Is it possible that crypto ban can boost the demand?
John McAfee ‘almost died’ but announces a new BitFi wallet, the US wants to prevent the use of privacy-oriented coins on their territory and Vitalik Buterin talks about scalability, forks and more.
John McAfee claims he was poisoned by his enemies, who wanted him dead
To confirm this, he posted two pictures of himself in the hospital. 5 hours later McAfee returned with a new tweet, announcing a new hardware wallet with unprecedented levels of security, the BitFi wallet.
A crypto wallet, approved by McAfee? It could be interesting. Despite being a controversial person, John McAfee is definitely a high-class expert in cybersecurity. He developed one of the first antiviruses in the world and has been known not only for his crazy behavior and troubles with the law but also for being at the edge of technologies. His commercial interests include cybersecurity, biotechnologies, and blockchain.
BitFi isn’t his own company, and by the looks of it, he joined the company to promote the wallet like a spokesperson, but the fact that he joined this company lets us draw a conclusion that the BitFi has at least a decent wallet, otherwise why join them. At this point, money shouldn’t be a concern for McAfee, as he should have gotten a lot of money with his Coin of the Day pumps and other blockchain mining activity. So let’s wait for this wallet.
What about the assassination attempt? Honestly, we don’t believe that’s the case here. Maybe just an ordinary food poisoning, spoiled milk, old lasagna? And a nice headline to promote his wallet. Totally possible.
It becomes harder to fight all kinds of cyber and financial crimes that use privacy-oriented coins, like Monero and Zcash
That was stated by Robert Novy, a Deputy Assistant Director of the US Secret Service’s Office of Investigation. He asked the Congress to come up with some countermeasures to prevent the use of these coins on US territory.
If you can’t fight something, you wouldn’t win just by prohibiting it. You have already lost, how the ban would help it? Many exchanges don’t care about US laws and don’t operate in the US. With nowadays’ globalization scale, you need only one exchange in the world to sell you DASH, or Monero, or Zcash to use these currencies without restrictions. Just send your bitcoin to this exchange, buy these coins and voila, you’re hardly traceable.
Even if these coins would be banned from the US, it’s highly dubious that it would impact the price. It could even boost the demand, being a confirmation of the privacy of these coins. Will it stop criminals from using it? Of course not. The USA government should learn how to deal with issues because not everything can be banned.
Vitalik Buterin spoke at Chinese show, said that Ethereum won’t see any more forks with the aim to restore lost funds
At the same time, he made a remark that it’s still possible that in the process of migration to sharding there will be one-time recovery to as many users as possible. Also, he expressed his disagreement with existing rules that provide many privileges to accredited investors over small investors and called it a plutocracy.
Seems that Vitalik has learned his lesson. The code is the law. There will always be some people who will lose something due to the irreversibility of blockchain transactions. You can’t fork every time someone loses his funds. If you start forking after each major disaster, like the Parity wallet bug, it’s basically opening the Pandora Box. If you recover the funds for Parity users, why not recover them for an ordinary Joe who sent his hard-earned money to a wrong address. Otherwise, it would be favoring certain users over others. Thus, we approach the topic of inequality between rich people and poor or middle-class investors by the law.
To be considered a qualified investor, your net worth must exceed $1 million, not counting the value of your house you live in. Accredited investors have larger investment opportunities, thus many people think that this rule broadens the gap between rich and poor. But does it really prevent unaccredited investors from investing in good ventures?
Let’s take into account that it’s easier for companies to raise funds from 2–3 large investors instead of taking money from 10,000 individuals. It requires less paperwork, and it’s more profitable for both sides. The truth is, promising companies wouldn’t work with retail investors, even if they would be allowed to invest. There are too many wealthy people wanting to invest more than $1 million in one chunk, there’s no reason for companies to bother themselves with taking $100 investments. Thus, only those who wouldn’t raise money from qualified investors are willing to accept small investments.
By looking at the example of ICOs we see why retail investors aren’t allowed to invest in traditional startups. Many ICOs are a questionable investment, they stink like a fraud a mile off, however they raise millions. It’s like playing the lottery. We see that people with small capital are easily deceived and can’t control their emotions, especially greed, throwing away their money. We see that rich people are rich not because they were granted their money from heavens, simply because they can tell bad investment from good investment.
There were times when many of these so-called rich people were as poor as everyone else. Plutocracy? Maybe. Rich get richer every day, that’s the law, not because it’s some kind of conspiracy, but only because they know how to make money. And anyone can learn it too, anyone can get rich and become a qualified investor. Where is inequality in that?
