There are plenty of anonymous (even decentralized) P2P market places for trading crypto for cash, bank transfers, or other agreed upon forms of payment.
I have over 2x my fiat savings in crypto and none of it could easily be traced to my real identity.
Just last week I walked into a random "crypto exchange service" in the city I was visiting and sold them USDT and walked out with $10k in cash. No kyc. They didn't even ask my name. They were buying and selling for only 0.5% commission.
It’s cool that you got cash for the USDT that you had but that had very little to do with my asking somebody that wants to only buy books with Bitcoin what payment processor they used to get the Bitcoin that they have.
This is interesting. Every mention of buying a specific good in a specific context with Bitcoin in particular is a valuable moment to learn about each other’s cash and USDT holdings.
I don't understand the reason for your sarcasm. In your original reply, were you not asking for an anonymous way to obtain Bitcoin, so that one could then use it to buy books?
My reply described how it's easily possible to convert USDT to fiat because I assumed it was obvious that the process is similar in both directions and can be done for any common form of crypto, including Bitcoin.
Your anecdote about your exchanging the USDT that you held for cash in your city is has virtually zero bearing in the average consumer. Not everyone has the access to piles of non-KYC no-questions-asked cash and asserting otherwise is an embarrassing pivot to distract from your strange brag about your net worth.
Also your story begins with you holding USDT. I am assuming that you were able to amass your entire crypto fortune without ever involving a bank account or debit card, because otherwise your answer to my question would likely be “Visa or Mastercard” when it comes to how you came to possess any crypto assets in the first place.
You bragged about money laundering in a thread about ebooks buddy. “I have access to a Hawala” is not constructive to the conversation in the slightest.
You're confusing me with someone else. Do you see the irony in complaining about unconstructive comments with a reply that is so obviously wrong and unrelated to the parent? Awful tone and childish argumentation to boot.
You're almost there: the parent didn't describe money laundering, they described a legal conversion. It's your prerogative to reflexively interpret privacy concerns as criminality, but it isn't useful for a constructive discussion.
I learnt that Cryto ATM withdrawal limits have grown significantly in the last few years.
It’s a bit of a shame that you’re primarily interested in my posting style, not payment processing, crypto or the publishing industry.
As a fun observation, when you see someone discussing something inane like buying ebooks, it’s actually pretty odd for a stranger to hop in and volunteer details about how much money they have and to brag about how they knowingly pay a premium to avoid KYC when handling cash.
For example, if a stranger walked up to you on the street and interrupted your conversation with “I totally know a guy that’ll take any amount of cash you’ve got and give you untraceable crypto or vice versa, no questions asked” without volunteering any other information, you’d be better off being suspicious of him rather than the person being skeptical of that guy.
If you think GP is talking about “Bitcoin ATMs”, can you point me to one that will dispense $10,000 cash from USDT, not Bitcoin without any KYC?
It's really not. Growing up, I had plenty of classmates who spent more than that on superficial car modifications while working a minimum wage job and whose family was on food stamps.
It's not ridiculous. You need to consider the numbers involved. If one extra person breaks his leg because he didn't look and see the quiet car before crossing the street, that's a fair trade off for reducing the noise pollution for a million people.
Cars are 'less noisy' vs all the things that you mentioned simply because they are omnipresent. They wear you down, grind away at your tranquility, but because they're always there, they do so without you even noticing. A peaceful evening walk is made wearisome by the constant trickle of cars intruding into your hearing. Particularly so in the USA, because the cars there (just like everything else) are vast. Car use in city is a blot on humanity. I wish they would all just go away and be saved for the weekend road trip, or moving house, but not for groceries or commuting.
I have hyperacusis (hypersensitive to noise) and insomnia and I wish all noisy things would go away. I’m one of those people who’s health is severely impacted by noise and I spend a lot of money trying to get away from it. I know that most people don’t have these conditions so they don’t understand how inconsiderate they’re being. It is unrealistic of me to expect others to be more accommodating. If anything people are getting much noisier. I would be exceedingly happy to live in a place where electric cars are the biggest generators of noise pollution. I’ve lived in Europe in walkable cities with little car traffic and it’s worse with drunk revealers singing at the top of their lungs at all hours, parties going until late at night and barking dogs in the early morning. Makes me pine for a HOA controlled gated city suburbia with strict noise controls. Most traffic noise, and especially electric car noise, can be covered up by a noise generator. One place I lived installed an artwork that lit up to different levels depending on the noise pollution, instead of encourage people to be quieter it did the opposite as they competed on who could make the most noise.
