Plated [legislation and BS]

    Good way to make the obvious point. Funny, but true enough to justify an Insightful mod if someone wanted to go there. Almost an obligatory joke for this case. Also a nice FP. (I want to grow up to join the FP police!)

    My (old) angle would be that every technology remains morally neutral. Or you can think of the coin having two sides. Can't stop the bad actors from finding bad applications, and you can't even write rules that get around Godel's Incompleteness or Turing's angle on the halting problem.

    But that

  • Re:

    I'm pretty sure the plan is to get the criminals in too, to this statement is just for appearances.

    London is already the money laundering capital of the world. If you have dirty money, London is the place to make it legitimate, and the prices are insanely low. Literally just a few thousand to the Tory Party.

    Also, didn't some artist make a solid gold crapper?

• He doesn't want it to be a hub for anything he wants kickbacks and bribes. Crypto Bros know they can't survive regulation because the backbone in crypto is money laundering, ransomware and Ponzi schemes. So right now they're going around splashing cash all over politicians to prevent regulation that will put them out of business. I'm sure the mafia did something similar in an effort to keep Prohibition in place. This is like that but kind of in reverse.
  
  Mark my words if we let crypto become legitimate it's going to cause the biggest economic collapse since the Great depression. That's because it's unregulated banking and that's exactly what caused the Great depression. There's a reason we regulate banking and it's not just because the global Illuminati want to put fluoride in your precious bodily fluids.
  • 1 hidden comment

  • Re:

    It's a bit ironic, because if crypto currency worked the way that fans want it to work, nobody would make any money on it third-hand. Only the two parties involved in a transaction would benefit. No taxes, no transaction fees, no bank or card fees, no interest rates, etc. *Except* for criminals. In other words, in a perfect cryptocurrency utopia, no one profits from being a cryptocurrency hub...

    • 1 hidden comment

  • Re:

    You keep repeating these lies despite the fact that people who hunt "crypto criminals" for a living continue to prove you wrong:

    https://blog.chainalysis.com/r... [chainalysis.com]

    And you get modded up for the effort.

• The main uses of crypto are for criminal purposes.

  • Re:

    Or for anything legal you do not want people to be able to associate with you. For instance, buying your mistress a nice set of diamond earrings.

    • pseudoanonymous is not anonymous [Re:Good luck...]

      That transaction will be on the blockchain forever, of course. Twenty years later it can be used against you in the divorce proceedings. Unless perhaps you buy the diamonds on the black market from somebody who themself has incentive to keep their transactions confidential. Do you happen to know black-market diamond dealers? When the cops take them down for fencing stolen jewelry and they turn all their records over to the feds for a lenient sentence, are you ready to be questioned?

      • Re:

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
        
        tl;dr: "cryptocurrency" is a giant scam which serves no legitimate purpose that is not infinitely better served by actual legitimate banks, and if you participate in it you hate mother earth.

  • Re:

    ALL the uses of crypto are for criminal purposes.

    Corrected it for you.

• • Re:

    He just wanted to say: we have enough criminals here already

    • Re:

      Or "the government doesn't want the competition from other criminals."

• He wants the UK to be a tax haven, without the tax evasion, of course.

• Yeah, sure they will piss off their #1 clients. The UK joining EU again is more likely.

• I wonder what advantages crypto bring that are worth the cost?

  Decentralized transactions are a cool idea, but what happens is that on smaller currencies, a 51% attack can be mounted. You can add parties for proof of trust, where their influence on the blockchain is a lot heavier as a way to mitigate this, but that does a lot to strike a stake through the heart of decentralization. In fact, there isn't anything truly decentralized, as even F/OSS always has some authoritative source, even if it means choosing a fork.

  Almost all cryptocurrencies have zero anonymity. Do people want a condom purchase when they were 18 to be still around 30-40 years later for all to see? Not really. With the fact that any transactions are there forever, coupled with companies and organizations that have extremely precise tracking of wallet interactions is not a good thing for privacy.

  As a store of value... who knows. How far will the bottom go right now? It may not be a reliable store of value at all, because at least dollars are backed by a government, and Euros are also backed by governments. A lot of cryptocurrencies have hit zero and will be there forever more.

  As a way of processing transactions, they are a lot less usable and more energy intensive than existing payment networks.

  Then, add the fraud aspect and entire minefield of scams and compromises.

  A few years back, it had some promise. A QR code where one could scan, pay with a cryptocurrency, the cryptocurrency would sit on the destination wallet, eventually to be spent. However, with all the issues, why is that any better than just slapping a QR code that has a PayPal address?