Sure, but to achieve equal remineralization, you'll likely end up ingesting orders of magnitude more fluoride when delivered via drinking water vs toothpaste.
I read it, yearly, but the main value for me is probably identifying what I need to do/understand in order to “get to the next step” of whatever I’m currently trying to do.
People who actually rely on Upwork care about fresh reputation and active status. Platform makes it appealing to stay active. They have a decent reputation with customers, so it's a backup for when you fire your current client. But if you are inactive they stop recommending you and after a while you are delisted making it tougher to get clients. And customers like to see people who are active.
Also, automatic billing is a big value add for those of us who hate paperwork and chasing non paying customers. Upwork does it for you.
Re crypto, it's an appealing vehicle for laundering and we don't want to be implicated. couple of clients suggested it and it's a red flag for me. (if you want to get paid in crypto I don't get why you would use Upwork at all honestly, surely you have your own great platforms with how much talent is supposedly working on that web3 stuff)
The advantage of staying on the platform for freelancers is that they are guaranteed to get paid for correctly booked work on a predictable timeline.
For buyers, the advantage is one weekly payment to your credit card, some contractural protection and a bunch of features to support the work.
I’ve never felt the need to bypass them as a buyer, and I’ve only been approach a few times by freelancers to go direct. (My answer has been no mainly because I dislike the admin of manually paying people, checking timesheets, invoices etc.)
This is against the terms and conditions I believe and in theory Upwork can charge you or the client some extra fee if you take the project outside of the platform.
I don't want to trust a 3rd party to be able to restore access to accounts after losing my phone. I've lost several Google and Yandex accounts that way. Despite knowing the passwords, they refused to let me log in again after loosing my phone.
You just listed a bunch scary sounding financial buzz words, but I doubt that a thorough analysis of them would support your conclusion.
In fact, many have the opposite effect and result in more efficient price discovery. Take naked shorting for example. Without shorting, it would be far more difficult for an equity research firm to be incentivized to look into fraudulent stocks, as was widespread with Chinese companies a few years ago. Without their efforts, stock prices would have remained inflated for longer.
You don't understand what naked shorting is. Naked shorting is shorting without first borrowing from someone. Normal shorting is limited by the availability of stock to borrow (by the way, if stock holders wish, they can request from their broker that their stock won't be available for borrowing, potentially causing short squeeze), by the interest rates on borrowing the stock.
Naked shorting skips it all. Some market makers are privileged and can sell stock they don't own and didn't borrow. So they have a privilege of printing stocks in the short term, and that's quite broken, and many of them abused this position to manipulate markets. Normal participants in the market can't naked short.
Naked shorting means that the market maker who supposedly sold you a stock, can now fail to find the stock he sold you, leading to "fail to deliver".
The excuse given is that naked shorting allows for more liquidity, but given the other problems, I think it's bad.
> excuse given is that naked shorting allows for more liquidity, but given the other problems, I think it's bad
I assume you have a counterpoint to the decades of data the NYSE, SEC, Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and others around the world have collected that show naked shorting improves liquidity without FTDs negatively impacting price discovery while tamping volatility, evidence made particularly robust by the fact that naked shorting is permanently banned, and has been temporarily banned, in many markets, such as Australia, Switzerland and, for some stocks post crisis, in the United States? (See Wikipedia for a summary.) The whole affair reminds me of the lead up to the Onion Futures Act [1].
Isn’t that argument somewhat strange or dishonest? To paraphrase you: I‘d rather have naked shorting and the associated manipulation and problems with it than better price discovery for stockholders.
In your example, the stockholder isn’t protected either, only an equity firm derives profit from this information. In a more ideal world the stockholders themselves would do this due diligence, which is something that already happens.
Also there’s differences between shorting and naked shorting. I could well imagine allowing fully hedged shorting and outlawing naked shorting. Especially considering the issue of fail to deliver, that’s just absurd with our technology.
I have over 2x my fiat savings in crypto and none of it could easily be traced to my real identity.
Just last week I walked into a random "crypto exchange service" in the city I was visiting and sold them USDT and walked out with $10k in cash. No kyc. They didn't even ask my name. They were buying and selling for only 0.5% commission.