  I know I've mentioned this before, but it would be nice to see a cryptocurrency that gives credit for SETI@Home or protein folding... stuff that is actually useful. Add to that the ability to prune the entire blockchain of expired transactions, so a purchase from 1-2 years ago can drop off and not be needed, built in anonymity via ring signatures (like Monero), as well as using a TOR-like network, a high capacity for a lot of transactions, and open source, so it is easy to make hardware wallets. Additional features like multi-sig go without saying as well. However, with the misuse of cryptocurrencies (mainly the pump and dump stuff ), who knows if any will survive in any useful fashion. Especially stablecoins which can unpin themselves from the dollar (or yaun, or Euro) at any time.

  • Re:

    We already have decentralized transactions. What crypto gives you is a decentralized ledger of those transactions. You and I can conduct a dollar-denominated transaction without anyone else knowing about it.

    • Re:

      Isn't that IF you both are using a private wallet? The transaction would go on the blockchain, no? With all the KYC and AML stuff, who is going to do the exchange for dollars for your crypto anonymously? That is definitely not the way Coinbase or Binance is moving. Doing a private transaction between wallets is one thing, getting your magic beans turned back into cash is quite another.

• may as well just open casinos for all the world to use

  crypto "coin", gambling token: to-may-to to-mah-to to-may-ters

  • Re:

    We want Mafia run casinos, but without the crime please.

• If he still want's the UK to be a crypto hub, if crypto is cratering.

• Would it even be City of London financial services if you didn't let the criminals take part?

• I mean they are about to break international law anyway https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/1... [cnbc.com] so why the posturing? Criminals would be widely welcomed at all levels of the UK government.

  • Re:

    There is no such thing as international law. Each country can independently agree on some things but nobody can force a country to do anything without military force or the threat thereof.

    • Re:

      Well the UK made an agreement with the EU on how it would handle the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland and they're now breaking that deal [bbc.com]. So even if you don't believe in the widely accepted concept of International Law, Britain has made an agreement and they're now breaking it.

      The problem is that Brexiters created an obvious and unsolvable problem. Brexit means you now have a hard border with the EU, if it's in Ireland you've torn up the Good Friday protocol and you're going to re

      • Re:

        There's nothing "united" about the UK's territories despite what it says in the name.

    • Re:

      I'm going to just leave this link here and hope you educate yourself https://www.law.cornell.edu/we... [cornell.edu] rather than wallowing in your own ignorance.

• The main thing is that I don't respect their Authority. In the typical fashion they were big naysayers in the early days. Now that it's looking like they're idiotic and behind the times, time to rush in try to control everything.

  It's the British way.

  Royally incompetent but super eager to stick their noses in places they don't belong and start constructing their monarchy hierarchies.

  I don't respect their Authority one bit. Bunch of pompous aristocratic inbred do-nothings. Watch them fail.

• Seriously, mate. Go on BBC, Twitter or just do something.

• It's less likely to happen than my winning the lottery**

  The ratio of ministerial ambitions to deliveries is always very small.

  These days it's even smaller as the government are keen to announce anything to distract from: partygate, investigations into PPE procurement from "chums" with no experience in the field, soaring inflation, highest death rates for Covid in Europe, the Rwanda fiasco, the Northern Ireland Brexit meltdown, Brexit in general, Boris's latest gaffe...

  So, let's make an announcement, prefer

  • Re:

    You forgot the Polish.

• Looking at the profile of this particular minister, looks to me like he's just caught up in the "shiny new thing" hype, having absolutely zero background in the tech industry - not that this is in any way a prerequisite for creating Ponzi schemes.

  The problem is, he's making these statements right at the time when the cryptocurrency market is tanking, partially as the aftermath of the TerraUSD/Luna collapse, but also because of global financial pains, SEC investigations or because some random cryptobro derp

  • Re:

    How true.

    Given the UK government are not chasing the billions that were spaffed away in the pandemic frenzy I wouldn't expect them to be too bothered about what goes on.

• Crypto is a hive of scum and villainy and will be until it is properly regulated.

  • Re:

    And then it will be an entertaining footnote in history, which is where it's headed now.

• separate the scam from the scammers and end up with something legitimate?

• "UK Minister Wants Nation To Be a Crypto Hub, Minus the Criminals"

  So the whole government goes into exile?

• They will also create a completely UK-alone GPS system.
  Hilarity ensued.

• and they will pour millions in just as it crashes.
• Why stop at crypto ? Why not make Britain the center of all decentralized things, like DNS, scottish and welsh devolution etc.

• On the same day Bill Gates announces that crypto is "100% based on greater fool theory", Ministers from the UK respond with - you rang?